#and there’s a million other examples exactly like that scattered all throughout the parts of my childhood i still remember

[dykeyuu]

i spent 7 hours studying for one subject today no problem and even had fun doing it + im trying to imagine what middle/high school would’ve been like if i’d been properly medicated

[originalhybridnik]

harry potter: why it’s not “just for kids.”

the other day, this girl i know told me, “why the hell are you reading harry potter? it’s for kids only.” i’m 17, and, well, close to adulthood. i don’t reply to her, because, often, when someone asks me something like this, i have a huge explanation, lasting for a long time, and people don’t like it. so, i’m gonna give my explanation here.

harry potter. the boy who lived. the whole series is loved by millions of people in the world, from different age groups and from different parts of the world. it’d be an understatement to say that i love the series. i’ve read the books, seen the movies, even read the supplementary books, as well as harry potter and the cursed child. i’ve seen the fantastic beasts movies as well. and i’ve read the books not once, not twice, not even thrice. i’ve read the series 8 times. 

here are the reasons as to why harry potter isn’t for any specific age group.

(spoiler alert to everyone out there) trigger warnings: foul language, death, slavery, discrimination.

1. harry potter, the kid who was orphaned at the age of one, the boy who had no family but his nasty muggle uncle, aunt and cousin, the name known to every wizard and witch, the one-year-old who weakened voldemort to the brink of death. this boy has gone through more pain, sorrow and grief than any fictional character i’ve read of. provided, it doesn’t seem so. but, take it from someone who has read the series as much as i have, he isn’t what he apparently seems to be. j.k. rowling gives us a glimpse of his life before hogwarts, just a mere glimpse. this small portion shows us the amount of bullying he has to go through. he has absolutely no friends, and his cousin’s gang was always behind him. his aunt and uncle starve him for the tinniest of mistakes and he did not even know the real cause of his parents’ death. he has no one to talk to, or be with. he lives in a cupboard under the stairs. his aunt and uncle are certain to “bash out” the magic in him by keeping him away from the wizarding world. he is constantly treated like trash, and he has to do all of the dursleys’ work whether he wanted to or not.

2. he gets a letter from hogwarts, and he isn’t allowed to read it. he keeps getting more and more of them, and he still isn’t allowed to read them. the letters arrive at such a pace that uncle vernon decides to move into a small hut on a rock in the middle of a sea. he then gets his letter hand delivered by hagrid, the keeper of keys at hogwarts. he finally catches a break, and goes to hogwarts, the prized boy who apparently killed voldemort. during his first year at hogwarts, he and his closest friends, ron and hermione embark on a quest to keep the philosopher’s stone from voldemort’s reach. the three 11-year-olds have to get past a three headed dog, past the devil’s snare, one of the deadliest plants in the wizarding world, past a door that could be opened only by catching a flying key scattered across many other flying keys, play on a life size board of wizard’s chess-where ron sacrifices himself so that harry could continue, which almost kills ron, past a room with 7 containers of potions which could kill them if they weren’t smart, and finally to a room where harry meets professor quirell who has provided his body as a refuge for voldemort, who manifests on the back of his head. harry faces the man who killed his parents before he could even speak, and he almost gets possessed by voldemort, because he’s probably the only one who could have the stone, as the mirror of erised could give it only to the person who wanted the stone, but not for a selfish reason. he kills quirell, but voldemort gets away. you see, this shows how deep the first book is. i mean, as a kid, i never understood the sacrifices made, by any of the characters. but, as i read the book again, i understood why what happened happened. it became obvious to me. this shows that we can enjoy the book as a child, without realizing the deepness, and as teens and adults, we get the sacrifices made, the blood shed, the connections forged, and most importantly, how important it is to recognize the values left behind, and, for once, try understanding that this series, even if written for kids, is suitable, and, important for older readers as well.

3. ronald weasely, the sixth child in a relatively poor, and commonplace wizarding family that turns out to be the most loyal, brave and worthy wizarding families ever. he grew up as a wizard and knew a lot about the wizarding world, especially it’s prejudices. he’s the perfect example of a trustworthy, loyal and brave friend. he deserves a lot more than the unnecessary hate he gets. he befriends harry potter, a famous kid that didn’t know anything about his true self, and sticks with him forever. throughout the series, we see this brave boy sacrifice a lot for his best friend. book 1, he sacrifices himself, AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD, for a boy that he knew for less than a year. book 2, he’s ready to walk into a forest, following his WORST fear, spiders, into their fucking home. book 3, he’s ready to follow a mass murderer(not really a mass murderer, but yeah) to help his best friends. book 4, even though he gets jealous and stops talking to harry for a while, we totally get what he was gong through. book 5, he fucking walks breaks into the ministry of magic with his best friends to fight the most feared group of dark wizards and witches ever. book 6, he’s ready to fight anYone for his best friends. book 7, HE’S READY TO RUN AWAY AND FIGHT THE MOST FEARED WIZARD EVER, for his best friend.

all of this, ALL OF THIS, just shows how mature he is, how much we can learn from him, and, most importantly, how wrong it is to title this series as one “for kids”. we see a mere boy sacrifice himself, put his life in danger, time and again, for his best friends. if that isn’t something every human being should be exposed to, then what is?

4. hermione granger, another important character, throughout the series, born into a muggle family, living her life as a smart, bookworm, one day, gets a letter, getting accepted into the best wizarding institution, and, unlike the dursleys, her parents are proud of her and she’s all set for this magical experience. she never anticipates the hate or the prejudice that, is shown towards her and children like her, born into a muggle family. “mudblood,” they call them, exactly the kind of discrimination imminent to THIS DAY all over the world. whether it’s on an international standard, or within a country, whether it is race, caste, gender or preferences, whether it’s against a group or an individual, it’s exactly like this. the whole concept of blood status shows us how deep the books are. it shows us how mature we need to be to understand this. it shows us how we need to think more about this and implement this in real life. a kid from a “pureblood” family, namely, draco malfoy, is the first person to use this, in book 2. it just shows us how parents like his encourage their kids to discriminate people based on their lineage. i won’t point to a specific issue but all of us know of examples, whether we’re the offenders or the offended.

5. slavery is a very important issue touched upon in the series. even though we see harry free dobby from the malfoys, there’s very little importance given to the base, the root cause of what dobby went through. he was a slave to a rich family that considered itself above anyone without “pure blood.” but, we see this very issue taken up in a book 4. we see hermione take a stand against the improper and infuriating treatment of house elves, by organizing a committee called S.P.E.W(society for the promotion of elfish welfare). we see her force people into taking part in this, and even though it’s by force, we all see where she came from. if you don’t know, house elves believed they had only one true purpose in life, to slave around for their owners, without being respected or treated well, and no matter what. we see winky, another elf, previously working(for lack of a better word, cuz that wasn’t working) for bartemius crouch, who’s absolutely against the idea of being paid or even being free. despite seeing dobby and how he enjoyed freedom, she was absolutely against it. again, we see how such an important and deep issue was addressed in a way that makes use all understand, despite our age, that EVERYONE is equal, no matter what. if you STILL think it’s a book for kids only, please continue reading.(continue anyways)

6. can we talk about how the magic-folk have had to live in hiding forever because people are afraid of them? they’re treated like they’re inhuman, trash and most importantly, like they deserve to die for being born with a power for magic? 

7. as long as we’re talking about discrimination, we can also look into the fact that, squibs(non-magic folk born into magical families) are looked down upon? they’re tortured, and they receive as much hate, if not more, as “mudbloods.”

8. a special trigger warning for this: TW /death. THROUGHOUT the series, we see some of our most beloved characters die. spoiler alert: in book 1, we see how james and lily were ruthlessly killed by voldemort, orphaning a one year old boy that’d be famous for something he never knew he did. honestly, it wasn’t even his doing. in the same book, we see the killing of unicorns, the consequences of killing a unicorn and drinking it’s blood, AND the killing of professor quirell/voldemort, and even though he/they were the bad person, it deserves to be a part of this list. book 2, we see a young tom riddle get killed in the end, we see how young myrtle got killed, we see students getting fucking petrified by a monster, an inch away from death. book 3, we see how sirius black apparently killed 13 people and was an accomplice to his best friend’s murder. book 4, we see cedric die as a direct affect from the killing curse. we see harry get tortured by the cruciatus curse. we see the most feared wizard reborn, and, not to mention, we see his weakened form in the movie. book 5, we see the rampage that voldemort causes, killing more and more people, muggles and magic-folk alike. more importantly, we see harry’s godfather, sirius black die. we see the pain harry goes through. book 6, again, we see not only voldemort’s actions, but the use of sectumsempra by harry on draco, and how snape killed dumbledore. book 7, we see SO MUCH death. from alastor (mad-eye) moody to fred weasely, from severus snape to remus lupin and nymphadora tonks, so many fucking deaths. we see harry potter die.

9. can we talk about the phrase “lamb for slaughter”? most of us have heard of this phrase at least once. i cannot think of another explanation of this than the way it’s shown in these books. albus dumbledore literally prepares and protets harry for seventeen fucking years just so he can get get killed by voldemort in the end. this teaches an important lesson to everyone that, sometimes, you need to do what you think is right. even if an adult cares about you more than anything, sometimes they do things they believe in and end up hurting kids.

10. can we talk about how bill weasely got bit in the face by an untransformed werewolf and got deformed for life? even after this, fleur didn’t leave him. if this isn’t a lesson to us about what true love is, then, what is?

11. let’s talk about love. firstly, about how much harry, hermione and ron love each other. they’re the true example of best friends. they were together through everything, there for each other in the worst of times, and for the happiest of moments, and will probably be together until they die. secondly, can we talk about how when people are truly in love, they don’t care about appearances. all they care about is what’s on the inside. this is clearly shown by fleur(check point 10). ALSO, we see tonks sacrifice herself with remus, in the final battle. we see dumbledore care about harry so much, love him so much, despite everything else. we see the love family has. we see harry and hermione become a part of the weasleys. we see harry and ginny fall in love. we even see snape’s love for lily. we see so much love. now, this is something very important for all of us. whether we’re raised in that way, or we are exposed to it later in life, we need to learn that love is important in life.

12. can we talk about the torture neville’s parents, among countless others, went through? because of voldemort? and his death eaters? do you still think these books are for kids?

13. can we talk about how a group of 15 year-olds form a group to learn how to fight in the real world, because of a careless ministry of magic and a cruel teacher? it shows us values of leadership, team work, and most of all, how important friendship is. we see a part of this group march into a battle against death eaters, and, possibly, even voldemort himself, without fear of death. for one moment, look at how brave one is when one is with one’s true friends. this teaches us so much.

14. CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW A CRUEL TEACHER MAKES A 15-YEAR OLD BOY SCAR HIMSELF WITH THE WORDS “I WILL NOT TELL LIES” JUST BECAUSE SHE WAS TOO ADAMENT TO BELIEVE THE TRUTH? do you still fucking think this series is for kids?

15. can we talk about how all the magical creatures are treated cruelly? from elves to centaurs, it’s cruelty at it’s finest. are you still convinced it’s a book for kids just because it has magic?

16. can we talk about how much trauma a reader experiences throughout the series? i mean, i’m absolutely grateful that i went through this trauma, because i came out as a better person, in not one, but, multiple ways. we journey through seven years of happiness, sorrow, pain, love, and so much more. we see our favorites get killed, we see how sometimes, people are misunderstood. we see how everyone is born good, but it’s our childhood and the way we’re raised that makes us bad. this is not something all kids understand. an older person can read this series, go through all of this, and will come out as a better human being.

17. how many of you remember the way snape was treated as a kid? huh? by harry’s own father and his friends. this is a shout out to all the bullies out there that think they can do whatever they want and not care about consequences just because they’re stronger, or more famous, or more good-looking. this fucking teaches kids to NOT bully anyone.

this is more than just a series for me. it let me into this new universe where i experienced so fucking much.

if this wasn’t enough for you to at least consider the fact that these books are not “just for kids,” i’m sorry, but you’re just being morons. you don’t wanna even consider something that goes against what you say and that’s your problem, not ours. so, STOP HATING ON THE WIZARDING WORLD COMMUNITY AND GET A FUCKING JOB.

[mobius-prime]

276. Sonic Universe #7

Mobius: 30 Years Later (Part 3 of 4): What's Old is New Again

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Jason Jensen

Sally is currently in the middle of dealing with two tired, confused children and an unconscious Silver, leading them through the lower levels of the castle to the panic room. The kids, of course, have no idea what's going on, and aren't taking things seriously, making her job somewhat more difficult. Meanwhile, Sonic, Lara-Su, Melody, and Skye show up at Argyle's door (whose name is misspelled "Argyll" throughout the issue, for some reason) looking for help. He and Lara-Su are pretty clearly in a relationship given how they act towards each other, but there's no time for lovey-dovey nonsense today. Unfortunately, most of the old Freedom Fighters and Chaotix are scattered all over the world and nowhere nearby, but at the very least, Argyle did have some foresight once he got the call from Lara-Su.

Well, who might that be? Meanwhile, Lien-Da and her Dark Presence guards are in the catacombs under the castle, with the just-freed Shadow. He's infuriated when she informs him of how much time has passed and how the people have wholeheartedly accepted Sonic as their king, and strides with purpose through the catacombs, bringing Lien-Da and a few guards along. Weirdly enough, he's able to unlock a secure door with the override phrase "Maria's Wish," which I suppose ties into a comment made last issue about how Sonic didn't let Knuckles completely overhaul the castle's security system after they took the castle from Shadow's regime. You left a lot of backdoors open for your enemies, Sonic! Shadow seems pleased at whatever it is that lies behind the door, while Lien-Da is abruptly terrified.

Back in Argyle's house, it turns out that the two people he called for help are Jacques and Belle D'Coolette, who are, of course, Bunnie and Antoine's kids! Interestingly, they both have one robotic arm and leg each, and this is never explained - of course there's no way Bunnie would have passed on being half-roboticized to her kids, and anyway, though she's never actually seen in this particular AU, the proto-Light Mobius shown in the Sonic In Your Face! special way back in the very first era of the comics depicted her as having been fully deroboticized at some point. That would have had to have happened as well in this timeline, I'd imagine, since otherwise there's really no way for her to have had children. Jacques and Belle also use a mixture of French and Southern slang, which is really endearing, honestly. But anyway, with Jacques and Belle on the scene, the group's numbers are up to seven, counting Sonic, Skye, Melody, Lara-Su, and Argyle, the last of whom plans to stay behind and feed them info.

Down in the catacombs, Shadow approaches a large spherical glass container, which is full of greenish goo that forms itself into the shape of Tikal. This being, whom he calls "Tikhaos," looks awful, murmuring about how horribly lonely and hungry she's been. As Shadow reassures her and promises to let her out and "feed" her, Lien-Da begs him to reconsider, obviously terrified of Tikhaos.

*sigh* I know, I know I've already gone over a million times why I hate King Shadow and I think his characterization here is an insult to the entire character of Shadow the Hedgehog, but this is just yet another example of why it's so bad. Lien-Da was loyal for five years without him, risked everything to bring him back, and all she wants in return is to be able to be with her son again, and Shadow outright kills her by erasing her from the timeline just because she dares to question one decision he makes. It's what you'd expect from someone like Eggman, not Shadow.

Ugh. Anyway, Sonic, Belle, and Jacques charge the front gate of the castle to create a distraction, while Lara-Su, Melody, and Skye go in a hidden back window unnoticed. Skye is still getting used to flying, resulting in him becoming pretty dizzy on the way up. However, this quickly proves itself to be a secret asset, as they approach the security room full of Dark Eyes and figure out how to take them out.

That… works, I suppose! Sonic's team is saved from having to break down the front door by Melody who lets them in, and Sonic questions Argyle about Sally, to which he replies that he can confirm she made it to the panic room with the others and is working on actually contacting her. He's then distracted by something else he's picking up from within the Dark Presence's communications, and tells them they should head down to the catacombs as something crazy seems to be going on down there. Sonic, still wanting to get to his family first, asks Lara-Su if she can see what's happening down there.

Like father, like daughter! Argyle finally manages to patch Sonic through to his wife, and Sally confirms that they're fine, that Silver is beginning to wake up, and that most importantly, they have a few monitors within the room that they've been able to watch the proceedings on. Their kids are excited at all the action, but Sonic is more concerned with asking Sally what exactly is being kept down in the catacombs that's so dangerous. She lists off a few noodle implements that suggest some truly crazy shenanigans from earlier in the timeline, but of course, we know what Shadow is actually after…

Shadow begins to blast Chaos energy into Tikhaos, who begins screaming that it's too much and she's losing control, and the Dark Presence guards panic and leave, yelling about how they "didn't sign up for this" and they have to evacuate the island. Sonic and his new band of Freedom Fighters get ready for a big fight as they make their way into the catacombs, but…

Anyone who's studied history knows that it likes to repeat itself, and so, as we've seen once before with Perfect Chaos itself, the castle begins to crumble under the stress of a massive rush of water that begins to flood the entire city of Portal. Sonic and his team escape the castle safely, and from the relative safety of a nearby bit of rubble, they watch as "Perfect Tikhaos," which really just looks exactly like Perfect Chaos except green and with echidna dreads (it looks cooler than it sounds, I promise), begins to tear the city apart…

[runenc03]

HH - Kaycee’s fifth year (part 6)

Writing date: January 2020

Genre: fluff. And an approaching war

Warnings: maybe some harassment? It all ends up being okay and nothing terrible happens

Word count: 6.3k

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Summer

"Have you ever heard about horcruxes?"

Kaycee was sitting in Professor Dumbledore's office, her stomach slightly squeasy because of the nerves she felt all throughout her body. She shook her head, unsure of herself, before looking to her side to see if her sister knew anything about it. Hermione's brows were furrowed, but her head was slightly tilted, two signs Kaycee had learned to recognise through years of being with her sister.  It indicated Hermione didn't know something yet, but was inquisitive to learn more about it.

Dumbledore cleared his throat, looking at them with a kind smile, but a serious expression in his eyes.

"Horcruxes are very, very rare objects. They're also a very dark form of magic, which is why most people have never heard of it before. A horcrux is an object in which a piece of someone's soul is placed. The process is not something I'd recommend, though. In order to make a horcrux, one has to splinch their own soul. I've obviously never experienced it myself, but it's said to be one of the worst kinds of pain to exist."

The heavy silence Kaycee thought would follow was immediately killed by Hermione's voice full of disbelief.

"But why would someone do that? That sounds gruesome!"

The headmaster nodded understandingly at her.

"That's the clue, Miss Granger. You can't kill someone who has put a part of his soul in another object. Horcruxes always make it possible to return from death."

Kaycee heard Hermione gasp, and she knew her sister had connected the dots. She, however, still had difficulty comprehending where this conversation was heading, until her sister started whispering the answer to the questions that were swirling inside of her head.

"Voldemort has put a part of his soul in a horcrux."

"I'm afraid it's not just one horcrux, Miss Granger. Voldemort has indeed used this technique to be able to reclaim his life, but he has splinched his soul not once, but at least 3 times."

This time, it was Kaycee who gasped. She just couldn't imagine wanting to splinch your own soul. She promptly started shivering at the idea, for once hating how much empathy she possessed. Her shock didn't make her forget her confusion, however, so she asked her headmaster the question that had been burning on her tongue throughout the entire visit.

"But, Professor, what does that have to do with me, and my strange feeling?"

The old man's eyes went from serious to grave, as if he were about to convey some very bad news, and Kaycee suddenly went from sweating to being very, very cold. She wanted this to be over with, so she could crawl in her blankets, the familiar prison for once protecting her from the outside world, instead of the other way around.

"Miss Granger, that's where it gets very interesting. First of all, I want you to know that nothing like this has ever happened in the entire history of Magic, or at least as far as we can read back. That being said, I do have a suspicion I am pretty confident about. You undoubtedly remember your first year, and the diary you wrote in."

