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[marsden-online]

TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."

[marsden-online]

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”

[marsden-online]

"God is formless, transcendent. We dance with them, we are them, we are a part of their creation, and if we align ourselves right with the prayers and avoidance of maya (illusions of the world like drugs, beauty standards, wealth and competition with one another) we could join them in the centre of the universe.

...

I imagine his disbelief that we are still thinking about gender as a set of rules to follow – doesn’t this count as an illusion of the world?"

[marsden-online]

cats would be so fucking upset if they understood they were missing out on the ability to lie verbally

[marsden-online]

"[She] was built like a soviet apartment building..."

Large concrete Soviet apartment buildings are a type of girl

[marsden-online]

Something I made while dealing with my own stuff and hoping drawing this would pick me up somehow. Maybe it worked.

FT my cat. His name is Mischief

[marsden-online]

As I was driving in to the [annual social group event] last night the radio was playing a retro-top-40 from 1994 and my mind idly remembered that 1994 was the year I was dragged along to my first [social group] event(s). A little while later my mind also went "hang on, 1994, 2024, that's ummm" … and I may have had a very brief existential crisis.

[marsden-online]

Yes, good.

there should be a sex ed program called ‘are you fucking serious’

[marsden-online]

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.

[marsden-online]

hey im going to new zealand soon for my exchange, and since you lived there (i think), what’s your favourite thing about the country? And what’s your least favourite?

My favourite thing is the attitude that "we're all in the same canoe".

My least favourite thing is the Nationals trying to remove te reo Maori from signs and people's lips.

[marsden-online]

A gorgeous, talented Black girl on TikTok independently released a single with a music video for it that's probably one of the few songs I could describe as Goth Pop, both by the sound itself and by her being clearly versed in the goth subculture, and she's getting so many mean comments. The song is good, she dances gothly and beautifully, her voice is very soft and sweet. Pay her a listen!

[marsden-online]

"In recent years, Wikipedia has frequently picked up some controversy for being less than reliable. Last time, I showed you how one editor in a niche corner of online Welsh history could completely distort reality, and create a king who didn't exist. This time, however, is different. This time, the history of Wales has not just been morphed by a lone editor, but by a series of historical mistakes spanning over 3 centuries. Many online articles and websites have continually perpetuated this myth, but none of them are at fault for it's creation.

Today I am covering the story of how one man rewrote 1000 years of history."

[marsden-online]

"We are conditioned to believe it’s wrong to show how we truly feel. The anger, the hurt, the raw ugly feelings….In a sanitised filtered world, nobody wants to see ugly. We tell our children it’s OK to cry, but do we know it is OK to cry? .. We want to care and we do care. We’re thrown by injustice. We feel thrown off kilter by oppression. That is a good thing. I worry too often we don’t recognise that this is what it is to be human."

[marsden-online]

Related (this article only touches on the issue of maintaining access to historical digital files, but it was recent and thus easy for me to backtrack to :) )

"“Digital files are much more fragile and ephemeral than paper,” she says. “When you have a paper document, you don’t have to think much about it if it’s away from water and fire, but digital material needs ongoing care. You need equipment, software, electricity – there are all these dependencies that a printed photo doesn’t have because you can look at it without technology.”

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[marsden-online]

A distant acquaintance also blogged on this today.

This particular lamp is meant to be mounted in a sterilization unit. The kind of thing where you wheel it into a specially designed surgical suite full of equipment SPECIFICALLY CHOSEN such that bleach and UV-C don’t cause them to quickly degrade, shoo the humans out of the room, lock the door, and run it for an hour.

[marsden-online]

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon