A man survived the sinking of a ship in 1871, leaving him traumatized afterwards. Some forty years later he was finally able to overcome his fears and sail again… only to die on the Titanic.
There are stories so darkly ironic that if they showed up in a movie, you’d roll your eyes and say, “Okay, come on. That’s too much.” This is one of them.
Ramon Artagaveytia was a 71-year-old Uruguayan businessman with a history that reads like the setup to a cosmic joke. In 1871, he survived the fiery sinking of the steamer America off the coast of Uruguay. He jumped overboard, swam for his life, and carried that trauma like a scar stitched into his psyche. For decades afterward, he couldn’t get back on a ship without panicking. He had nightmares—literal nightmares—of fire and drowning. In a letter to his cousin, written just a couple months before his final voyage, he confessed that even on calm trips he’d bolt awake screaming “Fire! Fire! Fire!” and sometimes found himself on deck in the middle of the night, fully dressed, life belt on, like muscle memory from a trauma he couldn’t shake.
So what finally broke the curse?
The Titanic.
Yes, that Titanic. The one with the movie. The one that was called “unsinkable.” The one whose name has become a metaphor for misplaced confidence and ice-cold consequences. After forty years of fear, Ramon finally convinced himself it was safe to sail again—because this ship had all the modern bells and whistles: steel bulkheads, electric lights, a wireless telegraph. He thought the future had arrived, and he could finally leave the past behind.
Instead, he boarded the most famous shipwreck in human history.
He was a first-class passenger, no less. Walked the decks. Took notes. Wrote letters about how comfortable it all was—how big the ship was, how warm his cabin felt. He admired the green chairs. He ate fine meals. He saw the coast of Ireland pass by from the rail.
And then, five days later, he was gone.
His body was recovered a week after the sinking, pulled from the freezing Atlantic by the MacKay-Bennett. He still had his valuables—gold coins, a watch, two vests marked with his initials. He was dressed like someone who thought he had time.
There’s something cruel and beautiful about his story. This wasn’t just bad luck. This was the universe playing the long game. The man who feared ships for 40 years finally finds the courage to sail again—and dies in one of the deadliest maritime disasters of all time.
And yet, there’s a strange kind of nobility in it too. Because Artagaveytia tried. He didn’t let the trauma win forever. He boarded that ship hoping for peace, for sleep, for a calm voyage where he wouldn’t have to keep reliving the worst night of his life. He believed, finally, that it was safe.
And that’s what makes it tragic. Not that he died—but that he dared to believe he wouldn’t.
Medal of Honor recipient, Roy Benavidez, was attacked by an NVA infantry battalion. He had 37 puncture wounds, an exposed intestine, a broken jaw, and eyes caked in blood. He was assumed to be dead until he managed to spit in the face of the doctor who was zipping him up in a body bag.
There are stories that sound made up—not because they’re unbelievable, but because they make everything else seem kind of pointless in comparison. This is one of those stories.
Roy Benavidez was a Green Beret, and on one terrible day in Vietnam, he basically turned into the human version of that scene in The Revenant—except it wasn’t a bear that got him. It was an entire North Vietnamese Army battalion.
Here’s how it went down: Benavidez jumped out of a helicopter to rescue a 12-man recon team that had been surrounded in the jungle. He ran straight into a kill zone, armed with only a knife. Over the course of the next six hours, he was shot, stabbed with a bayonet, and hit with shrapnel. His jaw was broken. His intestines were exposed. He had 37 separate wounds. That’s not a typo—thirty-seven.
And here’s the part that would get cut from a movie script for being “too unrealistic”: when they finally pulled him out, covered in blood and barely breathing, a medic assumed he was dead. They started zipping him into a body bag.
And that’s when Benavidez spit in the doctor’s face.
It wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t symbolic. It was literally the only movement he could make. His body was too broken to speak, too busted up to move—so he used the last bit of strength he had to spit at the guy zipping the bag shut. Just to say: Not yet.