Dumbledore's voice got lower, his guilt about not being able to prevent all of that from happening evident in the way he spoke, and Kaycee nodded, half to indicate that she was still following, half to let him know that she was well now, and didn't hold any grudge.

"The diary was a horcrux. When Mr. Potter destroyed it with the basilisk fang, a piece of Voldemort got destroyed along with the object. Since you had been taking the diary with you for such a long time by then, the influence of the horcrux had kind of put itself inside of you, Miss Granger. I know that sounds very concerning, but I want you to know that you were not a horcrux, the influence of the horcrux had merely started residing inside of you, if I can put it like that. Of course that influence got destroyed at the same time that the source of it, the horcrux, got dismantled, but the place it had stayed at, didn't immediately get occupied again. Not that your mind misses anything, it's quite the opposite, really. If anything, your mind got stretched with that influence, and since that space didn't exist before your first year, it was empty after Mr Potter's battle with the basilisk."

"So, my mind is basically larger than average?"

Dumbledore nodded.

"It is, Miss Granger, but that's not all there is to it. After doing some research, I found out that such 'mindgaps' have existed before yours, although they were made in other circumstances. Losing a mind twin, for example, is an unfortunate event in which the mind twin experiences a void in their mind, but fortunately, that's not the case for you, Miss Granger. In fact, your mind has magically filled itself again, with what I expect to be exactly the feeling you have described. See it as an extra gut feeling, an extra internal compass, if you would. Miss Granger, I know that this must come as a surprise, and if it was possible, I wouldn't let you dwell on it any further, instead opting to let you enjoy your teenage years to their full extent, but I'm afraid that in times of war, we must use everything we can, and that includes the extra capacity of your mind."

Kaycee was fast to nod, agreeing completely with what her headmaster was saying. Unlike what Professor Dumbledore had expected, Kaycee didn't feel all that shocked or overwhelmed anymore. True, this was not what she expected, but she finally had an answer now, finally knew for sure that the feeling was not something she made up, or exaggerated. It was useful, she was finally useful in this journey to the light - as she liked to call the war going on around them.

"What's the plan, professor? I'm up to whatever you see fit."

The headmaster smiled at that, his eyes twinkling with pride.

"I would like you to come to my office every 2 weeks, for an extra class outside of your normal classes. I will teach you how to understand your power, how to use it, and, if necessary, how to suppress it. Are you okay with that?"

"Yes, Professor. I look forward to it."

And she did. For so many years, she had been struggling with the memories of her first year, the nightmares, the guilt of holding onto that diary for so long.

It was time for her to step up, do her part, help her loved ones.

She was ready.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Autumn

Sean breathed out a sigh of relief when he finally found her. The sight of her sitting there with crossed legs, looking up at the sky through the massive window, her hair cascading down her back, made him feel so many things at once. It was breathtaking, really, and he could've stood there all night, up there in the astronomy tower, without moving an inch. He knew that wasn't an option though.

"So there you are."

She didn't move, didn't say anything at first, but Sean knew he was allowed to come closer. He vaguely registered how the wooden floor creaked as he moved, but his focus was on Kaycee. He was still hesitant to do anything. She was the one who ran away so suddenly, after all.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left like that. It was not your fault, I promise."

She said it with a quiet, hoarse voice, and he knew right then and there that she had been able to think while looking at all those constellations above them. It had made her calm. Another wave of relief crashed over him.

She wasn't going to run from him.

"Do you want to tell me what happened?"

She finally looked at him, a million stars seemingly reflected in her eyes at that moment. She nodded, stretching out her arm to him, beckoning him to sit down, but - to Sean's disappointment - letting go of that arm as soon as he was sitting beside her. For a few seconds, she said nothing, and he didn't push her. He knew that she would start when she had found the right words.

"Look, we both know that I like you as more than a friend, right?"

Sean tried his best to hide his surprise that she didn't beat around the bush. For some reason, the dark blue colour of the sky combined with the bright spots scattered across it had made him think their conversation would be a meaningful one, one to start gradually but last forever in his memory.

"Did I say too much...?..."

Her voice, a lot softer than normal, brought him out of his thoughts, and he started to speak immediately, not wanting her to be insecure because she decided to be brave enough to finally address their dynamic.

"No, no you definitely didn't Kayc! I just....didn't expect you to be so open about it so suddenly."

She smiled at that, still a bit shy, but at least more comfortable now.

"Sean, when Ron asked me to come smell his Amortentia, I just, I don't know....for some reason I really didn't think it would be that much of a big deal, but then I smelled it and I just...panicked, I guess."

Those last few words made Sean panic in her place. Had he actually been mistaken about her signs and did she not feel anything for him? Had he really been that arrogant? A cold spot formed itself in his chest, and the longer Kaycee waited with continuing her story, the more it spread out towards the rest of his body.

"So....what did you smell then?"

He tried to be casual about it, he really did, but the cold spot had reached his throat and made it hard to speak. Kaycee finally turned her head, now looking at him instead of at the constellations, a small smile on her face.

"Come on Shamu, like it's not embarrassingly obvious already. I smelled...well, this is probably pretty unique for Amortentia, but I smelled sweaty dance rooms, and parchment, and freshly cooked meals. Sean, I already knew I liked you. I mean, I guess I made it pretty obvious. Smelling you in Amortentia though...it brings everything on a much higher level. And I...I guess I underestimated how serious my feelings for you were, but we both know Amortentia never lies, now does it?"

And he knew as well that Amortentia never masked anything. Whatever you smelled while hanging above a cauldron of the lovely liquid was what your deepest desire was in terms of love, and that wouldn't go away after your crush stayed uninterested or your teenage years passed.

No, what you smelled in Amortentia, counted for the rest of your life.

"Sunflowers, hairspray and just a hint of sweat, but the good, 'I gave my all and created something magical' kind, not the disgusting one."

"What?"

He almost laughed at the clueless expression on her face, but then he didn't, suddenly realising that this could very well become the moment he could officially ask her to be his girlfriend.

"It's what I smelled in my Amortentia, Kaycee. I think we both know who smells like that, don't we?"

"Well, I hope I don't smell like sweat all the time."

She said it while laughing, but Sean could hear the relief she was trying to cover up. Had she been so insecure about his feelings for her? He thought he'd always made it pretty obvious she was it for him.

"No, you don't. You smell like sunflowers most of the time, but if I talk or think about you, I always picture you dancing, so I guess that's where the smell of hairspray and sweat comes from."

And then, when he saw the doubt on her face:

"Kaycee, it's you. And I don't know what that does to you, I hope it makes you happy, although it can also cost me my friendship with you if it makes you panic, but it has to be said. I am completely in love with you, and I've known it for far longer than my Amortentia class, or than going to the Yule Ball with you, even. And there's nothing I can do about it. I can only hope you feel the same, really, because there is no way to get over what I feel for you."

He didn't know why he said all of that. It was true, in fact there was nothing more honest he had ever said, but even he realised that this was probably a bit much to take in all at once. He should've said those things all separately, at the right time, but then again, he had been walking around for almost 3 years now, his head repeating these words like a mantra, over and over again.

All the while, Kaycee's face stayed unreadable.

"Sean....wow. I wish I could say something as meaningful, but you're the one with the right words, aren't you?"

Her tone was so controlled, almost restrained, that his first thought was that she was angry with him. He should've known better.

"It's one of the many reasons I'm in love with you as well. You want to hear some other ones?"

Sean could only nod, overcome with a second, huge wave of relief, gratitude, and slight disbelief. When talking about this moment to others later on, he would always contemplate telling them about how Kaycee's skin seemed to bask in the light those millions of stars emitted. He never did. It was something only he would ever know, and he knew he would always remember it.

"Your friendship with Hermione is something that makes my heart warm. Or the way you don't try to overpower me when we dance, but rather dance with me, next to me. I love how you can engulf me in your arms, how you offer me comfort, but also see me as my own person. And then we haven't talked about all the sweet gestures. Like, I love it when you take my hand, or lay yours on the small of my back. Or when we duelled in the DA last year, you never held back, you duelled against me to win, which made me feel that much more accomplished when I managed to win. You saw me as your equal opponent, not as a little, fragile sister or a too-naïve Hufflepuff. You saw and continue to see me as the deepest, rawest, most true version of myself. And that, Sean, is something I'll always be grateful for.

He couldn't help himself anymore, needed to diminish the distance between them, so he opened his arms, ready to wrap them around her.

"Come here, Kayc."

And she did, with a surprising amount of eagerness. She shuffled closer, and then, when Sean expected her to come to a halt propped next to him, she moved again, this time lifting herself up and sitting down again on his lap, leaning backwards and laying her head on his shoulder, looking at the stars again.

They were silent once again, but Sean wasn't one to stop talking because a moment was beautiful. He believed words had a great power, and if used in the right way, they could make that beautiful moment even better.

"Kaycee, does this mean..."

He still couldn't outright say it. Was it because of all the years he had stayed silent before this, or because of the intoxicating smell of her hair currently tickling the right side of his neck, he didn't know. He wanted to kick himself for ruining this moment with his words, when Kaycee's next ones made him smile again.

"Do you want it to?"

Something in her tone was open enough to finally give him the courage to go through with it. He took her hand, interlacing her fingers with his, letting them rest on her lap.

"Kaycee Caitlin Rice, do you, at last, after everything we've been through, want to be my girlfriend?"

She said nothing at first, only raising the hand that was holding hers and kissing the back of it. Sean could feel the outline of her smile on his skin. His heart was soaring, burning, even, and he loved every second of it.

"I would love to be your girlfriend, Sean Charles Lew. Very much so."

And that was it. He gave her a kiss on her hair, and put his arm around her middle, pulling her just a smidge closer to his chest. He needed to feel her, to assure himself that this had actually just happened. For some reason, he'd always thought getting together with Kaycee would be something grand, something with music, flowers, lengthy speeches, tears. It hadn't been anything like that, this was probably the most silent get together in the history of Hogwarts.

Still, he looked up at the stars again, wanting to cherish this moment, no matter how silent it had been. What followed could be his imagination, but he swore he saw one of the stars wink. It was all that was needed to tell him that the roaring of his heart was loud enough, and, judging by the way Kaycee's thumb kept rubbing over his arm, he knew it sounded like music to her, too.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Winter

"Mione! Look, quickly!"

She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice, already having to remind herself that she had to stay silent. This was a library, after all.

Her sister shuffled closer to her after putting away her wand, trying to watch their friends sitting at an old wooden table through the same small gap in between 2 seemingly endless rows of books.

"Oh, there's mistletoe above us, Neville!"

Neville promptly looked up at Luna's wondering tone of voice, and Kaycee squeezed Sean's hand, smiling when he immediately squeezed back, as well as putting his chin on top of her head.

"I wonder how it started blooming here so suddenly...the living conditions in a library aren't exactly ideal for a plant like misletoe..."

Kaycee could almost feel the identical grins that were on both Hermione's and Sean's face now. She herself, couldn't help but grin as well. They should have known Neville would start thinking about the misletoe's traits, rather than its meaning.

"Well Neville, in a place like Hogwarts, I believe everything is possible. You do know what this means, right? I've already checked, there aren't any nargles in it, which means it's real mistletoe, and not giving me a kiss would mean lots of things, starting with being bothered by hinkypunks for the rest of your life. Now of course I understand if you do not wish to kiss me, but -"

"I do!"

Neville had cut Luna off, and everyone, including Neville himself, only realised a few seconds later what he had actually said. Kaycee smiled, hidden from Neville and Luna by that massive wall of books. She hadn't expected their plan to go so easily.

"I mean, I do want to kiss you, Luna. Especially under a misletoe. It's tradition, after all."

Neville's voice was a lot softer now, and Kaycee silently thanked him for it, afraid for a second that Madam Pinch would check on the pair and their moment would be completely ruined.

"Well then, what are you waiting for?"

Luna sounded even brighter than usual, although Kaycee's fangirl heart could also be playing tricks on her. Either way, she was excited beyond words for what was about to unfold right in front of her.

And then, it happened.

After Neville had taken one last deep breath, he lowered his head, hesitating for only a second before finally letting his lips touch Luna's. For just a second, nothing happened, they just stayed like that, quiet, in peace, and Kaycee was about to swallow her 'awwww' when something changed.

Luna had shuffled closer to Neville, wrapping her arms around his neck. His reaction was a bright smile, not even hidden behind Luna's lips. His arm was next, Neville wrapping it around Luna's waist, squeezing her side when his hand ended up laying there. Kaycee thought her jaw would actually drop, the whole thing looked so fluent. It took her brain a second to realise just how right this had to feel for both of them in that moment, and her heart melted a little more. They deserved it so much.

By now, Luna had moved her arms, one laying on Neville's chest, the other on his left sideburn, tilting his head so she could reach it. Then, they separated, but as soon as they looked into each other's eyes, they diminished the distance between them again, Neville taking the lead now, following her example of laying a hand on his cheek, moving his thumb across her jawline.

They pulled away slowly, both of them seemingly not wanting this to end. It was only now that Neville started to blush. He pulled her even closer, Luna responding to that by putting her legs over his lap and once again wrapping her arms around his neck.

"Do you think he's going to confess?"

Kaycee whispered her words in Sean's ear, afraid the faintest sound would ruin the cozy bubble Neville and Luna were in right now. He made a face, telling his girlfriend wordlessly that he didn't know, but hoped it would finally happen. Kaycee could feel his arm coming to hold her waist, and in this moment she could only think about how much she wanted Luna to be able to feel the same thing, not just now, but always.

On the other side of the wall of books, Luna placed her forehead against Neville's, her eyes closed.

"Did you know that when you're in love, there are little elves in your belly? Everyone always thinks those are butterflies, but that's not true."

"Is that so? Well...it's good to know what's going on in my stomach, then."

Okay, Kaycee had to admit that one was smooth.

"Yeah, when I first felt them, I wanted to know what caused the feeling, so I started searching for an explanation and eventually, I found an article about it in an old edition of the Quibbler."

Kaycee noticed that while Luna's eyes were still closed, Neville's were wide open, looking at the girl in front of him. Kaycee didn't think she'd ever seen so much adoration in someone gaze.

"When do you feel them, Luna?"

Luna's smile got even broader, her whole body actually emitting a warm glow.

"They always crawl around when we sit in the greenhouses. Or when I help you with your homework. Or when you accidentally touch me and apologise while you really don't need to. Also when you just smile at me."

Neville answered with a kiss on Luna's forehead, and Kaycee knew that this was the start of something extraordinarily beautiful.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey, babe!"

As soon as Kaycee heard those words, she turned around warily. This was definitely not Sean. He had nicknames for her, yes, like darling, or love, or baby, when he was in a particularly clingy mood, but never babe.

Upon seeing the guy who had clearly called out on her as there were no other people in the corridor she was currently standing, she put on an unimpressed face, trying to seem unaffected, but wrapping her thin coat tighter around her body. The past week had been remarkably warm for this time of the year, and Kaycee had secretly started hoping Spring would come early this year, but apparently, thin coats didn't protect you against creepy dudes. Not that thick coats did, really.

"Hey, I was talking to you there!"

This time, Kaycee couldn't ignore him anymore. She took a closer look at the guy. He was striding forward urgently, black hair sleeked back, a dangerous glint in his dark eyes. She didn't trust him one bit.

"What do you want?"

She was snapping at him, Kaycee could hear it herself. She could only hope he didn't hear the panic sleeping through her tone. She just couldn't help it, the guy was so much taller than her, actually towering over her small form. There was a threatening glow around him that automatically made her want to get as far away from him as possible.

"Oh, well, you see, Kaycee Granger, I've heard some things about you. All good things, don't worry. You're a dancer, aren't you?"

Kaycee nodded, still unsure of where the creepy guy was going. She just wanted Luna to show up so they could go feed the thestrals, which was the reason she was standing here in the first place. Suddenly, his face came closer to hers, and Kaycee had to suppress the urge to lean backwards. She didn't though, because she had finally recognised that dangerous gleam in the boy's eyes. It was a look of pure hunger.

"Do you also like to dance in more...suggestive ways? What do you think about dancing for me? I'd quite like you to give me a lap dance...would you like that, Kaycee?"

This was actually disgusting. She didn't know where this guy got his information from, but it made her sick to her stomach to realise that people immediately linked dancing with sexual things. Even then, she really had nothing against more suggestive dances, but the fact that this guy thought every dancer would automatically want to dance for everyone in that way just went beyond what she thought possible.

"I...stay..away from me."

But even she heard how soft it sounded, vulnerable even, and she could kick herself for being scared of this guy. He didn't deserve that satisfaction.

"Are you sure, sweetheart? I'll surely reward you well..."

And then, there was another voice, not hard at all, but icy, his words echoing through the corridor.

"Do as she says. Stay away from her. For your information, she keeps those kind of dances exclusively for her boyfriend, who is, in this case, only a few feet away from you. If I were you, I'd listen to her."

Both Kaycee and the scary guy looked at the owner of the voice, and if Kaycee had had any way to run to the guy by escaping her threatener, she would have, but he was standing too close, leaving her little more than a few inches of free space on both her sides, her back already against the stone wall.

"Sean Lew."

It was a statement, the teasing undertone completely wiped from his voice, now sounding hollow, empty.

"Geoffrey Zagan."

She had never heard of the guy before, never even seen him. It was only when her eyes fell on his scarf that she realised how the two knew each other. Geoffrey was a Ravenclaw as well.

Sean started walking closer now, his face still void of any emotion. Kaycee could see it though, the cold, threatening glare in his eyes. For the first time in her life, she wasn't completely sure Sean wouldn't physically fight with someone. His steps were deliberate, almost demonstrative, but Kaycee knew he was not playing games. This was a serious matter for her boyfriend.

When the distance between the guys had diminished to 2 feet, Sean came to a halt, right across from Zagan, who had now turned to the other Ravenclaw. That's where the 2 boys stayed for a while, just looking each other in the eye, the silence around them somehow sounding even louder than the words they had spoken a few moments ago.

"Right. I'll go then. Enjoy your girlfriend, Lew."

And with that, he was gone, his steps brisk, with each one he took loosening the iron hold on Kaycee's lungs a little more.

As soon as Geoffrey Zagan had turned around the corner, Sean started talking, his voice harsher than Kaycee had expected it to be.

"I cannot believe this just happened. Honestly Kaycee, how long has this been going on?"

"Sean, stop overreacting. This was the first time this happened, and he didn't have any time to do something to me, now did he? You were fast enough to show him I'm all yours"

She didn't know whether reminding him was a good choice or not, but it was the only thing the could think of.

She saw that her boyfriend finally relaxed at her words, smiling now, and then she smiled too, relieved he wasn't angry anymore. He wrapped an arm around her and rested his hand on her hip, pulling her closer to him, a grin spreading over his face while looking into her eyes.

"That, you absolutely are, my darling. All mine to love."

Her arms wrapped themselves around his neck automatically, as if it was second nature. She stood on her tiptoes, her balance perfect because of all the technique classes she had taken throughout the holiday, and angled her face to kiss him. As a thank you, or as an I love you, or maybe both. Sean immediately kissed back, smiling in the kiss, the arm that was still wrapped around her waist pulling her closer to him, his other hand weaving through her curly hair, angling her face so he could reach her better.

Kaycee pulled back from his lips now, but only slightly.

"I love you Shamu. I truly couldn't help it, what he did...but I'm sorry you had to rescue me."

They were whispering against each other's lips now, the moment feeling delicate, vulnerable, and in Kaycee's eyes, easy to escalate in the wrong way. Sean's angry tone had scared her, even though she wouldn't admit it. That wasn't necessary, however, because Sean could see it in her eyes, she knew she couldn't hide it, and his face was immediately filled with guilt.

"I'm sorry love, I just....I got so enraged seeing him so close to you. Not even because I was jealous, I wasn't, but because of the look on your face. I promise I won't put my frustration on you anymore Kayc."

She nodded, caressing his cheek, and he smiled again, his dimples showing. She couldn't help but poke them, they were so adorable, resulting in the 2 of them falling into a fit of laughter, desperately clinging to each other while trying to get at least a little bit of oxygen.

