#oceangoer

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Word List: Ocean

beautiful words with "ocean" to try to include in your poem/story

Interoceanic - existing or extending between oceans

Oceanarium - a large marine aquarium

Oceanaut - aquanaut (i.e., a scuba diver who lives and operates both inside and outside an underwater shelter for an extended period)

Oceanfront - a shore area on the ocean

Oceangoing - of, relating to, or designed for travel on the ocean

Oceanid - any of the ocean nymphs that are daughters of Oceanus and Tethys in Greek mythology

Oceanity - the quality or state of being oceanic; the degree to which a climate has oceanic qualities

Oceanography - a science that deals with the oceans and includes the delimitation of their extent and depth, the physics and chemistry of their waters, marine biology, and the exploitation of their resources

Oceanology - oceanography; specifically: the science of marine resources and technology

Suboceanic - situated, taking place, or formed beneath the ocean or its bottom

Transoceanic - crossing or extending across the ocean a transoceanic telephone cable; lying or dwelling beyond the ocean

If any of these words inspire your writing, do tag me or send me a link. I'd love to read your work!

More: Word Lists ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[photoblogdujour]

Sea Lavender (Limonium Spectabile) -- sort of like Sea cucumber, Sea Lemon, strawberry anemone -- this is an oceangoing animal that is named after a terran plant. These predate (eat, as in predate-or, not come before) killer whales and the outlaw Josey Wales. Predating (pun intended) is what future fathers-in-law would like to do with their (youngish) daughters' first few boyfriends.

[vintagerpg]

Way back, before I started doing this, I bought like four feet of Palladium books in an eBay lot for next to nothing. It was ridiculous and possibly the very worst way to try to interface with Rifts. A single Rifts book is overwhelming on its own. Two dozen is just static blasting at top volume. I picked about half a foot of books with the best art and sold the rest on eBay. Adventures on the High Seas (1996) was among the ones I sold. But last year, I saw a copy on eBay for five bucks and I bought it again. I had zero memory of the contents of the book, I did this based entirely on the Martin McKenna cover alone. It’s a mighty fine cover.

Looking at this one again, it’s actually good. I don’t think I had any other books from the 2E Palladium Fantasy line aside of the core rules, but if they are all like this one, then it is a pretty strong line, and much improved over the older stuff. It’s well organized and the details on the many islands all make me want to dip in and read a bit whenever I flip through. The majority of the book is islands and ports, with particular detail paid to the isle of the cyclopses, which is cool, because I like cyclopi. There is a big section on ships, too, but that seems secondary. There are a bunch of new classes too, none but Pirate and Sailor seeming particularly themed to oceangoing adventures, but whatever. More is More in Palladia.

Art’s pretty great throughout. Scott Johnson does the lion’s share. There are interiors by Martin McKenna, Wayne Breaux and Peter Simon as well, but no clear credits (Johnson’s got a super obvious signature, though).

[esperfruit]

The cool and beloved Hercules

Hardik "Hercules" Mahto

Age: 36

Height: 205 cm

Captain Star's oceangoing tug helmsman and highly respected by everyone, including the Zero Fleet. Hercules is highly competent, well-informed and always keeps a cool head as if nothing could ever break him to a point that everyone around him sees him as an invinceable Mr. Perfect. Whenever he is around, his colleagues can always rely on him for his intelligence but also his courage and strenght as he is the strongest person in Bigg City Port. He may be smooth-spoken all the time but he has a very no-nonsense attitude when it comes to work and does not take any provocations from anyone.

He is the oldest out of six siblings with his little brother Ten Cents being the youngest. After the loss of their family, Hercules decided to move to Bigg City and take Ten Cents with him. At first Hercules worked for Zero Marine but had to quit after a big falling out with Captain Zero. After that he met O.J, who introduced him to Captain Star, who just started his own fleet. With no hesitation, he joined the Stars. He was way happier under Captain Star and decided to get Ten Cents a job under him as well when he became old enough. However, he regrets that he wasn’t able to convince his closest colleague and not-so-secret lover Zorran to join him and still misses him.

As a ocean goer, he is outside the port most of the time doing dangerous work and being alone for a very long time and thus really appreciates the company he gets from his close friend the lightship attendend Lillie. Hercules is fully aware of his overly positive reputation and tends to overwork himself to meet everyone's expectations, leading to him being severly sleep deprived. Another thing he tries to not show to other too much is his overprotectiveness towards his loved ones. He would do absolutely anything to protect somone he deeply cares about, even if that means getting his own hands dirty in the process...

[stargazer-sims]

Journal Entry #6

previous // next // story index

__________

Victor

It’s hard to believe I’ve been here on Kainani Island for a week already. I haven’t updated my journal for a few days, but it’s time to fix that right now. The last few days have been eventful, and not all in a good way, but let me start with the good stuff.

I went on a bus tour to the far side of the island yesterday, and the day before that I went on a hiking excursion and then went to a place where people can swim with dolphins. Besides the organized activities, I’ve also been swimming, working on my tan, playing soccer with some friendly locals I met, and eating way more food than I necessarily should. Oh, and searching for mermaids. I haven’t seen any signs of them since that one time a few nights ago, so I’m staring to wonder if I imagined it after all. Alana laughs at me whenever I bring it up. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t believe in merfolk.

Alana and I have been hanging out a lot. She’s awesome at soccer, and she’s a great cook. She took me fishing one afternoon, and then she grilled our catch for us when we got back. Before this, I thought the only meal that could make me want to eat so much I could barely move afterwards was my Nonna Isabella’s lasagne and garlic cheese bread, but I was absolutely stuffed by the time I was ready to quit eating our grilled fresh-caught fish. All I could do afterwards was lay there in the sand and gaze up at the perfect blue sky, sleepy and satisfied. Alana was sprawled on the sand beside me, probably just as full and happy as I was.

Today, Alana brought me to this amazing deserted stretch of beach that the locals call Sailor’s Folly. Alana explained it’s called that because a crew ran their ship aground here a long time ago. There’s a local legend that the sailors were lured toward shore by a siren’s song, and that’s how they crashed the ship. I guess whoever came up with that story was leaning into Kainani’s merfolk lore. Alana said it’s more likely the ship was too close to land when it was caught in a sudden storm. Whatever happened, at least the shipwreck part of the story is true. There are even pieces of the ship still here, sticking out of the sand. It’s like something from a movie.

We didn’t go to Sailor’s Folly to see the remains of the ship, though. We went there so I could sail. Or at least, try to.

I knew it had to happen eventually. I’ve finally discovered a sport that I’m absolutely not good at, and sailing is it. It’s super difficult, and I think I like it less than scuba diving. At least I’m halfway good at scuba diving.

The type of boat we were using is called an outrigger, according to Alana. It looks kind of like a big canoe with a sail on it. I don't know much about boats, so I can't tell you much about it other than that. My dad's family is from Nova Scotia, and if my Grandpa Michael is to be believed, all Nova Scotians have "saltwater in their veins" which I think means they're instinctively knowledgeable about the ocean and sailing. But the thing is, I'm only half Nova Scotian and I've never lived there, and being raised in an Ontario town with a lazy little river running through it in no way prepared me for an oceangoing voyage.

Alana showed me the basics of how to steer the outrigger, but that was the extent of our lesson. She said she was going to do some free-diving, and she wouldn’t be too far away if I needed her, but that she was certain I could work out how to sail the boat on my own. Free diving sounded interesting, but even though I’m a strong swimmer, I know for sure I’m not skilled enough to do something like that. If I’m going to dive down more than a few meters, I’ll do it with all the proper equipment. You know, like a steady supply of air.

