#and so many grand things. cosmos. stars. galaxies. so much.

[staryuee]

hi ! ru still taking reqs? if so i hv one for u:

diluc, ei, ganyu, itto, venti and xiao's reactions when u tell them ur from another world?

kinda like traveler lowkey - since traveler did introduce u to [char]. so what happens when they clear out the fog of your origins? (lets also make u extremely overpowered 👍)

my apologies for the abundance of characters i want u to write for :( - i may or may not think out of all the people who's works i've read ur the best? aoqooqoao don't mind that but tysm if u take my req! ily :D

S/O THAT’S FROM ANOTHER WORLD

꒰warnings꒱ honkai star rail references, not proofread oopsie

⠀꒲ ` characters . . . diluc, venti, zhongli, ganyu, xiao, ei, itto

⠀꒲ ` notes . . . i’m currently on a hsr grind so i just decided to steal both that universe and technically the elements of honkai impact to feed into my delusions ♡

traversing the planets that sprinkle the gorgeous celestial galaxy above has led you to a sticky situation. for the past several months you’ve been wandering around the land known as ‘teyvat’ with the kind traveler aiding you as someone who understands your predicament all too well.

it wouldn’t have been so weird for you as a trailblazer - after all, a nameless’s job is to explore the cosmos and the planets that dot the universe - but what made it undoubtedly difficult was the fact you were: A. alone. B. in a whole different branch of the imaginary tree. C. completely attached to a person from this precarious world.

see, over the course of your adventure you’ve met so many different types of people; some the equivalent of scraping nails on a chalkboard and some…or should i say someone, who’s been at your loving side ever since their heart skipped a beat for you.

R. DILUC — 迪卢克

ʚ diluc doesn’t like to assume things unless it’s built on a foundation of logic and evidence. so this was an absolute surprise to him.

ʚ your sweet and silly habits, the little mumbles you kept to yourself, your reliance on him to converse with others…he thought those were just endearing quirks of yours! not because you were from a whole other world!!

ʚ listen, he’s not mad, per se. you’re the love of his life (as absolutely corny as that sounds), but he doesn’t appreciate having something like this be brought up so randomly and not with precaution. the traveler was one thing, this was another. he loved you. he needs to sit down for a moment…

ʚ in the grand scheme of things, this revelation made a lot of sense. there were moments you mentioned little tidbits about your personal life where it had him scratching his head. you were freely allowed to have secrets and friends outside of mondstadt…but it came to a point where he was absolutely sure you were making things up.

ʚ what do you mean you reminded him of a man called argenti? he didn’t particularly enjoy getting compared to another man of all things…but you seemed pretty happy with yourself so he’ll let it slide. you’re missing someone named…kiana? well, he’s not exactly sure who that is, but he’d be happy to escort you to meet them?

ʚ it was sweet, really—how much he tried to appease your little waves of nostalgia and nights of sorrow with nonchalant compliance while he had no knowledge of your situation. but, now that he has…everything has become so much more convoluted.

ʚ he’s already a man of very few words, preferring actions to prove his love than mere bluffs—but how was he meant to show you anything when all you ever want is something out of his reach?

ʚ diluc has never been in a position where he couldn’t give someone he loved something they desired. you manage to surprise him even now.

ʚ aside from the guilt he feels about not being able to give you more than a hug and a kiss with a muttered “it’ll be okay, sweetheart”, he’s utterly proud and in awe of you.

ʚ you were truly something else in battle. fierce, swift, barely visible through smoke and gashes of elements bombarding together like an alchemy lesson gone wrong—he couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

ʚ if diluc was one for relaxing in fairytale bliss, he wouldn’t hesitate to lean back as you slaughtered with delicate ease with a dreamy grin on his face.

VENTI — 温迪

ʚ venti knows every song from the past, present and the future. the future being the most helpful for situations like this.

ʚ but he certainly didn’t expect for you to just say it out right! i mean, he had suspicions (you called him wendy upon your first meeting, he immediately knew there was something curious about you…), but you’ve never really mentioned it before.

ʚ his initial reaction was a mix of unbridled curiosity and utter joy. he has SO many questions which he will let you use as payment instead of mora for every ballad and sonnet he sings for you. but also… you trusted him with this information? fr? (>﹏<)

ʚ he is SO down for you to chat shit about people who pissed you off in your world. will he understand any of the factions or wars involved? nope! but he’s always willing to listen to his windblume when they’re caressing and squshjng at his cheeks as a form of venting relief.

ʚ not only are you a super intriguing storyteller, one that does a heck of a good job to give him the proper material for future ballads, you’re so powerful and talented it makes him shiver! (*≧ω≦)

ʚ he already loved watching your skilful fingers wrap around a weapon…but watching your entire demeanour shift and posture straighten after you’ve left a residue of dust from a hoard of enemies? ooh you’ve got him wrapped around your finger.

ʚ there is a certain bittersweetness to your predicament however… being the god of the freedom of all things means a lot of things, but one thing in particular that makes his heart ache: eventually, he’ll have to let you go.

ʚ and not in a dramatic romeo and juliet way, or an anti-commitment way—in the way that this isn’t your home. and venti would never deprive you of the chance to see your own peers and family.

ʚ what’s a little distance to a god who’s already been alone for most his life anyway?

ZHONGLI — 钟离

ʚ “i know.” were the only words that left his lips as soon as you reveal your identity. he never delves deeper into how he knew; or perhaps he didn’t and is just lying to save face…either way, he remains silent with a complaisant smile as he once again picks up his teacup.

ʚ it’s awfully unsettling how this proclamation is met with such nonchalance, but to be fair, he’s a god, and a dragon at that—he’s seen and been the fault of countless of empires falling and rising, including the one you’re standing in today with qingxin’s in your hair, he’s not fazed, but he is certainly intrigued.

ʚ won’t hesitate to bombard you with questions, slowly of course, he doesn’t wish to overwhelm you.

ʚ it’s not every day he gets to speak with someone who’s from a world completely unlike his own who’s actually willing to share their tales and past. of course the traveler was there to chat about their own experiences, but it always felt like they were leaving portions of their story covered.

ʚ it’s not every day he gets to speak with someone who’s from a world completely unlike his own who’s actually willing to share their tales and past. of course, the traveler was there to chat about their own experiences, but it always felt like they were leaving portions of their story covered. 

ʚ he’s suddenly a lot more in tune with your habits and quirks, he enjoys the whole process of guessing what things you’ve adapted to and learn from teyvat and the things you’ve clearly been conditioned into by your past.

 ʚ silly things like calling accidentally calling the archons “herrscher”, face suddenly going limp with sorrow at the mention of murata, he also does think it’s a little funny you mimic his osmanthus wine line with one of your own…something to do with life being ephemeral and being filled with worldly strife.

 ʚ aside from your unique quirks, another obvious thing that caught his eye was your power. he’s seen many a mortal in his life—some of which had left puffed scarring in his psyche from their sheer strength and will.

 ʚ but you? you were something else. he couldn’t even tell if it was just because he loved you so much that anything you did amazed him, or because it was simply endearing to see his partner so nonchalantly powerful.

 ʚ he may or may not pull the grandpa card occasionally to watch you in action. Can he technically match you in power? possibly. but you should forgive the old dragon, he merely enjoys watching you get sweaty as he sips tea, is that so wrong?  

GANYU — 甘雨

ʚ ganyu is barely awake when she comes home to you, so when you suddenly revealed such news, it abruptly awoke her. yes, she nearly lost a horn in the process—please don’t mention the bump on her forehead.

ʚ despite ganyu being extremely intelligent and quietly observant like an white barn owl with hooded eyes, this was the last thing she expected: was teyvat some sort of resort for outlanders strewn off their course? or did the gods specifically send you down here so you can play with her heart?

ʚ the revelation doesn’t change much apart from your late night pillow talks. suddenly, even the sleepy goat preferred counting the moles and freckles on your skin than imaginary sheep. please do enlighten her about your world!! she will soak up any information and perhaps help you relive some memories with some diy—she’s sure she can remake the food from the xianzhou luofu with some mismatched ingredients!

ʚ one thing that intrigued her immediately about your travels was the place called penacony; you seriously visited a world where dreams were a reality? where you can simply let go of the troubles of life and engage in mindless fun? that was far too out of her realm of imagination, but she was certainly replaying the image you placed in her mind during her late hours at work.

ʚ however…the rest of the story about the dreamy land solidified in her mind that maybe those few hours with ink are worth more than indulging in delusions…

ʚ your martial art skills and general technique with your desired weapon had also piqued her interest, but she had never really put too much emphasis on it or thought to express her curiosity. after all, it’s not like she gets out of liyue much—perhaps this was merely a style from one of the other nations?

ʚ of course, with the present context, she was now even more intrigued! you have to teach her some of those cool choreography moves! you practically use the entire battlefield like a dance floor, sliding around to avoid enemy attacks with such poise and grace you’d think you were merely doing ballet. she’s never been so motivated for something so seemingly trivial to you.

ʚ there’s certainly a hint of worry with your whereabouts. after all, doesn’t this mean you’ll eventually have to make it back home? if so, would you be potentially willing to return to her if your heartbeats ever sync again?

XIAO — 魈

ʚ that explains a lot of the mumbles you told him not to worry about where in which you compared him to people he’s never heard of in teyvat - i mean he barely remembers the blurry faces of people he’s encountered but even so.

ʚ i mean who in the world was blade?? like the weapon? if so, that’s a rather cruel comparison for a man used as a killing slave for most his life.

ʚ he did think it was weird that despite your long stay in teyvat, you hadn’t managed to properly integrate yourself into their cultures - though he wasn’t really one to judge you for that, he was born to protect liyue and he still hasn’t got a clue how to socialise, so really? he understood you all too well.

ʚ soon as you admitted to him your story, it’s like all the lanterns in his head suddenly flutter with light. ah, so you’re not just an outcast weirdo—you’re quite literally from a different planet.

ʚ xiao isn’t one to be super intrigued about other people, his life and duty is specifically intended for the protection of liyue and its people. he has no time to wonder about what’s beyond that.

ʚ but…since it’s you, he’ll try. during those alone nights at the inn, him wrapped up in your arms like an injured kitten as you brush away the dark streaks of hair clinging to his bloodied forehead—he’ll ask.

ʚ did you have any friends? any family? did they love you? what sort of things did you experience? …do you miss them?

ʚ he rarely wants the answer to the last one, he shuts it out almost entirely. he can’t bear the thought of you potentially yearning for somewhere, or even someone, that wasn’t him. it was petty and selfish—but for the first time in his sacrificial life, he allowed it.

ʚ as for your power…he’s not one to be impressed by something he was literally designed for, but it was another thing to watch you work so diligently. it was…admirable.

ʚ there’s been times where you’ve surprised him, and unintentionally hurt his ego. he’s supposed to be YOUR protector, he wants to be. because if he isn’t, what else can he be? you can’t just swoop in and snatch him by the waist while he’s in the middle of training because you think he’s in trouble!

RAIDEN EI — 影

ʚ she truly believes she misheard you at first.

ʚ you’re from where? huh? speak up, please before the stoic shogun breaks down.

ʚ you can’t be from somewhere unreachable…you were hers. and now you’re telling her you belong to a whole other world?

ʚ it’s a poignant moment. on one hand, she’s deeply honoured that you trusted her to admit something so important to you, but truly…the idea you were just barely hers made her irrationally upset.

ʚ once she gets over the sulking, ei finds a little peace with you as you retell some stories of your own life. it’s a little healing almost, knowing you handled yourself so fiercely without her need of protection.

ʚ another raiden shogun? well you better pray you hadn’t dated because otherwise…she’s not sure she can keep that purple electricity of hers in check enough to not leave a branch-like streak across your face (she wouldn’t dare no matter how tempting the idea of branding you as hers the thought may be).

ʚ yae sakura and miko though? now that was certainly interesting. at least she finally had a conversation starter with the kitsune that strayed from the typical teasing.

ʚ you must know that she will absolutely be using this information against you, in the most lighthearted manner of course.

ʚ no it’s actually very normal in the inazuman custom for a shogun to eat a handful of sweets before dinner, you simply haven’t heard of it! yup she also must be the little spoon at night no matter how much smaller or bigger you are from her—it’s a status thing, so come on, get to it.

A. ITTO — 荒泷一斗

ʚ OH SHIT??

ʚ unexpected, bewildered and absolutely enamoured.

ʚ not only did he manage to bag an absolute gorgeous partner, one that could kick ass like it was second nature, but also one that was from some super cool other world?! oh babe you shouldn’t have said anything, he will absolutely chew your ear off with this.

ʚ nonstop talking and questioning— did you have things like this in your world?? when reference to the most common items. dig you also have rain? did you wake up before dawn or was it always night in your realm? do you have family? what were they like? friends? gasp LOVERS?

