Call me Charlie or Paola.
I'm an Italian Trekker and Fansubber, Classic Whovian and Fan-Writer.
PokéManiac and more!
TMNT MANIAC!
Bisexual slasher and fem-slasher.
Bat-family addicted.
OT3 dynamics lover.
10 year old Dick Grayson fresh off the circus and kidnapped by the joker 2 weeks into being Robin: can you juggle? can you do a backflip? can you do balloon animals? my favorites are the giraffes. can you make me a balloon giraffe? what about a flower? my friend Bobo the Clown used to make them for me. do you know Bobo? did you actually go to clown school? what company did you travel with? have you ever worked a rodeo? did you-
good afternoon, day five of the strike for palestine! here are some action items for you to help palestinians
donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, the fund goal is 80% raised as of today
2. donations for the Pious Project, to help get menstrual products into Gaza. you can donate $5, $20, or bigger amounts depending on ability
3. download the Nomad app -> Menu -> Shop Plans -> Data -> Select "Middle East" (or if there is no option for that, choose "Global") -> enter data amount and pay (plans range from $4-$60, >20GB plans preferred!) -> do not activate eSIM! screenshot the QR code in the confirmation email -> email [email protected] with the subject title "[CARRIER] eSIM" and attach the QR code screenshot
4. download the Holafly app -> search for "Israel" in the search bar -> select data package -> Checkout -> Pay -> do not activate eSIM. wait for confirmation email -> email [email protected] with the subject title "[CARRIER] eSIM" and attach the QR code screenshot
"Who Is Superman? A Private Interview with Lois Lane" a fancomic about hope and connection.
I've had this story in mind for so long and I'm very excited to be able to share it at last. Thank you for reading, and happy Lunar New Year!
Mcspirk Month is a fandom event meant to celebrate the ship of McCoy/Spock/Kirk, in any and all forms. QPRs are valid, and celebrated here.
If you make something for Mcspirk month you can post it on tumblr and tag this blog (I'll reblog your works). You can also post it to the Ao3 collection, found here.
Mcspirk month 2024 begins March 1st. However you can post whenever you want. (If you find these prompt lists five years after the fact and still want to post to the collection, or tag this blog then go for it!)
Can I mix and match prompts?
Absolutely! If there's an NSFW prompt you want to write the most tooth-rotting, safe for work fluff with, then do it. The vice versa is also cool.
What are the Bonus prompts?
They are extra prompts. If there's a day with a prompt you don't like, you can switch it out with the bonus prompts. You could even combine them with other prompts if you want.
Below the cut will be written out list of the days and prompts. The NSFW list is below the cut.
SFW list of prompts:
Day 1: Forced Proximity
Day 2: Touch-starved
Day 3: Badass Power Throuple
Day 4: Hand Holding
Day 5: Hurt/Comfort
Day 6: Protective McCoy
Day 7: Going to a Planet Where They Have To Wear Silly Outfits
All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?
i very much want to do that.
I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.
But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.
There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.
This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.
So is the German submarine U-55.
She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.
The second torpedo hits the engine room.
Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.
The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.
She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.
The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.
Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.
There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.
This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.
And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.
There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.
U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.
HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.
She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.
U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.
Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.
But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.
The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.
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 responsibility 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.