Let’s just say that after today, activities that carry the potential for me to drown while trying to do them don’t appeal to me very much any more. Sailing was way more than risky enough, and I may have lost some of my taste for danger because of it.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

While I was out there, all alone in deep water and fighting with a small boat that may have been possessed by evil spirits, it started to rain. I wouldn’t have minded if it’d been a nice light shower, but this weather event was anything but light. The storm came up so fast, it was as if some invisible hand had flipped a switch marked ‘heavy rain’. It caught me completely off guard.

I wonder if a storm like this caused the shipwreck.

That was the thought that popped into my head; a thought which I instantly regretted. I mean, if a sudden storm could wreck an entire huge ship, what chance did I have in that stupidly tiny sailboat?

Don’t panic, I told myself. You can see where you left the AquaZip. Just steer the boat that way. It’ll be fine.

It was easier said than done, obviously. I have no clue why I thought I’d suddenly be able to control the boat properly when I’d clearly been struggling with it for the previous half hour.

I sat there for few minutes, letting the boat drift and frankly considering if the better option might be to just leave it there, hop into the water and swim to the AquaZip. That’d be faster and would take far less effort. I could get back to shore, grab my bag with my clothes and phone, and then find someplace safe and dry. I didn’t know where Alana was, but I assumed she must’ve been heading for shore already. Any sane person would’ve been.

I’d just made up my mind that not attempting to wrangle the uncontrollable boat was the best thing to do, and I was mentally preparing myself to jump into the sea when it happened.

Thunder.

The noise was so loud that it obscured every other ambient sound, and it felt like it was coming from everywhere at once.

You’re not crying, Victor. I told myself sternly. You’re not.

But then, this intense flash of lightning turned the whole sky above me a terrifyingly bright purplish-white, and any further denials seemed utterly pointless. I was most definitely crying, and I’m not going to lie, I was scared. Like, really scared. This was my worst nightmare from childhood brought vividly into reality. It was the most intense storm I’d ever experienced in my entire life, and there I was, outside in the middle of it.

I’ve never liked thunderstorms, but my real fear of them started when I was seven years old. My mom was watching the news one evening and I was playing in the same room where she was watching TV, and I happened to hear something about a woman who died after being struck by lightning. For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I even had a nightmare about it that night. In my dream, it hadn’t been some random stranger who’d died after being struck by lightning, though; it’d been my dad. In reality, Dad had passed away the previous year, when I was six, and it’d had nothing at all to do with the weather. But, I guess a child’s mind deals with fear and grief in unexpected ways.

For a long time after that, any time it rained hard at night — whether there was accompanying thunder and lightning or not — I’d rush to Mom’s room to make sure she was okay. I was afraid something would happen to her and, in the illogical way of a little kid, I was absolutely convinced that some malicious force of nature would be to blame for taking her from me.

She was always fine when I went to check on her, and she’d let me climb into bed and snuggle with her until I fell asleep. I remember how comforting it was to feel the palm of her hand on my back, moving in slow circles, soothing away my ragged breathing and my tears.

“My superhero,” she’d say, as if I was brave, as if I was the one protecting her. It was a good little fiction. It made me feel like a grown-up man.

It goes without saying that I grew out of needing that kind of consolation from my mom, but I never grew out of my fear of thunderstorms. In fact, it may have gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, maybe because I no longer have that special superpower bestowed on me by my mother on so many dark and stormy nights under the security of her yellow-flowered quilt. Adulthood takes things away from us that sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we could keep. The ability to pretend we’re something greater than we are and to believe it, for instance. The ability to shield ourselves from the world as it really is, to pull a veil over it so the things we fear don’t look as scary and allow us to get on with whatever needs doing.

But, I was talking about thunderstorms. Thankfully, we don’t get a lot of them in the Matsumori area, and they don’t last very long when we do. On the rare occasions when we have a storm, my typical way of dealing with it isn’t all that different than it was when I was little. I hide in my bed with the blankets over my head, and Yuri usually crawls under the covers with me and holds me till it’s over. He knows how irrationally afraid I get whenever it storms, and he’s good at helping me through it.

Sitting there all by myself in that insanely small boat, I wished more than anything that I was at home, curled up in my bed with Yuri, listening to his quiet voice reassuring me that he’d stay close to me and that everything would be okay.

With the weather having taken a decided turn for the worse, I ditched my plan of swimming to the AquaZip. I looked around for Alana, but I didn’t see her. I yelled her name a bunch of times, wondering if she was able to hear me through the wind and rain.

I reasoned that maybe if I stood up, I’d have a better chance of seeing her, but that turned out to be firmly in the category of ‘it seemed like a great idea the time’. What I mean to say is, it was a super bad choice. Never stand up in a boat. Seriously, it’s dangerous. This is major personal experience talking, here.

I actually don’t know what happened. I’m not sure if I slipped, or lost my balance because the boat was rocking, or what. All I can tell you is that before I could do anything about it, I was plunging over the side and into the ocean, and I was not ready for that. Like, not at all.

I swallowed a huge mouthful of seawater on the way down, probably because I was yelling. If I’d meant to dive, I would’ve had my mouth firmly closed.

Even though I realize now that I was likely underwater for no more than ten or fifteen seconds, It felt as if it took forever for me to orient myself and fight my way upwards. When I broke the surface, my arms and chest were aching. I was coughing up water, and my eyes, throat and nostrils were stinging from the ocean’s salt. I thrashed around like some idiotic caricature of a guy who’s fallen overboard, utterly determined not to sink again, and doing precisely the wrong thing to keep myself afloat.

I’m going to drown, I thought. I don’t want to die alone in a foreign country during a thunderstorm.

Then I thought of Yuri and how I’d told him I would come back safe. If my own desperate need for self-preservation wasn’t already enough to fuel my motivation to stop flailing and start swimming, the fear that I’d never see my soulmate again certainly added purpose to it.

I’m going to come home to you, Yuri. I promise.

I must’ve repeated that a hundred times in my head as I swam. I don’t even care how dramatic that might sound to anyone watching this. It kept me going, and that’s all that mattered to me at that moment.

I’ve never been more grateful for anything than I was for the instant my hand touched the side of the AquaZip. I pulled myself out of the water and scrambled onto it. The only thing occupying me was my desire to get ashore.

I couldn’t take the AquaZip all the way to land, so as soon as I judged the water to be shallow enough, I jumped off and tried to run to the beach. It’s hard to run in the water, especially when it’s up to your waist. Not unpredictably, I stumbled and splashed down face first.

When I came up for the second time, I was somehow facing out to sea again. The thunder rumbled as if it might rip the sky apart, and I saw a distinct zigzag of purplish light over the water. Grandpa Michael always says that when you can hear the thunder and see the lightning at exactly the same time, the storm is directly above where you are. I can't even describe my terror at the idea of that killer weather event being literally on top of me.

You know the proverbial last straw? That was it. I lost every scrap of willpower I’d had up to that point. All I could do was stand there, exhausted, frightened and unable to make my brain or my body obey me any longer.

That was when Alana finally showed up. She looked perfectly fine, not the least bit bothered by the weather, and not particularly concerned that she’d pretty much abandoned me to my fate.

“Alana!” I shouted. “Where were you?”

“I told you, I was diving,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“No! No, I’m not okay!" I practically screamed. "I thought I was going to die out there! Couldn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, I did hear you, but I was around the other side of that big rock formation. By the time I got over here, you’d almost made it back to where we left the AquaZip.”