ʚ ooh he suddenly couldn’t take it. he knows you’re the most beautiful, handsomest, prettiest person alive—but just the thought of someone else—someone who he couldn’t fight!!—thinking the same thing before he ever did made his stomach feel all funny.

ʚ were there monsters and freaks in your world too? and did you love them as much as you hopefully loved him?

ʚ he knows it’s a little unfair to expect you to only have had eyes for him, but for the sake of his ego…it’s much better to keep past romantic endeavours to yourself. he’s currently more than content that the great arataki itto is your first TEYVAT! boyfriend. no other dude from some shammy planet could change that significant status.

©STARYUEE do not copy, steal or repost ♡ ᴜsᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ɪʜᴇᴀʀᴛɢᴀɴʏᴜ

[spaceistheplaceart]

once again thinking about @void-dude's static ford. ough.

check this out

[mistermalaprop]

"a moment for the poet's play"

[an angsty sky-byte (kinda jetbyte) oneshot buried in my docs that i decided to post. originally written between july-august of 2024.]

[title is a lyric from Sleeping Sun by Nightwish. it's a banger song, go listen to it.]

--

Sky-Byte did not spend that much time on Earth.

Well, not the millions of years that the other Decepticons did, at least. He visited every once in a while, every couple of centuries perhaps. Humans were so finicky.

In their infant cycles, humans would try to kill Sky-Byte if he stood on their lands. It is how he adapted to his shark alt-mode, it kept him off the land and in the sea with the unique aquatic animals of Earth…

Oh… how he adored the ocean. It was the only consistent thing he enjoyed for stellar cycles. It was so different from Cybertron’s metal surface. If Sky-Byte wanted to swim on Cybertron, the most that was offered were solvent baths… even then, Sky-Byte got many glares for trying to swim in solvent. That was the reason Sky-Byte gained his ability to fly.

If Sky-Byte could not swim without judgment, then he would fly!

When humans began to write, Sky-Byte would painstakingly translate every bit of human literature and read it for himself. Most of it was primitive garbage that not even a sparkling could read, some intimate, yet… few caught his optic.

Epics, Sonnets, Limericks, Haikus, Elegies, Ballads, Ekphrases— Poetry. Sky-Byte could never get enough of it.

It was everything that Sky-Byte could ever want. Everything his spark desired… right in that tiny little human word.

Sky-Byte knew little of a Cybertronian equivalent to human poetry, perhaps there was never an equivalent. Cybertronians lacked the distinction for human music, too.

… While the war between Autobots and Decepticons simmered down— with the disappearance of both Optimus Prime and Megatron and no other Cybertronian to take their places— Sky-Byte spent his cycles studying and replicating the human art. If he were not doing that, then he was busy filling his schedule up with duels to fight against his arch-rival, Jetfire.

When he had gained enough confidence to perform his newly found art and attempt to implement it into Cybertronian customs, Sky-Byte found that his fellow Transformers were not willing to listen. He would be sooner booed off a grand stage than be heard. It was discouraging, Sky-Byte would admit… but he never gave up. Much like with his rivalry with Jetfire, Sky-Byte would never give up on such glorious art. The world needed to hear what wonderful creations he could speak! And so, no matter the response he got, Sky-Byte pushed forward in his goal to appreciate the art of poetry.

He would pursue in the name of the art; he would study and write and listen until he could speak a new haiku from the tip of his glossa, until he could improvise a ballad from a single star in the galaxy, until he could craft an elegy that moved even the toughest of sparks to tears, until he could recite epics that spanned the cosmos. Sky-Byte refused to be silenced, his passion burning brighter than the stars themselves. Despite the sneers and scoffs from his fellow Cybertronians, he continued to immerse himself in the human art of poetry, finding solace and purpose in each carefully constructed verse.

He found solace in the rhythmic flow of verses, the power of metaphors, and the beauty of language woven together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

As he delved deeper into the world of poetry, Sky-Byte discovered that it was not just about words on a page or spoken aloud— it was a connection, a bridge between sparks. His creations began to resonate with those who were willing to listen (which were very few), sparking something within them that transcended the boundaries of their mechanical bodies. Through his poetry, Sky-Byte found a way to express his innermost thoughts and feelings and to share his experiences and dreams with others. He poured his spark into each verse, each line a reflection of his true self. Through his poetry, Sky-Byte and Jetfire were able to stand beside one another and gaze up at the clouds of dust and space particles.

… that was until the war began again. The Autobots and Decepticons were founded once more, and the battle for control of their home Cybertron was refueled once more.

Against his will, Sky-Byte was called upon to battle against the Autobots after years of “peace”. His spark heavy with conflicted emotions, Sky-Byte grudgingly joined the fray, his mind torn between his duty to his faction and his love for poetry. As he clashed with his foes on the battlefield, the echoes of sonnets and ballads still rang in his audio receptors, a bittersweet reminder of the life he had briefly tasted before the war's resurgence.

Each strike he landed and blow he received only fueled the turmoil within him, the desire for peace warring with the necessity of conflict. Jetfire, once his rival in battles of words and swords alike, now stood across from him as an adversary once more, their camaraderie shattered by the divide of factions. Their rivalry became bitter yet comical— a cliché tragedy written at Sky-Byte’s forced servo by the angry tyrant that was his leader, Megatron. On the battlefield, where screams of agony drowned out any semblance of melody, Sky-Byte yearned for the tranquility of the ocean depths, where only the soft hum of water against his hull could be heard. He longed for a moment of respite, a chance to immerse himself in the verses that had once fueled his spark.

… That leads him to tonight. Tonight.

The night his sacred energon spilled to the dust-coated metal below. The night he collapsed and held little strength to stand.

The night his optics dimmed, and his systems faltered, overwhelmed by the weight of his conflicting desires and the harsh reality of war. Sky-Byte lay on the battlefield, surrounded by the remnants of his comrades and enemies, the echoes of their clashes fading into the distance. His once proud frame now seemed small and fragile, a mere shell of the warrior he had once been.

As he struggled to rise, his optics caught a glimpse of something in the dim light of Cybertron's moon.

“Sky-Byte.” He heard his name spoken by a familiar pair of lips as if it were a forbidden word. Sky-Byte turned his weary optics to the tall figure standing by his side… Jetfire.

"Jetfire," Sky-Byte rasped, his voice barely above a whisper. The sight of his former rival filled him with a mix of conflicting emotions – gratitude for the unexpected help, bitterness at the situation that had led them to this moment, and a deep sense of loss for the time when they had stood together as friends rather than soldiers on opposite sides. “You’re here…”

“Yes, of course…” Jetfire knelt beside Sky-Byte, his expression unreadable behind the battle-worn mask. "I never thought I'd see you like this," he said quietly, his optics scanning Sky-Byte's damaged frame, “It does not feel… real.”

Sky-Byte's systems flickered weakly as he tried to muster a response, the weight of defeat pressing down on him like an iron fist. "Nor I," he managed to choke out, his voice strained with pain and exhaustion. The once-mighty warrior felt a sense of vulnerability creeping over him, his usual bravado stripped away by the harsh realities of war.

He locked optics with Jetfire, “You… were supposed to end me, Jetfire… we agreed…” Sky-Byte formed a small grin upon his lips, his derma sharp as usual for his alternative mode, “But… it was instead another… foolish Autobot…”

Jetfire's optics dimmed at the mention of their agreement, a flicker of regret passing through his optics. "I never wanted it to come to this, Sky-Byte," he replied, his voice heavy with sorrow, “It was never meant to end in such a way…”

Sky-Byte's energy levels were dipping dangerously low, the battle damage taking its toll on his systems. Despite the pain coursing through his frame, a spark of determination flickered in his optics. "You were always a worthy adversary, Jetfire," he murmured, each word a struggle to articulate. "Even in our rivalry, there was… respect."

Jetfire nodded solemnly, a sense of camaraderie mingling with the ache of loss. "We may have been on opposing sides, but I never doubted your dedication to your beliefs, Sky-Byte," he said, reaching out his servos and lifting the Decepticon, holding Sky-Byte in his arms as the battle continued all around them. It seemed as though both of their worlds only consisted of each other, at this moment. Two rivals that swore by their sparks to kill one another, now at the bitter end of their goal…

As Jetfire carried Sky-Byte through the chaos of the battlefield, a sense of surreal calm enveloped them. The sounds of clashing metal and blaring alarms faded into the background, replaced by the steady thrum of their sparks resonating in unison. Despite the weight of their conflicting loyalties and the bitter taste of defeat lingering in the air, there was a strange sense of peace settling over them. As they moved through the wreckage-strewn battlefield, Jetfire's grip tightened around Sky-Byte, offering silent support and a fleeting moment of solace amidst the turmoil. The once-bitter rivals found themselves bound together not by duty or allegiance, but by a shared understanding forged in the flame of war.

Through the haze of pain and exhaustion, Sky-Byte felt a sense of gratitude towards Jetfire for showing him compassion in his darkest hour. Despite the odds stacked against them and the scars that covered their frames, there was a glimmer of hope flickering in Sky-Byte’s spark that perhaps he would not be alone once his light was sucked back into the well.

After kliks of walking, passing by soldiers amid battle, Jetfire finally found a sheltered alcove amidst the ruins of what was once a bustling city on Cybertron. Gently laying Sky-Byte down, Jetfire knelt beside him, his optics scanning the Decepticon's damaged frame with a mixture of concern and regret.

"You shouldn't have to endure this, not like this," Jetfire murmured, his soft voice barely above a whisper amidst the chaos that surrounded them. "You deserved more than the fate that awaits you…"

Sky-Byte met Jetfire's gaze, a flicker of defiance in his optics despite his weakened state. "Perhaps... but every spark has its ending, and mine seems to be near its concluding act…" he replied, his voice barely audible as he struggled to draw in each ventilated breath. The weight of his injuries bore down on him like an unrelenting force, threatening to extinguish the last embers of his spark. Jetfire's servos hovered over Sky-Byte's as the shark spoke, his digits shaking before he finally bit the bullet and held the other’s servo.

“I do not know what I will do without you, Sky-Byte.”

Sky-Byte's optics softened at Jetfire's words, a rare sense of warmth spreading through his damaged frame. Despite the pain that wracked his systems and the knowledge of his imminent fate, there was a flicker of peace in his spark at the thought that he would not face it alone. "You do not have to think of such, Jetfire," he said, his voice barely more than a whisper as he squeezed Jetfire's servo weakly in return. "Our paths may have diverged, but our connection runs deeper than allegiance or war. We were once comrades, and at this moment, we are more than enemies. We are bound by fate, standing together."

Jetfire's optics shimmered with unshed coolant as he gazed down at Sky-Byte, his grip tightening ever so slightly in a silent promise. "I will stand by your side until the end, my old friend," he vowed, a bittersweet smile forming on his lips.

“That… is all I ask, old friend.” Sky-Byte nodded, his optics drifting off to the sky above the now dwindling battlefield, lingering on the fractured moons and the stars, “Though, I wish… I could think of.. a good haiku to bid farewell.”

Jetfire remained by Sky-Byte's side as the mech’s spark snuffed out unceremoniously, his optics locked on the still, slowly rusting form of his former rival. A heavy silence settled over the alcove as the sounds of battle continued to echo in the distance. Grief weighed heavily on Jetfire's spark as he processed the loss of a being who had once been both friend and foe. 

The cacophony of battle slowly faded away, replaced by an eerie stillness that enveloped the alcove where the two former rivals had found a moment of respite.

There was nothing to be done, so Jetfire sighed as he held Sky-Byte’s rusty frame just a little closer.

end.

[justafairytailofinnocence]

Ziggy stardust x reader 👨‍🎤🌌👢

You were always the dreamer. You weren't very popular in comparison to the singer but somehow you caught his attention. You lived a simple life, in a house with alone, you didn't need anyone. The one thing that kept you going was the dreams. You were a walking dream.

No one understands you. You couldn't socialise with normal people. As you put it. Everyone had their quirks, but—they all spoke of boring, mundane things you cared not for. You did get along with those of a grand imagination but that was only short lasted.

You prefer the quiet life of being alone.

One night, you were studying or watching TV. When a sudden flash of light beamed down. You looked out your window, seeing a strange aura of glitter.

Rushing out outside, you looked down to see who it was. And to your surprise—it was the rockstar himself—Ziggy Stardust.

He was draped in flamboyant attire with bright red and orange. His hair was bright like Mars. He had a strange circle on his forehead, and he carried a red tear drop shaped 12-string guitar.

Your breath dropped. You weren't sure if this was real. Ziggy Stardust was here, in the flesh.

You checked his pulse. He was alive.

Acting quickly, you decided to carry him—to the best of your ability—inside your house. You placed him in your bed. To the best of your ability, you kept him warm and safe.

He was breathing. You draped a blanket over him for the time being and placed his guitar to the side.

After a few hours, he woke up. His eyes flickered, and you felt the weight lift off your chest.

"Where, where in the bloody cosmos am I?" He asked, placing a hand to his head.