Their laughter eventually calmed down, however, and a thought suddenly struck Kaycee, promptly removing all happiness from her mind.

"Sean...you lied to him."

Sean looked confused, and didn't know what to say to that, unsure of what she actually meant. She could see it in his eyes, he was already going over all the previous events, trying to pinpoint what he had done wrong. Quickly, she put her hands on his chest, putting her weight forward instead of backwards, showing him she wasn't, and would never be, afraid of him.

"You didn't do anything wrong, in fact I'm incredibly grateful you did this for me in the way you did. Saving me-"

"I didn't save you, I helped you. You would've been able to fight him on your own, I'm not your knight in shining armor, even though I'd like to be sometimes."

Kaycee just continued what she was going to say, but couldn't fight the small grin that was returning on her face.

"Be that as it may, my point is that you made me feel taken care of, but you did so by lying, and I didn't even realise it. You said I dance for you in that way Sean. And we both know I don't. We only do cute and sweet things, never the more...spicy ones. And...I just...I guess I only realise now that you maybe want that and I've been so insensitive about your wants and needs, never even asking if you wanted me to do something like that while you've given me everything I want and more and I-"

"Hey hey, calm down darling, breathe. Please tell me this is just the shock from meeting Zagan, and you don't really think this."

The silence following his words answered him, and she could see that it wasn't the answer he had been hoping for.

"Sean...I just, he made me think, okay? I would understand if you wanted me to do certain things. Why hasn't that happened yet? I mean, we've been together for almost 5 months now, and you're a healthy teenage boy, I would truly understand Sean."

He was shaking his head, and she was afraid he hadn't even heard her, hadn't even wanted to know what she was saying, but to her, this wasn't something unreasonable. She would really understand, she wasn't just saying it to make him happy.

"Kaycee, you're so wrong this time. This doesn't have anything to do with my needs or wants in terms of sexy things, at least not only mine. I know this is going to sound so cliché but I swear I'm telling you the truth. Your wellbeing will always be my number 1 priority. I really don't care whether we do those things now, or in a few weeks, months, years. The thing is, Kaycee, that it'll only be fun for me of I'm 100% convinced you are enjoying yourself too, and until then, I'm happy to wait. Really, I am. Darling, say something please, I want you to understand."

And she finally did. What Sean had said was true for her too, things were only fun or nice whenever the person you were doing it with was happy as well. Kaycee realised then, that the beauty of everything, but most of all these romantic steps, was the knowledge that you were sharing that beauty, sharing the memories, the feelings, not just the activity itself. It all made sense now. And she could only hug Sean, this wonderful young man in front of her, not only for reassuring her he wanted to wait with things, but for convincing her that he was 100% okay with it.

In time, they would make their own, unique, precious, and beautiful memories in that department, but until then, she was going to show this extraordinary human in front of her all the other ways in which her heart longed for him.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spring

This could very well be the worst day of Sean Lew's life.

Not even when he had had to save Kaycee in his second year did he feel as sad as he did now. Back then, he had been able to do something. Right now, it was all out of his hands, irreversible.

Albus Dumbledore was dead, and he would be gone forever.

It was the only thought that was able to sink through the thick fog pervading his brain, the only thing he could hear, over and over again, his inner voice echoeing within his head. He could only sit there, outside, alone on one of the wooden benches after the Headmaster's funeral. Of course Kaycee and his friends had been there during the service, but afterwards, they had all known Sean needed some time alone, and he was grateful that they let him gather his thoughts in solitude.

Until now.

"Hey there Sean Lew. Do you mind if I sit here with you? You look like you could use another perspective on all this."

Sean turned his head, smiling slightly when he heard Luna's voice. His fellow Ravenclaw had a way with words, with saying them, and he realised that it would probably be wise to listen to what she wanted to tell him. He was no fool, having someone like Luna in your life was a true blessing, like a breath of fresh air, time and time again, and he had figured out a long time ago that he should never take her presence for granted.

"You know Sean, when my mother died, my father and I didn't do anything extremely special. We didn't remove her pictures inside the house, but we also didn't put any more on the walls. Her grave was very simple as well, no special bouquets or incredibly long letters. No intricate service, not at all. We said goodbye to her and that was about it."

Her tone was so light when she told about her mum, Sean noted, and he could only be impressed. She didn't sound sad at all, and he wanted to know how that was possible.

"Luna....why are you telling me this now?"

She smiled at that, not looking him in the eye, but rather at the field of grass in front of her.

"Because, Sean, you look too much at the earthly things, the tangible things, the facts. Services, flowers, gravestones....they're not important, or at least not in my opinion. If we follow biological rules, there's no denying that dead people are, and will always be, dead. They won't come back. But what people often tend to forget is that there is one way to keep those loved ones alive, regardless of your religious or scientific beliefs."

A brief silence fell over them, and for the first time since she approached him, Luna turned her head, making eye contact with him.

"You keep them alive in your heart."

And there was something about the way she said it that made him believe her. The fog in his head disappeared, and the sun that had been shining all along, reached Sean now as well.

And deep within his heart, a home for Professor Dumbledore started to bloom.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 135

Retina: The Mind-Boggler

One of the most mysterious layers of the eye, the retina has an elaborate structure with a slew of functions. Not every eye surgeon dares touch the retina, which houses the most sensitive and special cellular layers. It is a three dimensional, crescent-shaped structure located in the back of the eye and is made up of ten super thin layers of cells that span the exterior part of the eye abutting the veins and its interiors.

Retinal layers

The ten layers that form the retina are:

Pigment (coloring matter) layer

Layer of rods and cones

External limiting membrane

Outer nuclear layer comprising rod and cone cells

Outer plexiform layer

Inner nuclear layer

Inner plexiform layer

Ganglion layer

Nerve fiber layer

Inner limiting membrane

These layers are incredibly sensitive and elaborate, and studying their intricate structure give a sense of awe.

Light for sight

Light first arrives at and penetrates through the cornea, the living glassy layer at the outermost layer of the eye. It then goes through the frontal fluid (aquesous humor) and the aperture called the pupil (pupilla). It hits the internal wall of the retina (the inside of the crescent) after passing through the lens in the eye and then the optic fluid filling up the chamber in the back. This alone is an interesting fact because it is much later that the light that gets to the retina reaches the layer of sensitive cone and rod cells, which perceive light. As these cone and rod cells are lined one after another for their protection, light reaches this outer layer of the retina after the ganglion cells, retinal layers and nuclear layers. Such an alignment leads to a reduction of acuity in the peripheral regions of the retina.

We have theories about the many details – such as the perception and representation of mental images and their storage in the memory – but we still do not exactly know how the act of seeing works

The central pit (fovea centralis)

The inner layers at the center of the retina, on the other hand, are drawn to the sides to prevent any loss in visual acuity. Resembling a pit, this section is much thinner than the periphery of the retina, so the layers that are likely to obstruct the passage of the light, and hence reduce visual acuity, are aligned specifically to allow light to directly hit cone and rod cells. Besides, cone cells, which are in charge of exact, colored sight, exist in this region, whereas rod cells, which are in charge of rough and uncolored (black and white) sight, do not. The central pit where visual acuity is at its highest is for keen, colored, and exact sight. Why then is the rest of the retina not created for acute sight and why is this small section equipped with this ability?

As it turns out, if the entire retina had the ability to see keenly then it would not be possible for the eye to focus on a spot and accurately distinguish it from surrounding objects. If we could see the entire page of a book at a glance, for example, the lines would mix up in our brain. We would not be able to understand what we are reading. We normally start reading from the top of the written page and continue line by line as we focus on and take in each word. Our brain then can focus and perceive a single word accurately by restricting keen perception of the surrounding area.

The retinal pigment layer

The color black is known to absorb, not reflect, light. Thanks to such absorption, the layer made up of black pigments (melanin) or dyes prevents the reflection of light, which is crucial for visual acuity. This black substance functions like the black dye in the bellows of old cameras. If there were not any layer to absorb light, light would scatter off the wall inside the eyeball, thereby obscuring the sharpness between light and dark spots, which is essential for the formation of a clear image, and producing a blurry image due to the overall illumination of the retina.

People who lack this melanin pigment as a result of a genetic defect (Albinism disorder) have white hair, and they are oversensitive to light because the colored iris layer of the eye does not contain the melanin pigment, which refracts light. When an albino person enters a bright area, the light that hits the retina is reflected in all directions through the pigment-lacking retina and the white surfaces of the rigid layer underneath (sclera). Therefore, a ray of light that would normally stimulate a few cones or rods is scattered everywhere, stimulating all or most of the light receivers. As a result, visual acuity in albinos can only be between 20/100 and 20/200, even with the help of the best optical correction, which is a low value compared to 20/20 in normal sight. The joke that rabbits do not wear glasses because they eat carrots is based on the high concentration of vitamin A in this pigment, or black dye, layer of the eye. Indeed, vitamin A is a crucial factor for the health of these pigments.

Layer of rods and cones

Composed of 127 million light-sensitive receivers (photoreceptors), the retina is 0.2 mm thick at the yellow spot (macula lutea), where the image forms most clearly, and 0.1 mm thick at the edges of this area. The 120 million cylindrical rods in the retina are in charge of black and white sight (at twilight), and the 7 million tapered cones, of colored, colored and exact sight. The more common cylindrical rods are 50 µm (microns) in length and 1-5 µm in thickness. The less common cones are 40 µm (microns) in length and 3-5 µm in thickness.

The concentration of the cones increases toward the center of the retina and decreases toward the edges, to be outnumbered by the rods. In the cytoplasm of the cones and rods are stored substances that are sensitive to light (photosensitive) which break up when light contacts them and produce electricity in the cones and rods. In rods this chemical is called rhodopsin. In cones, on the other hand, are three substances corresponding to the colors red, green, and blue that are sensitive to the wavelengths of colored light. To be more exact, there are three separate cone cells that include one of these three substances. Chemically, the photosensitive substances in the cones are a little different from rhodopsins.

The destruction of rhodopsin by light energy

Rhodopsin, along with the color substances, fills up about 40% of rods and cones. They are made up of a protein called scotopsin and a molecule called retinene that is derived from vitamin A. When light energy is absorbed by rhodopsin or the color substances, rhodopsin starts to fade in as fast as one trillionth of a second. The underlying reason for this is that the electrons in the retinene (vitamin A) part of rhodopsin is activated by light, which alters the shape of the retinal molecule at a mind-boggling speed (one trillionth of a second). Extremely complicated and precise chemical and physical changes then take place. It is very difficult to monitor all of these biochemical changes, and they require specialization.

The regeneration of the rhodopsin destroyed by light

Rhodopsin destroyed by light is regenerated in the dark. Only in the twentieth century did we manage to partially identify the mechanism by which molecules with very specific geometric shapes decay at incredible speeds only to be regenerated later. It is wondrous that such knowledge and power are present in the cell allowing the light energy to destroy the molecule and the regeneration process is launched. The circulation between destruction and regeneration of the molecule continues throughout a lifetime. Vitamin A is assigned a crucial task in the generation of rhodopsin in the dark. All-trans retinal is converted in the retina into all-trans retinol, which is then converted into 11-cys retinol with the help of an isomerase enzyme. Finally, 11-cys retinol is converted into 11-cys retinal, which in turn combines with scotopsin to form rhodopsin. Vitamin A is present both in the cytoplasm of rods and in the pigment layer of the retina. In this way, vitamin A is kept in reserve to be used for generations of new retinal. If, on the other hand, there is an excess of vitamin A in the retina, the excess amount is converted into retinal, by which the amount of light-sensitive pigment in the retina is lowered.

Night blindness

Night blindness appears in anyone who suffers a serious deficiency of vitamin A. Because there is a lack of vitamin A to be converted into retinal, rhodopsin amounts decrease dramatically. This disease is called night blindness as it is noticeable only in the dark or at night and does not affect sight during the day, due to the reduction of light for proper seeing. In daylight, however, cones can still be stimulated despite a similar decrease in color pigments. Night blindness typically only appears in people that have a low vitamin A diet because huge reserves of vitamin A are normally stored in the liver to be used for the eyes.

The human retina contains 400,000 light receptive cells per square millimeter. For comparison, this number is 680,000 in the retina of the owl, which needs to perceive even the slightest glow when hunting in the night. As another example, with 397,000 such cells the amount in the cat’s retina is almost the same as ours.

An average of 130 sight cells in the retina are connected to a ganglion (nerve node) cell. Constituting the nerve of sight, or the optic nerve (nervus opticus), every nerve fiber is connected to a ganglion cell. It takes about 15-60 seconds for the retinal optic nerves to adapt from dark to light, while it takes as long as 30-45 minutes to adapt from light to dark. The visual range of optic cells, i.e. the lowest and highest amount of light the eye can perceive, is between 10-7 and 106 nanometers. Light that is below or above this range is invisible to us because of its insufficient or overwhelming wavelength.

All the colors we see in the world are named according to the wavelengths absorbed and reflected by optic cells. The spectrum of the optic cells lies between red and violet, which is the limit of visible light for humans. Light with a wavelength of 400 nm is perceived as violet, while light with a wavelength of 760 nm is perceived as red. Our eyes cannot see infrared and ultraviolet light. Some animals, however, are known to see light beyond these limits. For example, we know that bees can see certain shades of ultraviolet light, which helps them find flowers to pollenate.

Clearly, it is not an easy job to elaborate on the divine art manifested in such a small area as the retina. Complicated structures and reactions that require specialization even to comprehend keep taking place smoothly every moment we look around. At least we can be thankful for this amazing gift of vision given to us free of charge so that we can recognize the universe.

[interviewswith-warfstachetonight]

Interview: Vriska Serket (11/20/19)

Interviewer: Wilford Warfstache (WW)

Interviewee: Vriska Serket ( @aquaticculler ) (VS)

Date: Nov. 20, 2019

Time: 12:33 AM - 2:33 AM (CST)

(*”8″ = “B” and “eight” sounds; I.e “no8ility” = “nobility,” “expect8ions” = “expectations”)

WW: Okay! I think I’m all set- now.. you were a blueblooded troll, correct? Did bluebloods have any set roles or expectations? (Like how jades were more or less all caretakers, from what I understand.)

VS: I was a cerulean, yes. Expect8ions were really just what you'd expect, nothing too out of the ordinary. Our caste was mostly just the troll version of "lower upper class", we had the 8enefits of wealth without the responsi8ility or expect8ions of no8ility

WW: Well, that certainly sounds like it’d be interesting..! Were there any, ah.. differences?, I suppose?, between the blues? (Ah.. teal, cerulean, and indigo, I believe?) As in.. well, like physical abilities and such, how some trolls seemed to have certain abilities that others didn’t.

VS: Yes! Generally speaking, teal 8looded trolls (apparently) could "S3NSE TH3 1NT3NT1ONS OF OTH3RS" -something my terezi said, once. Cerulean 8loods like me tended to fall into one of two categories, either we could mind control to a certain extent or we had higher strength for lack of psychic a8ilities, on par with an indigo vs the normal cerulean strength. I was in the former camp so to speak. Indigos just had a8surd strength, that's kind of their whole deal

WW: And you could mind control, you say? Did you do that often?

VS: Not particularly, it only worked on castes with stronger psychic a8ilities (Rust, 8ronze, Gold) and for the most part I had no reason to

WW: Ah, that’s fair, that’s fair.. was it something you had to train/learn? Or was it more of an.. innate ability?

VS:  At it's 8ase level it was inn8, 8ut when I was a little wriggler I pro8a8ly had to practice it to get 8etter at it, I don't remem8er much of 8eing a wriggler though, that was thousands of sweeps ago. Or hundreds. Or millions. Time flows weirdly in paradox space

WW: Oh, goodness gracious, what in the world happened to bring paradox space into it all? Was that something that happened then or a matter of ending up here?

VS: I died as a god tier, then woke up in paradox space. After what felt like a very long time in paradox space I woke up here missing a lot of memories.

VS: I do remem8er finding this place though, it was a dream 8u88le and it looked interesting. Didn't know it was one way only though, we are 8asically stuck here

WW: Well, that’s odd, hm? Ah.. what is a dream bubble, exactly?

VS: Simply put, pocket worlds in paradox space

VS: Less simply put

VS: Dream 8u88les are essentially pocket dimentions typically created 8y memories of whoever is residing in them, and those are scattered throughout paradox space. Apparently though, "inworlds" can also 8e found there too, though I am presently unsure if only certain ones are present, or if every8ody's are. I also do not have an explan8ion for memory loss while travelling certain dream 8u88les and not others, perhaps there are different types that can 8e distinguished. I did not put enough time into researching them while I was active in paradox space

VS: At least that's how I see them

VS: I do know that they transcend canons though! I met our meenah in paradox space, and her canon is wildly different from my own

WW: How odd! I wonder if that means they still exist in our world.. (oh! And you mentioned a, ah.. god tier? What is that?)

VS: A god tier is a s8ur8 mechanic, as a method to reach higher powers according to your classpect. You find your quest8ed, which is a stone 8lock with your aspect engraved, wherever you're destined to, and then you die on it and merge with your dreamself, and gain a 8unch of powers

WW: And what was your godtier, if you don’t mind?

VS: Here's where I differ the most from other Vriska's, I was a seer of life

VS: And I still am

WW: Oh? What are other Vriskas usually, then?

VS: Thief of Light

WW: And is that a huge change? (As in, like.. total opposites or something to that effect.)

VS: It's not total oppos8s, 8ut it is going from an active class to a passive class

WW: And I figure that would be a big change? (At least, in the sense of a shift from one to the other.)

VS: That one isn't a huge change 8ut it is sizea8le enough

VS: Classpects are still highly de88d to this day, with no one set system of explaining it all is agreed upon

WW: Oh, that does sound like it could cause a lot of confusion..

WW: If you don’t mind my asking, what does a Seer of Life do? Or.. what can they do?

VS: Well a seer is the passive understanding class, so I understand life, and I invite understanding through life

VS:  Though life as an aspect tends to more dou8le down on your class, from source examples

VS: So in my case I understand [a lot] and I invite understanding through [usually oversharing]

VS: It's a little 8it iffy

WW: Well, that sounds interesting..! What do you mean by understanding a lot?

VS: Knowing things, seeing things (metaphorically, literally we're 8lind as fuck), just in general. In my time on this planet I've studied everything from mathematics, to 8iology, to quantum physics, to cooking, to astronomy, ect. ect.

VS: Of course I'm aware of my own 8lind spots, I know there are gaps in my knowledge, lots of them in fact

WW: And you said you overshare a lot? Does that ever cause any trouble for you?

VS: Sometimes, 8ut I also know when to shut my mouth so to speak. Whether or not I do is another matter........

WW: Well, that’s certainly a relatable statement— Has there been anything you’ve found issue in learning?

VS: Human anatomy

VS: Dear god what is with these 8odies

VS: Programming is something we've collectively had issues with, 8ut we're okay at it now

VS: And any form of art that isn't music or writing

WW: Oh? Is there a form of music you prefer over the others?

VS: Violin was always fun

WW: Violin? Is that one that’s particularly hard to learn?

VS: It varies from person to person, 8ut it is considered one of the more difficult instruments. All instruments have difficulties in learning though, so it's hard to r8 one over another in terms of difficulty

VS: Instruments we've at least started learning to d8 are(in no particular order):

-Voice

-Trumpet

-Trom8one

-Flute

-Cello

-Viola

-Violin

-Piano

-Guitar

VS: Though we were only competent at:

-Voice

-Violin

-Piano

VS: I have never 8een good with the voice, personally

WW: Oh, gosh, that’s a lot! Were you doing more than one at a time?

VS: We did voice along piano and violin. Other than that, no

VS: Some of those we did for less than a year

WW: What’s the longest one you’ve done?

VS: 5 years of voice pro8a8ly?

VS: May8e longer

VS:  *We only did viola for two weeks 8efore swapping to violin, 8ut I'm counting it 8ecause I can still play it through violin skills

WW: Oh! Is there a difference between viola and violin?