“Why weren’t you watching me? I failed so hard at sailing, and then the storm started, and��”

“Victor, you need to calm down,” she said. “You need to take some deep breaths, and then we’re going to get out of the water, okay? We need to get you to somewhere warm and dry.”

I heard her words, but I wasn’t really listening. Calming down and taking deep breaths was the farthest thing from my mind. I’m not ashamed to admit I was crying so hard that I could barely breathe at all, much less take a deep breath, and I couldn’t stop shaking.

Alana didn’t say anything else. She took me by the arm and turned me around. I let her lead me a little way, but once I noticed the water was only touching my feet and ankles, I shook her off and began to sprint.

That short dash must’ve used up whatever energy I had left, because by the time I reached the safety of the beach, I was totally done. My legs were so rubbery that I couldn’t hold myself up, and I fell on my face in the sand. Fortunately I had enough remaining sense to roll myself over, but that was about it. I was wet and dirty and shivering, and I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and lay there, not moving, just infinitely relieved I wasn’t dead.

I’m pretty sure I passed out – or nearly passed out – because the last thing I remembered clearly was lying on the beach, with gritty sand digging into my skin in a million places, and cold rain pouring down on me from an angry sky roaring with thunder. I wasn’t dead, but I still wasn’t sure if I was going to make it home.

For a while after, everything that happened was a blur. I kind of remember talking to somebody, and feeling way too weak to say or do anything when he told me that he and his friend were going to carry me. They lifted me and started walking, and they were talking to each other in a language I didn’t know or was possibly just too incoherent to understand.

I must’ve been confused because when I noticed that I wasn’t cold and soaked any more, I thought I was at home in my own bed. When somebody stroked the wet hair off my forehead and told me I'd be fine, I was convinced the hand belonged to Yuri.

Of course I wasn’t and it didn’t. I was far from home and far from my Yuri, and everything was just… wrong.

I had absolutely no clue where I was when I finally woke up properly. I’d been having the most horribly vivid dream, a variation of my recurring nightmare where someone I love gets struck by lightning. In this version of my nightmare, it was Yuri, and he’d been in the water. I’d been leaning over the side of the boat, too scared to move and completely unable to save him.

I must’ve been crying in my sleep, because my face was wet and my eyes felt sore and swollen. I sat up. My heart was racing and I was gasping for breath.

It took me a handful of seconds to recognize that I’d been dreaming. It wasn’t real. I was safe and Yuri was probably tucked into bed in our little house in Matsumori, safe and sound too. Just as I was assuring myself that my love was okay, the realization struck me that I’d missed our nightly call and that he’d gone to bed without hearing my voice. That made me start crying all over again.

I climbed off the unfamiliar bed I was on, but I didn’t make it very far. My legs were so shaky that I had to sit down immediately, before I fell down. Feeling helpless and totally, hopelessly lost, I curled up on the smooth wooden floor and gave up trying to stop myself from sobbing.

That was when a guy who seemed vaguely familiar appeared next to me. I hadn’t noticed him when I first woke up and I didn’t see where he came from, but the house we were in looked like it only had two rooms. There weren’t that many places he could’ve been. Maybe he was lying on the sofa or maybe he’d been in what I presumed was the bathroom.

He knelt down beside me and asked me if I was okay, which was a pretty dumb question, all things considered, but I didn’t say that out loud. I was anything but fine, but I could hardly be rude to this guy, especially since he was probably the one who’d rescued me.

“Y-yeah,” I stammered. “I’m okay.”

He introduced himself as Mitchell Sheridan. I found out that he's a marine biologist and coincidentally from Nova Scotia. I guess he's the 'saltwater in the veins' type, unlike me. I also learned that the two-room beach house we were in belongs to him and his roommate Kai. The roommate wasn’t there, which seemed odd. Where would anyone want to be other than at home in weather like that?

Mitchell helped me off the floor and back onto the bed, and then asked me if he could clean up the cut on my head. I hadn’t even realized I’d cut my forehead. Mitchell figured I’d scraped it on a broken shell or a rock, but I couldn’t remember anything like that.

“You’re lucky,” Mitchell said. “This scrape on your head looks like it's your only injury. Does anything else hurt?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Do you want some hot tea? Or something to eat?”

“Tea, please. That’d be great.”

Despite me not mentioning that I wanted food, Mitchell busied himself in the corner that served as a kitchen. He made us some sandwiches and he heated a bowl of soup and cut up some fruit for me. Once I started eating, I was suddenly ravenous, and I have to say that the tea and the warm, spicy soup made me feel a lot better. I mean, I still felt really tired and not like myself, but food always improves my day.

Once I was satisfied that I was no longer in danger of expiring from hunger, the only thing I wanted to do was find out what had become of my phone and my other stuff. I was wearing the clothes I’d had in my backpack before I went sailing, so I figured Mitchell or his roommate had brought it back from the beach. It was likely they’d taken my wet swim shorts off me and redressed me in my dry shorts and t-shirt too.

When I asked Mitchell about it, he told me that Alana had brought my bag to the house for me. I found it partially underneath the bed, amazingly intact with my phone, passport, wallet, and even a half-empty bottle of Gatorade and a slightly crushed energy bar still inside. I hoped the rest of my stuff back at my campsite would survive the storm as well.

Ignoring the rest of my items, I pulled my phone out of the backpack. It was at forty-one percent, but I could charge it later. For now, forty-one percent was enough. Fingers trembling, I dialled Yuri’s number.

I let the line ring several times, knowing that if Yuri was asleep, it’d take him a while to answer.

After about six rings, I heard a groggy-sounding “Hello?”

“I’m sorry!” was the first thing I said.. “I promised I’d call you every night, and I didn’t mean to forget, but there was this storm, and I fell off a boat, and—“

“Victor!” Suddenly, there wasn’t a single trace of sleepiness in Yuri’s voice. “What…? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay now,” I said.

“You don’t sound okay. Are you crying?”

“Yeah. Sorry. It’s just… I had a nightmare, and I was really scared after what happened today. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I feel so bad about missing our call earlier, and waking you up in the middle of the night, and making you worry.”

“It’s all right that you woke me up,” he said. You’re not making sense, though. Did you have a bad dream, or did something happen?”

“Both!” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry if I’m not making sense. This whole day was so awful, and I don’t even know where to start.”

“We’ll sort it out,” Yuri said. “All that really matters is that you’re safe. You are, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes,” I told him.

“Okay. Take some deep breaths. Can you do that?”

I gulped air. “I… I’m trying.”

“Slowly, Victor,” said Yuri’s soft voice in my ear. “Breathe slowly. You’ve got this. You’re all right.“

I had to take several deep breaths. Listening to Yuri gently telling me when to inhale and exhale helped me settle down quite a lot. "Thank you,” I whispered into the phone. “I love you.”

“I love you,” he replied. “To the ends of the earth and back. Now, please tell me what happened. Slowly.”

So, I did. I told him everything, and by the time I was done, I wasn’t the only one weeping. I could picture him, leaning against the headboard of his bed, knees up, clutching a pillow against his chest. Yuri rarely cries, but it’s heartbreaking to me whenever he does. His face always gets red, just like a small child’s, and he trembles as if the release of emotion physically hurts him.

In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to hold him, to wipe the tears from his cheeks with my fingertips, and to kiss his sweet face. It was my fault that he was so upset. He was crying because of me, and I felt terrible for it.

