umm how to be a dog by andrew kane. btw.
in case you didnt fucking know
[ID: How To Be A Dog
If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak, you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit, or placed behind a door-this will depend on what kind of a dog you want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string, or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not— a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity; you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog, you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.
End ID]
my favorite thing about this post is all the people who chose to use the default icon defending themselves in the notes like no stop it just put a picture up
Loving this energy
*wipes tear* they learn tumblr culture so fast . . . the spite . . . the malicious compliance of it all . . . I'm so proud
thank god for the mythbusters though because it used to be that whenever i knew i had insomnia i’d just kind of accept it and stay up doing whatever until my morning classes and spend the day feeling like shit
but then they did an episode where they established that even just fucking laying there for a half hour, not even sleeping just laying there and not even for an hour, makes a significant difference and you’ll feel way better
it has made a huge difference in my life to know that it’s okay if i can’t fall asleep, it takes a lot of the pressure off and ironically helps me fall asleep better
…i did not know this, thank you
If anyone wants to look it up, the episode was specifically the Deadliest Catch crossover ep, and the myth was that it’s better/safer when working a 30 hour shift to take a 20 minute nap every six hours rather than try to power through. They did an obstacle course test, one without naps and one with, and even though they couldn’t even sleep half the time the naps resulted in their scores doubling.
So actually I undersold it, even if it’s 7:40 and your alarm goes off at 8 just lie down and shut your eyes and it will still be better than nothing
This was immensely huge for me as someone with anxiety issues. I used to drive myself delirious trying to ‘calm down before I went to sleep’ by staying up and just working myself into a panic. Having this knowledge and knowing that laying down and closing my eyes is a better option and counts as rest was way more helpful, eased my mind and actually sends you to sleep faster.
I didn’t know this. This makes me feel a little better
I saw this post a while ago, and my life has been all the better for it. Releasing that stress to fall asleep when you’re on short hours to begin with has been a huge relief.
I shared the info with a coworker who had trouble sleeping the night before a sun-has-just-come-up shift, and it has helped her as well.
sent a message
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.
I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.
I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation.
I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.
It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post.
And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.
If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.
I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.
A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic.
They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.
If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried.
Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.
You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.
It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.
seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything
this post has blown up to the point where some of the folks in the notes are starting to think it's about exclusively office jobs (it's not; had the same problem when i worked in a busy deli - when we reached a rare lull and had cleaned up the counter from the rush we weren't allowed to relax or sit for five minutes (this is why food service workers go in the walk-in: sometimes you're the only one in there and you can sit down)) and i also just want to say slacking off at work will NEVER be a no from me. even if a coworker is a little slow during a rush and it's bothering me i will never get on them about it because i know that person who's moseying and relaxing isn't ever gonna rat on me to a boss type if i happen to do the same . we will never achieve comfortable working environments unless we allow one another to goof off and chill out! anway stream david graeber bullshit jobs
children outside screaming: annoying but ultimately for the greater good. children need Going Outside and Screaming Time for proper emotional development. an auditory burden I am willing to bear
neighbor with his car he made louder on purpose: jail for neighbor. jail for ten thousand years
enough reclaiming slurs, I think in 2023 we should reclaim nascar. they banned the confederate flag on all properties & their stance on lgbtq+ isn’t just performative bc in 2013 they fined a driver 10k for using a homophobic slur, condemned indiana in a statement for an anti lgbt law, and partnered w carolina’s lgbt+ chamber of conference in 2022. nascar was founded by anti-cop moonshiners/bootleggers who drove suped-up fords to out-run the police. #yaaascar
HELP
To this day, my favorite argument I ever had was with my Nascar-loving family about how a thin blue line flag on a Nascar is antithetical to the core tenets of Nascar.
There is no organization more rooted in ACAB than Nascar. Literally, the only reason it exists was that a bunch of moonshining families had to build cars that could outrun the cops while on supply runs during the Prohibition Era. The goal was to make the car look like a regular vehicle so they could pick up supplies or drop off illegal alcohol without arousing suspicion. But if the cops were on you all you had to do was put the pedal to the metal and that little truck could outrun them with no problems.
And of course, families would be in competition over who made the best alcohol, and whose car was fastest. So, they would have races on the weekends. When prohibition was lifted, the races continued. And that is why we have Nascar.
It really frustrates me how people look at American car culture and scoff at it. Formula One racing is more exciting and more dynamic to watch, but the history of it is not as interesting: a bunch of rich assholes who made specialized cars for racing. And to this day, it is still a rich man's sport. Whereas Nascar was about a bunch of so-called hicks in the backwoods who used some basic hand tools and trial and error to make a junker into a racecar.
As the grandkid of a bootlegger yeah. My grandfather loved nascar and he had absolutely nothing to indicate he loved nascar
He was so impressed by how safe the cars had gotten above all else
i dont believe anyone has npc energy in the sense that their thoughts and feelings dont matter but i did just walk past an old woman today who (presumably to no one) said “ive been dreaming of croissants…” and trailed off while i walked by her and i believe. that is a moment i will never know more about
oh well now here come the side quest enthusiasts 🙄
the “i am from russia” was a warning
I asked a taxi driver in Bucharest to take the quickest route to the airport. 10 minutes later we're doing 120kph the wrong way done the street car tracks when another taxi tried to pass us and dude just floors it. Never spoke a word, smoked 9 cigarettes over the 30 minute ride, never took off his sunglasses and blasting opera all the way. I look at it as paying 15€ plús tip to lose all fear of death.
Having lived in Bucharest I can tell you he would have done that even with out you asking
a study i did because i realized idk how to draw environments at all LMAO
