We all know how the story of the Titanic starts and ends. The ship that was too big to fail sets sail on her maiden voyage with 2,224 souls on board. And in the wee hours of the morning on April 15, 1912, she hits an iceberg and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Sure, we know the lore (thanks in big part to a bang-up blockbuster from James Cameron). But there's something very different about reliving it in real-time.
104 years after the Titanic took more than 1,000 passengers and crew to their watery graves, one person has recreated the action, minute-by-minute, in tweets. And I can't bear to watch.
There's something gut-wrenching about watching one of the biggest peacetime maritime tragedies play out in real-time. And just like when you watched Jack's fingers slip below the water (I think we can all agree the statute of limitations has expired on that spoiler) there's nothing you can do to stop it.
It's not the first time someone has used Twitter's 140 character format to micro-blog the past. There are accounts like @samuelpepys, which tweets out the words of one of history's most famous diarists in real time, bringing Samuel Pepys' eyewitness accounts of the events 1663 roaring into the future.
There are also plenty of accounts that claim to recreate historical photos, only to have them debunked by the links of @PicPedant, the "punctilious internet killjoy" that points out photoshop fails and spoofed photos online.
Whether the live-tweeting of the Titanic sinking is entirely accurate or a few liberties have been taken, we just couldn't turn away. Even though we know these tweeted quips will sink ships.