"I’m sorry,” I said, when I finally came to the end of my tale. “You were right about everything.”

“Not everything,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You thought that if I came with you, I’d keep you out of trouble, remember? I kind of thought so too, but I wouldn’t have been much help at all, would I? I can’t swim.”

“I’m going to teach you,” I said. “When I get home. Just like we talked about.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“Do you want me to come home now?” I asked. “Like, as soon as I can change my flight? Maybe I could get a flight tomorrow or—”

“Have you seen everything you wanted to see?”

“No, but—”

“What I want is what I always want for you,” he told me. “If you want to come home as soon as you can, please come home, but if you’re not done exploring then you should stay and do what you’d planned.”

“I miss you so much,” I said.

“I know you do, and I miss you. But, I don’t want you to make any decisions when you’re this upset. Get some rest, and call me again in the morning. We’ll talk about it some more then.”

“Okay. But either way, I can hardly wait to get home so I can see you and hold you,” I said. “I might never let you go.”

“You would,” Yuri countered, and there was the smallest note of teasing in his voice. “You’d get hungry after a while.”

The sound I made in reply came out somewhere between a laugh and a moan. “Yuri Okamoto, you are everything."

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t be anything without you.”

We said good night, and then I decided I’d better record this before my phone ran out of juice. Actually, getting everything out on video like this has helped me clear my mind, which will hopefully allow me to get some rest. Yuri wasn’t wrong about me needing sleep.

Mitchell is letting me stay here for the night, and he says he’ll go with me to my campsite in the morning. Until then, I’m gonna try to think pleasant thoughts and hope that tomorrow will be a brighter and better day.

[arinzeture]

Interesting facts about Sierra Leone

1. Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 is located in West Africa on the Atlantic coast and bordered by Guinea and Liberia.

2. The country takes its name from the Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra who named the country “Serra Leoa” (Lion Mountains) due to the impressive mountains he saw while sailing along the West African coast in 1462.

3. Archaeological evidence suggests Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 has been inhabited for thousands of years with successive waves of inv.aders as well as immigration from inland peoples making up today’s diverse population

4. Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 is home to 16 ethnic groups. Each group has their own language and traditional attire.

5. If there is one thing that this small nation is blessed with is its rich mineral resource. Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 is famous for its diamonds. Apart from diamonds, bauxite and titanium are also extracted on large scale. It also produces gold and rutile on a large scale.

6. Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, was founded as a home for repatriated and rescued former slaves in 1787

7. English is the official language; however, Krio is the language that is understood by most of the population. Krio is a Creole language, first spoken by descendants of freed Jamaican slaves who settled in the Freetown area.

8. Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 has a simple horizontally striped green, white and blue flag. Green stands for agriculture and the mountains, white for unity and justice, and blue for the aspiration to “contribute to world peace, especially through the use of its unique natural harbour at Freetown”.

9. The Outamba-Kilimi National Park, a tract of savannah and jungle in Sierra Leone, is home to highly diverse wildlife including primates such as chimpanzees, colobus monkeys and sooty mangabeys as well as hippos, bongo antelopes, buffalo, forest elephants and over 150 species of bird.

10. Freetown was home to the first institution of higher learning in modern sub-Saharan Africa after the collapse of the university at Timbuktu. Fourah Bay College opened in 1827 and at the time was the only alternative to Europe and America for British colony West Africans who wanted a university degree.

11. Sierra Leone’s “blood diamonds” helped fuel atr0cities during the w.ar. Blood diamonds, also known as conflict diamonds, were used to fund certain conflicts in Africa

12. Freetown has the largest natural harbour on the African continent. It is capable of receiving oceangoing vessels of all kinds.

Guys let's get our YouTube channel (YT: Historical Africa) to 200k subscribers. Kindly Click on the link to subscribe https://youtube.com/c/HistoricalAfrica

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this article from The New Yorker, written by Bill McKibben:

Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows.

As 2024 began, we’d just finished the most remarkable year in the planet’s modern climate history—2023 had shattered every global record for temperature, with researchers firm in the conviction that our planet had seen its hottest average temperatures in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. But, even as they watched the mercury soar, they weren’t completely sure why: temperatures seemed to be rising even before an El Niño warming in the Pacific fully kicked in. In a remarkably candid essay this March in Nature, NASA’s chief climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, said, “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” If temperatures hadn’t settled back to something more like a consistent rise by late summer 2024, he noted, that would imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”

In the event, this August was the warmest August on record, and most of the other months of 2024 also broke records; it now seems certain that, when meteorological officials announce their results early in January, this will again have been the hottest year ever measured. Scientists still can’t explain what’s causing the spike, which sits atop the steady ramp in temperature over the past few decades. As Schmidt said in an October interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, “it’s still pretty much, I would say, amateur hour in terms of assessing” what’s going on. The proffered explanations—the eruption of a submarine volcano in the South Pacific that put a lot of heat-trapping water vapor into the air, the phase-out of high-sulfur fuels in oceangoing ships that reduced heat-reflecting pollution—don’t seem large enough to account for what the thermometers are measuring; it’s possible that we may have tripped some switches we don’t understand in the global climate system.

What we do understand is bad enough. In September, Hurricane Helene swept across the Gulf of Mexico, turning from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane in barely more than a day—the kind of “rapid intensification” that researchers increasingly see as a hallmark of a warming ocean. It moved so fast that it carried the freight of rain that it picked up over the record-hot waters of the Gulf far inland; in the mountains just north of Asheville, radar estimates suggested rainfall totals of up to forty inches. That water inundated the cricks and hollows of southern Appalachia—the death toll from the storm sits at two hundred and forty-one (making it the deadliest to hit the U.S. since Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017), and the economic damage is nearing a hundred billion dollars, making it one of the costliest storms since Katrina. But the pictures from a ravaged North Carolina looked an awful lot like pictures from devastated parts of southern Europe or northern Africa or Brazil or Southeast Asia—if you look on YouTube, you can find a near-daily flood of flood pictures, with floating cars careening down the streets of mountain towns.

There seems to be just one way left to even start to slow down that torrent, and that’s to rapidly replace coal, gas, and oil with sun, wind, and batteries—and if you’re trying to avoid existential despair, there are stories and numbers this year worth focussing on. Solar power expanded so rapidly in 2023 (eighty-six per cent up on 2022 worldwide) that some wondered whether the charge could continue this year; it did, with the best guess being we will see a further growth of nearly thirty per cent this year. We’ve clearly moved into the steep part of the S-curve of clean-energy expansion, where even the most optimistic forecasts are consistently surpassed, and at the moment we appear to be installing a gigawatt’s worth of photovoltaic panels (roughly the size of a nuclear power plant) every eighteen hours or so.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/16/2024

did not commit fratricide this week but it got a little close there

listening

spotify tried to rec me some electro remix of this Eartha Kitt song i did NOT care for but i did enjoy the original Mink Schmink (YouTube). very similar to last year’s favorite Peel Me A Grape by Anita O’Day. this is a particular kind of oldies #girlboss song that i am super weak to

i also have an entire album to rec! spotify recced me a movie soundtrack by this artist and i went to check out their latest work. a very pleasant outer space themed saxophone-forward experience to enjoy while trying out a very slow video game! the opening track Chaldene will let you know pretty fast if you’ll like the whole album. bouncy, in the ways that saxophones are. very cowboy bebop soundtrack adjacent? i have a data entry playlist with many instrumental albums of long pieces for when i need really consistent vibes or vibes that change very slowly and this is going to be such a good addition

reading

feeling a little bit grim about the state of the world and long-tail reporting/continuity of knowledge, partially bc some friends got fired from the games industry and are throwing in the towel (do not blame them at ALL, also now this means i don't know anyone in the industry with more than three years of experience under their belt) and partially feeling a little bit grim bc i read an article FOREVER ago from the old motherboard team at VICE about how locations were being harvested from various religious and health apps, and FINALLY that data broker is starting to see some real consequences. the ONLY reason this reporter is still following this story/is still a reporter is bc after VICE summarily fired like half the site last year, he went off and started his own site.