VS: Viola's are similar to a violin, 8ut are larger and play lower notes than a violin. It's 8etween a cello and a violin in scale and size, and is played similarly to a violin

WW: Ooooooooh! Well, I didn’t even know those existed, heh— and you mentioned writing? Is that something you like doing?

VS:  I personally don't write often, 8ut Eva likes to write poetry. She's also trying to write a 8ook

VS:  I guess you can count this as writing though, I do love answering questions or going on lectures a8out things

WW: It does sound fun! Are there any particular subjects you like talking about?

VS: Quantum physics, Astronomy, and Philosophy

VS: All at once ::::)

VS: They're all connected

VS: Well everything is, really, 8ut those three are the most o8vious

WW: How so? 

VS: Well using quantum physics to explain certain aspects of astronomy, and how they rel8 has several different theories that we do not have the energy to get into right now, 8ut it is fun to use those to 8oth prove and disprove free will ::::)

WW: Disprove free will?

VS: Mhm!

VS: Certain theories of how the universe works ends up with us having no free will at all

VS: That everything is predetermined, 8ut at the same time having free will

VS: It's the theory that I su8scri8e to that eventually the universe will stop expanding, then contract upon itself, and then eventually another 8ig 8ang in exactly the same way will happen. At the end of the day we're just atoms and electrical signals 8umping next to each other in a specific way, like a game of pool with a good enough computer if you run the same shot over and over again the 8alls will end up in the same exact place, right? It's the same concept only applied to every single particle in the universe. That we've had this convers8ion potentially 8illions of times 8efore in the same exact way and we will have it 8illions of times again. Oh 8ut this is usually the end of my ram8le on the su8ject, this is missing all the material that leads up to it

WW: Well, that all sounds quite interesting..!

VS: 8ut we are tired so the condensed version of the ending will do

WW: That’s quite alright! I’ve never heard it before anyways, so I’m simply happy to learn something new!

VS: I'm glad to have presented you something new and interesting to learn

VS: I'll go over other theories at a l8r d8

VS: We seemed to have side tracked quite a 8it whoops

WW: Eh, it happens sometimes!

VS: Or I have rather hahahaha

WW: Hey, I think it’s still just as valid! It is something you’re interested in, after all!

VS: Alright next question~

WW: Hm.. well, did you have anyone you considered most important to you?

VS: During my time alive in my own 8ody, pro8a8ly terezi. In paradox space, meenah (the one I'm here with)

WW: What was your Terezi like? (If you don’t mind sharing)

VS: She was a sylph of doom, she talked 8out the inevita8le a lot, rules, limits, things I don't care a8out. She was also really strict, 8ut I liked her. I can't remem8er 8ut we were either flushed or pale

WW: What do those mean?

VS: M8sprit or moirail, respectively

VS: Oh you don't- okay

WW: Well, I know they’re types of romance!

VS: Good start! So

VS: M8spritship resem8les typical human romantic rel8ionships the most, it's not 1:1 8ut there's a lot of love

VS: Moirailegence is like the human concept of soul m8s, 8ut not like "I love this person" more "We need each other", you t8ke care of each other and keep each other pacified and calm. Stopping them from doing stupid things, or they stop you from doing stupid things (or try to, and then they're there to say "I told you so")

WW: Pfft- Well, I can think of more than a few people I knew who were like that.. but no matter, ah- you said Terezi was a.. Sylph of Doom? What does that entail?

VS: Sylph is the passive cre8ion class, they create for others, and invite the creation of their aspect

VS: In this case doom, which is all a8out rules, limit8ions, f8, ect.

VS: It is the oppos8 of life, which is generally a8out freedom, choices, and change

WW: So, does that mean that she created rules and such for others? (Or is that what you meant by strict?)

VS: To all those reading along who are versed in classpects, I am extremely tired and doing a terri8le jo8 of explaining things

VS: 8ut yes, that is exactly what she did

WW: Did you think they were patricularly fair?

VS: Some times I have to admit they are, 8ut I'm not a 8ig rules person. I like to passively oper8 doing what I do, and usually that falls within the rules

VS: If I can't do something, that just m8kes me want to do it more, until I can do it

WW: Had you two ever had any fights over them? (And ah, that is- a mood)

VS: Small tiffs, 8ut nothing major most of the time

WW: Well, that’s good to hear! And, hm.. what’s Meenah like?

VS: Meenah isn't from my canon, 8ut I met her in paradox space

VS: She resem8les meenah from homestuck itself decently well

WW: Would you say that’s a good thing?

VS: She's nice, a 8it crass at times, I like her

WW: Well, that’s good to hear! It can always be a bit frustrating when people don’t get along.. and- hmm.. who would you say is somebody you didn’t like in your canon?

VS: Tavros

VS: He was annoying as fuck

VS: I 8roke his legs though, that was fun

VS: (On that topic, I also 8roke joke's legs too!)

VS: Or jape or whatever his name was

VS: I didn't like him either

VS: 8ut tavros I just couldn't stand

VS: (And now he can't either hahahaha)

WW: Pfft- Goodness..! What happened to lead up to that?

VS: He was 8eing super annoying while we were playing flarp, so I introduced him to a scenario where there was a cliff, and there was my mind control powers, and suddenly there was a tavros jumping off said cliff

VS:  I wouldn't do that again, I've mellowed out a lot over the sweeps, 8ut I don't regret it

VS: Terezi got pissed at me for that one

VS: That was the only major fight we had

WW: Well, I could certainly imagine- but, ah.. what is.. flarp?

VS: Fantasy Live Action Role Play

WW: Oh! Were there particular things you could do? Or just whatever you wanted?

VS: GM (Game master)'s discretion (aka mine), 8ut for the most part you could do anything. Funnily enough it also had classes like in s8ur8

WW: Oh?

VS:  I don't have the energy to go over that, so let's wrap this up with any closing questions you may have and then we can continue l8r ::::)

WW: Ah, alright! I believe the only closing question I can think of is.. what, if anything, do you wish people would stop assuming about you?

VS: Stop assuming all vriska's are 8ad! I'm working on 8eing 8etter 8y human standards, it's annoying to 8e written off as a 8ad person just 8ecause "Oh she's a serket what do you expect"

VS: Anyways that's all the time we have for tonight, thank you for 8eing here, and thank you whoever actually read all this

WW: Oh, I’m glad to be here! Thank you for allowing me to! (And I hope you rest well!)

[exploremars]

By MATT STAGGS | UNBOUND WORLDS

The National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” is a six-part global event series that depicts mankind’s first crewed mission to Mars in the year 2033. This reality-based drama is accompanied by unscripted interviews with today’s biggest innovators in the growing field of space exploration. Among them is aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin: a longtime advocate for a crewed journey to Mars, and author of several books, among them How to Live on Mars.

Zubrin recently spoke with me about the television program, the opportunities that a journey to Mars would offer, and the limitations of conventional thinking. 

Note: This article is from November 2016 but republished here for its relevancy to current affairs in the space industry, NASA, and the recent formulation of a National Space Council via the Trump Administration.

UNBOUND WORLDS: I see that you invented three-player chess as a young man. What were you like as a kid? Have you always been someone who didn’t want to take accepted wisdom as the final answer to a problem?

ROBERT ZUBRIN: That was my first patented invention: I invented it when I was in high school. I would say that’s true. I’ve always looked for alternative ways to do things, and always asked why it can’t be done a different way. One thing impairs people from being inventors is that a lot of people have this idea that if they think something could be done a different way, and it’s not already being done that way, then they think there must be a reason why they’re wrong. My attitude has always been, “show me”, okay? They also think that if it was a good idea then someone else would have thought of it first.

There are so many inventions that you could look at, from bicycles to parasails, that could have been invented decades or centuries before they actually were. Did you know that the wheelbarrow wasn’t even invented until the 1200s? The Romans didn’t have wheelbarrows. It took until the high Middle Ages to invent wheelbarrows, but there was no reason why the Romans couldn’t have had them, or invented bicycles or at least scooters, but they didn’t. By World War II, people knew pretty much everything about subsonic aerodynamics that they know now, and yet they only had parachutes that could not be directed, as opposed to parasails, which were fully within their understanding, but no one had them.

I mean, look, the ketchup bottle you stand on its head so you won’t have to knock the ketchup out? We had that until 5 or 10 years ago when someone thought to put the ketchup bottle that way. There’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been invented yet. People just need to have the guts to say, “Show me why I’m wrong.”

UW: How often have you been in that position? Do you get a lot of pushback when it comes to things like Mars and your plans there?

RZ: You get this throughout life. I always got, “You can’t be right because someone else would have thought about it first.” I recently published a critique of Elon Musk’s space colonization system. I said that he has this giant second-stage booster that he’s sending all the way to the surface of Mars and back. Seven million pounds of thrust? He should stage off of that just short of Earth escape and then it would be back in Earth’s orbit within a week. It could be used five times per opportunity, or every other opportunity, and you wouldn’t be sending it all the way to the surface of Mars and back. I published that.

Some people see what I’m saying, and then others believe that Musk must have already thought of that and rejected it. I don’t buy that argument. If you think that it’s wrong, then show me why it’s wrong. It must be wrong because otherwise Musk would have thought of it? People make mistakes. People leave things out. It happens all the time. That’s what you’ve got to do: Look at it with not cold reason, but brave reason.

UW: You’re an advocate of settling Mars by getting there and then developing what we need on the ground, is that right?

RZ: We’ll have to do it with what we have now, or what we’ll have soon. You have to understand that technologists are not the constituents of the Mars program, although they appear to some managerial types to be that. They are the vendors to the Mars program. You need some of them, but you want to need as few of them as you can.

It’s like running my business: I don’t run my business to please my vendors. There are certain vendors that I have and I make a lot of use of them, but I don’t run my business to give them maximum business. I try to economize. The problem that you have at NASA is that whenever anyone says, “Let’s send Humans to Mars”, then a bunch of people crowd into the room representing various technologies, and they say, “We love this idea because you’ll give our technology a job. We’ll support your program if you use our technology. On the other hand, if you don’t, we’ll hate you forever.”

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The problem with the 90 Day Study wasn’t that the engineers who designed it were incompetent: It was that the managers who were leading that effort were trying to find key roles for everyone’s pet technology. It’s exactly the opposite of the correct way to do engineering: They designed the most complicated mission they possibly could. In contract, with Mars Direct, we said, “We want to send humans to Mars. What’s the simplest way to do it?”

UW: “Mars” is set a couple of decades or so in the future. Did you have much input on the program or the mission as it is portrayed?

RZ: I was interviewed and you’ll see various comments by me scattered throughout the series, but to the extent that I influenced the design of the mission, it wasn’t as a consultant to the program. It was through my contributions to our thoughts about space travel, more broadly. For example, you have this ship that lands on Mars: There’s no mothership, just like in Mars Direct. That’s a break from the Von Braun paradigm, and I think one that I’m significantly responsible for. I haven’t seen the future episodes, but I have to assume that they’re going to come back using methane and oxygen produced on the surface of Mars. The direct landing on Mars only makes sense if you’re going to use in situ propellant. If you try to land on Mars bringing with you all of the propellant you’ll need to go home, then you’ll blow the mission’s mass budget out of the water. It’s impractical.

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UW: Were we able to come together as a species and use private and public resources, would we be able to make this happen sooner than we think?

RZ: I think we could have humans on Mars by 2024: not in 16 years, but eight. In fact, I just had a caller from a conservative publication who asked what I thought Trump should do. I said that he should commit the nation to land humans on Mars by the end of his second term. If Trump wants to make America great again, then great nations do great things. That’s what you have to do.

From a technical point of view, we are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send them to the moon when Kennedy started the moon program, and we were there eight years later. Here we are, a country with twice the population and four times the gross national product of the America of the sixties. For us to say we can’t do this now — that we’re too poor, weak, or this or that — is to say that we’ve become less the kind of people that we used to be. That is something this country cannot afford. If you’re asking me if it’s realistic that we could be landing people on Mars in 2033 (the year that the Mars mission depicted in the program occurs), then, yes, absolutely. I think we could do it sooner.

UW: What frustrates you? What do you wish people would come together and solve right now?

RZ: What frustrates me is that we’ve had a number of swings at this. There was the original one when NASA landed us on the moon and said that we were ready to go to Mars. We could have been on Mars by 1981, but Nixon derailed the whole thing. Then the first president Bush, in 1989, said that we should go to the moon, Mars, and beyond, and then NASA totally hosed it up. Rather than embracing the goal and Bush’s desire to do that, they treated it as a way to justify a gigantic assortment of programs and that’s why they came up with that very expensive report that killed that program. I was fighting that and that’s how Mars Direct came about.

I was saying that we didn’t have to do it that way. We could be on Mars in 10 years, not 30, and it didn’t have to cost $400 billion. We could do it for a tenth of that. I did educate a fair number of people at that time and got NASA to embrace a Mars Direct-like approach. They then said, “Well, gee, we could have human beings on Mars in almost 10 years and it would cost $55 billion.” Yet, it didn’t go anywhere and most of those people have moved on from their jobs, so in 2004, when the second Bush announced an initiative for space exploration, I had to go in and educate a whole new group of people who then passed.

Now, here we are again. Maybe. We’ll see if Trump wants to do anything significant or not, because who knows what’s going to come out of this, right? I know that if he does announce it, then I’ll have to go in and re-teach everything: Why we don’t need giant, electric propulsion-driven space ships to go to Mars, and why you want to fly to Mars in conjunction class missions and not opposition class missions — that means a long duration stay and not a short duration stay. We’ll need people to finally look at the numbers and realize the radiation doses aren’t that great. As a matter of fact, we’ve already had a number of astronauts and cosmonauts with the same radiation dose by being on Mir or the International Space Station that they would get going to Mars and back.

This is not something to be done by Captain Kirk or Picard: It can be done by us, and it’s frustrating to have to keep digging it out. We’ll see you, know? Trump’s victory was a surprise. Most people, including me, thought that Hillary was going to win, and I had worked out a strategy to deal with that and get a humans to Mars program going because it would be a way to get millions of young people to enter science and engineering: to become technological entrepreneurs and inventors, medical researchers, and everything that would advance the nation. This would be a way to astonish the world and show what free people could do in a time when we’re being challenged by Putin, the Islamists, and the Chinese. They say that we’re of the past, and we need to show that we’re not. I think there’s still a message in there for the Trump crowd, assuming that he does want to stand up to Putin.

UW: What makes you hopeful? What are you excited about?

RZ: I think that in the long game we’re winning. Even though we’ve had all of these false starts, the fundamentals of the space program are much stronger than they were in the sixties. Right now, I would say that a significant fraction of the American population — it could be a majority, maybe 30 percent, but certainly not less than 20 percent — believe that it is essential for a positive future that humans expand into space; that we’re not just doing this for a temporary geopolitical purpose and that it’s something people really need to do. The mythos that has been developed through science-fiction and movies, as well as the missions themselves, has established this in people’s minds: This is where we’re going. That’s the fundamental driver on this.

We may have temporary reverses, but the fundamental technological foundation is advanced. We have wild cards like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have advanced technological innovation greatly through entrepreneurship. That’s caused by two things. The spread of the idea that it is essential to a positive human future that we expand into outer space recruited Musk and Bezos so that they are doing what they’re doing. They aren’t doing this to make money: They have other ways to make money. They are doing this because they believe this is the most important thing being done in the world at this time and they want to do it.

The other fact that lends itself to make itself possible is that there’s a lot more very wealthy people in the world today than there was a hundred years or so. A hundred years ago, there were maybe 10 people in the United States that were like Bezos or Musk. You could name Rockefeller or Morgan, but now there must be at least a thousand of them. Because the world has gotten wealthy as a function of the advance of technology, average people are much wealthier than they were a hundred years ago or 50 years ago. At the far end of that income distribution there are a thousand people like that where there were 10. Were there only 10 such people, then it would be much less likely that one of them would be recruited to this idea of devoting their fortunes and talents to human advancement into space. You’ve got Musk doing this thing, and he has now demonstrated the ability to build space systems at a third of the cost and time of the mainline aerospace industry, and not only that, but developing things that nobody had developed before, like the reusable first stage. He’s really pushing the envelope and he’s much more daring than any bureaucracy could be. He has a higher rate of failure as a result, but that’s actually a good thing. Only if you’ve got the guts to fail will you do things that haven’t been done before. Even if Musk fails completely, if he has as series of failures and fades, or his political opponents manage to knife him, there will be others. He’s showing how it’s done and there will be others.

There are millions who understand that this is the most important thing going on at this time in history; that it will be remembered by others because this is the time that we first set sail to other worlds. They want to be the ones who made it happen, or helped to make it happen. It’s going to happen. We’re going to win. Failure is impossible.

Source: UNBOUND WORLDS

Images: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ‘MARS’ 

Thinking about moving to mars?

Well, why not? Mars, after all, is the planet that holds the greatest promise for human colonization. But why speculate about the possibilities when you can get the real scientific scoop from someone who’s been happily living and working there for years? Straight from the not-so-distant future, this intrepid pioneer’s tips for physical, financial, and social survival on the Red Planet cover:

• How to get to Mars (Cycling spacecraft offer cheap rides, but the smell is not for everyone.) • Choosing a spacesuit (The old-fashioned but reliable pneumatic Neil Armstrong style versus the sleek new—but anatomically unforgiving—elastic “skinsuit.”) • Selecting a habitat (Just like on Earth: location, location, location.) • Finding a job that pays well and doesn’t kill you (This is not a metaphor on Mars.) • How to meet the opposite sex (Master more than forty Mars-centric pickup lines.) With more than twenty original illustrations by Michael Carroll, Robert Murray, and other renowned space artists, How to Live on Mars seamlessly blends humor and real science, and is a practical and exhilarating guide to life on our first extraterrestrial home.  

Robert Zubrin is a recipient of the National Space Society’s prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Award and is the author of the bestselling The Case for Mars, as well as Entering Space, Energy Victory, and First Landing. He is the president of the Mars Society, an international organization committed to furthering the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet. With a doctorate in nuclear engineering and a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics, Dr. Zubrin led the Mars Direct project at Martin Marietta Astronautics (later Lockheed Martin) and is the founder and president of the engineering firm Pioneer Astronautics.

Source: @penguinrandomhouse​

[procyonvulpecula]

Do you have any basic, common facts that are still amazing and weird to you when you think about it? For me it's microscopic things... the very thought of something SO small, we cannot see them without special viewing equipment!

The fact that everything we can see around us is made of protons, neutrons and electrons in different combinations. Three basic “building blocks” are enough to create everything as diverse as a storm cloud, Boris Johnson, a computer and the planet Neptune, and each one of those basic ingredients is identical to any other one. Swap every proton in my body with protons from the Andromeda Galaxy and everything would be exactly the same!

On a similar vein, the fact that atoms are so small and numerous that every breath you inhale contains atoms from everyone who has ever lived, and every breath you exhale will eventually make its way into everyone who will ever live. When you breathe in, there are more molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in your lungs than stars in the observable Universe.

The hydrogen in our bodies was made from protons and electrons not long after the Big Bang at the beginning of the Universe. All our other elements were built inside stars and released into space to form new generations of stars and planets when those stars exploded. We are all, literally, made out of stardust. (Although you could look at it and say we’re all made of nuclear waste too…)

Although we weren’t human, in a sense we’ve been here since the beginning of the Universe - first as subatomic particles, then hydrogen and helium gas, then as atoms in stars, then as grains of dust orbiting the newborn Sun, then as clumps of dirt or air or water on Earth, our atoms cycling through countless animals and plants and microbes and through the air, sea and land on continents that haven’t existed for countless millennia until finally coming together as us for a very brief while before drifting off to become something else again. In this sense we are all the same age - 13.8 billion years old - and we will never die, just continue being different arrangements of matter and energy throughout eternity.

