Forest

Joanna Kosinska

“Oh, what a sweet child,” cooed the god/goddess as they picked the crying child off of the floor. They cradled them in their arms, smiling softly. “How could anybody be so cruel to such an adorable little thing?”

The child began to stop sniffling as they looked up at the deity. There wasn’t any attention paid to the bodies of their attackers strewn about the room.

“Come now,” the deity said as they turned to leave. “You will be with me from now on.”

In case you don’t know this story, the Norse gods wanted a wall around Asgard to protect themselves and a jotun only known as The Builder offers to make it in exchange for Freya, Sun and Moon. Freya gets rightfully pissed and refuses (no word on Sun or Moon’s feelings about this), so Loki turns into a female horse and lures The Builder’s horse away, causing all work on the wall to stop. Because he can’t finish the wall The Builder has to leave without Freya, Sun and Moon. Loki disappears for 9 nine months and returns with an eight-legged foal (yes, he had sex with the horse and got pregnant. I know you all love that part). The end.

For some reason people often leave out that The Builder wanted Sun and Moon too, and English translations often translate it to “the sun and moon” as if he wanted the heavenly bodies, but no, he wanted the goddess and god responsible for said heavenly bodies. He absolutely intended to have sex with all of them which is why a lot of translations leave out Moon because ew that’s gay.

Freya didn’t want to marry a Jotun, let alone as part of a god damn harem me thinks.

I wrote the word 'soup' last night, which was about the 15 word I wrote. That was as far as I got before I went on a search of what food peasants ate in medieval times, and fell asleep. Writing is truly bizarre.

AND a race one since the most affected regions will be Africa, Asia and Oceania

I just went down the back with dad to cut some wood(I got the small pieces of pine because I haven't really cut the wood before) and let me tell you, when he said "grab your pine and let's go" and I grabbed my tiny pile of kindling, I felt so much like a small medieval child happily following their father into their small house on the edge of the village to proudly show my mother how strong I am, and that I'll be able to help keep the house warm in the winter, but I am a teenager and not a small child

I just saw that my science teacher put 'worked well in science today :)' for a positive acknowledgement. Udhd. One of the best teachers I've had. He's patient with students, lets us have our phones, actually helps students understand things, gives us choices on the extra things we can do once we've done the notes and he lets us handed them in later so we can finish them.

He's tied with one other teacher for Best Teacher At High School

The other is up there mostly for his sense of humour, he can make anyone laugh

…

martinpodt

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 respondibility 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.