Two Roads

1. Ketsch- a vessel with two masts, the front main mast and the aft mizzen mast, which is getting smaller and smaller. The ketch has its mizzen mast within the (construction) waterline.

2. Schooner- a schooner is a sailing ship which has two or more masts, has scraper sails as main sails on all masts and whose foremost mast is lower than (one) the aft mast(s).

3. Topsail schooner - This term describes the rigging of the ship, not the type of ship. It is a two- or three-masted sailing vessel rigged primarily with fore-and-aft sails (gaff mainsail and staysails) but featuring one or more square topsails on the foremast.

4. Brigantine - a brigantine is a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on the main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail mainsail (behind the mast). The main mast is the second and taller of the two masts.

5. Brig- A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century.

6. Barkentine - while a full-rigged ship is square-rigged on all three masts, and the barque is square-rigged except for the mizzen-mast, the barquentine extends the principle by making only the foremast square-rigged.

7. Bark - a barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts of which the fore mast, mainmast, and any additional masts are rigged square, and only the aftmost mast (mizzen in three-masted barques) is rigged fore and aft. Sometimes, the mizzen is only partly fore-and-aft rigged, bearing a square-rigged sail above.

8. Full rigged ship - a full-rigged ship or fully rigged ship is a sailing vessel with a sail plan of three or more masts, all of them square-rigged. Such a vessel is said to have a ship rig or be ship-rigged, with each mast stepped in three segments: lower, top, and topgallant.

9. Ewer - classic fishing and transport vessel of the Lower Elbe with flat bottom and side swords. It is rigged as single mast as well as one and a half mast.

10. Galeass- mostly a two-masted coastal sailer, ketch rigged, especially common in the Baltic Sea. Length rarely over 20 meters.

11. Tjalk - old East Frisian-Dutch coastal vessels with flat bottom, side swords and round ship ends. Rigging as one or one and a half master. Still common in the Netherlands.

@pscentral​ event 36: trios alec hardison & eliot spencer & parker

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

*sobbing* i love em

Solar coloring

«Dragonfly and the Sunset Reflection»

For this painting, I used every color I felt belonged in it. As always, I didn’t use black. I still consider black the enemy of acrylic painting. Acrylics naturally dry a little darker and often shift in tone, and black can easily make a painting feel heavier and duller than intended.

The dragonfly came into this painting thanks to my middle son, who is six years old and currently fascinated by insects, birds, butterflies, dogs, and pretty much every living creature he can find. We spend a lot of time learning about insects together. From time to time I share the development of our Madagascan silk moths in my stories, showing how they grow from tiny eggs into beautiful creatures.

Lately, dragonflies have become his new favorite, so I simply couldn’t resist adding one to this sunset scene.

I also have a little dream. One day, I hope the children and I will have our own pond where we can grow aquatic plants, watch frogs, and observe dragonflies dancing above the water on warm summer evenings.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Tuesday. 💛

#dragonfly #sunsetpainting #acrylicpainting #landscapeart #natureinspired