We’re literally related to everything alive on Earth. We’re close cousins of each other, as every human being alive today is descended from a common ancestor a few tens of thousands of years ago. We’re more distant cousins of chimpanzees and bonobos, sharing a common ancestor about 6 or 7 million years ago; more distant cousins yet of gorillas, then orang-utans, then gibbons, Asian and African monkeys, South American monkeys, tarsiers, lemurs, tree shrews… other mammals… even further back, reptiles and birds… amphibians… fish… other animals… single-celled eukaryotes, fungi and plants… and ultimately we share a common ancestor with the simplest bacteria who lived around 3.5 billion years ago when Earth was only a billion years old. We are all cousins!

The Himalayas are made of marine limestone and contain shells of sea creatures. They were once the floor of a tropical sea, before being caught between India and Asia and thrust up into the highest mountains on Earth. Britain was at one point under several kilometres of ice; was a tropical reef habitat submerged underwater; and was a densely forested temperate woodland at different parts of its history. Mountains eventually wear down; new mountains arise; continents drift. Earth is constantly changing and the planet we live on now is an alien planet compared to Earth two billion years ago.

Nearly all of the mass of an atom is contained in a very, very tiny nucleus at the centre, about 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller in radius than the atom as a whole. Imagine the nucleus as being like a pea in the middle of a football stadium. Then imagine 99.9% of the mass of that football stadium - all the furniture, walls, the pitch, etc. - crushed into that pea, with just a few scattered chairs remaining outside it. That’s how dense nuclei are, and how empty atoms are. Matter is mostly made of nothing. If you could squeeze all the electrons in all our atoms down into our nuclei, the entire human species could fit into a sugar cube.

Time and distance are not absolutes but differ from one observer to another, depending on how fast they’re travelling. If a pair of twins celebrate their birthday together on Earth before one flies off on a journey at 99% of the speed of light, the travelling twin could return after a year away to find the stay-at-home twin has experienced seven years. This effect is very small at slow speeds, but GPS calculators still have to take it into account when working out where you are in relation to the satellites. Distances also shrink the faster you go, and you behave as if you’ve become heavier. At the speed of light itself, time would come to a stop and all distances would shrink to zero - although you could never actually get up to the speed of light, since you’d be infinitely heavy and need an infinite amount of energy to get up to that speed. The only way you can travel at the speed of light is if you have no mass to start with - like light itself.

All the different forces in nature are actually just four different forces - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. The two nuclear forces are only relevant at very tiny scales (like the nucleus of an atom), so the only forces that shape our everyday world are gravity and electromagnetism. Obviously the electric and magnetic forces are examples of electromagnetism. But all the “other” familiar forces you can think of - friction, air resistance, contact forces, buoyancy, tension - are all caused by atoms and molecules in close contact, and the electrical repulsion between their outer electron clouds - so they’re all just electricity in disguise! (And atoms and molecules never actually “touch,” by the way - they get very close, but the electrical repulsion between electron clouds prevents them from being squeezed into one another. When you sit on a chair or stand on the floor, you’re actually levitating a tiny fraction of a nanometre above it!)

The dinosaurs dominated life on Earth for so long that Tyrannosaurus rex is closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus. And speaking of dinosaurs, they’re not quite dead - birds are their direct descendants, and it still amazes me that the pigeons I see in my garden are living, breathing dinosaurs. Jurassic Park is real!

You have about 100 trillion cells in your body - only around 10 trillion of them are human. The rest are the bacteria that share your body with you and are essential for keeping you healthy. But because bacterial cells are much smaller and lighter than human cells, they contribute only a small fraction to your body weight.

I still find it fascinating sometimes that there are invisible colours of light out there, that our eyes can’t see but our communications devices can make good use of. There’s really no difference between radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays except their frequency - all the others are literally invisible colours of light!

Speaking of colours, each individual atom is set up to emit or absorb very specific colours of light. In a solid, liquid or a dense gas, the atoms are closely packed together and interacting, which smears out the possible range of colours they can emit or absorb into a broad, continuous spectrum. But for a not very dense gas made up of individual atoms or molecules quite far apart from each other, the atoms and molecules absorb or emit only those specific colours. So what? Well, that means we can look carefully at the spectrum of light emitted by other stars or absorbed by the atmospheres of other planets and look at the pattern of which colours are absorbed to be able to tell what atoms and molecules are there. We can tell the composition of another world without even having to go there - just by looking at the colours of light in its spectrum! Maybe one day we’ll find substances in the atmosphere of a distant planet this way that conclusively show the existence of life on that planet. All by looking at its light!

DNA. A double helix made up of four basic kinds of molecules can code for every living thing on the planet, from petunias to porcupines to people, like an amazing computer program that’s written itself over billions of years through trial and error. Isn’t that bizarre? A simple string of four different molecular bases is enough to account for the differences between you and the apple you ate yesterday - and you both run the same code. But then, that’s not really surprising when you consider the previously-mentioned fact that we’re distant relatives!

Consciousness is a thing. That’s just weird, and it gets more baffling the more we think about it. Why am I aware of my existence and experiencing things when a rock - as far as we know - doesn’t? How does that process work exactly? It’s… something to do with the brain? But that’s pretty much as far as we’ve got. What is this thing we call consciousness?

But the most amazing fact of all is that the Universe is something we can understand. We - hairless, upright apes who were running around on the savannah trying not to get eaten just a few tens of thousands of years ago - can measure the age of the Universe, the size of the atom, the composition of distant stars, and can look back through time to find out how our planet was formed, what’s under our feet, etc. As far as we know we’re the only species that can do this. We’re not separate from the Universe, we’re a part of it, as much as your cells and organs are a part of you. We are the Universe’s eyes, ears and brain. We are the Universe able to look at itself, think about itself, and understand itself.

I could go on for years but I think that’s enough for now!

[mjjjj07]

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Yes, that is in fact a real German word. We learned the meaning of it on our trip to Berlin. My German flatmate Max describes it as: facing the past and taking responsibility of it.

 We had a wonderful time in Berlin, Germany! Since our flight departed at 6:45am from the East Midlands airport + about 1.5-2 hours of travel time, I set my alarm for 2:30am so I could shower/get ready. Excitedly I woke up around 2am and figured there was no use going back to sleep. Around 3am I ensured my 2 flatmates Max and Tom were awake via WhatsApp and got my things together to head down to the kitchen to meet them and try to leave our flat by 4am to walk to the city center to catch the airport bus. When I came into the kitchen I found Tom cooking a full English breakfast at 3:30am! I couldn’t help but laugh – he said he was craving it although I couldn’t imagine eating such a heavy meal so early in the morning. I made a piece of toast and rushed the boys along to make it out the door by 4am. We caught the Sky bus to the airport and I was surprised to see about 20 early risers come and go from the bus presumably on their way to work. When we arrived about an hour later at the airport we met our 4th travel companion, Hannah, my coursemate. We all walked through the airport toward security repacking our liquids and chugging our water bottles on the way. Once at security we almost got through without a hiccup until Tom realized one of his shoes was missing! I asked a gentleman putting on brown leather dress shoes if the black shoe in his conveyor belt bin was his and he said no but it was his son’s. Where had Tom��s shoe gone?! We asked TSA and they took a broom beneath the machines and brushed out Tom’s shoe – what a terrible start to the trip that would’ve been to lose a shoe! We meandered through the airport and made our way to the gate. East Midlands is a small airport and on our way I noticed some converters for sale and then realized I had brought my converter but didn’t change the plug from UK to Germany….DAMNIT. At the shops in the airport the American to European converters were around £10 so I didn’t buy one. Luckily, I had a portable charger for my phone and my friends had the converters that accepted USBs. We waited in line at the gate and when it was time to board the plane the gate agent checked my boarding pass and said “Uh oh, you don’t have a stamp”…She looked to the other gate agent and said “She’s an American and didn’t get her visa checked” My heart sunk for a second but thankfully she let me through without the stamp. WHEW! Another close call! I would have been so upset if they hadn’t let me board the plane. I mentioned it to my friends and made a mental note to check with the RyanAir desk on the way back home.

Because it was a RyanAir flight it was super cheap! Only $67 roundtrip! Also, because it was cheap none of us paid extra to select our seats so we were scattered throughout the plane. I love European flights because in just a couple hours you’re in a completely different country! The flight was about 2 hours (plus a 1 hour time difference). I read my book - The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - and took about an hour nap which was much needed. When we landed it was about 9:40am local time. We made our way to the train which would be a 30 min ride into Berlin. We got off the train at Alexanderplatz which is a large public transport hub – one we’d grow to learn and love quickly. Hannah and I were staying at Wombat’s Hostel near the Rosa-Luxemburg Platz (platform) and since when we booked only girls’ rooms were available – so the boys booked a hostel called EastSeven just a 10 minute walk away from ours. Since check-in time wasn’t until the afternoon Hannah and I dropped our bags off – happy to rid ourselves of their weight and then walked with the boys to drop their bags off.

We had only one real order of business at that point and that was to EAT. We started by walking toward the city center while looking for ATMs along the way so I could pull out Euros. After a little sight-seeing I’ll admit I was getting a bit hangry and just wanted us to find any place to eat so we settled on an Italian restaurant that was nicely decorated with wicker chairs and red blankets. I asked if we could sit outside which everyone kindly obliged even though it was chilly! We ate pizza and pasta and drank beer cheersing ‘PROST’ to our first meal in Berlin!

After eating, Max had arranged a free walking tour for us starting at Brandenburg Gate in the city center. Since we were running short on time we hopped on the metro to get there. Standing in the city center was beautiful. A lot had changed since WW2. We were given a numbered ticket from our tour guide and broken up into groups – our tour was in English of course – and our tour guide was from Spain! His English was flawless and he said he originally came to Berlin to study but had ended up loving it so much he stayed. He started by discussing the Brandenburg Gate; he told us that right where we were standing in what was formerly known as the “Death Strip”….uh what? Well, because of where the Berlin Wall was erected there was space between East and West Berlin where people trying to escape East Berlin were often shot and killed because they were trying to get to ‘freedom’ on the West side. The wall was built by the GDR and stood for 28 years. Something interesting about the GDR lasting 28 years is that we were in Berlin exactly 28 years after the wall had been torn down – which was easy math for me since it’s my age. The wall was torn down the year I was born (1989).

The Brandenburg Gate reminded me of the Arc de Triumph in Paris and has a lot of historical significance because it is located right between East and West Berlin. We then passed through the gate toward our next destination: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This was one of the most interesting parts of the tour, as you will be able to see in the photos I upload – this memorial consists of concrete slabs, varying in height, laid out in a grid-like pattern. Our tour guide challenged us to think about the meaning behind this memorial and allowed us to walk through it to the other side. What I realized when we were walking through is that the ground sloped inward and the further we walked toward the center – the higher the concrete slabs rose above our heads. Soon enough we were completely dwarfed within the memorial. When we came out at the other side our tour guide wanted us to understand the beginnings of the Holocaust. He pointed to a concrete slab near the edge of the monument that was flat, flush with the sidewalk, and said “This is how the Holocaust started – hate speech, people turning a blind eye, small things that eventually led to the murder of millions of Jews and others”. I got chills…because it feels like this is happening again. But this time it’s starting in America.. under the rule of Trump. I for one, won’t stand for it which is why I’m trying to continuously show by supporting women, people of color, intersectionality, LGBTQ+, the disabled, etc. by attending the women’s march and (for lack of a better term) staying woke in America’s current political shit storm.

Next our tour guide led us to a muddy parking lot, wet from recent rainfall. We laughed when he said “I bet you’re wondering why a boring parking lot is on our tour today” but what he said next was astonishing…where we were standing was right atop Hitler’s bunker! Our tour guide described how Hitler and his wife Eva committed suicide in the bunker after they learned the war was lost and then their bodies were identified later with dental records and the bunker was blown up and sealed. It was then decided to make Hitler’s bunker an unremarkable spot. No monument or memorial was placed there because Hitler was, of course, on the wrong side of history. So it seemed fitting that a parking lot was placed there.

Next we stopped at a café about halfway through the tour to give our feet a break and have a cold beer. My German roomie Max found his favorite beer in the cooler and said I had to try it (which of course I did!) so we sipped our beers and then were told we had to keep moving a few minutes later. I wasn’t finished with my beer and Max said that was okay I could take the glass bottle of beer with me…WHAT? Amazing! In Germany you can drink alcohol in the street. He said you leave glass bottles underneath or next to the trash so the homeless people can return them to stores for money. For example when you buy a plastic bottle of water from a grocery store in Germany – it costs 19 cents + 25 cents. 19 cents for the water and 25 cents refunded once the bottle is returned to the store. America has similar practices but not as good of a system as Germany!

Next stop on our walking tour: the Berlin Wall! We came out of the café to a busted up, decrepit concrete wall. Our tour guide described a daring escape made by a family who hid in a tall building near the wall until the middle of the night where they threw a makeshift grappling hook and ziplined over the wall! He said once they were over the wall in the West they were safe – no one could send them back to the East Side.

After that we walked to an area called ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ named after the letter “C” in the NATO alphabet. It was very interesting to see a large photo of an American soldier mounted in the middle of the intersection, formerly a crossing point in the Berlin Wall for allied forces. Our tour guide explained this crossing point almost became the starting point of WW3 due to a U.S. and Soviet tank standoff due to a misunderstanding in 1961. The dispute was because of an American diplomat trying to enter East Berlin when German guards stopped him. Luckily, our president at the time – JFK peacefully negotiated us out of the standoff before a single shot was fired.

At this point it was starting to get dark and our feet were starting to hurt so we went on to the last 2 stops on the walking tour. Second to last was the “Square of Tolerance”, where 2 beautiful churches were erected next to each other with differing religions. The point Berlin was trying to make after tearing down the wall was that it welcomed the coexistence of different religions and people in the city. Finally, our last stop on the tour was a large plaza with beautiful views of Humboldt University of Berlin.

After the walking tour we went back to officially check into our hostels and get freshened up before dinner. Hannah and I met at the rooftop terrace, aptly named “Wombar” to use our free drink coupons given by our hostel before dinner. Then we met up with the boys and took the train to town. Max took us to get burgers and fries which were delicious and we were very hungry. I was so exhausted from being up since 2am that morning that I didn’t feel like going out so we called it a night around 11pm.

The next morning we were up at a decent hour and met the boys for breakfast. I ate fresh fruit, muesli, and yogurt as well as a cheesy breadstick which were delicious! Then Max said we would explore town – Tom said he wanted to buy a new hat since it was a bit chilly in Berlin and us girls wanted to look around to shop. Near Alexanderplatz we dinked around, poked our heads into a few stores, and enjoyed the view of the Alex TV Tower (an iconic symbol of Berlin). Then Max wanted us to head to another neighborhood via bus to walk around and see local shops. Hannah had been dying to try currywurst so we figured we could find some for lunch. We stumbled upon a little indoor market and had a look inside. We sampled some organic-vegan “treats” that tasted a bit like dog food BLEH and had to pay 50 cents to use the restroom inside but then decided to treat ourselves to a beer because why not? We were on vacation! We took our beers to the street and walked around the plaza and then over to the food trucks where we finally got to try currywurst! I got a vegetarian one and it was delicious! I let everyone taste mine and we all agreed it tasted just like meat! Currywurst is basically just sausage drenched in curry flavored ketchup (and fries if you desire). After we ate it was late afternoon and we decided to head back to the hostel for a quick rest and to get ready for the pub crawl! Back in my room I met a nice girl named Sonne from the Netherlands. I invited her to come with us for dinner because she was in Berlin alone and only for one night. She agreed and we met up with the boys to walk to a local German restaurant. After we walked there Max reported the restaurant had a sign up saying they were closed for a formal party so we trekked to another spot nearby and got a table.

We talked and laughed a bit over beer and delicious food. I ordered the gorgonzola penne pasta which was delicious and filling. Then we were off to our pub crawl starting at a bar right next to our hostel called CCCP (I have no idea what that stands for). We got our wrists stamped and ordered drinks at the bar. Included in our pub crawl was 6 shots along the way – little did we know they’d be Jägerbombs and straight vodka (gross). The 2nd bar was a ping pong bar! None of us played but we watched as all the people surrounded the table rotating in a circle so each one had a chance to hit the ball across – if you missed a shot then you were out until there were only 4 people left to play at the end. It was fun to watch and apparently a hidden spot in Berlin. The 3rd bar was an “absinthe” bar. The boys wanted to try absinthe and I was annoyed the pub crawl would take us there because real absinthe is illegal and it’s just a scam for tourists to buy overpriced shots. My friends and I had tried to find the real thing in Paris when we were there in 2014 but to no avail. The boys ended up getting “absinthe” and I have a video of them trying it - Tom’s face says it all: he took one sip and scrunched up his face “Yuck!”. The next stop on our pub crawl was a club with many different rooms and each had a different variety of music. We stayed and danced to Despacito (which was then subsequently stuck in my head the entire next day) and then wanted to go to the final club. Hannah and I enjoyed the last club the most. It was an eccentric looking African bar and club with great music and we got a friendly welcoming vibe from. We danced for a while but then the boys wanted to go back and get their coats because they left them at the previous club. Hannah and I were tired anyway and seeing as it was 3:30am we figured it was time for bed. The boys got off the metro and Hannah and I changed trains to head home. Little did we know we had gotten on going the wrong direction – whoops. When we reached the end we got off and rode the metro the other way back to our hostel.

The next morning we all slept in a little and while waiting to meet the boys for breakfast, Hannah and I decided to go get coffee across the street. This was our final full day in Berlin and we didn’t want to waste any time! When the boys met up with us we walked to a cute café to try their signature bagel sandwiches. I ordered an avocado/veggie bagel that was delicious. Then Max said he was taking us to the Wall Museum/East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is a stretch of the Berlin Wall that has been beautifully painted in murals. Max kindly read me the poems and quotes that were in German and it was a truly moving experience. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. After viewing the entire East Side Gallery we walked across the street for a bite to eat at a large train station. Hannah and Tom got currywurst and I finally got a pretzel with butter + chives, it was sooo yummy! Then I bought a tiramisu ice cream cone, my favorite.

After that Max wanted to take us to a main plaza to see the Berlin Cathedral. The cathedral was beautiful and right across the Spree River was a cute little outdoor art market on “Museum Island” (which isn’t really an island). The art market was one of my favorite parts of the day because it’s nice to see local artsy goods being sold. They had beautiful prints of Berlin, crocheted hats and gloves, and other touristy knickknacks. After the art market we had tickets to the DDR Museum (which was confusing because the DDR Museum is about the GDR – German Democratic Republic and I don’t know what DDR stands for even after Googling it). This museum was really cool because it was set up to interact with. We learned a lot about socialist society which was both interesting and a little scary (it made me dislike Bernie Sanders a bit more). Since everyone was “equal” it took somewhere between 10-20 years just to be given the one and only car available to the public - the Trabant. Everyone was encouraged to participate in sports (said to increase German pride), educated about socialism, and lived in identical apartments. In some ways socialism was good for the general population but what struck me as unfair is that the authorities were given special treatment, perks, bigger apartments, luxury-type food and goods made in Germany but primarily exported and not buyable by the public. It really made me appreciate some of the freedoms America offers.

After our long day we again went back to our hostels to freshen up before dinner. FINALLY we were going out for a traditional German meal. Max’s mom and brother recommended a restaurant about 30 minutes away by train and it was well worth the journey. The restaurant seated us right away, their specialty was spätzle which is basically potato-pasta. I ordered 2 glasses of wine, a side salad, and mushroom spätzle with cream sauce. IT WAS SOOOOOOO DELICIOUS! We all shut up the moment the food arrived and stuffed our faces. After we had our fill, Hannah had the nice idea of going around and saying our favorite and least favorite parts of the trip. I said my least favorite part was forgetting my outlet converter for Germany (which was really no big deal) and my favorite part of the trip was probably the 2nd day where we walked around the city, tried currywurst, took photos, and just had a chill day with good company. After dinner we headed back to our hostels, Hannah and I snuck the guys up to the Wombar for a couple drinks and we ended up playing pool with Sonne and another guy until it was time for bed, it was a really nice way to end the night.