"Uh, my house." You said.

"Your house, is it?" he cocked an eyebrow.

"Yeah."

"Ah, well forgive the intrusion, darlin', I was surfin' through space, through the stars to find earth for me next gig and I—crashed here." He sat up.

"Gig? Oh? Do you mean like with your band?" You questioned, seeing as he was the only one here.

"Yeah, me band, spiders from Mars we are."

You then offered, "I see, well, I could drive you if you'd like."

"That would be great, I mean, it doesn't start for another 12 hours." His reddish lips curved, and his eyes glinted.

By the time you got there, he gave you access to backstage. You'd attend more concerts day by day, helping with props, set up and make up.

Despite not being as famous, nor a singer or musician. He found you intriguing. It's about the flare of your imagination that drew him in. Why your're so dreamy and artistic like him.

He would use comforting words to help with insecurity and fame. Even when you were less, he would reassure you. "Darlin' you are enough. You don't need popularity. you're a unique star on your own. I'd rather that than anyone else."

As you attend concerts, he would mention something like. "Ello' me beautiful audience. I ave' a special guest with me tonight, one whose been elpin' me travel the cosmos. Y/n L/n".

If you choose to go on stage, you would awkwardly stand there as ziggy sings to you. Lady Stardust. He doesn't just see you. He sees what you are. He's in love no matter what you look like.

Parties are wild. You're not into the drug life, maybe a cig, but otherwise, he would respect that. If it got much ziggy, would hold you in his hand and protect you, some knight in shining armour.

You helped with his make up in performances.

You'd travel the cosmos with him and his 12-string guitar. It'd be like a galatic dream, holding him as he played and flew through the galaxy, creating a whirlwind of glittery colours.

On mars, you'd be allowed to be yourself and chill out. Many of the residents are full of love and hope. They'd be rocking out to the Spiders from Mars.

A band group you met through ziggy. He'd be rocking out on Mars twenty-four-seven.

On earth, you'd likely attempt to help ziggy.

That was until his downfall. Ziggy became more obsessed with the fame life he began to forget you in a sense.

The fans and his fame sent him on a spiralling madness to forget his original mission. To bring peace and love on earth by rocking out to the youth.

You started to become alienated, and the Spiders from Mars noticed it too.

You remembered your first time doing it. He was hyped up on drugs and alcohol.

You were hyped up on the rock star life.

You were both in his hotel after a party in London with mick Jagger and Iggy Pop. He got you into corruption.

He would seduce you and have his way with you. You remembered smearing his makeup on both your faces. Causing a night to remember as you both deflowered on his living room floor.

Ziggys' last performance was in London's Hammersmith Odeon. It was his last performance, singing "rock n roll suicide." Where ziggy was killed off mysteriously.

You later found his body carrying his guitar on stage, and that was the end. He did leave a message for you. "Stay true darlin', ain't no one is like you. Be the cosmic star that you are."

David bowie persona requests: open

[wolverenmayden]

So much in the universe

So much in the universe, Endless galaxies, stars, and planets Stretching out into infinity. We are but a speck in the grand scheme of things, A tiny blip on the radar of existence.

The universe is a vast expanse Of mysteries waiting to be uncovered, Of secrets waiting to be revealed. We may never fully understand The complexity of it all.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Exploring, discovering, seeking knowledge - These are what drive us forward. To unlock the secrets of the cosmos, To grasp at understanding, even if just a little bit.

So much in the universe, So many wonders yet to behold. From supernovas exploding with power, To black holes swallowing light whole. There is so much beauty and terror, In this vast expanse we call home.

And yet, amidst it all, We find ourselves feeling small. Lost in the grandeur of it all, Feeling insignificant against its backdrop.

But let us not forget - We are made from stardust and dreams, Brought forth from the very fabric of creation itself. Our existence is no mistake or accident - It is part of something greater than ourselves.

So as we gaze up at the night sky, Let us remember our place within it all. Not just observers or spectators, But active participants - Connected to every corner and crevice , of this magnificent tapestry unfold.

For even though life may seem fleeting , in comparison tot he age old stars above we too leave an imprint , however small on this universe wonder land .

So let's embrace our insignificance And revel in our connection to everything around us . beholding beauty with heart wide open taking solace knowing that while we may be minute and temporary beings amongst giants we play an essential role in keeping balance within these celestial majesties for there exist so few places with such potential for wonder While loss reverberates throughout time letting go opens doors for new beginnings

Thus ensues endless cycle living dying born anew breathing living loving endlessly towards eternity dispense

And hand n' heart will guide through darkness taking comfort finding light across divides steadfast despite uncertainty

Embracing ever ebbing tide we'll sail beyond event horizon into spatial seas galaxy glide trusting path transcend defining

Together pass through cosmic gates embrace mystery expand into awe discover moment embracing fate into boundless possibility before return crescendo

May your spirit forever echo dancing among astral symphonies resonating eternal laughter

[sfwordsmith]

Johnny B. Goode

Genre: Science Fiction

Style: Flash Fiction (Under 1500 words)

Prompt: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

  Johnny B. Goode

  On March 5, 1979, the United States of America sent a deep space probe on an escape trajectory from our solar system, headed for a date with interstellar space. On this probe they included a golden record, or rather, a gold-plated copper disc, much like a vinyl record, with a cartridge and needle necessary to play its recordings. The audio on the disc included greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds from life on Earth such as laughter, whale songs, wild dogs, the surf, wind, and fire, among other things, as well as 90 minutes of music, which included pieces from Mozart and Bach all the way to rock n’ roll like Chuck Berry. It also included 115 images of life on Earth and came with a message from then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In it, he said, 

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some–perhaps many–may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

On August 1, 2012, Voyager 1 succeeded in its mission of entering interstellar space, leaving behind the solar system it was built in and entering the grand unknown…

The Voyager 1 ran out of power and ceased contact with Earth in late October 2025. On September 9, 2062, we now know that it was found. We also know that the beings that found it listened to the record and for some reason, liked Chuck Berry. When what we now know as the Nazalqar ships arrived, they broadcast two and a half minutes of the rock and roll masterpiece Johnny B. Goode to every possible receiver and speaker in the world. By the time the end of the song had occurred, skylines across the globe were cast in shadow by monolithic ships, that even the most conservative news stations cited esteemed scientists reports as saying that it was made of a metal unknown to our solar system, undoubtedly alien in nature, incredibly dense, and seemingly impenetrable by any radiation. Resistance would be futile. Advanced alien lifeforms had arrived. All because we sent a record out to space. 

People lost their minds. There were religious riots, mass-suicides, the stock market plummeted and then ceased to exist, and nations collapsed overnight. The ones still managing to hang on poured every single cent they could into the scientific research of their alien visitors. The U.N. welcomed all remaining nations into their midst, and surprisingly none refused. The warmongering nuclear discussions were never brought to the table, as humanity instinctively knew they were utterly outmatched.

Yet the Nazalqar did nothing but orbit ominously. They remained around the Earth, playing daily at 6:18am Pacific time, Johnny B. Goode, throughout every speaker in the world. Entire careers were made trying to explain the numerical significance of this exact timing or why Chuck Berry – to no avail. No one ever knew the truth behind it. Most just ended up throwing away their radios.

There was debate as to whether the Nazalqar ships even held lifeforms or if they were solely operated by artificial intelligence. There was no resounding evidence one way or another as all scans proved useless.. They were clearly capable of course correction, as could be quantified by scientific calculations noticing readjustments based on magnetic pole drift, so they had some sort of reason about them. Yet, all communication efforts by humanity were met with deaf ears, with the only response being Chuck Berry.

“Go Johnny, go, go! Go Johnny, go, go!”

The Berry estate made billions in royalties and shuttered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Artists around the world went even hungrier than they had before. Poets became doomsday prophets. The arrival of the Nazalqar ships changed the fabric of humanity in so many different ways.

By the way, we call them Nazalqar ships, as that was the closest English pronunciation of a series of glyphs identifiable at the bottom of every ship. People wondered if that was the name of the species that surrounded us or if it was a message. Some asked if it was the name of the company that had created the ships. Imagine driving a town over and being forever known as Toyota.

Anyway, I will quit my rambling and get to the point of the matter, as this recording must fit on another gold record.

My name is Tahib Moorey, and I am the Speaker on behalf of the United Terran Space Corps. We send the following message to anyone who might listen. There is evidence of intelligent life in the Universe. We know this to be undoubtedly true because of what we witnessed. 1 year and 9 months after the Nazalqar ships arrived to our planet, the Nazalqar ships moved and merged together to completely surround and encapsulate the Earth. For the first time in our planet’s history, we received no light from our star. 

Now, this is where it gets hard to explain for me. It was a cataclysmic event. I am not a scientist, but I know what I experienced. We did not feel its effects immediately. Of course, we instantly noticed the darkness… that shocked us all as we scrambled for lanterns and power generators – but nothing else was instant. The temperature, however, did begin to drop, and they never stopped dropping continuously; all photosynthesis stopped, solar panels worldwide became useless, and electricity consumption skyrocketed. All private utility companies were mandated to become public entities, and as such, had we not already been in a crisis, the power crisis on Earth would have been solved.

After a week of darkness, the average surface temperature of Earth was -17 degrees Celsius. We were on the advent of a new ice age. There were mass exoduses from multiple locales to areas with more geothermal activity. Plant life around the globe had begun to falter. Life as we knew it was soon to be over. Aliens had destroyed the planet. Yet, every morning, we heard Johnny B. Goode through our radios.

That was until the day came where the sky lit up green as the Nazalqar ships glowed intensely with heat and moaned under the stress of massive temperature changes for precisely 37.15 minutes before then cooling back to their cold and dark hardened grey. The shield began breaking apart. Some pieces of the Nazalqar ships began to float away lifelessly, while others, still operable, dispersed themselves or drifted away into the Sun. It was as if they had finished what they were made for, their purpose complete, and they would no longer protect us. Almost immediately after, certain areas on the Sun-facing side of the planet began seeing the light again. What was seen as humanity’s mass extinction event became the day we all saw the light.

Not long after, scientists measured the remnants of a gamma-ray burst from a nearby star cluster that had recently had a massive and rapidly rotating star collapse upon itself, creating a black hole. Were not it for the Nazalqar ships, or rather, the Nazalqar shield as it is now known, humanity would never have gotten to send this message to you at all.

So, if you can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: Now we humans of Earth have banded together, and we send this message to express our gratitude to whoever sent the Nazalqar ships to our system, for you have not only saved our species as well as countless others… but you have broken down our borders, and have genuinely welcomed us to a community of galactic civilizations. We no longer see ourselves as disparate or divided. We no longer have nation states. We are now globally united. For that, we have the Nazalqar to thank, whoever they might be. We cast that first golden record to the stars with hope and determination and were met with goodwill in a vast and awesome universe. We hope that some civilization will hear our story and know of this exchange, and know that we in kind welcome any other galactic civilizations, and will offer that same goodwill, in the efforts of spreading peace and prosperity, as the Nazalqar ships provided us the time necessary to achieve just that for ourselves.

With that said, we hope still that whoever was out there listening the first time receives this message as well, and can perhaps tell us in simple terms, ‘Why Chuck Berry?’

Read more here

[firemandeanbuck]

Stars

HC Hob has this kind of ceiling in his bedroom, vibrant, glittery and spectacular. He painted it himself. He is crafty that way.

After their first time, spent and sticky with sweat Hob and Dream lay in bed, talking lazily, giggling and caressing each other's skin. Dream's skin is smooth, cold, and soft. Hob's skin is scarred, warm, and rough. It's perfect. Dream mouths Hob's throat, drinking the sounds coming from Hob's lips.

Hob had waited for this moment for over 500 years. He had hoped that one of these days, his stranger would be his lover. At last. It was true.

Hob did not sleep that night, he held Dream and talked and talked. Asked him endless questions, what he is, how he came to be, how the Dreaming is a part of him. In return, he told him all about the new age, the changes. Even when his arm fell asleep from being under Dream, he didn't move.

"Are you asleep?" Dream asked at some point.

"No", came the sheepish reply.

"That's a wonderful ceiling you have", he comments, just like the first time he saw his room a few weeks ago.

"Thanks. I painted it", murmured Hob, clearly fighting to remain awake.

"You can sleep", Dream reminds him,"I'll be here when you wake up".

“No, I’m fine”, Hob ran his hand on Dream’s jaw and kept it there, gently pressed against it.

“Your eyes are…beautiful”, Hob breathed, he didn’t dare to even blink.

They were beautiful, Dream’s eyes, they reflected the cosmos, the borning stars, the winking stars, the bursting nebulae, the damning blackholes, all of it. It appeared as if his eyes were windows to the universe themselves.

“You flatter me”, his cheeks went pink, his red lips tilted in a small smile.