That one spit kept him alive. He lived. He recovered. He walked again. And years later, he was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Reagan, who read his citation out loud with visible disbelief, like he couldn’t believe the guy standing next to him wasn’t just a myth someone cooked up in a bar.
There’s a weird tension in stories like this. On one hand, they make you want to stand up and salute something—courage, grit, whatever you want to call it. On the other hand, they remind you just how broken the world has to be for a man to go through that much pain and still consider himself lucky.
Roy Benavidez didn’t survive because he was superhuman. He survived because, for six hours, he refused to die. And when death showed up with a zipper, he did the only thing he could: he spit in its face.
A man named George Yao became the #1 Clash of Clans player in the world by playing on five iPads at once—even taking them into the shower to stay online.
At the height of his reign in 2013, George Yao wasn’t just good at Clash of Clans—he was legendary. His rise came at a time when the game was exploding in popularity, and he became its first true celebrity. Kids idolized him. Players in far-off clans tweeted at him daily. YouTube videos of his attacks were devoured by hundreds of thousands. And yet behind the myth of “Jorge Yao” was a 25-year-old financial compliance analyst living alone in a 300-square-foot San Francisco apartment, feeling bored, isolated, and disillusioned with his life.
When he discovered Clash of Clans, it wasn’t just a game—it was an escape. The global clan system gave him a sense of belonging he couldn’t find in real life. His clan, North 44, became a surrogate family. But keeping the #1 spot required an almost superhuman level of time and attention. Players could only protect themselves from attacks while online or through timed “shields,” which meant Yao had to coordinate shield timing, sleep in shifts, and stay online as often as humanly possible. On weekends, he’d play for up to 48 hours straight to recover lost trophies from even the smallest mistakes.
His solution to staying protected during the workday? Wake up before dawn and convince a clanmate to attack him just enough to trigger a protective shield. When that got too complicated, he started playing multiple accounts so he could attack himself, which meant keeping five separate top-tier accounts active, each on its own iPad. A clanmate in the UAE even sent him three iPads to help him manage this.
The cost wasn’t just mental—it was financial. By the time he quit, Yao had spent over $3,000 on in-game purchases and was running low on funds. A wealthy sponsor eventually stepped in to help, but even that couldn’t fix the deeper problem: the game had completely consumed his life. He barely ate, rarely went outside, and described his office job as his “Clark Kent life,” while his real identity—the one where he mattered—was in the game.
When he finally took a weekend trip to Las Vegas with friends, it was like breaking out of a spell. He handed over his account to a friend and decided he was done. He later leveraged his fame into a job promoting and marketing mobile games and moved to London, but he couldn’t bring himself to play Clash of Clans again. The game that made him famous had also made him disappear.
Emilia Clarke read the words that revealed her character Daenerys Targaryen’s fate 7 times in a row thinking “What, what, what, WHAT!?” because it “comes out of fucking nowhere.” She also cried & went on a 5-hr walk that put blisters on her feet. Eventually, she stands by Dany’s “Mad Queen” turn
Let’s start with the mental picture: Emilia Clarke, back home from vacation, opening her email to find the final Game of Thrones scripts waiting for her like a bomb with a blinking light. She makes a cup of tea. She sits down. She starts reading.
And then her face just melts.
She reads the ending. Then she reads it again. Seven times in a row. “What, what, what, WHAT?!” she remembers thinking. Because it made no sense. Daenerys Targaryen—the woman she’d played for ten years—goes full war criminal, burns down King’s Landing, and then gets stabbed by Jon Snow in a quiet scene that feels less like the climax of a fantasy epic and more like a breakup that ends with murder.
Clarke was devastated. She cried. She left her house and walked for five hours—until her shoes gave her blisters. That’s not just a reaction to a plot twist. That’s a reaction to emotional whiplash. The writers had taken one of the show’s most iconic characters and fast-tracked her into madness like they were rushing to catch a flight. And they kind of were. The final season felt like everyone behind the scenes was already mentally checked out, halfway into their next Netflix deal.