grim! grim article, grim context, grim all around.

watching

i would love for my best friend's son to become obsessed with a different movie than pixar's elemental. but if this is the price of having an only semi-interrupted conversation with his mom then so be it.

playing

“sail forth” by developer Quantum Astrophysicists Guild and published by Festive Vector (pair of really killer names there) is the free epic game this week. i spent a reasonably okay hour with it but do not plan to continue further. the opening area has some problems that do not interest me in whatever this game does in the next area. tldr: the actual sailing part is fun, which is good bc it's a sailing game, but there isn't enough to Do in this adventure/exploration game and it's all really far apart.

it has a particular sensibility married with its art style that makes me say “cozy game” (derogatory). your main character is named captain toot. everyone has funky sentence structure liberally sprinkled with nautical terms that come off vaguely nonsensical instead of piratical. there are a lot of almost-kennings like “deepblue” “moontiders” “fishfolk”. things of this nature. while i do love a kenning i don’t have a lot of patience for this. which is unfortunate bc this game tested my patience in several ways.

the actual Sailing part is the best part of the game. there's some very fun weather-- i have seen light and heavy fog, light and heavy rain, and a full on thunderstorm. the fact that sailing is the best part of the game would be good except everything is VERY far apart, and while the call of a blank horizon is super important in an oceangoing game (i think) when it becomes more fun to just fast travel everywhere instead of sailing the long way, i think that’s where you have to refine some things in your game. this is less of an open world and more little pockets of things in between a truly ridiculous amount of empty space. i cannot imagine this runs in an acceptable manner on switch.

the good parts of sailing are the thoughtful controls: the compass, the wind on the compass, and the little sail trim bar. you should also keep an eye on wave direction bc that will really impact your top speed. you CAN tack back and forth directly into the wind but this game will make you fucking work for it, which i do like. i also liked sailing with the camera zoomed all the way in, it felt very fast and dangerous on the very long wait to get to the next island. and then it was no longer fun on the very long sail to get to the next island. i am almost confident these islands are procgen, it’s possible i got a weirdly big seed but i don’t care enough to fire up a new save.

the general pace of the game/this first area feels a little underbaked or weirdly optimized. i got enough wood in the first hour to upgrade to the best available one-mast sloop, i fought a pirate which required a lot of precision seamanship with my one lonely bow gun, i did a race, i declined a target practice course, i poked my head into eight different map locations. despite this variety, it all felt very samey. generally the map locations have one or two things to do plus one resource (the precision seamanship required to collect resources is fun for the first two islands but then stops being interesting) or one collectible. no one island is particularly memorable. i really loved Sunless Sea, a game that also features a large map and very slow travel, but there’s a WAY more resource management and random events, and shit is simply closer together in that game.

if i was looking for a very slow podcast game and was 20% cutesier as a person this would be ideal, but for who i am right now? not for me.

making

my siblings visited! we did not kill each other, nobody had food poisoning, and nobody died! that's all i can really ask for. here's me and my sister looking at a big quilt at the 1940 Air Terminal Museum

phil went to the emergency vet sunday afternoon bc her spay site was looking Gnarly. she either has an infection or a reaction to her sutures but the treatment is the same either way. the emergency vet said we could probably skip our normal vet visit on friday but, given that we discover a new problem every time we go to the vet, we will be keeping that appointment. all recent pics of her are smushed up on my lap at a goofy angle. have a pic of mackaroni and beans

[fenrislorsrai]

The Biden administration agreed Thursday to spend more than $200 million to fully fund Native tribes’ plans to reintroduce salmon in the upper Columbia River basin — more than 80 years after construction of the Grand Coulee Dam rendered the fish extinct in parts of Washington, Idaho and British Columbia.

The unprecedented show of federal support is a course correction from the previous efforts of some federal agencies to resist tribal salmon restoration, which were documented in an August 2022 investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica.

“This agreement is the start of fixing a wrong,” Greg Abrahamson, chair of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, said during the announcement of the agreement. “Grand Coulee Dam allowed the desert to bloom, and many faraway cities enjoyed the cheap electricity it produces, at my people’s expense.”

The announcement is also a recognition of the federal government’s long-standing violations of the fishing rights of sovereign tribes, some of whom have signed treaties with the U.S. government. Construction of Grand Coulee Dam destroyed the Columbia River fishing site of Kettle Falls, a regional trading hub and sacred site for many salmon-dependent tribes. It cut off hundreds of miles of river habitat for salmon, who migrate to the ocean as young fish and return to their home waters to spawn as adults. Salmon and other oceangoing fish once accounted for an estimated 60% of the historic diet for Northwest Indigenous people. After the construction of Grand Coulee and other dams in the upper Columbia basin, those fish disappeared.

After nearly 80 years without those fish, a coalition of tribes along the upper Columbia River developed in 2015 a multiphase plan to reintroduce salmon into areas where they’d been blocked.

The tribes’ long-term plan involves building hatcheries, releasing fish into waters above Grand Coulee, tracking their migration and developing plans to pass fish safely around the dams through techniques like trapping them and trucking them up or downstream. They designed the plan to ensure it does not interfere with hydropower generation at the federal government’s biggest dam on the Columbia.

[alexilulu]

Books I Read in 2024, #8: Moby Dick (Herman Melville, Independent Publisher (originally Harper & Brothers), 1851)

A sprawling narrative of the narrator Ishmael's time on the whaling ship Pequod, Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's obsessive quest for revenge upon the whale that maimed him. Drawing upon elements of contemporary naturalist writing of the world and whaling, Ishmael paints a sharp picture of the whaling culture and industry of the time and it's foibles and the world it brought into being.

You'll be able to tell eventually based on my to read list, but Limbus Company is partly to blame for my reading this one. I'd long thought about going back to classics, and have done so plenty in the past, but the game by one of my favorite developers drawing upon 12 different classics of literature from across the world was a pretty good reason go step it up a bit more.

And in fact, this one was meant to be posted before Wuthering Heights, but I got swept up in how good that book was and posted it first right after finishing it. Which is not to say that this isn't good. Moby Dick is a fucking banger. Truly crazy. May have given me some grist to work with in some other projects, even.

Moby Dick is a sprawling bastard of a novel, at times lapsing into stage direction, epistolary and direct address of the audience by Ishmael, our near-silent and yet deeply wordy narrator. It feels like the production of a hyperfixation (which on some level it is) and a genuine love for the material, a piece of rock carefully sculpted around a vein of gold that gives you glimpses of what lies underneath without simply laying it all bare. Moby Dick is a novel of small, momentous moments.

Famously, Herman Melville made significant changes to the novel after speaking with Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of Mosses from an Old Manse) to deepen it and draw in elements of human nature, more directly drawing a parallel between Ahab and Moby Dick as a war between Man and God. It's probably felt the strongest in the beginning and the end, when faith and circumstance are both questioned the most. Ishmael is warned against the black end that is coming for the Pequod by Elijah but cannot begin to fathom the reason why, but by the time they arrive in the seas of Japan to hunt Moby Dick, Ahab has forged a harpoon quenched in blood in the name of Satan to slay his foe.