“I love to see you red”, he brushed the back of his fingers against his cheek,

“Storyteller, tell me a tale”, Hob requested promptly,

Without taking his eyes off Hob, who was completely hypnotised with his eyes, Dream waved a hand to the ceiling, “I can SHOW you a tale”, delicately, Dream grabbed Hob’s chin and turned it to the ceiling.

Hob was stunned to say the least. It was spectacular, mind blowing, intriguing and celestial, to say the least. He personally felt like he was flying across the cosmos, like he can touch the stars, so close and intimate. He felt the stars dancing around him, the immortal basked in their company. It was almost like he could hear their heavenly laughter and siren-like voice, calling out to him to join their never ending celebration of life, universe and just being bigger than life.

The colours, oh, the colours, they were more beautiful than anything Hob had ever seen. Red, orange, green, blue, violet, pink, even the simple black stood out so much. So rich and vivid were the colours, no picture can compare. The way the nebulae move around, swimming freely like a mermaid in the deep sea. So many colours. Hob was sure there are more than his human eyes can comprehend or translate.

“It’s amazing”, Hob’s breath hitched. He reached out his hand to touch them. 

For a moment, he felt tiny, microscopic even. What or who is he in the grand scheme of things?

“Thank you”, Dream muttered, “I’ve crafted them”,

“I know”, Hob chuckled.

“I mean the actual stars. The Night is my Mother, but she wasn’t as decorated as she is now”,

Hob blinked and turned his gaze to Dream, who was still staring at him, unblinkingly. Such adoration and love in his galaxy eyes.

“She is beautiful”, Hob managed, before his words got stuck in his throat.

“Aye. But I rather look at you”, Dream smirked at the open mouthed shock on Hob’s face. He brought his hand to Hob’s hairy arms, “Universe is a vast thing, you can be easily lost in it. So are your eyes. And I have been there. I prefer where I can feel your warmth and sweet touch”, Dream carried on the stroking to his hip and thigh, “You show me humanity that I’ve long forgotten”, the Endless blinked, now caressing his neck “Trust me when I say, the stars and planets holds no candle to your brilliance, my heart”

It’s safe to say Hob’s mind short circuited that moment and they didn’t get ANY sleep that night.

MY FIRST (hopefully not last) CONTRIBUTION TO FLUFFBRUARY <3

inspired by @staroftheendless starting a war against angst and dedicated to Fluff Princess @immacaria

[rhaaclaws]

thoughts on astronomy. space in general?

THE SCIENCE TO EVER TO ALL ITS SO OHGIIKJGLHJNGKKHLGJK

There's so much we don't know about it and It's so hard to comprehend because of its sheer scale and beauty and oughgjhgj

While some people take its magnitude to be pessimistic assholes like "mimimi we are so insignificant we are a speck of dust compared to space" it honestly kills me because if anything, we are significant enough to exist and while in the grand scheme of things we don't ""matter"", I think just being here and being able to see and appreciate the beauty of the cosmos is enough

Also astronomy is so dramatic i love it, my fav example being how gold is formed aka two neutron stars constantly colliding and creating gold, which is one of the heaviest metals. ALSO ALSO how a star gets destroyed by a black hole, of course u make everything bright. another very dramatic thing are just how BRIGHT supernovas are. do u know the things id do to go back to 1000 ad for even a day to see SN 1006 in the sky. id go insane and like die or smth idk

One of my completely fav things to read and talk about are black holes, specially since they're what I want to focus on with my studies [if I even manage to get a degree in astrophysics, I want to find out information on them]. I think one of the coolest things ever is how not only their gravity is strong enough to not let light escape, but to slow down time and its just aahujhjkgjhgkjg its so fascinating to me their sheer power [kinda irrelevant but i wanna put it here, if you squished down the earth to make a classic black hole, it'd be 0.69 inches in diameter and that's nice]. also everytime i see that picture [picture!!!!] of a black hole [hiii galaxy m87] I legit get soso emotional like holy shit. Holy shit. for so long we couldn't fully confirm their existence and its just aAAAAAAAAAAAAA to even see this in my lifetime its sososoooo fucking cool I'm so excited to see how more research leads to any discoveries [who knows maybe I'm gonna be on the same team that makes the next breakthrough]

Another fav thing of mine is the golden record NASA sent. i know I keep saying the word beautiful but I truly mean it every time I say it. sending out a physical means of contact to space to say hi the most human thing ever and it makes me so happy that its been going into space. will it contact another civilization? who knows, maybe not this lifetime or the next but the way that we try so hard to reach out to an unknown entity makes me go crazy insane

THIS IS SO LONG. but i have so many thoughts on space it makes me so emotional and I'm so passionate about it. i think astronomy is one of the most amazing parts of human curiosity. Every single living [on earth at least] thing has seen the same sky as us, and we have been slowly finding out more stuff about it and its so beautiful to me how the love of knowledge makes us want to learn about things, specifically space

anyways here are some of my fav space pics. whoever sent this [or anyone!!!] is always free to message me at any time to talk about astronomy in general. i love talking and listening about it <333

[cassieoh]

Stellar Lifecycles by Anthony J Crowley, demon

1 - Irreversible Collapse

Tell me about the stars, Crowley. (You are my safe place to ask questions, Crowley. I have so many of them). How were they made? How do they live? (Surely there is worship in understanding God’s marvels? After all, the beauty of a good book isn’t just in the pleasure to the eyes, the pretty arrangement of words on the page. The pleasure is in the way the soul gazes into the mirror and comes to know itself better. Let me know the heavens better. Let me know you better.)

I’ll tell you, angel. God created the universe in heat and light, and then She created the angels to weave it. We took the light and moulded it in our hands, pressed it into protons and neutrons, tiny buzzing electrons, and then we pressed those together, too. She called them hydrogen atoms and we gathered them up in our arms into great luminous clouds. Then comes the neat bit, angel, the real trick. The Almighty looked at the way the bits of the atoms stuck together, and said, ‘like that, but for big things,’ and She called it gravity.

But how does gravity make a star?

It’s like a hill, you see. Or more like a valley. You put the cloud at the top and gradually, it’ll all fall down.

(Apples fall. Angels, too. Does a fall always end in fire?)

Those atoms’ll get closer together, it all starts to get hot. And you know, it’s still just a cloud at that point, swirling around in space and all that, but eventually, it gets dense enough that its own mass takes over, and it starts to collapse in on itself. It starts to collapse, right, and you can’t stop it. After that point, the star is going to get born come what may. It’s inevitable.

2 - Fusion

Well, and then things get hotter and hotter until… See, making hydrogen nuclei is easy, in the grand scheme of things. Take a proton, right? That's basically it. Sometimes add a neutron. 'S not that hard. The leap from hydrogen to helium, though, that's a thing. Takes a whole boatload of energy to force four of those recalcitrant little bastards to share space in a nucleus.

They don't just… attract? (Like you and I? Tell me we're just another law of nature, an inevitable binding.)

They get close enough, they do. Almost impossible to separate, eventually. But to start with, no. Something has to force them together, some external circumstance. Something like the heat generated in a collapsing gas cloud.

(Something like a conversation on a wall, an unexpected moment of kinship, the way my stomach swooped like a swallow when you smiled at me, close, close, under my wing.)

Are you still listening?

Yes, go on, my dear.

So, it gets hot enough to push the hydrogen nuclei together to form helium, but the really clever bit comes next, because, angel, get this. When they fuse, they actually release more energy. It's like Creation in miniature. Happens fast, too. BOOM. And suddenly your nice innocuous little gas cloud is a fiery ball of nuclear fusion.

3 - Balance

After that, you've got a main sequence star, happy to shine away for however long. Millions of years, probably, if She'd let it.

The atoms stop falling inwards? (Tell me there's an end, a soft landing. Surely it can't go on forever.)

For now. Gravity's still pulling them in, but the force of the fusion is also trying to push them back out.

Like a tug of war.

Exactly. Both sides are equally matched. No one's going anywhere. The forces are balanced.

Oh. A little like us.

You… yeah. You could say that.

4 - Imbalance

It doesn’t last, though. It can’t.

Why not? (If you don’t rock the boat, if you’re careful, surely nothing needs to change.)

All good things, angel, you know what they say. The star runs out of hydrogen, converts it all to helium, so there’s nothing left to burn. It’s like letting go of the rope in that tug of war. Gravity wins out, and hard. The star collapses in on itself, heats up again, until suddenly it’s hot enough to start fusing helium.

Oh, a daring rescue? (Tell me, tell me there’s a hero at the eleventh hour. Tell me there’s a safe way to proceed.)

Not... exactly. Not precisely, no. ‘Cause the same thing happens all over again -- the helium runs out, gravity wins, the star collapses and heats up until it’s hot enough to start burning the next biggest element. And so on and so forth. It just sort of wobbles about like that, expanding and contracting, clinging on desperately to life, until it’s burned through everything it can.

It sounds positively awful.

Perhaps, in a way. There’s something beautiful to it, too, though. Symphonic, almost. The layers of elements that build up like tree rings, the way it flings out its coronal envelope while the core is slowly collapsing, like a robin puffing up its chest feathers. Red giants, the humans’ll call them, and they’re magnificent.

But it’s dying.

No, I know, but-- this stage is important, because this is where the complex elements come from. Iron for blood, oxygen for air, carbon for-- everything. You can’t have life without this stage, angel. The star has to start to die for everything else to begin.

5 - End State

And that’s the end of it? Nucleogenesis completed? Do we… do we simply mourn the star’s noble sacrifice, and move on?

Not in the least, angel. How do you think the elements get out of the star to make life?

How, then?

A big-- really big explosion. Massive. As much light given off as an entire galaxy.

Oh, like the one we saw at Bethlehem. What did you call it?

A supernova. Exactly. Not all stars go out that way. Not the smaller ones. The sun will go with a bit less fanfare, just shut off the power and go dark one day. But the bigger ones, the ones with sufficient mass, they go up like a firework, like an atom bomb.

With a bang, rather than a whimper. I suppose you approve.

If you’ve got to go, go with style, that’s what I always say.

Yes, I am aware. (That's what I'm afraid of.) And after that?

Depends on the mass again. There’s always something left behind, some compact little memory of what went before. Might be a white dwarf or a neutron star. With sufficient mass, it can lead to a black hole. Even they serve their purpose, though. Most galaxies have them, right at the very centre. The dark heart of the cosmos.

Surely, this must be the end.

No, angel. Not even close.

6 - New Life

“I helped make this one,” Crowley said quietly. “Wasn’t much of an angel, but I enjoyed the work.”

“You should be proud,” Aziraphale said. “It’s incredible, my dear. Tell me about it?”

“It’s a stellar nursery, a place where new stars are born. D’you remember what I told you that time, about how stars live and die?”

“How could I forget?”

“Right. Well,” Crowley said, shifting a little, caressing Aziraphale’s fingers restlessly. “After the fusion’s stopped and the star’s gone cold, or exploded or whatever it’s going to do, the molecules that’re left over eventually form a nebula. Over time, gravity does its work again, and the densest bits of the cloud pull in more and more matter, until they’re dense enough to collapse into a protostar. At critical density, fusion starts all over again.”

“Bob’s your uncle.”

“Bob’s your…” Crowley shook his head. “Nevermind. Point is, a star died, and a new star was born. It’s different to what came before, more complex in its make-up maybe, but just as… just as precious.”

{excerpts from Starstuff, written by @themoonmothwrites​/the_moonmoth, illustrated by me/cassieoh for the Good Omens Big Bang 2019}

[tomasorban]

The Dogon’s Extraordinary Knowledge of the Cosmos and the Cult of Nommo

France, 1920: Marcel Griaule is a young man who is very well-established in his studies, especially in mathematics. He has recently served as a volunteer in the French Air Force and aspires to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grande.

Although his future already seems marked, fate has other plans for him - a new road that begins to take shape when he decides to attend a conference that same year. The speakers are Marcel Mauss, anthropologist, sociologist, and historian of religions, and Marcel Cohen, linguist.

Griaule is struck by their words and decides to devote himself entirely to the study of anthropology. Between 1928 and 1933 he took part in two ethnographic expeditions, and in this period (1930) he came into contact with a mysterious African tribe: the Dogon.

The opportunity was given to him during a period of study in Mali alongside his pupil Germaine Dieterlen, who was also a pupil of Mauss and deeply interested in the study of ancient myths. From that moment, the mystery of the Nommo is born. It is an element of an ancient heritage of which we cannot expand without having first spoken of the Dogon people.

One People, Many Mysteries

The Dogon are a tribe that lives in a desert land of Mali, near the border with Burkina Faso. It is a place that welcomed them after their escape to avoid the expansionist pressures of the medieval empires…we are around the year 1000, during the fierce battles on the banks of the Niger river.

Many researchers have already discussed the range of mysteries that surround these people, but what interests us particularly for the development of the hypotheses contained in this article is their complex cosmogony, based on faith in a creative god, Amma, and in a creation produced by the movements of the “Egg of the World”.

A Dogon schematic of the “egg of the world” . 

