Best Part Of Princess Bride Is That Inigo Loudly And Openly States To Anybody Who Will Listen That He's

LGBTQ+

Reblog if you’re not out to your parents but basically everyone else knows

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

Being an Aromantic Asexual is Weird

Being an aromantic asexual is weird. We defy not one, not two, but three societal norms; heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, and amatonormativity. It gets even weirder when you’re indifferent (even favourable!) when it comes to sex and romance because you think your experience is universal, that everyone feels the way you do. It’s not feeling wrong and broken and out of place. It’s feeling normal, and then realizing that you aren’t.

Thinking (read: assuming) that you’re straight for most of your life and then finding out you’re not is weird. Mostly because once you realize you’re not straight, it dawns on you that you feel the same way about boys that you do about girls and non-binary people. And then you wonder if you’re pansexual because they’re attracted to all genders, and you have to be attracted to someone, right? And then that thought is immediately dismissed because you don’t feel attraction, at all. But it doesn’t stop you from contemplating every other sexuality and romantic orientation, because you’ve been taught that everyone wants sex and romance.

And then you remember: you like sex and romance in fiction. You like seeing your friends in happy, healthy, consenting relationships, and you’d always assumed that one day, you’d be in one too. But you’ve never pursued one. You never had more than a fleeting interest in boys, and lingering but still platonic affection for your female and non-binary friends. Those “crushes” that you had in elementary school? Maybe not crushes after all, because God knows you haven’t had one in nearly eight years. The most powerful feelings you’ve had for another person have been squishes so intense that you had to look back and question if it was actually romantic attraction (spoiler: it wasn’t).

And then there’s that epiphanic moment when things start to fall into place. Why you were always so vehement that soulmates could be platonic too. Why the idea of loving someone more than your best friend is incomprehensible (because romantic love is always shown as being more. Hello amatonormativity). Why when you ship fictional pairings, there are people you want to get together romantically, people you want to be friends so bad, and the ships that you like the most are the ones that could go either way. Why you desire emotional closeness and intimacy with the people in your life, but that had always been conflated with sex and romance so you wondered if what you wanted was more than friendship. Why you want to take the expression “more than friends”and burn it to the ground because there is no vocabulary for friendship that exceeds “best friend” without crossing over into romantic and/or sexual territory.

You realize that your ideal relationship isn’t necessarily romantic. It’s best friends who cohabitate and snuggle and hold hands and go on adventures to the library together. Kissing and sex? Well, that’s more of an afterthought. A “yeah, that’ll probably happen somewhere in there.” An assumption, because you’ve been taught that primary, monogamous relationships are always romantic and sexual. You reflect and see that there are very few things that you see and inherently romantic, and that there is a lot of cross-over between things you consider platonic, sensual, and romantic. A grey area that you can’t define.

Being an aromantic asexual is weird, because while I’ve always said that you don’t need romance and sex to be happy, I now realize that it applies to me too.

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Note from mod fitz: This has to be one of the most moving descriptions of this I have ever read. This exactly describes how I felt coming to the realization that I was not straight, and I think had I read this when I first began questioning it would have made things go a lot smoother for me. Thanks so much for submitting!

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

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.

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883