Much of the body of the novel is an exhaustive, frankly beautiful description of the circumstances of whaling, oceangoing and the process of whaling across the world. It would be a mistake to say that this is not necessary to the narrative, though I can imagine so many teens being forced to read this in high school english finding the task tedious in the extreme. And yet, it informs the story directly. Without these things, you would not come to an understanding of Ishmael himself, though it would seem superfluous. It's a labor of utmost love for the people who do this frankly insane and borderline suicidal thing, something that was considered necessary for the time by society at large and represented unerringly in its brutality and horror.

And yet, the novel understands that the pervasive whaling is on some level evil. Moby Dick is a punishment by God himself, a brilliant white avenger of humanity's evil. It strikes like the wrath of god when other whalers engage in the act against other shoals, utterly devastating and driving off the virtuous and sinful in equal measure. The other boats that encounter Moby Dick all survive because they fear it, the representative of God upon the ocean. Only Ahab's singular obsession drives him to ruin, even in the face of being offered the opportunity to repent in the form of the Rachel, the opportunity to turn away from ruin in the pursuit of saving a human life imperiled before them.

The fault lied within you all along, Ahab.

[rabbitcruiser]

Elephant Seal Viewing Point, CA (No. 6)

Elephant seals or sea elephants are very large, oceangoing earless seals in the genus Mirounga. Both species, the northern elephant seal (M. angustirostris) and the southern elephant seal (M. leonina), were hunted to the brink of extinction for oil by the end of the 19th century, but their numbers have since recovered. They are the largest extant carnivorans, weighing up to 4,000 kilograms (8,800 lb). Despite their name, elephant seals are not closely related to elephants, and the large proboscis or trunk that males have was convergently evolved.

The northern elephant seal, somewhat smaller than its southern relative, ranges over the Pacific coast of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The most northerly breeding location on the Pacific Coast is at Race Rocks Marine Protected Area, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The southern elephant seal is found in the Southern Hemisphere on islands such as South Georgia and Macquarie Island, and on the coasts of New Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa, and Argentina in the Peninsula Valdés. In southern Chile, there is a small colony of 120 animals at Jackson Bay (Bahía Jackson) in Admiralty Sound (Seno Almirantazgo) on the southern coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego.

The oldest known unambiguous elephant seal fossils are fragmentary fossils of a member of the tribe Miroungini described from the late Pliocene Petane Formation of New Zealand. Teeth originally identified as representing an unnamed species of Mirounga have been found in South Africa, and dated to the Miocene epoch; however, Boessenecker and Churchill (2016) considered these teeth almost certainly to be misidentified toothed whale (odontocete) teeth. The elephant seals evolved in the Pacific Ocean during the Pliocene period.

Elephant seals breed annually and are seemingly habitual to colonies that have established breeding areas.

Source: Wikipedia

[racefortheironthrone]

This is the Riverlands canal asker again. Thank you for answering my question. That's very interesting though, do you think the Riverlands could become an entrepreneur with trade from across Westeros and Essos using them as a speedier means to hit Oldtown/Lannisport? Could Harrenhal be remade into a commodities exchange market?

I implied this (although didn't perhaps go into enough detail) in my Westerosi Economic Development entry on the Riverlands. In my defense, it was the first entry and the series had a way of growing more elaborate over time as I warmed to the subject:

"a Blue Fork to Ironman’s Bay canal would hugely increase trade, to the benefit of House Mallister and my own (since the ships would have to pass by Riverrun-2), and allow House Mallister to better check the Freys (although I’d definitely insist that the Mallisters put some of the extra cash into more oceangoing ships - I want them to be the Riverlands Redwynes). At the same time, Riverrun-2 should ensure that the Mallisters’ new dependence on riverrine trade means a certain deference (make sure those ships’ keels are too long for the canal)."

Later on, in a separate post, the idea of a canal connecting the Godseye (and thus the Blackwater) to the Trident appealed to me as a secondary canal system.

And yes, I think the Riverlands could prosper from such an endeavor, both as an entrepôt between Oldtown/Lannisport and King's Landing/the Free CIties and as an exporter of grain, cattle, and other commodities.

As far as "Harrenhal be remade into a commodities exchange market," my original theory of the case was that a Blue Fork canal would drive urban development to settlements along the Trident and Blue Fork - Maidenpool, Lord Harroway's Town, Seagard. In that context, Harrenhal is a little inconvenient because it lies a good 75 miles or so to the south of the Trident.

However, if you were to build a secondary canal to the Godseye, Harrenhal would absolutely rise in economic prominence through its ability to dominate the King's Landing trade route.

[sea-shanty-bracket]

"Come, men, can't any of you sing? Sing now, and raise the dead." - Herman Melville

Hello and welcome to the Ultimate Sea Shanty Bracket! This is a silly little competition to see which sea shanty everybody loves the most. (Or the majority of people, at least.)

I'm currently taking submissions for songs to put in the bracket, which will be comprised of random match-ups. Feel free to include a version of the song that you particularly like along with your submission, if you feel like it!

I've decided to keep my definition of "sea shanty" pretty loose. Songs can be traditional shanties or foc's'le songs, or modern songs modeled after them (ex. Barrett's Privateers). Songs that are generally about the sea or oceangoing lifestyle, but that aren't quite sea shanties (ex. The Mariner's Revenge Song) won't be included in the bracket, but we love them anyways.

Songs that have already been submitted:

Leave Her, Johnny

Mingulay Boat Song

Drunken Sailor

Barrett's Privateers

Randy Dandy O

Fish In The Sea

Running Down To Cuba

Lowlands Away

Happy submitting, and fair winds and following seas to you!

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

hms captain??

hms captain indeed!!

i meant for this to be a short post but oops its really long already and im nowhere near finished so if you wanna learn about this terribly designed warship, join me after the cut; if you dont, enjoy this picture of an oddly designed ship.

the hms captain was a british warship. it was built during a time where shipbuilders were phasing sails out for steam engines, and where warships were being much better armoured. for example, the hms captain was steam-powered with two propellers and had wrought iron armour.

wrought iron armour caused a problem for warships. like think of any pirate media youve seen where theyve got wooden ships with these iron cannonballs; the cannonballs very easily breach the wooden ships. they dont really do that with iron armour. instead, they bounced off.

so the british admiralty, media and public were all in want, to some extent, of a ship with better guns that could breach ship armour. enter cowper phipps cole:

a man who looks like a rasputin prototype and seems to have the charisma to back up the comparison.

see coles was very good at public engagement. when he needed to, he could very easily get the media and public on his side, which is a power he leveraged in order to get hms captain approved, commissioned and built.

his design, oddly enough, goes back to a raft from the crimean war.

this is the lady nancy, constructed in 1855 to aid during the siege of taganrog. it was for shore bombardment which you can see in this illustration of it. while cameras were a thing back then (i think daguerreotypes existed during this time), i dont believe we have any photos of the lady nancy.

coles was a captain in the navy in 1855, and him and a group of sailors constructed it. according to those there, the guns on the raft were protected by some kind of dome structure or a "cupola" as they called it.

hms captain was inspired by the lady nancy, and so, it was also intended for shore bombardment. for this purpose, two big fuck off rotating turrets were mounted inside the hull on the gun deck.