On the basis of these beliefs, the “Nommo”, the eight pro-genitors of the Dogon, brought to Earth a basket containing the clay necessary to build the grain stores of their villages. This image, which at first sight appears quite simple and devoid of particular significance, hides in reality a very profound knowledge of the universe and of the celestial bodies.

The granary represents the universe, its scales symbolize both the males and females that generated the Dogon and the various stars and constellations: in this sense we will find the Pleiades in the north, Orion in the south, and a comet in the west. So, everything started with a “basket”, or container, that carried life.

Dogon Astronomical Knowledge

But the thing that most struck the two scholars was the finding that, despite the Dogon having come into contact with our civilization in fairly recent times (about the beginning of the century), they possessed incredible scientific and astronomical knowledge. Some of this knowledge was certainly the result of a cultural heritage that is millennia old, but one element in particular has decidedly current characteristics - the detailed knowledge of the star Sirius.

The Dogon were in fact aware of the fact that Sirius is a binary system (i.e. a system consisting of two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B); they were aware of the fact that Sirius B revolves around Sirius A with an elliptical orbit and over a period corresponding to 50 years; and the most disconcerting discovery was that the Dogon knew the exact position of Sirius A within the ellipse.

Sirius A and Sirius B as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The white dwarf can be seen to the lower left. (NASA, ESA, H. Bond/STScI, M. Barstow/University of Leicester/ CC BY 3.0 )

Many may wonder what is so disconcerting about all this? The amazement arises from the fact that it was only in 1862 when the American astronomer Alvan Clark deduced the existence of Sirius B using a telescope, among the most advanced for that era, and it was not before 1970 that there was confirmation of the existence of this star, not to mention a photograph of it.

Yet the Dogon knew of it hundreds of years before, and not only that, they called Sirius B with the name of “Po Tolo”; this name is certainly the most apt and shocking way to describe this system, the term Tolo, in fact, means star, while Po refers to a typical cereal that has the characteristic of being extremely heavy despite its small size; an expression, therefore, very close to reality since Sirius B is a white dwarf and, as such, has a very high density.

A Dogon diagram said to represent Sirius B’s elliptical orbit around Sirius A. ( CC BY SA 3.0 )

All this information is practically inaccessible without adequate astronomical equipment, and it is useless to specify that the Dogon had never come into possession of any such instrument, they even ignored its existence.

But the mystery does not end here, the Dogon, in fact, used to represent the planet Saturn as surrounded by a sort of halo, thus demonstrating that they knew of its rings; moreover, they knew that the planet Jupiter had around “four companions”, which correspond exactly to its four main moons.

As if this were not enough, they depicted the Earth as a sphere and knew that this sphere revolves around its axis, and together with other spheres (the planets), around the sun; last, but not least, it is surprising that the Dogon, or in any case the elders of the village, described our galaxy as an immense spiral shape. We know very well that this concept began to be disclosed by Western astronomers only at the beginning of this century.

For the Dogon, Sirius B was the first star created by God and it represents the fulcrum of the Universe. All matter developed from it, including souls, following a complex spiral motion - the same that is symbolized in the intertwined baskets.

Saturn is surrounded by rings, Jupiter has four main moons, and four calendars are used: one for the Sun, one for the Moon, one for Sirius, and one for Venus. Needless to say, that the Dogon believe a truth attested from ancient times - the fact that the planets orbit around the Sun.

The Dogon know what, logically, they should not know; their knowledge is not the result of ancient legacies acquired by observing the sky and the stars with the naked eye, as happened in other civilizations, they simply “know”; this is the most disturbing part of the Dogon mystery.

Dogon hats which resemble flying saucers.

The Nommo Cult

An old Dogon legend tells of when the God of the universe, Amma, sent the Nommo to earth. This was a half-man, half-amphibian creature which landed in the land of the Fox, a territory northeast of Bandiagara, in the Mopti region; the Nommo was red, but when it touched the ground it became white.

Mali, Dogon container This container shows the "Ark of the world", in which Nommo, the mythical progenitor of humanity, is supposed to have come down from the sky. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The name Nommo derives from a Dogon word that translates as “to do well”; much more often, however, this is remembered as “The Master of Water” (perhaps a reference to the fact that the Nommo could not survive out of water), the Admonitor, or the Destroyer.

We do not know exactly how this figure can be placed in the various events that characterized the growth of the Dogon culture, but it is not so difficult to identify other very similar creatures in different cultures - not only geographically distant but also with respect to various historical moments.

The same type of creature is present in a history of Mesopotamia written during the III Century BC from the priest Beroso; his name was Oannes, his body was similar to that of a fish, he lived only in water, and had feet similar to those of man. Are these images referring to the same event?

In any case, this ancient, almost primordial figure occupies a prominent place in all African cultures; not infrequently, for example, in the most internal areas of Africa. People belonging to monotheistic religions turn to the priests of the various villages because in situations of extreme difficulty they invoke the assistance of the Nommo.

Finally, let us not forget the God fish Dagon of the Philistines, and the same symbol of the fish which the first Christians used to represent their deity. Whoever or whatever it was, the Nommo still continues to lengthen its shadow on African territory, perhaps as a messenger waiting to be able to reveal ancient truths to those who have the courage and the predisposition of mind to listen to it.

[yeojaa]

( GHOST IN MY BED. )

Sometimes, hating someone is the only thing you can do.

pairing.  jjk x (named) f!reader. 

genre + rating.   rockstar!au.  e2l (exes n enemies!).  general angst.    

tags / warnings.  everything about this is pain.  you can literally spin in a circle and point at somewhere on the page and it’ll be pain.  i’m sorry.

beta reader(s).  @midnighttifa​ (your comments make my days better, @pars-ley​ (you’re so lovely), and @papillonsgf​ (i owe you my life and all my love).  thank you, my dears!  💖

wc.  3k

chapter three.

You’d thought they’d left - all the memories of him.  Packed into cardboard boxes and plastic bins, folded between clothes and bare picture frames.     

You realise now, they’d only been hiding, waiting for his return.  

The smell of your perfume.  His favourite one, strawberry jam and cosy cedar wood.  It calls to moments together, of his face buried into the side of your neck.  Wandering hands and wondrous laughter, warmth crowding everywhere.  The wet of his teeth against your skin as he’d smile.  Springtime and Sunday matinees, fresh picked fruit and messy kisses.  

The mirror in your hallway - the one you’d taken too many photos in front of, that’d you almost broke one drunken stumbling night.  The one he’d loved you breathless in, with a hand at your throat and another on your waist.  Where he’d whisper sweet nothings with eyes only for you.  Where your little piece of paradise was preserved by a pretty iron frame. 

The tee shirt that you’d washed and promised to return but never had, keeping it as a trophy.  A rightful reminder of his love.  How it fits you just right without fitting you at all, comfortable and lazy and effortless.  A mirror image to the one he wears now.  

You find pieces of him scattered everywhere, swept under rugs and tucked within cupboards.  He’s there in the kettle that whistles and the tea that steeps, dipped in the honey pot and hidden behind your curtains.  He’s there in your thoughts, tucked away on the top shelf that you pretend doesn’t exist.  

Even as he sits, still and unimposing on the couch you’d both picked, he’s everywhere.

How is he everywhere?

“Want some help?”  It floats across the space, comfortably as if he’d never left.  It fits easily, familiar and lovely.  You hate it.  You hate how it makes you feel, digging up emotions you’d buried from their rightful place in the ground.  

“I’m fine.”  

A lie.  Lily white and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. 

You’re not quite sure why you bother.  Whose feelings were you sparing - his or yours?

“You sure?”  It’s closer than you anticipate, a ghost of a breath over your shoulder.  It sends your mind reeling, feet following in the same fashion as you all but slam into the hard block edge of your counter.  You nearly topple mugs as you go, only avoiding a disastrous mess when hands find you, catch you like that’s what they were made for. 

Jungkook’s an indomitable figure, palms searing heat into every nerve ending beneath his touch.  You can’t help the way you instinctively lean into him.  You love him somewhere deep in your bones, in the stardust that makes up every atom - a moth drawn to his flame. 

But you knew better now.  Fly too close to the sun - you’ll only get burned. 

“Please don’t touch me.”  

It’s you who breaks away first, turned towards the scent of chamomile and lavender.  You can only imagine his expression;  it’ll twist out of shape, crooked like you’ve just kicked him while he’s down.  

You suppose you have, but he’d thrown the first punch.

“Why’d you invite me in if you’re only going to ignore me?”  It hits like a shot to the gut, exactly as it’s meant to.  He isn’t asking for the sake of asking - he’s asking so you’ll cry yourself hoarse and find comfort in his arms.  He’s asking because he knows the answer and he wants you to regret it.  

You know it.  You know this side of him, even if you wish you didn’t.  

Even if you wish he was still the same boy who you’d fallen in love with years ago, full of sunshine and promise.  The one who’d have held you all night, kissed you senseless under the moon and held your hand through the sunrise.  Who’d break his own back bending over, weather a hundred storms for the people he loved. 

It’s a silly wish - a useless one, wasted on shooting stars and broken bones.  

He would never be that boy again.  He’d come too far, changed too much.  You hardly even recognise him now, cut from stone rather than cloth.  A thousand sharp edges you catch your hands on when you foolishly reach for him.  He is an incomplete masterpiece and you’ve never been artistic.  There’s nothing for you here.  

A mug is extended - an unnecessary apology.  An olive branch in the form of your old ritual.  “Please don’t say that.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?  Can’t do or say anything.”  It’s petulant and angry, a riot crowded behind his teeth.  You’re worried what the words might do - how they’ll beat you black and blue. 

“I don’t know what you expected.”  You can’t hide the exasperation, the overwhelming sadness that starts in your heart and branches out into your veins.  It creeps further, presents itself prettily in jewels nestled along your lash line and the tremble of your chin.  You’d cry if you weren’t so tired, every ounce of your effort eaten up by the boy that glares at you now and demands more than you can possibly give.  

He sighs - a long, unbroken sound - and something shifts, snaps into place as if the entire cosmos has aligned to allow this moment.  

He looks like him suddenly, like the version of himself you’d thought long lost.  It’s hidden in the peculiar shape of his mouth, uneven around his frown;  it’s there in the light of his stare, where sunbeams pour past boarded up windows.  It’s there, even where you can’t quite see it, in the corner of his soul and his drifting heart.  He’s always been a wanderer.

But then he moves, retreats back to his seat and to himself.  

He feels farther away than the moon, his silence that of the stars.

You take a careful sip of the liquid that burns through ceramic - anything to distract from the cold hands of memory that claw at your neck.  You turn words over in your hand - test them for clarity and weight, a jeweller inspecting their most prized possessions.   Was there anything you could say that would make this better? That would fix this gaping, Jungkook-shaped silhouette that tore a hole right through you?

You remember how you’d fallen for him, tumbled headlong into love with him - intensely, blindly, wholeheartedly.  It’d been easy then.  You’d dived into depths too shallow, climbed trees too fall;  you hadn’t thought your heart would break, even if every other part of you did. 

You’d thought it’d all be worth it.  

Instead you’re left with alkaline bones calcified under paper-thin skin, parchment sewn together by shaking hands and sodden by saltwater.  It’s hardly a body at all, ripe for the picking and bruising and tearing beneath teeth like knives.  

Can you blame him for how he hurts you when you’d already hurt yourself?

There’s a tang on your tongue.  It pools between seams, dripping misery into your mouth and swallowing the sob that’s formed in a wave.  It crashes against your teeth, stings the pink of your gums with salt;  it rises and crests, engulfing sandy shores you’d once built your home upon.  It comes and comes and you can’t stop it - sound bursting forth like a siren song.

He’s upon you then, utterly defenseless to your call.  He crowds you before he can think twice about it;  a drowning man seeking air.  It’s a pretty metaphor for a pretty boy.  What he doesn’t realise is that he is a galaxy all his own - not a sailor lost at sea but a swirling vortex not fit for human life.�� Jungkook contains no oxygen of his own, smothering you in what he calls love and feels more like hell. 

“I’m sorry.”  It disappears into velvet, clinging to silk like electricity.  They spark in your eyes, electrifying your thoughts.  “I’m so fucking sorry, baby.”  

Arms do the opposite of what they’re meant to.  They crush your resolve beneath the weight of them - pry open your insides - and you’re crumbling.  The agony comes in sheets, like September rain.  It streaks down your cheeks and soaks your clothes, sinking beneath your skin until you’re waterlogged. 

“Don’t say that.  Don’t you say that to me.”  

Don’t lie to me, you think.  

He speaks the words he thinks you want to hear, weaving them until they’re a muzzle for your sadness.  “I’m sorry.  I never meant to hurt you.”  As if good intentions make up for the way your heart aches. 

They don’t. .

“Forgive me.  Please.  I need you.” 

Forgive him.  Forgive him?  You don’t even know what you’d forgive him for.  You’re certain there are more skeletons in his closet than in the ground.  Dig one up and another three would rise - some sort of awful hydra’s head born from your nightmares.

