The ONLY WAY To Combat The Lack Of Funding In Arts Education Is For Professionals To Take A Few Hours

shapeshifters who can just turn into their animal or thing on command: kinda cool 

shapeshifters who accidentally get weird nonhuman traits as they lose their grip on their emotions like get too excited or get angry or scared: really really fucking good

comic about someone’s strange dream (and daydreams)

kirby has eaten trees meta

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

Naruto (crack) Plotbunny: ANBU are the only social services

So, like, in canon, we all strongly suspect ANBU were the ones to raise bby Naruto for the first few years of his life, supporting evidence A) he's not nearly as fucked up as a kid neglected from birth would be.

(Babies who are not held and talked to, & fed and changed regularly, provided with stimulus, comforted when sick or frightened, etc, do not grow up to be even half as well adjusted as Naruto at 12.)

Taking that, and extrapolating wildly, I purpose an AU where ANBU are the only fucking shinobi who realize traumatized children do not well-adjusted shinobi make.

And goddammit, if they're the only fucking people in the village who understand basic child psychology, fine, it's absolutely fine, the hokage is a damn idiot, but everything is F I N E.

ANBU, looking at every shinobi under the age of 18: our kids now.

Kakashi joins ANBU at 14, looking to bury himself in work and maybe (hopefully) die.

He instead gets assigned a grief therapist and a statistically improbable number of missions which begin with 'We need you to summon a puppy'.

Tenzo is lovingly bullied into developing a backbone and his own opinions.

Itachi gets pushed into ANBU at 11 by his father and the hokage. ANBU spends precisely 3 seconds pretending Itachi is actually going to be an agent, and then dumps him in a pile of kittens and sends him to go play with civilian kids as 'infiltration practice'.

Itachi, 13: Taicho, Danzo-sama just ordered me to kill my entire clan

Hatake Kakashi, a graduate of the ANBU school of social services: I'm glad you told us, Itachi-kun. Sit tight while the adults go and murder the problem, okay?

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

sorry what

Art tip #462

Make A Pose is a free app that allows you to pose a model however you like, with any perspective you'd like. If you struggle to pose your characters, or can't find a specific reference, give it a look!

Watching my neighbors across the street having a block party during a literal time of pandemic makes me wonder if several hundred years ago there was another person looking out their window watching their neighbors congregate during the black death like verily forsooth, thou art truly ass-headed knaves.

*sigh* everytime

Circular Reasoning

INTP: *hears something that goes against values* INTP: *climbs on top of soapbox* INTP: *raises finger* INTP: *states opinion* INTP: “Actually-” INTP: “Wait-” INTP: “Unless, of course-” INTP: “But then again-” INTP: *realizes they don’t know what they believe* INTP: *stands on soapbox for the next 20 years in an existential crisis*