these had been patented by coles himself in 1859 which is partly how he became a consultant for the admiralty when it came to building ships. being the nephew of admiral lord edmund lyons 1st baron lyons gcb gcmg kch, by marriage, twice over certainly also helped.

quick note on that:

its not technically incest, i think, his wife emily pearson was lyons niece and his mom is the sister of lyons wife augusta

i also didnt know what those acronyms meant beforehand, gcb is a british order of chivalry called most honourable order of the bath, gcmg is another one: most distinguished order of saint michael and saint george, kch is a hanoverian order of chivlary called royal guelphic order. yeah thats just gobbledegook.

lyons was important because of his role in the crimean war as commander-in-chief of the mediterranean fleet and hes credited as ensuring victory for britain.

originally, the admiralty just ordered prototypes of his big fuck off turrets and they were actually impressed with them.

and so the hms prince albert was built with four of them (is that four turrets in your pants or are you just happy to see me) and the hms royal sovereign was converted to be a turret ship. both, however, could only operate as coastal service vessels.

hence, the admiralty allowed coles to draw up plans for a two (2) turret oceangoing ship in 1863, working with nathaniel barnaby who was chief constructor for the navy. keep in mind, coles had little to no experience in ship design.

then, they suspended the project.

but they allowed him to work on a one (1) turret oceangoing ship that was based on the hms pallas with joseph scullard who was head draughtsman in 1864.

and then in 1865, a committee rejected/cancelled his projects, and decided to move forward with a different design for a two (2) turret ship called hms monarch.

this made coles very angry, and an angry coles is not a good thing for the british admiralty.

(i spent an hour making this because im so bad at making things look purposefully bad)

so you know like today where bad actors like andrew tate, tucker carlson, joe rogan and even like graham hancock can just use public platforms and social medias to get a relatively large portion of the population of their side, seemingly with ease, just by talking/communicating confidently, playing into fears and anxieties of the public, and creating an us and them?

yeah so cowper phipps coles was also really good at this. grifters, liars and pretenders have alway existed.

(milo rossi discusses this a lot in his series on hancock's ancient apocalypse docuseries, and id 100% recommend the whole series.)

so how did coles do this?

well, he began with a very strong and very harsh attack on robert spencer robinson who was a vice admiral and controller of the navy, and his full title was admiral sir robert spencer robinson kcb frs.

the title admiral sir is very funny, like i want to get a cat called that with the nickname addy. kcb is basically the same as gcb. lyons was general grand cross and robinson was knight commander, because of fucking course its this stupid. frs is an award given to you from the royal society of london; the fellowship of the ring royal society is granted to those who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science".

it wasnt just mr admiral sir that coles attacked; he also attacked several other admirals who were on the committee but he really seemed to hate robinson. coles also lobbied parliament and the press, focussing on the flaws he saw in monarchs design and how britain was going to be left behind in the shipping arms race since many other nations were pressing ahead with several oceangoing turret ships. unsurprisingly, it was the united states that were winning the race so far.

around this time, coles' contract as a navy consultant was terminated in january 1866. like thats as hard as he was going, he fully lost his job. of course he had his dear not-quite-incest uncle lord lyons to fall back on. one hell of a safety net, very well entwined.

in response to this professional fuck you, coles simply protested that he had been misunderstood and the man must have rolled a nat 20 on his charisma saving roll because on the 1st march 1886, he was re-employed.

he waited a month and a half to submit his critique of the monarch proposal on the 16th april. he refused to publicly support a vessel that didnt represent his "views of a sea going turret-ship" because He Was Like That™. we're in the cowper karen era. his critique went on to say that hms monarch could not give his "principle a satisfactory and conclusive trial."

now at this point, the admiralty really should have just sent him packing. theyve given him chance after chance after chance despite him having pretty much no experience.

like say you have a blocked toilet that you cant unblock, but instead of calling a plumber, you ask your friends nephew whos an art curator who really wants to give this plumbing thing a go. then his first attempt makes it worse; now the taps in your bath turn on everytime you use the kitchen sink and your toilets still blocked. but you give him another go and now theres a shower curtain stuck in your toilet which is still blocked. and now youre fingers are hovering over the call button on a plumbers number when your friend calls and asks you to give their nephew another go. its only been three weeks and theres a 24 hours mcdonalds up the road that you can go to for the bathroom and youve got a shower at work you can use, so you think, okay, sure. and then he accidentally rips your kitchen sink out and you still have a blocked toilet and a non-working shower and your bath taps are running 24/7, and your friend asks you again to give him a "second chance."

like youre not giving him another chance, theres a goddamn shower curtain in your toilet and your kitchen sink is in your fucking living room. of course, youre not giving him another chance.

but say everyone in your street and everyone in your friend group is on his side because hes been telling little lies and charming them all with his aunts baked goods and his knowledge of local art and history. and everyone else is rooting for him and they all believe this is the chance.

thats the situation first naval lord admiral frederick grey (full title: admiral the hon. sir frederick william grey gcb) found himself in. obviously coles should not be given another chance, but the whole country believes he should.

so on the 21st april (thats me moms birthday :)) he agreed that coles should be allowed to build his "perfect" oceangoing turret ship.

and so the hms captain was born

the ship was to be built on a private shipyard and coles selected laird brothers' chesire yard on the 8th may 1866.

one of the biggest problems ship designers had with turret ships is that ships tend to have quite a lot of rigging that gets in the way of the turrets. this was a genuine design flaw for the hms monarch, it was brought up by the chief designer sir edward james reed kcb rfs, but he was overuled. he didnt think a turret ship should have either a forecastle or poop deck.

on a typical warship, youll see a small rise on either end of the ship. at the front/bow, you have the forecastle which was typically used as a defensive measure. at the back/stern, youd typically have the captain quarters within the hull and the roof of that is the poop deck. it would be used for either the captain or a helmsman or a first mate maybe to supervise the crew and their work.

reed, very correctly, did not want these measures because they interfered with the turrets. he also wanted much less rigging because the more wooden beams and rope and sail youve got, the less room the turrets have to fire.

he wrote that "the middle of the upper deck of a full-rigged ship is not a very eligible place for fighting large guns."

and coles and the lairds seemed to agree with this sentiment because their design corrected these flaws.

their solutions were to erect a hurricane deck to place the rigging on. this is an upper deck that is above the frame of the hull. they also used tripod masts to reduce rigging. they also placed the turrets within the hull in their own special gun deck.

now, just because youve corrected for some flaws doesnt mean you havent introduced several of your own which spoiler, the captain had a lot of flaws which we will be getting into.

captain had a length of 320ft or 97.54m; she had a beam (width at the widest part) of 53ft3 or 16.23m; her draught (the distance between the waterline and the keel/bottom of the hull) was 24ft10 or 7.57m; and her top speed was 15 knots which is about 17mph.

in a futile attempt at a balanced view, i will say that the speed was fairly impressive. most other ships had top speeds of 10-12 knots or about 11-14mph. the use of double propellers was a good choice.

one of the very few good choices.

see the captain was designed to displace or essentially weigh 6910 long tons, and was expected to have a freeboard of about 8ft or 2.4m.

a ships freeboard is the distance between her exposed upper deck and the waterline. typically, warships have high freeboards. its not quite as simple as the higher the freeboard, the more stable your ship is, but in general, higher freeboards do offer more stability. this is something the captain needed

see, most of her weight was high up in the ship which meant she had a low metacentric height. to not get into all of the complicated science that im not entirely sure i understand (dyspraxic nation rise up), lower metacentric heights tend to make ships more unstable.

