#a Really Sweet Minecraft World #it Spawned Me In A Cave With An Opening Above Me And Tons Of Redstone

Toothless, Quasimodo, and, Hiccup.

It's Show & Tell Time!

If you could have dinner with three fictional characters, who would you choose?

#uno

Reblog and put in the tags what your current comfort game/favorite game is right now.

Reblog and put in the tags what your favorite How to Train Your Dragon dragon is (book or movie).

#was mad because my dad went out drinking with his friends. ON. MY. BIRTHDAY.

Reblog and put in the tags what you did for your Sweet 16 (party, dinner, nothing..)

She almost looks too sweet-faced to be Ruff, but I stan the cuteness!

Slightly modern Ruffnut

When I was a kid, a friend of mine got into trouble for a story.

We’d grown up down the street from one another in a rural neighborhood and he was pretty much my best/only friend until I was 7 and his family moved away. Then, several years later, when the internet was more of a thing, we reconnected and chatted online (this was the days of AIM and hotmail). 

I’d gotten into message boards, and we wound up on some of the same RP and writing forums with assorted other friends I’d made, and some of the RPs we wrote got… kinda dark. The group of us were nerdy, precocious kids whose parents didn’t keep track of what we read and so we digested some dark shit (everything from Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King), and in our bumbling, childish way, explored and interacted with the themes we encountered through the fiction we were writing. This took place though middle school and into early high school.

One day, my friend wasn’t online. Or the next. I didn’t think about it much, as his activity was often sporadic at best, until my mom told me she’d heard from his mother and it turned out he was grounded. Apparently, his mom had gone on his computer and had found a story he’d been working on. A very dark, very grisly story, written from the point of view of a serial killer, stalking his victims.

I knew about this story. I’d read some of it. See, my friend was playing the antagonist/villain on an original fiction group RP some of us had set up, and wrote the story to explore his character’s backstory and motivations so he had a better grip on them when writing the character in our roleplay. And the kid was actually a pretty damn good writer. 

His parents, however, didn’t see it that way. He got in trouble, and I got to listen to my mom go on and on about how disturbing it was, how upset his poor mother must be, how glad she was that I wasn’t like that. 

And I said nothing.

I didn’t explain the context, even though it might have helped mitigate his punishment, if they realized he was just playing the villain in a group story and wasn’t some Columbine-in-the-making psychopath. I didn’t explain that I wrote characters even more depraved (though it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that I had, considering I was the kid obsessed with The Telltale Heart in the fifth goddamn grade).  And I definitely didn’t explain that I absolutely was ‘like that’, in that I was fascinated by the morbid stories and dark scenarios in my literal hundreds of books. 

Because I was scared shitless. Of being in trouble, sure, but also of being judged, and of being rejected and told I was sick and wrong. 

I hid my writing. I locked the floppy disks with my stories and wrote my notes in code. I became an expert at hiding my internet history and concealing my work from my parents. I continued to create, but largely in secret. To this day, my mother hasn’t read a single word of my fiction. And for years, I thought there was something wrong with me. That there was something fucked up, something dark and broken, something perverse that made me like that. 

Eventually, (and I mean YEARS down the turnpike here) I got past that and realized that plenty of people write dark stories and are perfectly well-adjusted, and that it’s not an indicator of being defective in some horrible way. And oddly enough, stumbling into fandom in my early 20s really helped me with that. Finding out that the kinds of stories I wrote that filled me with the most shame, the most self-loathing, were a whole goddamn genre, and that I wasn’t this strange little degenerate alone in the universe, but actually had pretty common narrative kinks? Was both a revelation, and a relief. 

Which is perhaps why I find it so upsetting now when I see people in fandom passing moral judgement on people over goddamn fiction, harassing or  ostracizing them based purely on the fact that the content they consume or create fails to meet some standard of purity. 

I’ve been watching people catch hell for stories since junior high, and I’m getting real tired of that shit. 

When I was 12, I said nothing. I was scared. Now, I know better, and I’m less scared and more salty, verging into downright irked. So I’m saying: Please, stop. Stop telling people they’re evil or warped for writing fictional stories about fictional characters just because they aren’t to your taste. Stop telling people they can’t explore darker themes or dynamics in their work, because it squicks you out. Stop being judgmental and obnoxious about something as societally inconsequential as fanwork, and stop suggesting there’s something wrong with people to make them like that.

We’re talking about stories, and stories are ideas; not actions. 

Judge people by the latter. 

(And no, my childhood friend did not go on to become a serial killer. Crazy method fucker turned into a huge theater nerd and was working on an MFA from an ivy league school last I checked)

This is going to sound weird, but, I was thinking about how Deathgrippers are dragons that eat other dragons and I came to the conclusion that Rumblehorns evolved to complete with them. My evidence for this is that Rumblehorns can canonically punch through seastacks (solid rocks) and ships so if they do a hawk style dive bomb or a shark style attack from below the Deathgripper isn’t surviving and they have these massive pieces of rounded plate-like armor in areas that are the biggest target for a stinger that would probably keep the stinger from penetrating.

It’s a weird theory, I know, but I just like the image of a Rumblehorn repossessing a Deathgripper’s spine.

Wait, you’ve got a point…

A- a big point. Oh my… oh. OH. Yeah you’ve got something here! This makes so much sense! SHOOT

*Swan Lake intensifies*🩰🦢

but in the reflection of the water your soft white feathers were red

support me on boosty if you have a coin to spare! (๑•͈ᴗ•͈)

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.

Pamina: I spilled lipstick in your Valentino bag

Queen of the night: Wha- lipstick?! In my Valentino white bag?!?!