The next morning when I got up I was feeling a little sad it was our last day. I got showered and dressed and was up in my bunk doing my makeup when my adorable bunkmate who was an older Japanese woman gave me 2 coupons for free breakfast at Wombar (which doubled as an all you can eat breakfast buffet in the morning). She said she would love to join Hannah and I but she hadn’t slept well and was going to stay in bed. I was up pretty early so I figured I’d go upstairs to the bar and read my book and have some coffee while I waited for everyone to meet me for breakfast. Hannah came up first and a little later the boys came over. The buffet was really good! They had hardboiled eggs, all kinds of bread, fruit, cheese, veggies, cereal, yogurt, juice, and coffee. I made a veggie and cheese panini sandwich with the hot press, then took a piece of fruit for later. Since our flight home wasn’t until the afternoon we had the morning to see a little bit more of the city. Max wanted to take us to see the Parliament building and a picturesque view of the Berlin Cathedral and the Spree River. We took some really great pictures in front of Parliament building which has a clear domed roof. The clear dome meant to symbolize government ‘transparency’ (take notes America). Shortly after that it was time to grab our bags and head to the airport. We hopped on the train for the 30 minute ride to the airport and when we arrived we discovered our flight was delayed by 20 minutes. We figured that was enough time to squeeze in one last beer and Hannah got one last currywurst! The flight home was quick, Max and I somehow got seated next to each other and he slept the whole time and I read my book. I was exhausted when we arrived back to East Midlands and we had a group hug before we parted ways with Hannah and then the boys and I found the bus back to Notts city center. We figured out we had walked 70,000 steps over the previous 3.5 days which equates to just under 30 miles! No wonder our feet were sore.

All in all it was a successful trip, Hannah got to eat currywurst and practice her German, this was Tom’s first hostel experience, and Max enjoyed being back in his home country in one of his favorite German cities. As for me, I can check Germany off my bucket list! I truly enjoyed the weekend and look forward to my next adventure which will be……NYE IN LONDON! I’m going on this adventure solo but my roommate Lauren lives in London so I may see her while I’m there. Stay tuned for photos from Berlin!

P.s. I got the job at Revs de Cuba! I’m excited to start working there as a host! I had orientation, training, and a team meeting turned rager this week! My coworkers and bosses sure can drink! I am just waiting on my application for a National Insurance Number which will enable me to work. Yay!

[foreignseongms-blog]

The Midnight Paradise Effect : Korean Fan Fiction

ForeignSeong’s 2nd Fan Fiction in the making, couldn’t wait to post it. I hope you all enjoy=)

An adopted simple kind-hearted high school student, Jin finds himself in the middle of a violent turned Seoul when people out of nowhere begin to wreak havoc in the streets. It is later found out that the root to people’s madness is a drug called Midnight Paradise, the goal is to get a high and hallucinate but meanwhile the user is in a state of high hallucination the body begins to go crazy or “brainless”. The government fiercely attempts to find the root of the problem and eliminate it as fast as possible. All clues of Midnight Paradise point to Jin. Could he possibly prove his innocence in time? Who framed him? Does he have to face this ordeal alone?

Genre : Fantasy, Romance, Angst, Mystery, Violence, and Psychological

Rating : M - mature for sexual suggestive themes, violence, and vulgar language

Characters : Kim Seok-jin (Choi Jin), Lee Soo-hyuk (Choi Chan-gyu), BTS, Block B, Bam-mi (Fictional), and Park Mi-ri (Fictional)

Chapter One : Killings

The middle aged man gasped trying to catch his breath from running for so long. Thick sweat dripped from his forehead as he panicked seeing nothing but an alley that ended with a brick wall.

“No! Fuck!” He cursed banging his fist on the wall.

The sound of chuckles echoed causing him to turn back in alarm. “Hmm…” The woman opened her bloodied mouth revealing fangs while limping towards him.

“No! Stay back!” He warned grabbing a piece of broken wood nearby trying to hold it steady but it still wavered. “No, I’m sorry! Please spare me!” He cried desperately.

“Ah!” Her hand slashed at the wood cutting through it with her fine claws making it hit the wall. “Hmm!” Her tongue stuck out while she forcefully grabbed the man by the arms digging her nails in deeply enough to penetrate his skin.

He cried out in pain looking straight into her eyes revealing nothing but an empty darkness. “No, please!” He still begged.

Her fangs dug deep into his neck drawing out an immense amount of blood as she repeatedly began to gnaw at the wound sucking the blood roughly while he cried out his last breath.

The Silver Hill High School stood bright and proud as the sun began to gleam rays at it. Two male high school students stood on the Silver Tower yawning and drinking coffee that early morning.

“What time is it?” One of them asked while he played with the large bell rope.

The other scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know let me check my phone.” He yawned stretching. “5:58.” He announced.

The one with the bell rope began to stand up and put on some type of sound cancelling ear plugs while his buddy did the same. The phone rang that it was six o’clock.

The boys pulled on the rope with all their might and the large bell began to toll throughout the whole school.

Several students ran to the open gate entrance. “Hurry before we get locked out!” Some students urged each other.

A female student held onto the gate door since it was her duty to close it with one of her junior officers of the student board. She tapped her foot impatiently searching through the students hoping to see someone in particular. “Ugh, where is he?” She muttered frowning.

“What has you so worried Mi-ri sunbae?” The junior asked.

She nodded with a nervous smile. “Nothing in particular Jae.”

All students successfully made it past the front entrance, except for maybe one. “Okay lock it down Miss Park!” Mi-ri bowed to the teacher’s order and slowly began to push the gate with Jae.

“Damn it Jin!” She cursed under her breath. “Why are you always so late?”

“Wait!” A familiar voice called out and she stopped pushing the gate looking out to see Jin.

“Jin!” She called out with a wave.

The teacher groaned but quickly turned to Jae. “Shut it, shut it down now!” He snapped and Jae quickly begin to push it as hard as he could but Jin managed to slip though just in time.

“Jin!” Mi-ri clapped bright while he tried to catch his breath. “You made it.” She playfully hit his arm. “What took you so long?” Everyone began to walk into the building ready to begin early class sessions.

Jin nervously scratched the back of his head. “Oh it is nothing just that I was looking into Chan-gyu hyung’s first case file.” He admitted.

Mi-ri gave him a distasteful look. “Why would ever want to look at that? Dead bodies and blood everywhere, how gross!”

“Yeah-yeah,” He rolled his eyes at his lady friend, “but hear me out when I tell you that this case is pretty peculiar. Guess what happened?”

“Ugh, what?”

“Some 36 year old victim got a large bite on his neck!”

Mi-ri looked alarmed. “Like vampire bite?”

Jin nodded. “No, way worse! The unsub ripped the flesh off and sucked out all the blood, leaving nothing but a dried up corpse.” He made many motions with his hands grabbing a small part of Mi-ri’s white neck making her flinch back.

“You’re lying!” She hit him with her book bag before reaching her locker and inserting her digital combination.

“No it’s true!” Some other male students got in the conversation.

“Yah are you guys talking about the killing last night?”

“I heard it was an animal that did it.”

“That’s stupid we’re in Seoul!”

All were talking at once making a huge gap between Jin and Mi-ri. To her disappointment Jin began to focus on all the other students overriding him with a million questions. “Hmph!” She slammed her locker turning a direction far away from Jin and his crowd of popularity.

Jin paused mid-sentence catching a glimpse of Mi-ri storming off towards her home classroom. “Mi-ri!” He called out.

“So does anyone know who did it or is the killer still out on the loose?” A girl asked nudging his rib cage.

Another one went through the crowd. “Does Chan-gyu oppa have the unsub already? If anyone can catch the unsub it would be him!” She squealed along with other girls that were part of the Choi Chan-gyu fan club, which is a surprisingly real thing at the school.

Jin only chuckled nervously feeling the exhaustion of being surrounded by girls swooning over his big brother.

“Everyone make way!” A boy with faded aqua hair pushed students aside with a Girl’s Generation light stick in one hand and a Sistar light stick in the other. Many students stuck to the sides making room like he urged them. “Move!” He shoved a shoulder against Jin making him bump his back on the lockers behind him.

Jin furrowed his brows clearly mad. “Don’t worry oppa they aren’t as cute as you.” Some of the first year girls snuggled into him making him grunt in annoyance. This is not how I pictured High School.

Five boys with flower boy looks walked into the hall gaining a lot of attention from the female students. “We’ll still stick with you!” The freshmen girls hugged onto Jin tighter.

“You are all...crushing…” He gasped a few breaths of air.

The obvious leader, just for the heck of it, kicked a nearby trash can to gain more attention from students this time making everyone tense up. He kept walking until he finally halted near Jin and his pile of girls.

The boy smirked. “It seems like losers always get the freshmen. Sometimes status never changes.” He blew air on Jin’s bangs causing him to blink but he was certainly not intimidated.

“You are right Nam-joon.” He agreed. “Status here can never change. For example, your status as the high school douche that thinks he can dominate everyone here but is really nothing, just a low life everytime he walks out of this school.” Suddenly the girls managed to run away as soon as Nam-joon’s hands caught a good hold of Jin’s collar. Both were in a dominant staredown.

“Yah, what is going on here?” A teacher from a nearby homeroom called out to the boys.

Nam-joon’s furrowed brows loosened and his lips made a forced smile. “Nothing!” He caught Jin’s head in his arm ruffling his maine. “Just having a little fun with my buddy.” He gave Jin a hard flick on his forehead.

The teacher just tapped a foot on the ground not buying a single word from the notorious Nam-joon. “Everyone needs to get to their home room immediately!” He announced in a booming voice, people began to scatter.

Nam-joon bumped into Jin purposefully making him slam back onto the lockers. “Watch that fat mouth next time Jinnie.” He warned continuing to walk the hall with his gang.

“Yah, homeroom Nam-joon!” The teacher warned while Nam-joon only stuck out his middle finger before disappearing behind a corner. The teacher clicked his tongue. “Aish, that little shit.”

Jin began to walk to his homeroom but caught a glimpse of Mi-ri eyeing him from her homeroom entrance. She frowned at him before disappearing into her classroom. “Aish!” He sighed a bit frustrated. High school can become a complicated mess sometimes.

Throughout the Seoul Police Department there was constant chatter, arguments, and phones ringing non-stop. “Aish, make it stop!” A chubby police officer groaned taking a few tablets of aspirin with water.

Chan-gyu chuckled sitting at his own small office desk near the officer. “You shouldn’t have gone drinking last night like I warned.”

“It was our superiors. It’s not like I had other plans.” He rubbed his temples.

Chan-gyu began to open the notes he made on his case file. “Make plans.” He pulled out a pair of glasses from his desk drawer putting them on before reviewing what he has understood so far from the horrific case-his first gruesome case. “I have never seen anything like it before.” He muttered tapping a long finger on his chin. “We may have to go back to the crime scene. It could help us make our next move.”

The other officer groaned with his head on his desk but still raising a thumbs up to Chan-gyu. He just sighed at his partner who was about to pass out.

“Yah, get your fucking paws off me!” A hooker yelled out while a police officer forcefully escorted her to a nearby jail cell. Behind her were like two or three other hookers, except one looked peculiar with a solemn look on her face as if she wasn’t exactly taking in her reality but something else.

They brought all the women into the jail cell. She sat down and only stared blankly sometimes blinking but that was about it. Chan-gyu furrowed his brows examining her intently. She did wear hooker style clothing, her dark hair untamed like it hasn’t been brushed in a long while.

She sensed a pair of eyes on her and she looked up to see her’s and Chan-gyu's eyes connect. He blinked away. She quickly stood up and held the bar handles tightly looking at Chan-gyu pleadingly.

One of the officers that took the girls in noticed officer Choi eyed the peculiar one. “Yeah she has been off ever since we caught them hanging around the streets. She didn’t even run or use force against us. Weird right?” Chan-gyu nodded.

“Does she have mental issues perhaps?” He asked the officer who only shrugged.

“Hell if I know. She hasn’t said a single word since we found her. Just stares sadly all the time or as if she is in a different world, poor thing, must have been through a lot.” They both looked at her while she stared intently at Chan-gyu her eyes glistening in the light almost as if she wants to cry. “She acts a bit childish though, only sometimes, like when we had her in the cop car she couldn’t stop messing with the window. She would push the buttons up and down, hell we were surprised how big she smiled when we let her turn on the siren. She might have amnesia and got caught with these hookers. We should get her examined in the hospital that’s for sure.”

“Yeah.” Chan-gyu nodded turning back to focus on his case.

“Wow, that’s a dirty one.” The officer commented.

Chan-gyu nodded. “Yes it is. I believe we are all going to be assigned to this case as a unit if we fail to catch the unsub before it strikes again.”

“It seems like a wild animal killing to me. This must be some real sicko.”

Many students in the school huddled to the nearest television sets and cell phones within the school and tuned into the news, all hyped about the fresh new killing.

Mi-ri appeared into Jin’s homeroom scouting for him but failed to find him in his seat. “Where is he?” She ran through the halls.

Jin sighed with arms behind his head looking up at the beautiful sky with only warm fluffy clouds decorating it. “I wish I wasn’t here, but up there.” He raised a hand up to the sky feeling the warmness of the sun. “It’s so pretty!” The light wind blew between his fingers. “I’m gonna skip the rest of the day.” He thought. “I’m sure hyung wouldn’t mind.”

Mi-ri ran through the halls and turned a corner tripping over someone’s leg. “Oh!” She gasped falling on the floor. “Ow!” She looked up to see six boys tower over her. Uh-oh.

“I’m sorry.” A boy with dark hair warmly stuck out a hand for her to take. Mi-ri blushed taking a good look at the boy’s cute smile and dimpled cheeks.

Before she took it another hand slapped his away. “Get out of the way Ho-seok it’s your fault she tripped anyways.” A large hand grabbed tight on the back of her blazer and pulled her up to her feet. “I apologize for my friend’s clumsy retardedness.” The leader leaned closer to whisper. “It’s a sickness. You better not catch it.” He chuckled pressing his index finger on her nose making her blush and blink constantly.

“Stop Nam-joon you’re scaring the girl.” Ji-min chuckled trying to pull Nam-joon away from her path. “Please, continue on your way girly.” He waved.

Mi-ri slowly walked past Nam-joon and his friends but a hand caught onto her arm, she gasped turning back to see a boy with peculiar eyes on her. “Jung-kook what the hell!” Nam-joon snapped at him.

Jung-kook squinted his eyes at her. “You’re that girl he hangs out with.”

Mi-ri blinked at him confused. “What?”

“Jin, Choi Jin. You are always around him. Are you two dating?” Her face blushed beet red.

“No,” Mi-ri tried to tug away from his strong grasp, “let go!” She panicked.

Nam-joon grabbed Jung-kook in a surprise choke hold. “Aish, what the hell?!” Jung-kook managed to spat out letting go of her.

“Sorry carry on.” Nam-joon gave her a dorky smile urging her to carry on and Mi-ri did-very quickly. “Is that a way to treat your leader’s lady?!” He started rubbing his fist hard in Jung-kook’s hair while he yelled out painful protests.

“Ow, what? Your lady?” He muffled in Nam-joon’s chest.

“Yes, you got that right minion. I’ve just found the love of my life thanks to Ho-seok!” Nam-joon freed Jung-kook and cupped Ho-seok by his cheeks and gave him a big smooch on the lips.

“Ugh!” Ho-seok managed to retort in distaste.

Nam-joon wrapped one arm around Ji-min and the other around Tae-hyung. “Come one guys let’s celebrate!” All three skipped together in the hall like a bunch of idiots while Jung-kook and Ho-seok struggled to keep up while holding onto Yoon-gi.

There was a large pounding sound coming from the High School’s roof entrance. Jin sat up alarmed. The door busted open with Mi-ri walking in and quickly closing it behind her gasping. “Aish, that was crazy. They are all crazy!”

“Mi-ri!” Jin called out to her and she yelped not expecting him to be there.

“You were here all along?” She walked up to him and sat next to him.

He nodded. “Yeah. Were you looking for me?” He raised his eyebrows in a mischievous way. Mi-ri could only roll her eyes at him. “I knew you couldn’t last all day without me.” Jin sighed lazily laying back down.

“Jin.” She began with a worried expression on her face revealing her phone from her pocket. Her eyes stared at it wide. “Oh shit! Damn it!”

“What?” He sat up to realize her screen cracked.

Mi-ri hit the phone on her forehead several times. “It must of happened when I tripped.”

Jin stared at her surprised. “But you never trip.” He laughed. “You have always been a cool and collected person who never made a fool out of herself.”

Mi-ri punched him on the arm roughly. “Why is it when it comes to you I do get clumsy?” She began to search through her phone while he laughed.

“You care about me too much.” Jin shrugged.

“There has been another murder like last night.” She handed him the phone.

Jin immediately turned serious seeing the female reporter on the screen. “We have come here today to the Hongdae club scene in the Mapo-gu District where tragedy has stricken. Hongik University student Jo Seung-woo was found brutally murdered this morning around the back alley of club Red Destination. Seung-woo was found like the previous victim, missing a large portion of his neck and with no traces of blood within the body.”

Jin handed Mi-ri back her phone and began to run into the building. “Jin wait, where are you going?” She ran after him.

Both appeared out near the school’s back courtyard. “I have to go see my brother! This is definitely a serial killer!” He began to climb the school walls.

“What are you insane? We’re in school right now, we can’t leave.” Mi-ri tugged on his backpack.

“Then I’m going alone.” Jin managed to sit on top of the wall. “You are the student body president Mi-ri. Don’t follow me anymore or they’ll just kick you out.”

“But,” She tugged on his shirt now with a very worried expression on her face, “Jin, you do realize this murder takes place this morning. It is escalating and so are the riots. Please, be very careful.” Jin grabbed her hand with a cheeky smile.

“Don’t worry I’ll be fine. I’m always fine. You worry too much. You’ll see me tomorrow morning, I promise.” He let go disappearing on the other side of the wall.

Mi-ri sighed with no traces of worry leaving her, not even for a second. “Jin, why do you always leave me so worried?” She slowly turned back and gasped at Nam-joon’s presence.

“So,” He began with an intrigued tone, “it appears that Jung-kook was right.” He popped his neck making Mi-ri wince. Oh god, what is he going to do to me? “Since you know Jinnie so well…” He grabbed Mi-ri roughly by the collar causing her to yelp, “where is he headed?”

[shervonfakhimi]

The 2019 Summer League Standouts

Summer League is finally coming to a close. Just because many didn’t watch lackluster doesn’t mean that *I* didn’t. Yes, I got my fair share of live ball turnovers, travels, and bricks, but I do enjoy watching journeymen fight for one more chance and young players dipping their toes into the shark-infested NBA waters. With that being the case, there were a few players who caught my eyes and stood out during Summer League. Here’s who did and how they did it.

Lonnie Walker IV SG SA: Surprise surprise. The Spurs’ player development program has paid dividends. Lonnie Walker IV is just the latest example. It feels like he made it his personal mission to serve buckets to anybody who tried to defend both in the Utah and Vegas Summer League, and that he has. In 4 games, Walker IV averaged 24.75 points per game shooting 55% from the field. The 4-to-9 negative assist-turnover ratio can be improved upon, but he flashed three-level scoring ability (especially in the midrange game), fulfilling some of the Donovan Mitchell comparisons he got coming out of Miami. The Spurs suddenly have a deep backcourt with Dejounte Murray returning alongside Derrick White and DeMar DeRozan, and Lonnie looks ready to contribute alongside them.

Anfernee Simons PG/SG POR: You like buckets? Well, get a load of Anfernee Simons, because he got a lot of them in Vegas. He showed an ability to score efficiently at all three levels and flashed fancy yet lethal footwork and handle in the process, averaging 22 points per game in the desert while shooting 55% from the field and 64.7% from three-point range. After trading Evan Turner to Atlanta, the Blazers believe Simons is ready to step into their backup point guard spot off the bench. While a 5-12 assist-turnover ratio does not exactly exude confidence running a team, he clearly can help a team keep up on second units, something Portland could use to give Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum longer spells of rest. 