[from wikipedia:]

so all of this is a bad design. apart from her impressive speed, she seemed like a ship with poor stability and a real risk of flooding because of the exposed gun decks. and with flooding, you might just fucking capsize 🚢⬆️↗️↘️🌊☠️

mr admiral sir robert spencer robins already raised concerns at the design stage in regards to the low freeboard and flooding. reed also raised concerns about the ship being too heavy and having too high a centre of gravity, but they were ignored.

if i had a nickel for every time edward james reed was overruled after raising a legitimate concern about the design of a turret ship, id have two nickels, but its weird its happened twice.

still, first lord of the admiralty (genuinely feel like this is a made up job) sir john pakington approved the design on the 23rd july 1866, though he did note that coles and the lairds would be held responsible for any failures.

if youre interested, john pakingtons full title is john somerset pakington 1st baron hampton gcb pc frs and he was a fucking tory, and the right honourable lord hampton, which okay, dude, you overcompensating for anything over there? pc means he was a member of his majestys most honourable privy council, who are all advisors yes-men to whichever bellend is on the crown.

moving past that cag-mag of a man, lets talk about how this mess got even worse. and you might be asking, "kai, how can it get worse? havent you already told me that the ship can easily sink?"

and you know, fair point, but you can always make your ship even more likely to sink.

see coles came down with an illness during the building of the ship. im not sure what it was; i cant find anything on it, but whatever it was, it meant he couldnt supervise the building of his ship. now, im not sure how much that would help considering he was the art curator turned amateur plumber in the metaphor, but maybe it would have done some good.

because when she was finished, she did not displace 6910 long tons. no, she displaced 7767 long tons. and her 8ft freeboard turned into a 6ft6 or 1.98m freeboard. she was floating 22 inches deeper than expected. oh, and her centre of gravity raised by 10 inches!

reed didnt just raise hell over this, he dragged heaven down too. and its not like he was wrong. the ship was a floating disaster.

hms captain had an angle of list of 21°. this means of she listed 21° or more, she would capsize.

now, theres no real average angle of list, but most people would say 40-50° as a reasonable yardstick. for some vessels, it might dip into the 30s°, but 21° is a ridiculously low angle of list.

for reference, this is a 20° angle.

its not much of an angle, is it?

and remember, the captain is meant to be an oceangoing vessel. the oceans dont exactly have a reputation for being calm.

unless youve got a direct telegram to poseidon and are in a place where you can ask him to calm down, the captains not gonna have fun.

and of course when reed raised his concerns, he was overuled.

if i had a nickel for every time edward james reed was overruled after raising a legitimate concern about the design of a turret ship, id have three nickels, and its kinda concerning that its happened three times.

instead, she was commissioned on the 30th april 1870 under captain hugh talbot burgoyne vc. to commission a ship is simply to place it into active service. also vc simply means burgoyne received the victoria cross whatever that one is.

anyway, she underwent several trials in the months after this and i guess everyone had pre-ordered their rose-coloured glasses because the captain won many supporters and was considered everything that coles had promised.

part of these trials were the gunnery trials. these took place in vigo and the captain was against both hms monarch and hms hercules, a non-turret ship. their target was a 600ft long, 60ft high rock. they each had 5 minutes of continuous firing.

all three ships had problems with aiming after the first few shots because the smoke emitted from the weapons meant they couldnt fucking see anything.

still, hms hercules had an accuracy rate of 65%, while hms monarch came in with a 40% rate and hms captain limped in with a 35% rate.

and im not just using "limped" as an exaggeration, these trials showed that when the turrets fired, it caused the ship to list and the list was 20°.

im sure you can see the problem there.

if you can, youre better than the admiralty who just ignored it and was like fantastic, she works. coles straight up had the entire admiralty hostage and the only person speaking up was reed.

if i had a nickel for every time edward james reed was overruled after raising a legitimate concern about the design of a turret ship, id have four nickels, which is great and all but id rather give reed a hug at this point.

-

now the 35% accuracy didnt really matter if the captain was going to be used for shore bombardment. most of the time, youre not aiming for anything specific, youre just trying to cause as much damage as possible.

but that 20° list? that mattered.

it mattered a lot because on the 7th september 1870, she capsized.

shocking i know. only five months after being commissioned and everything.

that day, she was running trials in the bay of biscay during a storm when she was hit by a gale of wind. she rolled over and capsized.

there were over 500 people on board and only 18 survived. coles was among the dead. i hope their souls were able to find peace.

theres a memorial for them in st paul's cathedral in london if youd ever like to pay your respect to them.

now theres not much else to say about the captain other than the inquiry into the sinking blame the public for it.

they concluded that "the captain was built in deference to public opinion expressed in parliament and through other channels, and in opposition to views and opinions of the controller and his department" and this was pretty significant in victorian britain as it was unprecedented.

but realistically, it wasnt wrong. they were the ones backing coles the whole time.

so i guess if theres something to learn from this mess, its that if youre going to support a public figure, whether it be a celebrity or politician or scientist or whatever, take a step back and ask yourself "do i agree with what theyre saying or are they just very good at talking?"

im sure someones said it better than me, but you know, that sentiment. we can also laugh at how much of a disaster hms captain was.

[lnwrcauli]

Cook the Arlesburgh Harbour Shunter [NWR AU]

History

Cook was built in 1909 at the North British Railway’s Cowlairs Works as No. 233 and was immediately put into service. The records on where exactly he worked before coming to Sodor have been lost to time, but if he is to be believed, he was allocated to Haymarket engine shed. In 1920, the Arlesburgh Harbour Board expressed interest in buying their own locomotive, and so brought him over on trial. He remained on loan from 1920 to 1924, when the board finally purchased him and had him repainted and fitted with a stovepipe chimney. He served the harbour dutifully for many more years, picking up the name Cook after the British explorer James Cook. All good things must come to an end though, and in 1947 that end finally came. As the last mines in the valleys dried up, Arlesburgh harbour fell out of use. Cook was mothballed and put into storage in a shed on the piers while the company lay dormant for the foreseeable future.

In 1961, the revival of the harbour began when the North Western Railway bought the land and all that was on it. During reconstruction, Cook was found in his shed by a gang of workmen on their lunch break. He was swiftly taken to Crovan’s Gate, where it was organised for him to be restored to running condition. Restoration took some time, but by 1962 Cook was ready for work once more, painted in NWR lined goods black and assigned the number 24 spot. He returned to Arlesburgh harbour, where he has worked tirelessly ever since.

Personality

Cook is your typical industrial engine: loud, naïve and sometimes unintentionally rude. Having (supposedly) worked on the docks at Edinburgh before his re-allocation, he has quite a heavy Edinburgh accent. Of course, being a dockyard engine, he has quite the affinity for the sea, oceangoing vessels and anything else related to it. Despite his sometimes rude attitude, Cook is quite the people person, expressing large amounts of discomfort when alone for long periods. He also has quite the dark sense of humour, sometimes cracking jokes that make other engines feel uncomfortable. Though he has his flaws, Cook is all-around a hard worker and loyal friend.

[hotapplekai]

It's #cafezootober Day 3: Marine Iguana & Strawberry

Cool marine iguana fact: Marine iguanas are the ONLY oceangoing lizard on the planet! Cool right? But they're a vulnerable species.

Participating in Cafezootober helps to spread the word about critically endangered species, as well as provides the world with much-needed art featuring these beautiful animals.

[Click here to learn more about Marine Iguanas and how you can help]