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[Someone in a grinning Guy Fawkes mask with a gleam in their eye leans toward us in a red-lit room. A sliver of green lighting the right side of their face, hat and long black hair/wig. Text reads, “CV, A - SMALL GOD OF Anonymity”]

• • • • • 

 He will not kill us if we tell you who he is, what he does, his purpose, his portfolio.  He promises he won’t.

But he’ll make us never have been.  We will be erased from all of time and history, and our deeds will come to nothing.  Even our account will not be seen, and we will have unmade ourselves for nothing.

We are sorry, but we can tell you nothing more.

We are also sorry to have told you he existed.​

This is not your fault; it is ours.

• • • • •

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

Instagram: https://instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage:

http://smallgodseries.com

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hey bi people

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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.

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happy 10th anniversary to these two fucked up towns!!

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Happy 10th Anniversary Gravity Falls

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Me, every time I reread a fic that I love:

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also i cannot say how pleased i am that as soon as the Netflix Persuasion trailer dropped my entire dash turned into a bunch of hissing feral cats

i love all of you and your reading comprehension skills

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Jason + Molotov cocktails

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battle couples has gotta be one of my favorite tropes though. The “you got me?” “Yeah, I got you.” The kiss for good luck. Fighting alongside each other for so long they know every strength and weakness. The dichotomy of being fucking terrifying to their enemies, but so soft with each other. When one is in danger and the other goes feral, protects them at any cost. When everything is over and done, it’s all “let me see where you’re hurt,” and washing off the dirt and blood.

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Big day for weird little towns

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If you’ve ever taken a road trip through the pacific northwest, you’ve probably seen a bumper sticker for a place called “Gravity Falls.” It’s not on any maps, and most people have never heard of it, some people think it’s a myth. But if you’re curious, don’t wait. Take a trip. Find it. It’s out there somewhere in the woods. Waiting.

HAPPY 10th ANNIVERSARY GRAVITY FALLS! first episode date: June 15th, 2012

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Somewhere between (งಠ_ಠ)ง and  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  every day.

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We don’t know where it came from, but it’s attracting a lot of cats.

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A Different Take On A Guide For New Tumblr Users:

you can do your blog however you want

tumblr is a place of people interacting, not an algorithm sorting

the focus of tumblr is sharing and that's what reblogging is

if you only like stuff and never reblog it doesn't actually destroy the universe (people really may block you though which will put a dent in your experience)

you can both like and reblog a post

the real reason you want to reblog is that's where the fun and social part of tumblr happens--it is also what ultimately makes tumblr work but again, you: new baby user aren't gonna bring this whole semi sentient trash heap down by not participating ~correctly~

a blog on tumblr is most often an unholy mess of everything you find neat as well as stuff you make yourself, there are theme blogs and sideblogs for sorting your mess or if you're really focused but mostly people throw everything in one blog

in fact tumblr has a weird emphasis on the SOCIAL part and the MEDIA part but isn't like other "social media"

so you want to collect cool things from other people by reblogging so you share them with your followers

followers on tumblr aren't really a popularity contest thing where the number is the point, they're more like other raccoons and magpies rooting around in a trash heap and you show each other neat or interesting or really smelly stuff so you want to attract other like minded people to share stuff with/have stuff shared with you

a high number of notes on a post is more of a curse than clout: your bit of shiny once it's shared beyond a certain distance will get very grimy and gross as it passes out of it's intended audience and gets mocked, hated, corrected, well actuallyed, etc etc etc

sometimes users have in fact shared posts around to get large numbers specifically to torture the original poster but also one time to get someone a silky chicken so it varies

the collective spirit of tumblr is generally petty but not always mean

if you see something shiny and don't reblog it, you can't share it with your fellow trash pandas, sharing is both nice and also the basic form of social interaction on tumblr

someone following you (who isn't a porn bot) is a sign they are interested in your particular taste in shiny trash objects

people may unfollow you for a variety of reasons but it's best not to take it personally--again followers are a private number that just indicates how many people you're sharing your blog with and if someone decides they don't want your specific trash this isn't a problem

the content on this site is actually NOT always garbage at all but the analogy is useful in terms of how NOT glamorous this place is or even wants to be and how the mentality is different from places with like...influencers

we don't have those here because tumblr is a semi sentient trash heap based on sharing

there are many talented people on here and some of them get more motivation if they feel people like their stuff which is why everyone is always screaming about how we need to reblog things

and you still can't destroy the universe by using the like button however you want

it's very good for posts that shouldn't be reblogged like personal posts, because not everything is for sharing around

it indicates support in the event someone posts something sad like they're having a bad day (you shouldn't reblog that post)

people also use it for things they want to mark for later or other organizational reasons

you get to decide how to use it and doesn't have to be a system

tumblr is glorious trash and we will share it with you