Let’s be honest here: season 8 was a disaster. Not in the “well, that could’ve been better” way. In the “wait, did they accidentally delete three episodes?” kind of way. Characters made decisions that broke everything we knew about them. Plotlines that took years to build wrapped up in a single awkward conversation. Major story arcs collapsed like wet cardboard. And through it all, you could feel this weird tension—like the showrunners wanted to be done with Game of Thrones more than they wanted to finish telling it.
Daenerys’ “Mad Queen” turn was the poster child for that problem. If they’d built it slowly, over a full season or two, you could’ve bought into it. She had done dark things before. She had lost people. The seeds were there. But instead, they just lit a match and said, “Surprise, she’s Hitler now.”
And yet, Emilia Clarke stood by it. Not because it made sense. Not because it was satisfying. But because when you spend ten years building a character—through aneurysms, through heartbreak, through fire—you don’t just abandon her when the script lets her down. Clarke became Daenerys. She saw her pain. She saw her logic, twisted as it was. And she asked her mom, like a kid needing reassurance: “Would you still love her?”
That question—Would you still love Daenerys?—is what makes this whole thing sting. Because for years, we loved her. We watched her rise from nothing. We cheered when she burned bad guys alive. We called her powerful. And then, when she finally crossed the line into villain territory, we acted shocked. But maybe we weren’t shocked at what she did. Maybe we were shocked at ourselves for not seeing it coming.
Clarke’s final thought says it all: “I stand by her.” And maybe that’s more honest than anything the writers put on screen. Because she knew what we all eventually had to admit: the character deserved better. The story deserved better. And yeah, we all probably should’ve seen the firestorm coming. But nobody expected it to be this rushed, this clumsy, or this hard to watch.
And that’s the legacy of Game of Thrones now. A decade of brilliance, ended with a five-hour walk and a pair of blisters.
Apple paid U2 $100m for the exclusive right to give its 500m iTunes customers U2’s album “Songs of Innocence” for free by installing it on their devices without asking. A week after release, Apple gave customers a method to remove it, as just 6.7% of the 500m had listened to at least part of it.
There was a moment in 2014 when Apple did something so strange, so wildly confident, so Apple, that it felt like performance art disguised as a marketing stunt. They dropped U2’s Songs of Innocence—a perfectly average album by a once-legendary band—directly onto 500 million iTunes accounts. Not as a free download. As a mandatory download. You opened your music library, and there it was: Bono, staring at you like a missionary who forgot to ask permission before laying hands on your forehead.
Apple paid $100 million for the privilege of giving away U2’s album. That’s not a typo. One hundred million dollars. For an album. That no one asked for. And almost no one listened to.
Within a week, the backlash was so fierce that Apple had to release a dedicated tool just to delete the album. It was like giving someone a fruitcake as a gift and then hiring a moving company to take it off their porch because they never opened it and now it’s starting to smell. Out of half a billion people who had the album forcibly added to their devices, only 6.7% listened to even a single track. Which is an astonishing number if you think about it. Apple spent more than the GDP of some island nations to make U2’s music unskippable—and people still skipped it.
But here’s the real question: Why did this feel so invasive? It was just music. It was free. And U2, at least historically, wasn’t a niche band. They were the biggest band in the world for, like, two decades. But the backlash wasn’t really about Songs of Innocence. It was about control. It was about waking up and realizing that your device, this sleek little monument to personalization, could be hijacked without your consent. Apple reminded everyone, however accidentally, that you don’t really own your phone. You just rent it—until someone decides to install Bono directly into your life.
In a weird way, this whole saga revealed more about the cultural moment than about Apple or U2. It was a turning point. A reminder that the intimacy of digital space feels sacred, even if it’s not. People didn’t just reject the album—they rejected the idea that someone could choose what “belongs” in their library. It wasn’t just unwanted. It was uninvited.
And for U2? It was like throwing a house party where no one shows up, and the neighbors call the cops because your music started playing in their backyard without warning.
The album was called Songs of Innocence. Which, in hindsight, feels like the most ironic name imaginable.
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