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[honourablejester]

We can’t afford to be innocent/Stand up and face the enemy!

It’s a do or die situation/We will be invincible!

-- Invincible, Pat Benatar

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reblog w the song lyrics in your head NOW. either stuck in yr head or what yr listening to

[honourablejester]

Pam Grier as The Dust Witch in ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ (1983) dir. Jack Clayton

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Assorted works from American Illustrator Mead schaeffer.

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That feeling when you pull a panicky werewolf out of a frozen river and he wakes up very unfairly still cranky at you.

Ladyhawke (1985)

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Some Nautical Magic Items (D&D 5e)

A random collection of salty artefacts for people to stumble across.

Trinkets

A plain, rusty sword hilt covered in barnacles, that sounds like the sea and whispers of salt and blood when touched.

A battered green glass fishing float, half filled with water, in which odd motes of greenish light bob and float, causing the bauble to emit a watery, green, dim radiance to a distance of 5ft.

A flute carved from whale bone that cannot be played, but sings a mournful whalesong by itself when held.

A 2-inch scrimshawed ivory plaque carved with a large seabird that absorbs any blood spilled upon its surface without staining.

Common Magic Items

SAILOR’S SALVATION (Wonderous Item). This leather waterskin has a chased silver mouthpiece. If filled with seawater, the waterskin converts it to clean, fresh drinking water after 1 minute. This transformation does not work on other liquids.

GRACEGIRDLE’S GUSTY MOTIVATOR (Wonderous Item). The product of gnome wizardry, this marvellous item appears to be a roughly 1ft diameter conch shell, beautifully carved, and mounted on a swivel attached to a pair of metal vices that would allow it to be fastened to the hull of a rowboat. If affixed to the rear of a small rowing vessel, the gusty motivator provides power to the boat equivalent to a sail, allowing the rowboat to move at a speed of 2 miles per hour without all that strenuous rowing nonsense. The boat can also be steered by adjusting the motivator on its swivel.

SAILMAKER’S NEEDLE (Wonderous Item). This heavy sailmaker’s needle, designed for moving through canvas, is enchanted to greatly speed repairs. As an action, the bearer can touch the needle to a piece of damaged cloth or sail and speak a command word, whereupon the needle with fly into the air and beginning repairing the material at a speed of 2ft per minute until it either runs out of material or the command word is spoken again. The needle produces its own thread to do this. It is not advised to use the sailmaker’s needle to repair clothes unless one is satisfied to have them stitched with sail thread.

Uncommon Magic Items

SCINTILLANT NET (Weapon (Net), Requires Attunement). Woven of strange, faintly glowing seaweed, this net does not restrain its target, but rather binds itself to them on a successful hit. The target must make a DC 14 Strength saving throw. On a successful save, the net deals an extra 1d4 poison damage and falls away, returning to your hand. On a failed save, the net binds itself to the target and sinks into their hide for 1 minute. The target may repeat the save at the start of each of their turns, the net falling away and returning to your hand on a success. While bound in this way, the target’s speed is reduced by 10ft, and their form is outlined in bluish-green luminescence, granting advantage to all attacks against them, and rendering them unable to benefit from invisibility.

Rare Magic Items

REACHER (Weapon (Pike), Requires Attunement). This heavy boarding pike has a beautiful bronze finish protecting its iron head, and is carved with images of grasping tentacles along its wooden haft. You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic weapon. On a successful hit with this weapon against a large or smaller enemy, the wielder can use a bonus action to attempt to pull the enemy forward off their feet with the hook. The enemy must make a Strength saving throw (DC equal to 8 plus your proficiency plus your strength modifier) and is knocked prone on a failed save. In addition, this weapon has 3 charges which replenish every day at dawn. The wielder can expend a charge as a bonus action to teleport to an unoccupied location that they can see within 40ft of them.