“I can’t.”  It claws itself out of your throat and into the air that suffocates, ripping it apart with teeth and nails.  Hands find the collar of his shirt and it isn’t clear whether you’re shoving him away or clinging to him.  You can’t make up your mind, fisting the material between your fingers until the strands might snap.  It feels terribly familiar, like the thing behind your ribs that’s six seconds from tearing.  

You’re pushing and pulling, hitting and halting.  Hauled in a million different directions.  It’s too much.

“What’re you sorry for?”  A fist to his chest, right where your heart lives (or dies, rather).  Your demands are barely coherent, words with no beginning and no end.  “Tell me.  Tell me what you’re sorry for.”  

He could push you away.  It’d be easy, really.  You half expect him to.  He hates being told what to do.

“I’m sorry for hurting you.  I’m sorry for not realising how good I had it.  I’m sorry for forgetting about what we had.  I’m so fucking sorry.”  They’re confessions you’ve heard a hundred times.  Over the phone, through the door, on his knees.  It never changes - a recital he knows intimately well.  “I’m sorry for letting you down.”  

You shouldn’t have expected more.  It would never come - not with him.  Not from him.  He had too much to lose and you’d never be enough.  Nothing in comparison to those thin white lines, those flashing lights, those women. 

You thought you’d known that.  You’d had three long years to learn that.

These apologies aren’t answers;  they’re excuses.

You peer up at him - into those wondrous eyes, so full of light and swirling with constellations - that you don’t think he expects it when you thrust your hand into his chest, past sinew and gristle to find the truth.  It squeezes, incremental, around the organ that you’d once thought beat in time with yours.  Silly girl.  It hardly beats at all.  

“That’s not what you should be sorry for.”  The tears still fall.  They come, relentless, as if his mere presence undoes all your hard work;  they carry your words, pull them off your tongue like white water rapids.  “You should be sorry you’re asking me to forgive you.  You should be sorry you’re putting me through this.”  It’s those same fists, over and over again, as if you might force something more out of him.

“I’m sorry I can’t let you go.”

“Please let me go.”

“I can’t.  I can’t.”  Jungkook cries like his tears might sway the tide.  “Stay with me.  I can’t do this without you.”  It’s a lie - a terrible, poorly-dressed lie - but he speaks it like the truth, like you’re his truth.  

He begs as if he doesn’t remember the harsh sting of reality and how it fits within your story.  He pretends like these chapters haven’t been written together, passages underlined in garish red ink.  He acts oblivious to the mistakes you point out, refusing to read between the lines even when they’re written in. 

Fault lies with him - mostly, wholly - carried in the palm of his hands with small portions - sections of his knuckles - divided up to reflect the ache of your mutual loss. 

He knows that - but knowing something doesn’t mean facing it.  

“I need you, Pumpkin.”  

“You don’t need me.”  Hasn’t needed you in years, far longer than even the last three.  He’d found others to need, others to fill the gaping you-shaped hole he swore was real.  

Women with beguiling eyes and beseeching mouths.  Women whose names you never learnt but whose perfume found a home somewhere along your shelves, whose clothes masqueraded as yours when you’d find a wayward scrap of lace in the back pocket of his jeans.  Women who took your everything - but only because he’d been ripe for the taking.  

I miss you, he’d insisted over those first few weeks.  I can’t wait to come home to you.  Nothing’s the same without you. 

You should’ve known then that someone so used to having it all would never let go so easily.  

In a perfect world, you would’ve fought less, given more - uprooted your whole life to travel across the world with him.  He would’ve stayed at your side, found his vice in the shape of your smile, the beat of your heart.  You would’ve been happy.  Together. 

You wonder - would it have made a difference?  Or would all paths have led to this?  Had you been doomed from the start?  Star-crossed lovers?  

You’d like to think so.  Passing blame helps - softens the pain and drowns out the what-ifs. 

You never had a chance.

He wants to tell you it’s true, that none of them mean anything close to you.  He wants to tell you that you’re the love of his life and that, when he gives this all up - flickers out like a star that’s burned too bright - you’ll be the one he crashes into.  You’ll be the only arms he seeks, his northern star in human form.

But you told him not to lie and you’d insist he was, so he doesn’t. 

He stares at you instead, soft and sad and so desperate he can trace the fractures in your composure as he levels you with that unwavering intensity.  It stutters to life a hundred hummingbird wings;  he can practically hear them buzzing about in your chest.  He thinks they’d burst out of your chest if you weren’t careful, caging them beneath brass.

“I love you,”  he tells you, words so sweet, so tender - a melody he strings together only for your ears.  It warms your cheeks and fizzles quietly in your stomach, melting away the ice that crystallises your heart and turns it cold.  He strips you bare with the admission, hoping to find some sort of acceptance in your eyes.

He forgets that he is not a blameless boy and your body is more than a confessional booth.

You believe it when you say it, half-hearted and defensive.  It would hurt more if it weren’t so wet.  “You don’t love me.” 

“I do.”  What can he do to convince you it’s true?  He thinks he’d do anything if it brought you back to him - where he wants you most - tucked away in his arms and his head and his heart.  “I swear I do.”  

He reaches for you with high hopes.  It’s silly of him, he knows.  You’re lightyears away, tucked among the stars.  It’s where you belong, out of reach and shining bright.  He can’t deny how badly it hurts.  He wants you here, beside him;  he wants it selfishly, as he wants most things.

“You don’t love me, because you don’t hurt the people you love.”  It’s a phrase Jungkook’s heard before.  From your lips, from movie screens, from god knows fucking where.  What a stupid phrase.  He didn’t mean to hurt you.  He didn’t mean a lot of things and didn’t that mean anything?

Each time it comes, it agitates him, stewing his blood to a boil.  It simmers in his veins like witch’s brew, a love potion rotten and ruined - sweet milk gone sour.. 

Was this that - a relationship that had run its course?  A bond past its expiration date?

“I love you,”  he repeats, ever harder.  As if the words might turn to amber, remain forever on the top of his tongue, crystallised and perfect.  It feels like it.  He’s told you enough times, ever since he was fifteen years old - practically an eternity.

“”You don’t.”  It’s your own insistence, biting and cold and yet somehow still a summer’s day.  You weren’t always like this.  He’d driven you to this.  But you were never very good at keeping him out;  warmth always crept in, sunlight streaming through the clouds.  That was the glory of your love.  It was irrefutable.  

Your skin may have thickened but the fire roars on.  

“I love you.  I love you so fucking much.”  He holds you, seeks to burn the truth of his words into your marrow.  Thumbs sweep the point of your chin, right below where he’d like to leave the impression of his mouth.  

There’s a sadness in your eyes - an ocean of melancholy that turns them bitter blue.  “Love is sacrifice.”  You pry each finger from your face, turn knuckles alabaster with your gentle ministrations.  A part of him wishes you’d tear them clean off;  your kindness hurts more than your hate.  “And sacrifice is something you’ll never understand.”

You lead him to leave, just as he’s led you through hell.  You don’t falter when the door of your home swings open, the one in your heart slamming shut in tandem.  

When you tell him to go, he isn’t ready - wants to spend the rest of his life in this place with you - so you guide him out, with a tiny shake of your head and a click of the lock.  He stares at the wood grain when it shuts in his face - memorises the patterns of the home you’d built together.  He stands there longer than he should, setting sun searing upon his shoulders.  He should leave, he knows.  

But you’re his weakness and he doesn’t know whether he loves you or hates you for it.

author note.  this was really meant to just... explore their past a little bit?  so i hope that comes across?  actual plot movement will be forthcoming.  tysm for reading!!!  💜 

tag list.  @jalexad​​​ @aa-ronpa​​ @kookiesbreaky​​ @celestialflamefairy​​ @xjoonchildx​​ @pars-ley​​ @seokjinssi​​ @youwannabelostandnotbefound​​ @patpus​ @dazedjjk​ @koozui​ @jinhitwhore​ @always-wishing-for-rain​

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS THE EVOLVING UNIVERSE THEORY??

Blog#91

Wednesday, May 26th ,2021

Welcome back,

Our universe is both old and tremendous, and growing out farther and quicker consistently. This speeding up universe, the dim energy that is by all accounts behind it, and different riddles like the specific idea of the Huge explosion and the early development of the universe are among the incredible riddles of cosmology.

Some time ago researchers thought Earth was at the focal point of the universe. As late as the 1920s, we didn't understand that our system was only one of numerous in an immense universe. Just later did we perceive that different systems were fleeing from us — toward each path — at ever more prominent velocities. Similarly, in ongoing many years, our comprehension of the universe has sped up.

I have thought a lot about how to illustrate what we know today about our Universe’s structure. It is not at all easy for many reasons, and not only because of the difficulty of simplifying things for non-specialists without leaving any loose ends that we take for granted.

If we consider the Universe to be everything that exists, from the smallest to the most gigantic entities, one way of showing their structure would be to make an inventory of all such elements and order them hierarchically in space. But this would be incomplete unless we also listed their interconnections and interrelations. Moreover, none of this—neither the elements nor their interconnections—is static, all of it is interacting and changing on a permanent basis. We must realize that, as such, we cannot have a “snapshot” of what is in the Universe at the present time, because when we look in one direction with a telescope, the deeper our gaze looks, the farther back in time we go. Thus, we are looking at a wedge of the Universe’s history, rather than a snapshot.

 Nevertheless, inasmuch as all directions in the Universe are statistically identical, what we see in any direction at a distance of thousands of millions of light-years must be a representation of how our own, or any other, region of space was, thousands of millions of years ago.

Let us take it a step at a time. First we should remember that, in keeping with what we have already said, more than three quarters of our Cosmos is now a form of that mysterious entity we call dark energy, and more than 85% of the rest is what is called “dark matter,” which we cannot see because, though it interacts with gravity, it does not interact with radiation. In other words, not much more than three percent of the entire Universe is “ordinary matter.” And we only manage to see a tiny part of the latter, concentrated in stars and galaxies. What we call ordinary matter is actually the baryonic matter—protons, neutrons, and so on—of which we ourselves are made. Most of such matter takes the form of ionized gas plasma, while only a tiny part of it is in solid or liquid state. 

How difficult it is to grasp that the immense oceans and solid ground of the Earth’s surface, on which we so confidently tread, are incredibly rare in our Universe! But science has taught us to accept that we live in a very exotic place in an everyday part of the Cosmos.

On the other hand, the panorama could not be any more disheartening: despite our elegant scientific speculation, we do not have the slightest idea about the nature of 97% of what constitutes our Universe! Of course, just knowing that is already a great triumph for the grand human adventure in search of knowledge.

Our own nature leads us to move and understand things in three spatial dimensions plus time. And this space-time is the context in which most relativist models are developed. That is why I am going to describe the structure of the Universe in four dimensions. But first, I must at least mention models of “multiverses” derived from superstring theory. These are elegant physical-mathematical speculations about multiple universes in which our three-dimensional Universe would be just one projection of three dimensions installed in a global space of nine.

 Below, I will try to offer an accessible description of how astronomers currently imagine the Universe to be at the present time in its history. Afterwards, I will focus on some of the most significant stages of its evolution. On a large scale, the Universe we can now contemplate with our telescopes appears to be a little more that 13,000 million years old, and enormously empty. Matter appears to be very concentrated and hierarchically organized around the gravitational fields of the stars, with their planetary systems, of galaxies, galactic cumuli, and super cumuli. The enormous planetary, interstellar, and intergalactic voids are filled with very diluted matter, which actually adds up to the greater part of ordinary matter. Dark matter also accumulates, and is ordered in analogous fashion, for it, too, is ruled by gravity. Dark energy, however, does quite the opposite: it is uniformly spread throughout the Universe.

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, May 29th ,2021)

“WHAT IS THE SUPERFUILD SPACE-TIME THEORY??”

[andromeda1023]

Pic:

On the left, what Rubin expected to see: stars orbiting the outskirts of a galaxy moving slower than those near the center. On the right, what was observed: the stars on the outside moving at the same speed as the center.

Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.

If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe.

The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown.

I’ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a new Vox podcast pilot you can listen to below.

It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered.

Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is.

“I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.”

The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained.

It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know.

This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It doesn’t win Nobel Prizes. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. And that’s a start.

But how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found.  

To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown.

Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88.

Flash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars.

This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. With one observation, Hubble doubled the size of the known universe.

By 1960, scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery. Like: How do galaxies move?

Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science, charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda. “I guess I wanted to confirm Newton’s laws,” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin.

Per Newton’s equations, the stars in the galaxy ought to move like the planets in our solar system do. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, orbits very quickly, propelled by the sun’s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph. Neptune, far from the sun, and less influenced by its gravity, moves much slower, at around 12,000 mph.

The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too: Stars near the dense, gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges.