Mfiondu Kabengele C LAC / Terance Mann SG LAC: Until another Canadian rookie dominated in consecutive games, I thought Mfiondu Kabengele was the best rookie that played in Summer League. But it wasn’t just him. His former Florida State teammate Terance Mann looked very sharp as well. Kabengele showed his versatility as a brute in the paint routinely stuffing bigs like Moe Wagner right in their path then running the floor, splashing 3s (he shot 7-16 from deep in Summer League) and playing hard all the time. Mann, on the other hand, showed he’s more than just a ‘3-and-D’ guy. He is a more than able creator with the ball in his hands, whether through the pass or looking to score, to go along with his defense. Both of these guys are perfect fits within the Clippers culture of toughness and versatility. For a team that gave up 5(!!!!!) first round picks in the deal for Paul George to land both him and Kawhi Leonard, they’ll need more young players to help sustain this run they’re about to embark upon. These two look like they can contribute right away.

Zach Norvell Jr. SG LAL: Norvell does not have a very sexy game. He isn’t going to routinely break a defense down off the dribble but has shown he can do it, whether it be via drive and kick potential assists or buckets for himself. He has a quick release to get shots off from deep before contests come his way, as evidenced by his game-winner against the Warriors in Sacramento. He’s a willing defender who does well at fighting through screens and using his length to get deflections. He is a very solid, willing passer who routinely makes the extra pass to get his team great shots rather than take good shots Though he is only on a 2-way contract, he looks like the prototypical kind of role player to surround stars like LeBron James and Anthony Davis. I had him ranked 44th overall on my big board. That the Lakers got him as an undrafted free agent is a steal. 

Tyler Herro SG MIA: Kudos to Tyler Herro for being amongst the few lotteries picks to actually play. Not only did Herro play, but he played very well. Obviously, his range is limitless, but that hasn’t been all he’s shown. While not great at playing through contact, his playmaking in space really impressed me during his time playing in Sacramento and Vegas. He is way more than just a shooter; he can score or playmake off the dribble as well. Miami used him as a de facto point guard during Summer League to help let Herro work on his off the dribble game. While he probably won’t be asked to bring the ball up with the big club, these skills can really come in handy if he gets ran off the three-point line. He fits in well with Jimmy Butler and the other young players Miami has, who knows how to use shooters like Herro (just ask Ray Allen or Wayne Ellington). I thought Miami reached a little to take Herro. I stand corrected, for now at least.

Kyle Guy SG SAC: Basically, anything I said about Herro applies to Kyle Guy, just a lesser version. I thought Guy should’ve been drafted, at the very least. His play in Sacramento and Vegas backed that up for me. 

Kendrick Nunn SG MIA / Duncan Robinson SF MIA: Two former undrafted free agents with drastically different games proved that they belong. Kendrick Nunn is a long, athletic, scoring wing who uses his length defensively as well. He gets busy offensively with his long strides, ability to play through contact and flashed an ability to score at all levels. Duncan Robinson may look nothing like an NBA player, yet he looks like exactly like an NBA player. Again, he is more than just a shooter. He repeatedly looked very comfortable putting the ball on the floor and finishing plays after getting run off the three-point line, whether on catch and shoot situations or running off screens or running the offense himself. He is comfortable shooting on the move and hitting contested shots, including this absurd shot on the move *over* the backboard. These two proved they belong in the league. The Heat guaranteed Duncan Robinson’s $1 million for next season, basically securing a roster spot for him on the team next season. We’ll see if Nunn gets the same guarantee as well. 

Nickeil Alexander-Walker PG NOLA / Jaxson Hayes C NOLA: Remember when I said Kabengele was the best rookie in Summer League until another Canadian came in and swooped that title away? Well, I wasn’t talking about RJ Barrett. No, I was referring to Nickeil Alexander-Walker. Since all we saw from Zion Williamson was him snatching the soul of Kevin Knox before injuring his knee, his teammate Nickeil stepped up and assured us a Pelican would dominate Summer League. We already knew his ability to and his feel was his best attribute coming out of Virginia Tech. While I knew he could score, I didn’t know he had advanced footwork and scoring ability like this lethal stepback. He has three-point range, but also can get inside the paint and either finish himself or find shooters scattered along the three-point line. He even has flashed some post game as well. He put everything together against the Miami Heat, bringing his team back and dominating in the process. He has the length to guard just about any guard or wing. He’s also the Pelicans’ third guard in line behind Jrue Holiday and Lonzo Ball. Good look scoring on them. We’re going to really look back at how Nickeil fell all the way to 17. He was dominant in Vegas. 

Jaxson Hayes, the eighth pick in the draft, played well in Summer League as well. He looked every bit the part of a Clint Capela/Jarrett Allen type of rim running, rim-protecting big. He also caught a body, the first of many. David Griffin looks to have nailed his first draft running the Pelicans, getting these two after trading the 4th pick acquired from the Lakers in the Anthony Davis trade. 

Daniel Gafford C CHI: What I said about Hayes applies to Gafford as well. Gafford’s numbers at Arkansas after inexplicably being used improperly compared very well to that of Jaxson Hayes’ during his time at Texas. The gap between the two should not have been 30 spots. Gafford has been a monster on the glass and putbacks and done a good job protecting the rim. He was a steal and a great backup for the Bulls behind Lauri Markkanen and Wendell Carter Jr. 

Bruce Brown PG/SG DET: Bruce Brown made his hay defensively his rookie year for the Detroit Pistons. He worked on his offensive repertoire during Summer League, repeatedly showing plus playmaking working as the point guard. He even messed around and dropped a triple-double. He earned himself an even bigger role heading into his sophomore season. 

Zhaire Smith SG PHI / Matisse Thybulle SF PHI: I’m lumping these two together because they both will likely have the same role next season for the gigantic Sixers. Any concern regarding whether Matisse Thybulle can defend in a man-to-man defense should be quelled. His defense translates. Zhaire Smith showed a scoring ability that will help him not be typecast as a one-dimensional offensive threat like Thybulle, who isn’t much of a threat with the ball in his hands. He is going to fly like Carol Danvers running with Ben Simmons in transition. Both Smith and Thybulle are long, tenacious defenders. Philly repeatedly got lit up by point guards last year. They now have three big guards to throw at them in these two and Josh Richardson, all likely having a size advantage. They also ran out of capable players in last year’s playoff run. These two should and likely will get minutes all throughout the year to prove they belong on that stage. Philadelphia is my favorite to boast the league’s best defense with Joel Embiid AND Al Horford protecting the middle. These guys will help on the outside. Good luck scoring against Philly next year.

[under-the-lake]

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Film: Deeper First Impressions - Part 3: The NSPS

The NSPS, also known as Second Salemers, are named not after the Salem’s Witches Institute (mentioned in GoF during the Quidditch World Cup) but after the witch trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-1693, in which twenty people were sentenced to death. A monument to the victims, resembling the Albert Memorial in Kensington Garden, London, UK, can be seen in the entrance hall of MACUSA. The aim of the NSPS is to track and eradicate witchcraft from the USA soil, no matter the means - banishing or killing.

That witch hunt happens in an already tense context, because of the end of WW1 bringing many immigrants to the USA, because a certain amount of trauma being generated by the flaw of foreigners, ploughing the field for the KKK and discrimination to grow and blossom, and also by the news from Russia and the rest of Europe, where not only Communism but also right-wing extremes slowly make their nests with the consequences we know.

Scourers, Salem Trials and the Creation of MACUSA

The origins of the NSPS is unknown but it is said, according to PM, that it might be of Scourer descent. Scourers were a band of mercenaries, all wizards, who hunted down criminals and later anybody who could be traded for a fair amount of Dragots (the USA wizarding currency), at the time where the colonial wizarding community was still small and scattered and had no laws of their own. Scourers decided to be the law.

Some of them were so greedy they became increasingly corrupt and started to kill, torture and traffick their fellow wizards (or Muggles they sold as wizards because of sheer money lust).

During the Salem Witch Trials held between 1692 and 1693, at least two of the Puritan judges were known Scourers (I never got it why the witches caught and sentenced to death by the Puritans didn’t simply Disapparate… or are the modern Muggle doctors right, and they weren’t witches but moslty ill women who were epileptic or had eaten mushroom-infested rye bread that is known to drive people mad?).

The Salem Trials caused many wizards to flee the New Continent, mostly back to Europe, and many more not to move there at all. As a consequence, the wizarding community in the USA remained small compared to other continents until the first decades of the twentieth century. Most of the community was made of Muggle-born witches and wizards. Therefore, the pure-blood ideology that spread in Europe had much less possibility of developing in the USA.

The most important collateral effect of the Salem Trials was the creation of the Magical Congress of the United States of America in 1693 (btw it can’t be named the Magical Congress of the United States of America because that country didn’t exist until nearly a century later, and at the time was a cluster of thirteen British Colonies). MACUSA followed the model set by the Wizards’ Council in Great Britain. Their main aim was to rid the country of Scourers, so they caught them and put them on trial. The sentence was death.

However, several of the most well-known Scourers escaped and eluded justice, even if there were international warrants for their arrest. They vanished into the Muggle community. Some married Muggles, and shunned their kids who might show signs of being magical. What happened to them is unknown. The worst those Scourers could do was pass on to their offspring the conviction that magic existed and was evil, therefore witches and wizards should be exterminated. That is probably the link to the NSPS, the New Salem Philanthropic Society.

New Protestantism, Ku Klux Klan, Dictatorships and the NSPS

To help eradicate magic, Mary Lou Barebone, a Muggle (or that’s what we see at least - I think she’s of a Scourer family), lectures people in the street, and ‘hires’ lost and orphaned kids to hand out flyers, paying them with a bowl of gruel if they do their job (makes me think of Oliver Twist, that one). She also has three adopted kids, Modesty, Credence and Chastity, whom she hates and abuses. Actually she doesn’t hate the human beings in them, but only what they represent to her. Basic xenophobia. Their names are virtues and make me think that the NSPS can be compared to the Puritan movements that were again flourishing throughout the US in the 1920s, the so called ‘new protestantism’ that wanted to eradicate everything ‘bad’ from society, making the Gospel THE law and reference to answer any question and address any issue in life, from the creation of the world to modern technology. That’s the theory of biblical inerrancy, meaning that the Bible can’t err.

New Protestants thought modern society had bad influences like alcohol (very modern indeed), cinema, cars, bad habits and jobs (yes, because prostitution isn’t the oldest job in the world - not saying it should be supported, but only that the argument is irrelevant), communism, atheism and whatever isn’t typically United-Statesian (which means everything that is different from their ideas in their opinion, basically), because they felt threatened.

The leaflets handed out show very clearly the views of the Second Salemers: Witches and wizards are sinners, the NSPS is an army that fights them, and if you don’t follow God’s word, bad things will happen to you. There is even a cross-stitched sampler called the Sin Sampler, that starts with ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, Blasphemy, Cursing, Divorce’… and goes on down to Witchcraft. That’s exactly the credo by which the puritans live. I say ‘live’ because there’s still people like Mary Lou today. I know some myself. There’s some words on that sampler that are not their credo though: racism, envy, hatred, jealousy, prejudice… which shows that in each dictatorship or extreme ideology there are Lies. I mean, Hitler was nor German nor Aryan, but he advocated aryanism and pangermanism. Just for the example. NSPS members are racists, envious and jealous of other people’s individualism, hate them because they are prejudiced against them…. -sighs-

Another organisation to which the NSPS can be compared is the Ku Klux Klan. Created in the late 1860s, it had three periods, but always with the same aim: racial purity of the USA, and fight against everything that was different, because the members felt threatened. The first period was short, from the late 1860s to the early 1870s. The second was in the first half of the 20th century, when the KKK was recreated in 1915, and flourished in the early and mid-1920s, until temporary death in 1944. It was during that period that the cross burning was brought into the show. We can draw a parallel with the wand-snapping in the NSPS. The third period is from the 1950s onwards. The KKK between 1915 and 1944 was reborn from the ashes by William Joseph Simmons, starting in Georgia, soon helped by Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, who make the KKK a nation-wide organisation. Simmons decided to reform the KKK after seeing the film Birth of a Nation, that glorified the first Klan. Simmons’s aim is to preserve pure Americanism (btw it’s funny how all those people who want to preserve ‘pure whateverism’ are forgetting that they weren’t the first to live there and are a melting pot of immigrants from all over the world). Another aim was to preserve the nation of the evils of the modern world, in the name of God; a bit like New Protestantism, but remarkably more violent and cunning (collecting money and sending part of it to the State, for instance, thus making them ‘tolerable’, a bit like the Malfoys in the Potter books). In the 1920s, the KKK boasted about 4 million members across the USA. It is curious that the KKK should be defending everything they’d call pure and biblical, but at the same time give the name of magical beasts or people to some of their hierarchy: titans, dragons, cyclops, Wizard (this was the overall leader at the time).

If we put together the ideals and ways of dealing of both the ‘new protestantism’ (notice the similarity with the ‘second Salmers’ name) and KKK (SS for Second Salemers, yet another similarity, and not only with KKK), we get a pretty good notion of the ways of the NSPS.

The fact that the Second Salemers are living and working in a small church is also relevant: the church is made into a home and has no sacred function anymore, as if the movement was detached of all fundamental virtues of the Christianism it claims to stem from (there’s even quotes of the Gospel on the leaflets). The church is the NSPS HQ. It is small and shabby, lost between huge modern buildings on Pike Street, as if willing to demonstrate that humility should be a virtue (which is totally true, but none of those NSPSians is virtuous in my eyes - or should I say not yet, since we don’t know what Credence and Modesty’s futures are). Moreover, it is dry and austere, like the New Protestantism wanted its members to be. It is discreet, like the KKK would have been (they called themselves ‘The Invisible Empire’), because it’s not completely fitting; after all, killing people is not exactly the best way to demonstrate charity (which is one of the cardinal virtues). So while the meetings are held in public places (and not just any place, but in front of capital buildings), the HQ must remain hidden so as not to attract too much attention.

Dictatorship-like brainwashing

If you want to go further into the comparison with extremism, it is rather easy. One of the things that strike me most is the brainwashing of children, that is done in so perverse a way that they don’t get what is happening to them. The children get food if they hand out leaflets on the street. In the script, they are told to get their leaflets before if they want food, which, by the way, looks like some horrid grub. So hand out leaflets or you starve. That would be a bit more acceptable (yet still not acceptable) if the kids weren’t brainwashed to believe the leaflets actually tell the truth. However, in one of the scenes in Pike Street, we see one of the boys asking if the mark he has on his face is a witch’s mark, which can lead us to think that they are instructed not only to hand out tracts, but also taught what witchcraft is and how to recognise it. This is proper indoctrination and smells strongly of the hitlerite or stalinist antisemitic and anti-manyothers propaganda: giving physical signs of how to recognise Jews or Catholics or Homosexuals. Building stereotypes. Of course you can claim that neither the Third Reich or Stalin’s USSR had really come into being in 1926 but Hitler had already written Mein Kampf and was campaigning energetically and gaining followers, and Stalin was fighting with Trotsky over the leadership of USSR now that Lenin was dead (1924; Stalin then became First Secretary of the Communist Party). Both doctrines were well established in the mind of their creators, and antisemitism and anti-manypeople were at the heart of them.

Thing is, in the Barebone case - like in many others, the use of physical signs doesn’t work. Credence is a wizard, and maybe Modesty too. Rowling herself said the Barebones (meaning Mary Lou, since the others are ‘adopted’) are of wizarding descent, probably Scourer, which would explain the urge of getting rid of that evil branch of humanity, wizards. Mary Lou is the result of generations of anti-witch brainwashing. She actively looks for children with traces of magic and tries to un-magic them, with ways that are worse than those of the Dursleys (who would have thought I’d say that one day), and that create dead children or haunted children. That’s what they look like into my eyes. While reading things about those kids, I found a quote of what the Warner Bros. Casting crew had said about Modesty, and this was the very word about her: ‘haunted’.

Harry never came to the point when he created an Obscurus inside him. However, if you look at the acts he performs when angry or distressed or upset while being forbidden to perform magic, they are always rather violent, particularly when it comes to Aunt Marge. Maybe it’s the very beginning of the birth of such a creature. Harry was saved that fate because he could attend Hogwarts though. Which is maybe not the case for Ariana Dumbledore… who knows? Perhaps she started repressing her own magic after her dad was sent to Azkaban for killing the three Muggles?

The brainwashing takes another visage in the shape of the what-would-you-call-it…. Er… rhyme? -For want of a better word - recited by Modesty when she plays hopscotch. They are anti-witch. Not only just anti-witch. The rhymes give the means of getting rid of them. This is kids’ indoctrination. Like you’d see in other dictatorships, you’d want to engrave some unique ideas in the mind of children so that they believe it’s right. Here it’s definitely ‘witches are the ‘’other’’, they are dangerous and deserve death’. Hatred generated by fear. Like always in such instances. The last bit of brainwashing comes in the shape of the dolls that Modesty has. Of course that’s something that was added in the film by the props department, but it goes along Mary Lou’s lines: it’s a toy girl and a toy witch, the latter being burnt at the stake.

Not only does Modesty sing that rhyme while playing alone, but also while walking in the midst of the other children who are folding leaflets. This is unconscious learning. The fact that you hear something over and over again, passively, finally settles in your brain as a truth, while you have never actually learnt it and never been aware of the significance. You know that witches deserve to die because you’ve heard that sung all around you for hours at a time, but you wouldn’t be able to say why. You just know it’s right to think so. That’s how any kind of advertising works, actually, with the difference that usually advertising only affects the contents of your wallet. Not your way of behaving to people.

Mary Lou

As said before, Mary Lou Barebone is probably of Scourer descent. She believes witchcraft exists, and that witches and wizards are among the regular Muggles, polluting the genes and thus the purity and nobility of ‘normal’ people. In this she combines the sort of pureblood madness we saw with Voldy later but the other way round, she embodies the fears of the other that always darkened the history of the USA, the racism, the xenophobia, the narrow-mindedness and paranoia of extremes. She’s a piece of social history alive. And she’s eerie. She’s scary. We can sense that she’s terrified to the bones that something that the Bible can’t explain - magic - exists. She’s degenerated, in a way, like Voldemort. Obsessed by her own thoughts and nothing else is important in her life. That’s the force that makes her get up every morning. She’s not yet in the state of a dictator in the end of their life, not a Lady Macbeth devoured by guilt and remorse, committing suicide, not a Macbeth going totally mad yet stubbornly never giving up his thoughts, but she’s not far from the latter. She’s already besieged by magic in the shape of Credence and maybe Modesty, like Macbeth was besieged by the moving Birnam Wood in his castle at Dunsinane, but, unlike Macbeth, she doesn’t know she’s fighting her final battle.

She’s scary because she’s so convinced, quietly convinced that she’s right. She doesn’t shout. She states things, quietly yet intensely, and goes forward unerring on the path she chose for herself. And that helps her manipulate the children and other people. She’s also scary because you can’t really know where her beliefs stem from and she’s cunning, which makes her character really complex.

She’s a manipulative dictator who took advantage of the end of the First World War and of humankind to any possible extent:    She surfs on the already rooted paranoia and racism to create the anti-witchcraft movement.    She uses all the possible orphans left by the war to make them her slaves (I didn’t find a record of the number of orphans in New York after WW1 and the two Spanish Flu waves, but if anyone finds one, please comment below or on the fb page with the source). Her work is probably made even easier because of the children hearing she feeds them, and coming to her themselves. Besides, the link between someone feeding you and that someone being good is a strong and easily built one. She wouldn’t need too much effort to make them believe her ideas are right. Actually, we don’t see her schooling them at all, nor do we see her really bullying them into believing her. The only thing we can see is Modesty sing-songing the rhyme to them while they’re folding leaflets on which it’s written in bold and big characters that ‘witches are among us’.    She also uses the fact that actually distributing leaflets is not that hard a job compared to what those kids would have been doing in other circumstances. So it’s a win-win in all their minds, but not in mine of course.    She uses the fact that she’s helping the children to be considered a charitable person to soften the opinion towards her. That’s no charity; that’s manipulation.        She feeds the kids the worst possible grub and bullies and abuses them. That’s, again, very much reminding of workhouses in the 19th century England. One example of a use she makes of the children is when she goes to see the Shaws. She takes them along, putting them forward to try and gain power with that, using the emotional chord, but fails miserably, since the Senator and his father are only drawn by power and money.

