[sosuperawesome]

Rachel Eaton on Instagram / Etsy

[writing-prompt-s]

After the hundredth child showed up on their doorstep claiming they were the hero destined to slay you, you decided to take matters into your own hands and visit the bastard who keeps sending orphans to kill you.

[beabadobo]

"you do so much good, red."

🥿⌛️♥️

[nonebinary-leftbeef]

NO WAY

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

I’ve been doxxed 😨

[thetetra]

I once worked on a phone campaign to disallow the trees around your crater from being cut down...

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

I am deeply deeply in love with you 💙 Thanks so much for your conservation effort!

It’s the small things we all do together that can make a big difference! 💙💙💙💙 And you’ve done it!!!

[pacificnorthwesterngothic]

People just gotta know what Crater Lake and Wizard Island looks like

[silent-calling]

What in the Skyrim

[jenroses]

been there several times. And yeah, Skyrim feels super duper Oregon in a lot of ways.

[fitzreiley]

We gonna talk about Crater Lake, and Wizard Island and not mention the Old Man of the Lake?

The Old Man of the Lake is a log that floats around the lake. It is somewhat strange in that it floats vertically. It's roughly 30 feet tall, with only about 5 or so feet sticking out above the surface of the water. It was first 'offically' recorded in the early 20th century, though there are oral reports of it as far back as 1896 (and likely earlier still given the cultural importance of Crater Lake to the Klamath tribe of that area.

The Old Man should have rotted away long ago or at the very least become waterlogged and sank into the water fully, but nope. Over a hundred years, and there is this log still in the water just floating.

So y'know how I said the fact that it floats vertically was 'somewhat strange'? Let's get into some actual strange territory regarding the Old Man. It moves. Against the wind. It has been recorded moving in paths that do not make sense, never getting stuck on the shore of Wizard Island, nor the area of shore around the lake. Now that's strange.

So now let's get freaky: The free-floating Old Man posed a hazard to boats since it moves, and only a small portion of it was above water. (though personal boats are no longer allowed on the lake) Anyway, in 1988 a team was using a small submersible to explore the lake. The scientist figured it'd be a good idea to moor the Old Man near the coast of Wizard Island out of their way, for safety. So they tied some rope to it, to move the Old Man. As soon as they did so, the clear blue skies of a warm August day turned dark. The wind kicked up, bad, and it started to rain, then hail, then snow in the span of a few minutes...again in August. Now snow in that area is common, but not in the summer months. It gets super warm in that area in summer (like 70 to 90 degrees on average) So the scientists decided to nope the fuck out of the water, because of this freak storm. They unmoored the Old Man, preparing to get the fuck out of dodge of this summer snowstorm. As soon as the rope loosened and was in the water, as quickly as the storm had come on them, the darkened skies cleared and it was once more a fine sunny summer day.

As a kid, I spent my summers with my family who lives like... 40 some odd miles from Crater Lake National Park so I had this knowledge just kinda buried in my head somewhere.

[bogleech]

I excitedly added a thing about the old man before I checked the notes so now I'm gonna reblog this great story instead but here is the old man!!!

"The Old Man floats vertically through the lake on a calm day"

"THE OLD MAN FLOATS. VERTICALLY. THROUGH THE LAKE ON A CALM DAY"

!!!!!!!!!!

[headspace-hotel]

Finally

Cryptobotany

[trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter]

🎶Old Man of the Lake floats! On a calm day!🎵

[pacificnorthwesterngothic]

This post really has everything. But, most importantly, it’s got Crater Lake and Wizard Island appreciation.

[sentientsky]

repeating this to myself forever and ever

[hannabec2]

Fábio Gomes Trindade, a Brazilian street artist, is celebrated for blending street art with nature, incorporating branches and flowers as living parts of his murals. His renowned works often depict women and children, where the natural greenery becomes their “hair,” resulting in a powerful and organic balance. Artist: @fabiogomestrindade

[skulandcrossbones]

it's so wild to me that you absolutely cannot force a hyperfixation to happen. like you'll watch the most perfectly tailor-made-for-you content that everyone says you'll love and feel absolutely nothing, and then the thing you watch on a whim to fill time will reach through the screen and put its damn fingers in your brain and start rearranging the neurons right in front of you and every single time you're like THIS??? THIS??????? and this happens like every 6-12 months forever

[dependsoncontext]

[awed-frog]

thanks I hate it

[siderealsandman]

You Got a Friend In Horse 

[garrettauthor]

YOU DO NOT HAVE A FRIEND IN HORSE

[britcision]

You Got A Lotta Friends In Horse

[ailithnight]

CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THAT THOSE ARE NOT FRIENDS IN HORSE

[kiyomides]

Rumi p-pretty... Quality here

[storybookprincess]

so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator

this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke

this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.

instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”

of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that

because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job

my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together

[birdcagesandbutterflies]

now that i am a real adult i am starting to realise. media lied to me about the availability of rooftops to go hang out on. every day i wish i could be hanging out on a rooftop somewhere looking cool as fuck

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[thegirlwiththebraids]

I feel like we’re in a dream. This is such a high… like never did I think we’d get a plot line like this. FULLY dedicated to THEM?! Wednesday feeling ALL of the emotions because she’d rather DIE the be the reason Enid does. I know we may not ever get true wenclair…but guys…this is pretty damn close. I can’t get over how awesome this feels. I genuinely have to keep rewatching the trailer to believe we didn’t just make this up in our heads.

[cyberneticnightmares]

saw an elderly woman walking around with a tote bag whose design were the four AO3 fic category squares and she very excitedly asked if i was a reader or a writer bcs nobody else at the con had recognized it, and after telling her that i've been writing fic since fanfic.net, she solemnly nodded and explained that she'd been reading fic since "the days of personal websites" but that she only started writing fanfic when she was 47 and oh my god when i tell you that i genuinely teared up on the spot!!!!! like!!! HELL YEAH???? LITERALLY NEVER TOO OLD TO START WRITING. NEVER TOO OLD TO WRITE AND SHARE YOUR FIC.

her enthusiastic "i'm a very nice and bubbly person, i swear! but i love writing angst and major character death :)" nearly took me the fuck out.

icon. legend. diva. i wish her nothing but a kajillion million comments and kudos. i hope her fic updates crash AO3. i hope she knows i'm promoting her to my personal patron saint of AO3.

[celebsnsirens-deactivated202601]

[backstepping]

sorry. i’m all booked up.

[fotobilog]

[iwillreadyourbooks]

STOP! Let the little penguin cross your dash he has places to go.