But that wasn’t what Rubin and Ford observed. Instead, they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior. “I think it was kind of like a ‘what the fuck’ moment,” Yeager says. “It was just so different than what everyone had expected.”

The data pointed to an enormous problem: The stars couldn’t just be moving that fast on their own. At those speeds, the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an accelerating merry-go-round with the brake turned off. To explain why this wasn’t happening, these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine. There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity. (For a refresher: Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass. The more mass in an area, the stronger the gravitational pull.)

The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn’t see. “As they’re looking out there, they just can’t seem to find any kind of evidence that it’s some normal type of matter,” Yeager says. It wasn’t black holes; it wasn’t dead stars. It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds.

“I mean, when you first see it, I think you’re afraid of being … you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation,” Rubin later recounted. Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data. But not Rubin. She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies.

Rubin and Ford weren’t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy. But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe. “She [studied] 20 galaxies, and then 40 and then 60, and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast,” Yeager explains.

This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize (the prizes are only awarded to living recipients, so she will never win one). She didn’t “discover” dark matter. But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomy community had to reckon with the idea that most of the mass in the universe is unknown.

By 1985, Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka: announcing not a discovery, but a huge absence in our collective knowledge. “Nature has played a trick on astronomers,” she’s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Union conference in 1985, “who thought we were studying the universe. We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.”

To this day, no one has “discovered” dark matter. But Rubin did something incredibly important: She told the scientific world about what they were missing.

In the decades since this anti-eureka, other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to. Their work isn’t complete. But what they’ve been learning about dark matter is that it’s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe, and that it’s deeply, deeply weird.

Since Rubin’s WTF moment in the Arizona desert, more and more evidence has accumulated that dark matter is real, and weird, and accounts for most of the mass in the universe.

“Even though we can’t see it, we can still infer that dark matter is there,” Kathryn Zurek, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains. “Even if we couldn’t see the moon with our eyes, we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it’s really very similar with dark matter.”

Scientists can’t see dark matter directly. But they can see its influence on the space and light around it. The biggest piece of indirect evidence: Dark matter, like all matter that accumulates in large quantities, has the ability to warp the very fabric of space.

“You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time,” Natarajan says. “All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.”

When light falls into one of these potholes, it bends like light does in a lens. In this way, we can’t “see” dark matter, but we can “see” the distortions it produces in astronomers’ views of the cosmos. From this, we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies, lending them more mass, which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton’s laws would otherwise suggest.

Continue reading, pictures: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/21537034/dark-matter-unexplainable-podcast

[wordynerdygurl]

Birth the Stars

Author’s Note:  Hello all!  So, this story is shamelessly and selfishly just for me.  It’s my birthday, you see, and I was inspired by @sherrybaby14​ and her delightful Loki birthday wish story.  Should you like it, as usual, leave some love! Tag lists, asks and requests are open! P.S. The gif is beautiful and I thank the OP! P.P.S. I will be on vacation for the next week, so, no planned posts, but I’ll make it up to you!  Promise! Summary:  Your special day coincides with a cosmic event and Loki helps you celebrate it grand fashion. Pairing:  Loki x Female Reader Warnings:  SMUT, just sweet birthday SMUT

How could you describe something that no earthly words were designed for?  

Through the massive glass shield you had an expansive view of the galaxy unfolding in burning stars and kaleidoscopic clouds.  Clouds that came in every color Crayola could possibly conceive, and a few they would never believe, curled closer, lit from behind by the strength of a foreign sun.  

Scientifically, you understood that it was gas and dust and light bending, blending, to create the spectacle you were staring at, slack jawed.  But seeing it?  Watching it rise on the unending horizon of space from the security of Loki's state room was something else entirely.  And you were lost in wonder.

"Glorious, is it not?"  Sneaking in on silent feet, his handsome face reflected in the glass, Loki offered you a small smile.  His voice is silky and soft, reverent and respectful of your contemplative quiet.

Your nod is barely perceptible, "I… I can't bear to look away.  It's magnificent."

Feeling his masculine presence at your back, blue eyes on you, "Magnificent… truly."

Sighing sweetly, stepping closer to the protective crystal window, "I'm talking about the nebula."

A hand skates over your hip, hugging your curves through the layers of your frock.  The other brushes lightly over your bare shoulder, fingers toying with the strap, and you cover them with your own.  

"I am not."  

Acknowledging him with a slight bow, "You, dearest, are just as rare…"  Loki's soft lips press against that tender place behind your ear as you tilt your head, "Just as beautiful…"  Now your jaw, "and more than magnificent."

Seeing your smile in reflection, "Liar."

"Me?  I would never!"  His mock innocence makes you chuckle which Loki uses to his advantage, shamelessly.  Lacing his fingers through yours, Loki gently pulls your arms between your bodies, effectively pinning you against your window to other worlds.

Standing there, breathing synced with Loki's, you lose yourself in the incredible view.  So easily lost to the streaks of stardust swirling in space, as if the ancient arcs of light and color were a painting hung in the sky of Creation's museum,  "On Earth, it takes eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach the planet, the people… Did you know that?" 

Sensing his head shake, continuing, "How many light years ago did this nebula begin, I wonder?  How long does it take to bring a star… a galaxy into the world?"

Those lips, his lips, trailed over you making strategic stops along the nape of your neck.  Brushing over your tight tendon, his sharp teeth nip at the junction, your cooing response music to Loki's ears.  "Making something so… perfect takes time, love.  Which reminds me.  Do you know what today is, dearest?"

Still looking out at the scenery, you shake your head, "Loki, since coming aboard I have lost track of so many things… the month, the day, the time… my sense of modesty."

Raising his eyebrow with a sly smirk, "I like to think I helped with that last one…"

"Oh, most definitely!  But, sorry, no… I don't know what day it is."

Wrapping your hands around Loki's trim figure, his back to your chest, grounds you to this place.  To him.  But it's true that your world has gone topsy turvy since Loki entered your life.  You haven't missed the way things were, instead, enjoying the amazing moments only a person like Loki could offer had become your new normal.  

Things like a front row seat to the ever expanding universe.  It startled you and delighted you.  So like the man you loved.  

"It is your birthday, my darling.  And everyone is waiting now to celebrate with you."

Cheeks turning crimson, you burrowed further into Loki's arms, "No!  Is it really?"

"Yes… really."

"Good thing someone was keeping track…", you answer softly.

Stepping snuggly against you, Loki's chin to your collarbone, "Just think, you and this cluster of stars will share a birthday."

Another twinkling laugh escapes you at the idea of billions of brilliant brothers and sisters.  Deepening silence returns as a streak of yellow collapses into a flash of green, swirling into teals before pulsing purple.  "Intergalactic fireworks for your special day, sweetling."

Shivering at the awe inspiring sight before you and the nearness of the God behind, Loki hums huskily, "Cold?"

Still gazing into the cosmos, "My dress isn't terribly thick."

"But it is lovely.  Perfect for tonight…"  Layers of gauzy chiffon in emerald and mint flowed from the thin straps tied at your shoulders.  It was a gown without a waist, falling in waves to the floor, after accentuating your abundant bust, of course.

Whining, just a little, "I had almost forgotten about tonight.  What time is it?"

"Early still."  Wandering hands trail up your arms, caressing the roundness of your shoulders, kissing each one in turn.  A strong hand turns your chin, your mouth parting for Loki's, his tongue eagerly licking over your bottom lip.  

Deepening the kiss, Loki kept you from turning into his arms, instead his hips held you in place.  "Keep watching, little dove.  Put your hands on the glass, like this." 

Bending at the elbow, Loki folded your forearms forward, fingers spread.  The glass is smooth and cool to the touch.  Crowding into you, trapping your body like a butterfly on display, Loki's hold on you tightened.  His mouth, suddenly savage, sampled the sugared skin of your neck, swept over your clavicle, stroked the shell of your ear.

Whimpering in want, forced focus on the star nursery expanding ahead of you, your head rested back on Loki's chest.  "It is creation… that glowing swirl of color in the distance.  Hot and cold, dark and light, all of those… contrasts colliding."

Slim fingers fidget with your dress.  First the right tie drops, the weight of your gown shifting to to the left, throwing you off balance for a beat.  Loki's palm falls to your freed breast, his skin warm compared to the space chilled glass in front of you.  Moaning, the startling difference between your gossamer garb, his petting paw and the chilled wall is suddenly too much.

The second strap lets go and your fancy shift puddles at your feet with a sigh.  Loki covers your exposed chest with his hands, kneading your sensitive globes in a way that walks the line between too hard and not hard enough.  His iron chest leans into your back as your tender nipples harden against the window, held down by the exquisite weight of Loki's lean body on your own.

"Loki… I… What if…?"

Cutting you off with a husk, "Hush… there's no one to see you but me.  And infinity."

Feather light, Loki's touch scorches down your ribs.  At the swell of your hips he hooks your flimsy panties at the waist, tugging them down to your knees.  "Spread your legs for me kitten.  That's it.  Just like that."

Boxed in, nowhere to hide your body, your want, he grants you enough room to accommodate his wayward wandering hands.  Maybe you should feel shame at being so casually exhibited to the expanding universe.  But you don't.

What you do feel is powerful.  It's as if you are manifesting the molecules which are dancing in that disco ball of unimaginable energy, calling them to you, bringing forth a million stars and with them a thousand planets.  It is life!  It is beautiful.  And it is terrifying.  

Loki's fingers find your silky slit, spreading your saucy excitement over your straining bud.  Circling you in slow, simple, strokes your body starts to sing.  Simpering, you're breathing in short gasps, fogging the glass in front of you and distorting the stellar symphony of light and color beyond your vessel.

Using his unoccupied hand to tangle your short hair, Loki pulls your head back from the window, attaching his hungry mouth to your throat.  His fingers grind against your firm clitoris, intent on releasing your sexual tension.  Cold, so cold, your collapsed breasts are sensitive and screaming for respite.

As you are forced to feel all of this competing stimulus, the fibers of your feminine form have compressed closer and closer and closer together.  Just like the nebulous cluster before you, to grow you must crack, shatter into a galaxy of glowing gaseous orbs.  Expanding, your excitement is matched by the spreading of stellar space dust, colors swirling as Loki's digits dance deliciously.

His own breathing hitches as your body vibrates under his hands.  You can't face him, he's too close, the clear glass ensures that.  So you have to endure hot kisses on your chilled cheeks, your icy shoulders, your cool clavicle.  When he sucks on the base of your neck, you hiss, pushing your hips forward, seeking more.  Undone, Loki's teeth break through the thin barrier of your skin with a flash of pain.  

Your ecstasy explodes from deep within.  Sweaty palms slide down the see through barrier, barely supporting your weight.  Legs shaking, you flood over Loki's fingers and your thighs, grateful for his Godly strength, his sturdy support.

He lingers, letting you catch your breath, his strong hand resting over yours as if together you could reach out and capture the haze of colors in the clouds rolling by.  It takes you a moment to come back to yourself, trembling at the power of your pleasure, overcome by the intimacy of Loki's attention.  Shivering, goosebumps break over your bare arms.

Pulling you back into his chest, Loki rubs his hands across you, warming you.  Dropping low, he lifts your panties, placing them on your hips where they started.  As you struggle to calm your racing heart Loki glides your gown back over your bruised bosom, "Can you hold this, darling?"  And with your help the straps of your dress are tied properly once more.

Tearing your eyes from the fiery furnace of creation in front of you, your head rolls onto Loki's chest, "Wow..."

You spin in his arms, molding yourself to him, staring up at Loki, the chaotic center of your own galaxy.  Finding your dewy mouth eager and accepting, ready for his talented tongue, Loki kissed you deeply.  Curling your hands into his raven locks, returning to Loki all of the pleasing passion he had given to you, and soon your body was craving more.

"Hmm… we have to stop now.  People will come looking for us."  

His voice was ragged from pleasure denied, something that pleased you greatly, so you purred, "Let them look!"

Sliding your hands up Loki's chest, he grabbed your wrists, "Oh, darling!  There will be time for that later."

"Promise?"  Wiggling against him, teasing Loki shameless had your smiling.

Pressing a kiss to each of your palms, releasing his grip, "Promise."

When you stepped back, smiling, Loki whispered, "Happy Birthday, sweetling."  

And it was.

--- Tag Team:  @just-random-obsessions​ @iamverity​ @brokenthelovely​ @nonsensicalobsessions​ @archy3001​ @rorybutnotgilmore​ @vodka-and-some-sass​ @mizfit2​ @jamielea81​ @jessiejunebug​ @alexakeyloveloki​ @procrastinatinglikeabitch​ @thefallenbibliophilequote​ @lots-of-loki​

[strad-214]

There is no Chaos, There is Harmony

Jedi June, Sunday, June 13th

“For forty years, the Jedi Code has been my focus, as it will become yours. It is the philosophy upon which stands the Jedi order. It is a pledge of protection to the citizens and inhabitants of the Republic. It is an encapsulation of our relationship with the Force. As a Jedi, you must be faithful to the spirit of the Code. Every day you must ask yourself: Do I understand it?