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I’m back to painting fantasy ladies!! Here’s a paladin and her Very Big angel friend

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Ara Güler. Tarlabaşı, 1965

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The Blue Valley Farmer, Oklahoma City, August 10, 1933

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You know when you stretch and your shoulder goes off like a fucking gunshot in your ear as it pops back in? No? That just me?

Fucking ouch.

[honourablejester]

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.

[honourablejester]

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.

[honourablejester]

horror sub-genres: gothic

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Regeneration

Artist: Quinton Hoover

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To be fair, malachite is a stone that lets you get a bit baroque. It has the strong colour and the drama for it.

Queen Desideria of Sweden’s Malachite Parure :D

[honourablejester]

Aw. I feel sorry for poor dandelion and oxeye daisy. Dandelion's new texture is much improved!

I'm a bit surprised lily of the valley won, but that might be because lily aggravates me the same way sunflowers do: let me change their direction. Because right now lilies can't be symmetrical. If I've got two flowerpots on either end of a mantlepiece, the lilies are pointing the same way, waving the viewer off to one side of the room. I want to point one of them back towards the other. So they aggravate me. Heh.

Random minecraft question: taking out the 2-tall flowers and the new and fancy options like the wither rose, torchflower and spore blossom, what's y'all's favourite minecraft flower?

(Yes I took those options out mostly so this would fit in a poll)

[honourablejester]

Talking to my sister, we were remembering the clapping games we used to play as kids. This was mostly in the country school, now that I think of it I don’t think they were played in the town school as much. Though that could also have been because we were older when we went there. But you know those games kids play where you have to clap a sequence while saying a rhyme? Sometimes individually, often in pairs, and then there were group games?

This would have been small town Ireland in the 90s, but the ones I remember …

'Double Double' was a really easy one for pairs. “Double double this this, double double that that, double this double that, double double this that!” You stand facing each other, and on ‘double’ you bring both fists to their fists, on ‘this’ you bring palms to palms, and on ‘that’ you bring the backs of your hands to the backs of their hands. The aim is to repeat the sequence, getting faster all the time, until somebody messes up. It was fun because you started out raising both fists at each other for ‘double double’, like you’re about to start a fist fight (which was not unknown to happen).

Then there’s ‘Under the Bam Bush’, again for pairs. I can’t remember the clap sequence for this one. I can remember most of the rhyme and the rhythm: “Under the bam bush, under the sea, boom boom boom. True love for you my darling, true love for me. When we get married, we shall have a family. A boy for you, a girl for me, how many fishes in the sea? Twelve and twelve is twenty four, kick the teacher out the door. If she knocks, give her a box, and then she’ll have the chicken pox!” I know it had a more complicated sequence, cross claps and over-unders, but I can’t for the life of me remember how it went.

We also had ‘Miss Mary Mack’, which had you alternating clapping your own hands and double high fiving your partner, and then when words repeated you repeated the high fives. “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, All dressed in black, black black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back back …”

And, when you had a LOT of people together, there was always ‘Concentration’. Basically, everyone in the group got a number, one to seven or twelve or however many you had. The rhythm was two claps of your hands, two claps on your thighs, rinse and repeat, and everyone kept up this rhythm. You spoke on the hand claps, the thigh claps gave the next person time to prepare. “Concentration! (beat beat) Are you ready? (beat beat) If so! (beat beat) Let’s go! (beat beat) One to six! (beat beat) Six to three! (beat beat)” etc. It started with person one, and on your handclapped beats, you called out who had to pick up after you. They had the thigh beats to get ready, and then on their turn they had to call out a different number. People were eliminated if they didn’t answer to their number or didn’t call out a viable number on their turn. So as you went you had to keep track of which numbers were still in the game, and be ready to call them out the instant your turn came.

Concentration’s really only good if you have a big group. Like, minimum of five/six, but honestly you wanted around ten to fourteen for a proper game. It gets really boring when it’s just ‘One to two!’ ‘Two to one!’ ad nauseum at the end.

I always wonder if these are still going. They are a lot of fun.