RoonieRandomThinks

dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain. 

dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)

so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.

but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing

in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement. 

so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.

related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:

x

Indeed, I am!

The other three replies, including the original, are serious. 

Jello, Popsicles, and Soup Broth are my legit triggers. I would never joke about that. 

I know it sounds bizarre. But trust me, I’m serious. 

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s Saturday, but learning is fun.

I’ve had seven surgeries in my lifetime and will probably have many more in the future. And one such surgery, which happened about nine years ago, involved really fun (*sarcasm*) things like tubes that are shoved up your nose and end up in your stomach (I know, I didn’t think it was possible either until they did it), eight gallons of really disgusting fluid, pain, lots of pain, and the direct order that I had to evacuate every single bit of food that was inside me.

And that was before the surgery even began!

After the surgery, I had to stay in the hospital for about a month.

And I was on what’s called a clear-liquid diet.

What’s a clear-liquid diet?

For this particular hospital:

Water, Jello, Popsicles, and Soup Broth.

A meal that was delivered to my hospital room three times a day.

That’s all I was allowed to eat.

For those of you who enjoy doing math: I was in the hospital for a month, which is roughly 30 days. I had to eat this meal three times a day. That’s 90 bowls of soup broth, 90 containers of Jello, and 90 Popsicles. Ninety times I had to eat these things. In the span of a month. 90.

Which means that nine years later, I am actually physically unable to eat these three items without vomiting. It’s a sensory trigger.

So why didn’t I talk about this from the beginning instead of enduring four death-threats, six unfollows, and nineteen messages/comments (not including the death threats and the ones that just said ‘Popsicles, Jello, Soup Broth’ over and over again)?

Well, there’s two reasons.

A.) I don’t have to. People don’t ever have to explain why something is triggering to them. Once they say that it is, it should just be a given.

And

B.) The above comment is right. I am a disability advocate. And part of that advocacy includes advocating on behalf of people with triggers. And so, you’ve all been part of a social experiment for the past few hours - an experiment to see how people react when they see that someone has really bizarre triggers (out-of-context).

And I’m a bit sad to say that many of you have failed. Even other people with triggers and/or other advocates. 

So listen because this is really important:

I know that triggers are a sensitive subject and I know that there are people out there who do joke about them.

But there are even more people out there who have triggers that seem really bizarre and even silly.

And you know what?

You cannot invalidate those triggers.

You cannot assume that someone is joking, you cannot assume that they’re mocking other people with triggers that are more commonplace or ‘sensible’, you cannot assume that they are anything less than genuine.

If someone tells you that they have a trigger, you need to believe them, no matter how bizarre it might seem.

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.