“In its classical form, as transcribed by Homonix Rectonia during the Early Manderon Period, the Code consists of five core precepts:

“There is Chaos, there is Harmony. Those who cannot see the threads uniting all live view existance as random and without purpose. The Jedi perceive the structure and will of the many galaxies.”

– Jedi Grand Master Fae Coven, The Jedi Path

Humor me for a moment:

The Galaxy Far, Far Away is very closely modeled on the design of our own Galaxy, The Milky Way. We live in a Spiral Galaxy, with grand arms spanning out from the center and tumbling in a grand pinwheel across the cosmos. If on where to observe The Milky Way from “the top-down” (there are no “directions” in space), it would look like we are gazing at a hurricane from high orbit around Earth. The Galaxy Far, Far Away looks nearly the same, with more arms and all arms traveling in a different direction than our Galaxy. Now, the origins of the Jedi Order are in general dispute: it is not currently settled on by the fan base where the Jedi Order was founded, what with all the lore of the Star Wars Universe taken into account. The Sequel Trilogy places the origins of the Jedi Order on the ancient world of Ach-To, a world beyond the known regions of space Galactic West of the Core. In original cannon, there were yet two more worlds that the Jedi Order might have been founded on: the planet Ossus in the Outer Rim in a large region of the Galaxy called The Slice, just Galactic South-East of the Perlemian Trade Rout, right on the border of grid R/S-6. Or, and I think more appropriately, their origins began on the planet Tython in the Deep Core at Grid Coordinates L-10. I think this is more appropriate because the Jedi helped found the Galactic Republic, who’s capital world is on Coruscant in the Core, and it places them in the “eye of the storm”. I previously referred to both The Milky Way and The Galaxy Far, Far Away as looking like a hurricane from the top-down, so what a better metaphor than having the calm, serine, harmonious protectors of that Republic stand in the eye of the hurricane where there is a dim, eerie calm and silence? From that center, one can easily see with calm clarity all of the chaos and wanton destruction that the hurricane unleashes upon the lands under its massive arms. So the point is thus: if the Galaxy is a hurricane, the Jedi are its Eye, both literally and figuratively.

In order to bring about peace, one must stem a tide of chaos, both internally and externally. Facing the mirror as we have been with our eyes open, we can easily see all that which we do not desire to have in our daily lives. Those things are a part of us and cannot be easily removed, no easier than removing an appendage of the human body. So, since they are of no mortal danger to ourselves (unless we overfeed them), then we must learn to accept and live with those parts of ourselves, to live in harmony with them. Let me explain in a way that makes sense to me:

I mentioned that I am a musician; I am teaching music to students of various skill levels and using the discipline of practicing music as the foundation upon which I am helping my students learn good life skills and practices. But I have been going on so much about morals and principles that I neglected to explain a little music; if you read on, you will see how this all relates:

In music, just as with the written word, we have an alphabet, though unlike in the written word, that alphabet is much, much shorter. The basics of that alphabet are quite literally and simply: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Once you reach G, you start over again with A and keep going to G and start again at A and go on and on for ever and ever and ever, Amen. I could go into why you repeat forever, but that would miss the point of this tangent, so let’s keep going. Let’s say that with this alphabet, you can spell words, for that is true, those words would not be called words, however, they would be called “chords” in musical terms. But just like with words, chords require specific letters to be spelled correctly. Typically, in music, we spell chords by starting on one letter and going up three letters-- including the first letter-- and collect our spelling in this manner. Example: we start on A, A is 1, go up three including 1 and we get C: A(1), B(2), C(3). We go up like this until we get a collection of three notes selected. We keep 1 and 3 and get rid of 2. To get our last note, we start on 3, make it 1, and go up again in the same fashion. When we do, we get E. Put A on top of this collection and we have our chord: A, C, E, A; an A Chord. For all basic reasoning, that is how you correctly spell a chord in music. Why am I going through all of this? I’ll tell you:

Each one of those letters represents a specific frequency of sound waves, we can add various symbols to them to tweak their representation and therefore their sound, but when we do and we play them together, the “word” comes out as a result. We put various words together and we get sentences, put sentences together and we get paragraphs, put paragraphs together and we get stories (or very long winded essays on morals filled with off topic tangents). Such is the same for music: we put notes (the lettered tones) together to make chords, we put chords together to make themes, we put themes together to make movements, and we put movements together to make musical pieces. However, it is not so simple as going A, C, E, A. In fact, in more advanced Music Theory, that is not a “correct” spelling of the A Chord; the C is not labeled with the correct quality, making the collection of these notes sound what we would call “dissonant”; they don’t sound very good together. So, let’s throw them away and never use them!… but that would be like saying to never use words like “wabajack” and “alliupe” in stories, to never have invented the name “Wookie”, or “Lightsaber”. Sometimes, we need strange chords in music in order to perform exciting literature, we must accept the things that are strange and dissonant, that we do not necessarily like when they stand alone. But, it’s all part of a bigger work: the chord we spelled together is what we call an A Minor Chord, the quality of any Minor Chord illicits the emotion of despair and sadness or conflict. A good example of this would be Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. We use those in conjuncture with various other chords of other qualities/sounds/emotional value and they become desirable, in fact the become entirely necessary for the piece of music to hold up. All those notes form what we call in music a “Harmony”, and without them, we wouldn’t have the piece of music as it is written and it would be something else entirely, and possibly undesirable all together. So too is it with the parts of ourselves we do not like when we face the mirror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu3hGQCra18 

All the chaos that those lesser parts of ourselves cause to ourselves and others around us, we fight them such as one fights the rolling waves of a terrible storm at sea: it is utterly impossible. Eventually, you will capsize the ship and be lost forever; hope that you didn’t take anybody with you. Instead, turn the bow towards the oncoming wave, face it head on though it towers over you like the maw of a great beast about to swallow you whole. If timed correctly, the wave will roll up underneath you and you will ride over it and land on the other side, a little shaken, but still floating and standing, ready for the next big wave when it comes. You became one with the forces of nature, you lived in harmony with the chaos that you cannot control, you accepted those lesser parts that you do not like and look at you, standing there despite the mire. How tall you stand, defiant in your flexibility against the torrent that knocks everything about. The mightiest trees bend to the wind; if they don’t, they will snap and live no more, despite all the beauty they might have possessed, despite their appearance of perfection. And let’s be honest, perfection is a lack of character, it’s boring. The scars we bare show the world what we have endured, what we are made of. Living with them is by no stretch easy, but I say again, nothing in life worth doing is easy (Star Wars Rebels, Season 2, Episode 04, Relics of the Old Republic). Baring them as a warning, challenge, or lesson for others is even harder, but coming to terms, living in harmony with them, will make it all worth while.

This is the way of withstanding Chaos and finding Harmony in it. There is chaos all around us for everyone fixates on the faults we see in others because they are reflections of ourselves. What we do with that information will decide whether we become agents of that chaos or live harmoniously with it. We all see the faults of ourselves in the world around us, just as from their seat in the Core, the Jedi can see their faults in the Galaxy around them. Whatever the Galaxy is lacking or needs most has to do with what the Jedi need to do most for the Galaxy; from the eye of a hurricane, you can see who is being burred and who is still surviving. Take the moment to be the calm the hurricane has allowed you and take it with you when the eye has passed on, for the storm is unrelenting and unforgiving just as the Galaxy is a massive void filled with stars and planets covered in life and death. They are unrelenting and unforgiving as well, taking life as much as giving life, unpredictable and wild. We never know when our time or the time of another is utterly spent, but do not fret that knowledge, accept it and make the most of the time you have. Live in harmony with the world around you rather than add to its chaos, and life will be so much more fulfilling, for when there is no Chaos, there is Harmony.

Now you are beginning to live the life of a Jedi in the real world.

There is no Chaos, there is Harmony. We are one with the Force, the Force is with us. For our ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.

Trust in the Force, all will be made clear, Padawans.

Happy Jedi June. May the Force be with you

@jedijune​

[minoacat]

Space Soup

We were the first. The first life I mean, best we can figure. And we've had a long time to figure, so I'm just gonna leave it as is. We were the first.

Started as some little worms feeding on primordial soup I suppose, but we grew into proper humans quick enough. 'Time we got radio telescopes we were a hell of a lot cooler than soup. Soup can't build a spaceship. Still, it's got its place. We can't build spaceships without air to stick on 'em, and most o' that air comes from bacterial soup. Thanks, soup.

But who gives a shit about soup. We built huts, then we built spaceships, then we built huts on spaceships, and off we went. Into the sky! We couldn't just stay put, now could we? We wanted to explore. So we did. We fanned out across the universe, looking. Looking for homes, looking for wonders, but above all, looking for people. 13.8 billion years since this whole shebang started, there's gotta be someone else out there besides us apes, right? Anyone? No one?

Down we settled. Back to the humdrum day-to-day. We reached out, we did our due diligence, and we found nothing. Zilch. We did our jobs, and now it was time to put up our feet and have a smoke. Shoot me if you like, I still say we earned it.

Everyone's got their own guilty pleasures though, y'know? Not everyone wants the same smoke. So some of us, we settled down on a rock and made it nice and homey, others of us built our own rocks outta the crappy natural ones – dyson spheres and rings and shit – and still others went roaming off into the cosmos in world-ships, taking bits of stars with us as we went. It was a grand old time, I tell you. Still is, I guess. Oh, yeah, there's war, there's strife, but there always is. But we had world-ships. Doesn't get much better than that, now does it?

Well, it didn't.

See, all this time while we'd been colonizing the universe and all that jazz, we'd been yapping at each other across the stars. But stars are loud. Like, really loud. Which means we had to yell over them. And that takes energy. And what happened to the energy once we were done yapping? It went out into space like so much shit. It got wasted is basically what I'm saying. For millions of years it got wasted.

Well, somewhere down the line, someone looked at that and said, “Well ain't that a cryin' shame. We oughtta make use of some o' this stuff.” No idea who, that kinda stuff gets lost way too fast to try to keep track of, and who gives a shit anyway? But someone saw the millions of years of high-energy communications clogging up the works and decided to do something about it.

See, it turns out if you take the stuff we use to send signals and bend it just right, you can catch the signals that are already out there and make 'em follow the same path. Then if you make it bend back around to you, you can snatch up all that energy and use it for whatever ya like. It's like a net, but instead o' catching fish, it catches energy.

The first energy net sucked, I won't lie. Barely picked up anything, and it ate up all the useful communications besides. But you know what, it worked. It took all that energy we poured out into space yapping, and it made it useful again. And it was only the first one! By the time we got around to building the second one, we were way better at the whole thing, I promise you. And the third. And the millionth.

It was a revolution, it was. Sure, it only worked because there were so many of us normie colonists around sending signals, but it was so much easier, so much faster than anything we could do before. First few net colonies just zoomed around spreading love and knowledge and all that crap. First time one of them started feeding though, that was when we knew something was up. Because that's what it was. It wasn't a war, it was a slaughter, and when they had picked the bones clean, they just picked up and moved on like nothing had happened. Scared the shit out of, well, out of just about everyone to be honest. That's life though, I guess.

Anyway, we passed resolutions, made alliances, yelled ultimatums, but let's be honest, when has that ever worked for us? Cat's out of the bag, my little mousy friends, time to run! So, we got used to it. Us humans are good at that. Sure, maybe a few thousand colonies would get killed off from time to time, but that's just the way it is. Life lives, life kills, and life dies. Why should this level be any different?

Once the net colonies started joining together though, that was when it went from scary to just plain cool.

We had never seen anything like it! Different parts each doing their thing to make it all work like one big organism. They weren't people like us anymore, they were pieces of some kinda grand dance. Is a skin cell its own person? Not really. Not anymore. Don't mean it ain't alive and doing its best. It's like if galaxies started doing a conga line, only no one had seen a conga line, a dance, or a galaxy before. Some of us normie colonies set up shop in the conga line and had ourselves a good ride. Some of us stayed in our little sea of stars and just watched the dancers from afar. Mostly though, life went on. We lived at our level, they lived at theirs. It's not like they could get rid of us completely, and we couldn't get rid of them, not that some of us didn't try.

And that's how it is. We're living, building, thriving, and the dancers, they're doing the same. Us normie apes aren't the bigshots anymore though. We all know that. I mean really, one time we found a wall just chilling in the middle of space so big it took us a million years to measure it, and by the time we got to the other side we still didn't know which one of the dancers built it. Maybe all of them did. I bet it was just one though.

It's hard as shit being down here, I won't lie to you, but there's a peace to it too. We've learned to cope. Move on. We live, we kill, we die, same as always. Just because we can see the shoulders of giants doesn't mean we gotta stand on 'em. Go out, get wasted, build a spaceship, crash it maybe. Go be happy. That's all we got now, and y'know what, it's a pretty good gig. It ain't so bad bein' small.