What we see in the film is that the children who aren’t in continuous and ‘close’ contact with her don’t see the evil. Those who are, namely her ‘adopted’ kids, either choose to fight or to follow.

Lethal or Not So Lethal Consequences

Trouble is, for Mary Lou, that her adopted children, apart from Chastity from whom we know very little, are really connected with magic (that was her point in the first place: take in kids whom she thought were magical but de-magic them). The risk in ‘adopting’ them was that they might fight her beliefs and get the magic out. I don’t reckon she thought of that. There was a flaw in her plan. Modesty believes in magic positively enough to have procured a toy wand and playing with it (is it really a toy?). As for Credence… well, he’s an Obscural. That means he’s a wizard, and his Ma’ tells him so: ‘your mother was a wicked, unnatural woman’ (scene 88).

An Obscural is a child whose magic has been hindered by force (their own or someone else’s) and who has developed a devastating negative power inside them, called an Obscurus. According to Newt, Obscurals are destroyed by their Obscuruses and don’t survive beyond 10 years - or at least, there was no records of anything surviving beyond that age so far (scene 61). Credence Barebone, however, is at least 21 years old, which makes it extraordinary that he’s still alive. The collateral effect of this is the fact that he lost control of his Obscurus (that’s what wiki says, but I don’t know if I agree. - thinks - Let’s close this bracket, because I don’t agree.).

So. I don’t agree about Credence losing control. He may have lost control at some point, but he’s learnt to control it. See, there are at least three pieces of evidence: Credence kills Henry Shaw Jr. during his gala speech. Only the Senator is killed. All the audience survive. Credence also kills his adoptive mother and sister, but not his little sister, who is standing inches from him. The same happens in that Bronx tenement, when Graves looks for Modesty and has cast Credence away. He unleashes his Obscurus on purpose, again, wanting to hurt something but sparing Modesty and, surprisingly, Graves. If he had lost control totally, then Modesty and Percival would have been hurt, as well as all the people on the streets. Yet only the cause of the fury (Mary Lou, Chastity and Shaw) and buildings are destroyed. So Credence controls his Obscurus. I’m really curious to see what is held in store for him in the future. How is his strange relationship with Grindelwald continue, did he finally understand that he had been manipulated by both his ‘Ma’ and his ‘friend’ Graves? Who did actually see the tiny bit of him fly out of the subway station, besides Newt? Because Credence’s not dead, is he? :P

Now regarding Modesty, all we know is that she’s apparently not developed an Obscurus inside her, which can mean two things: either she didn’t repress the magic inside her or she is no witch. I’m inclined to think she didn’t repress the magic. She’s not afraid of Credence and is rather close to him -as far as you can get close to an Obscural- and she knows he’s different. She’s scared of his Obscurus, and honestly, who wouldn’t, but it’s not a Muggle kind of fright. It’s not panic. She seems to understand what it is and where it comes from, sort of. Then she has a wand hidden under her bed, and she must have found a way of getting it, which denotes she’s got a will of her own. She knows what she wants, Modesty does. She wants to be freed of her ‘Ma’. We see that in a couple of instances in the film. When she deliberately throws the leaflets in the air without handing them out, with a triumphant look on her face. When she acknowledges defiantly that the wand Credence is holding is hers. And when she’s sing-songing the rhyme, I don’t know to what extent she does that out of habit (it sounds dull and boring) and because she knows nothing else, rather than out of conviction that she’s indeed educating the other children. I’m really curious to see what she becomes in the next film (if she becomes anything, but what would have been the point of keeping her alive and getting ‘closer’ to understanding Credence if it’s not to use her in any way later on?)

The others, that is to say Mary Lou and her eldest ‘daughter’ Chastity, who is a mini-Mary Lou, were both killed by Credence’s Obscurus after the discovery of Modesty’s wand. Those who wanted to get rid of wizards were finally got rid of by the very people they wanted to eliminate.

Sources for part 3:

Kaspi, André, Les Américains, I. Naissance et essor des Etats-Unis 1607-1945, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1986 (last edition exists, printed 2014), chapter 9

Immigration Act of 1924, wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

Christian Fundamentalism, wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

Ku Klux Klan, wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

Pottermore, History of Magic in North America, Writings by J.K. Rowling

Rowling, Joanne K., Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them - The Original Screenplay, Scholastic, 2016

Rowling, Joanne K., Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bloomsbury, London, 2000

Salisbury, Mark, and MinaLima, The Case of Beasts - Explore the Film Wizardry of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Obscurus Books, Diagon Alley, London; Harper Collins, London, 2016

[emma-what-son]

Cover Story: Emma Watson, Rebel Belle

From Vanity Fair Feb.2017: Since her years as Hermione ended, Emma Watson has fought to assert her own identity. Now that she has found her voice—most notably as a U.N. ambassador—she’s revamping a classic stereotype, the Disney princess, in Beauty and the Beast, the live-action musical coming out in March. Watson talks to Vanity Fair about her metamorphosis from child star to leading woman.

by Derek Blasberg

Photographs by Tim Walker

Styled by Jessica Diehl

Omg this is so LONG! I’m gonna take a Sam approach with this one and pepper comments all through the interview.

Emma Watson and I are standing on the 23rd Street platform of an uptown-bound E train in New York City and we’re littering. Literally. And literature-ly. The 26-year-old actress is scattering hardcover copies of Maya Angelou’s book Mom & Me & Mom throughout the station—tucking them between pipes, placing them on benches, atop the emergency call box—in hopes that New York commuters will pick them up and put down their smartphones. This display of civil disobedience was conceived by Books on the Underground, a London-based organization that plants books on public transportation for travelers to discover. “We’re being ninjas,” she says with a conspiratorial grin as she digs in a big black rucksack of books. “If there were anyone to be a ninja for, it’d be Maya Angelou.”

Watson is one of the most famous women in the world, the child star who skyrocketed to global fame at the age of 11 playing brainy Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies. Next month, she’s back on the big screen as Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the big-budget live-action musical—she sings too!—which broke the record for most viewed new movie trailer. (That’s 127 million views in its first 24 hours, beating Fifty Shades Darker’s record.) But today she’s makeup-free, her hair shoved into a bun, and she’s wearing a nondescript dark wool coat over a baggy black sweater, completely blending in with New York’s distracted mass-transit masses.

“It’s good that we’re spreading a little bit of love,” she says. As she removes the last book, a train pulls into the station. She hops in, places it on a seat, hops out, and watches from the platform as the doors close and a young man inquisitively picks it up.

Yes and get some good publicity along the way. Don’t forget to mention this in my Vanity Fair interview Derek.

Aboveground, over coffee at a nearby café, Watson explains why she thinks reading is “sacred.” There’s the obvious, professional reason: Harry Potter was a literary sensation before becoming the blockbuster franchise that made her famous and a millionaire many times over. But books are also rooted in her deepest personal experiences. “Books gave me a way to connect with my father,” she says. “Some of my most precious and treasured moments . . .” She trails off and, unexpectedly for someone who is known for her composure, tears up. Her parents divorced when she was young. “I just remember him reading to me before bed and how he used to do all the different voices. I grew up on film sets, and books were my connection to the outside world. They were my connection to my friends back at school because if I was reading what they were reading we’d have something in common. Later in life, they became an escape, a means of empowerment, a friend I could rely on.”

All this would be nice if it didn’t reek of pretentiousness.

I first met Watson, Hollywood’s latest exception to the rule that all child stars inevitably flame out, during Paris Fashion Week more than a decade ago, when she was still a teenager and filming the fourth of the eight Harry Potter films. It was both a homecoming for the actress—she was born in Paris to British parents, both lawyers, and lived there until she was five—and a symbol of her maturity on-screen. She was there to attend her first-ever fashion show, at Chanel, which was a big deal considering that up until then she had shopped in the bridesmaid section at Harrods or borrowed dresses from her stepmother for movie premieres.

She was a shy teenager, but friendly, intelligent, and down to earth. Watson is described as much the same today: “She’s way more like a real person than a movie star,” according to Gloria Steinem, who became a friend when Watson reached out to discuss the changing face of feminist activism. (More on that later.) Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who met Watson backstage at a performance of the musical, sums it up: “She played this very smart, conscious, noble wizard—and then somehow we had the good fortune that she became a smart, conscious, noble woman.” (They did a video together—Miranda freestyling, Watson beatboxing—to raise awareness for International Women’s Day. It got more than six million views.)

Of course they asked Lin Manuel Miranda questions for this interview. He can’t really say anything about her personality, but you know... Hamilton.

Emma and I got to know each other, and I visited her on the sets of the last two Harry Potter films. But as the Potter train pulled into its last station, I noticed the clouds of melancholy forming over her fairy-tale life. “I’d walk down the red carpet and go into the bathroom,” she remembers of the last few premieres. “I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I’d put my hands on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this?’ I didn’t connect with the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling.”

I’m sure I remember her a few years after HP saying that she was still figuring out who she was and that in Oct 2011 she said in her Elle UK interview: "I'm going to go travelling – a sort of gap year, condensed into a few months. Don't think I'm going off to find myself, though. I already know who I am," she told Elle. And that was a few months after the last HP movie released.

What few people knew when she enrolled at Brown University in 2009 was that she had a desire to give up acting and walk away from Hollywood altogether. “I was finding this fame thing was getting to a point of no return,” she remembers. “I sensed if this was something I was ever going to step away from it was now or never.” She loved performance and telling stories, but she had to reckon with the consequences of “winning the lottery,” as she calls getting the part of Hermione, when she was nine years old and literally still losing baby teeth. As an adult, “it dawned on me that this is what you’re really signing up for.”

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So she’s saying that she wanted to stop acting, right? That was the decision she made when enrolling? And yet in 2009 (a few months before she eent to Brown):                        

Paste: And studying will mean that a film career is put on the back burner for a while?                 

Watson: Not entirely, no, there are end of term breaks where I could do something if someone asks me, and I liked the idea. It all depends, doesn’t it? Acting and studying are in no way mutually exclusive, are they? Going there will mean a bit of “normality” for a while. It certainly doesn’t mean that I will never act again, that’s not true. There’s been a lot of confusion in the media about that, and most of it is ill informed—I seem to have managed pretty well up to this point! And also don’t forget that I’m also very interested in fashion, and in modeling, which I enjoy. I enjoy photo shoots, because there it seems that the cameramen (or camerawomen) look at me very differently. X

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The question most people ask when a celebrity moans about being famous: If you hate the fanfare so much, why keep making movies? Watson asked herself that all the time. “I’ve been doing this since I was 10 or 11, and I’ve often thought, I’m so wrong for this job because I’m too serious; I’m a pain in the ass; I’m difficult; I don’t fit,” she says. “But as I’ve got older, I’ve realized, No! Taking on those battles, the smaller ones and the bigger ones, is who I am.”

Well at least she openly admitted that she’s difficult. Whether her fans take it that way or not.

She recently found the courage to say no to selfie-seekers. “For me, it’s the difference between being able to have a life and not. If someone takes a photograph of me and posts it, within two seconds they’ve created a marker of exactly where I am within 10 meters. They can see what I’m wearing and who I’m with. I just can’t give that tracking data.” Sometimes, she’ll decline a photo but offer up an autograph or even a chat—“I’ll say, ‘I will sit here and answer every single Harry Potter fandom question you have but I just can’t do a picture’ ”—and much of the time people don’t bother. “I have to carefully pick and choose my moment to interact,” she says. “When am I a celebrity sighting versus when am I going to make someone’s freakin’ week? Children I don’t say no to, for example.”

I’m sure she’ll regret saying that when fans will actually start asking HP questions.

I tell Watson I’ve watched other actors, like Reese Witherspoon, walk down the street and happily pose with fans—and suddenly it becomes clear that the fans of Sweet Home Alabama are different from Harry Potter fans. For mostly better and occasionally worse, the Potter books and films not only captured the imagination of millions of people but, for many of them, changed their lives. It’s something Watson is deeply aware of. “I have met fans that have my face tattooed on their body. I’ve met people who used the Harry Potter books to get through cancer. I don’t know how to explain it, but the Harry Potter phenomenon steps into a different zone. It crosses into obsession. A big part of me coming to terms with it was accepting that this is not your average circumstances.” (Since the first movie premiered, in 2001, when Watson was 11, there have been numerous incidents with stalkers.) “People will say to me, ‘Have you spoken to Jodie Foster or Natalie Portman? They would have great advice for you on how to grow up in the limelight.’ I’m not saying it was in any way easy on them, but with social media it’s a whole new world. They’ve both said technology has changed the game.” When she was at Brown, Watson went to a Harvard football game and The Harvard Voice, a student magazine, live-tweeted as its staff stalked her at the stadium. I remember at Watson’s 18th-birthday party in London, the photographers outside had a bounty on who could get a picture taken up her skirt. She’s not exaggerating her security concerns, either. She purchased her house sight unseen over a Skype call with a real-estate agent because it had a paparazzi-proof entrance. “Privacy for me is not an abstract idea,” she says.

The stalking thing is a serious subject and I sympathize, but do we really need a play by play about HP, Brown and her quitting acting in interviews every few years?

Watson has a boyfriend, though she adamantly, vehemently refuses to expound on him. (The Internet says he’s called Mack, he’s handsome, and he works in tech in Silicon Valley.) “I want to be consistent: I can’t talk about my boyfriend in an interview and then expect people not to take paparazzi pictures of me walking around outside my home. You can’t have it both ways.” She sits back and wonders if she should finish this thought, and eventually she does: “I’ve noticed, in Hollywood, who you’re dating gets tied up into your film promotion and becomes part of the performance and the circus. I would hate anyone that I were with to feel like they were in any way part of a show or an act.”

Don’t get me started on the PR pics when she first started dating Matt.

Back in college, Watson was like most 20-year-olds, struggling to carve out her own identity, only she did it in front of a rabid fan base and a never-ending celebrity-news cycle. She made international headlines when she chopped Hermione’s long locks into a closely shorn pixie. We don’t need Sigmund Freud to read into the symbolism of that haircut, and to this day Watson declares, “It’s the sexiest I’ve ever felt.”

Ah the haircut talk makes a comeback. I didn’t think it was possible, but they managed it.

She got into yoga and meditation; being the Type A person she is, though, she wasn’t content just doing it. “Typical Emma,” says Harry Potter producer David Heyman, who has remained a close friend. “She had to become a certified meditation teacher.”

Watson shied away from doing additional big-budget studio films and instead focused on smaller movies, like Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), and sought out auteur directors, like Sofia Coppola with The Bling Ring (2013) and Darren Aronofsky with Noah (2014). She turned down big offers: from lucrative cosmetics deals to critically acclaimed scripts. (Emma Stone’s role in La La Land was reportedly developed for Watson.) “There have been hard moments in my career when I’ve had an agent or a movie producer say, ‘You are making a big mistake,’ ” Watson says. “But what’s the point of achieving great success if you feel like you’re losing your freakin’ mind? I’ve had to say, ‘Guys, I need to go back to school,’ or ‘I just need to go home and hang out with my cats.’ People have looked at me and been like, ‘Is she insane?’ But, actually, it’s the opposite of insane.”

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Really? REALLY? The role was made for Watson? REALLY?

Damien Chazelle: When I was first writing it back in 2011, I guess Ryan and Emma (Stone) were these pie in the sky ideas that I actually had for the casting, but it just didn’t seem like it would ever happen. And years passed where we were trying to get the movie off the ground with no success. And during those years there were actually many casting permutations, it was Miles and Emma Watson for a moment. It was other people in other moments, and what wound up happening was the movie kept falling apart. X

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What ultimately helped clarify her purpose was—you guessed it—reading. Last January, Watson started Our Shared Shelf, her bi-monthly online book club. She used Twitter (more than 23 million followers) to crowd-source the name, and chose Gloria Steinem’s book My Life on the Road as her first selection. All About Love: New Visions, by Bell Hooks, was Watson’s March 2016 book-club selection. Watson traveled to Berea, Kentucky, near the Appalachian Mountains, to meet Hooks, and the two quickly struck up a friendship based on, in the words of the writer, “the belief in the primacy of a spiritual foundation for life.”

“In so many ways she’s not like we think of movie stars,” Hooks told me. “She’s [part of] a very different, new breed who are interested in being whole and having a holistic life, as opposed to being identified with just wealth and fame.” In early 2014, U.N. Women, the United Nations’ department of gender equality, contacted Watson about becoming an ambassador. Everything clicked: she could focus the prying eyes of the world onto causes that she was passionate about, namely a new initiative called HeForShe, which aims to get men to co-sign on feminist issues. I was in the audience at the General Assembly on September 20, 2014, when Watson, elegantly and discreetly wrapped in a simple silver-gray Dior coatdress, stepped onto the podium and spoke passionately about women’s rights for a little more than 10 minutes. Her battle cry ended with: “I am inviting you to step forward, to be seen, and to ask yourself, If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Which was first said by Rabbi Hillel the Elder. Aren’t we giving credit anymore?

“I used to be scared of words like ‘feminism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘imperialist.’ But I’m not anymore,” Watson says. “It was not typical for U.N. Women to have a celebrity give a keynote address,” says Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of U.N. Women. “We needed a new messenger to break new ground for us. We didn’t want to just speak to the converted.” Watson blushed at the standing ovation and beamed as then secretary-general Ban Ki-moon became the first person to officially sign on to HeForShe. The U.N. Women Web site crashed in the aftermath of the media blitz that followed—“A good problem to have!,” Mlambo-Ngcuka says—and her speech made headline news around the world, from CNN to fashion blogs. Men like Hugh Jackman, Jared Leto, Harry Styles, Russell Crowe, and Eddie Redmayne aligned themselves with HeForShe. Feminists worldwide heralded their newest spokesperson: “For a time, there was a conversation about whether ‘feminism’ was a good thing or a bad thing,” Mlambo-Ngcuka says. Watson’s speech “gave us the word back.”

The first time Watson saw the final cut of Beauty and the Beast she took along her mother, Jacqueline, and Gloria Steinem to a screening in London. She wanted her mother’s approval, but she needed Steinem’s. “I couldn’t care less if I won an Oscar or not if the movie didn’t say something that I felt was important for people to hear,” Watson says.

Who is she fooling?

Specifically, she must have wanted assurance that her portrayal of a Disney princess, in the Bill Condon-directed film, didn’t conflict with the ideals of a feminist, and who better than Steinem to give that stamp of approval? She got it.

“It was fascinating that her activism could be so well mirrored by the film,” Steinem says, noting that Belle uses—you guessed it, again—reading as a way to expand her world. “It’s this love of literature that first bonds the Beauty to the Beast, and also what develops the entire story.”

This is a new Belle, much of it by Watson’s design. “I was like, ‘The first shot of the movie cannot be Belle walking out of this quiet little town carrying a basket with a white napkin in it,’ ” she says. “ ‘We need to rev things up!’

Why not? Why can’t she carry a basket? I don’t get it!

” In the original Disney movie, Belle is an assistant to her inventor father, but here she’s a creator in her own right, developing a “modern washing machine that allows her to sit and read.” Watson worked with costume designer Jacqueline Durran to incorporate pockets in her costume that are “kind of like a tool belt.” Another thing: in the animated version, Belle is on and off horses yet wearing a long dress and silk slippers, which didn’t sit well with Watson. Bloomers were created and Belle’s first pair of riding boots. “The original sketches had her in her ballet shoes,” Watson says, “which are lovely—don’t get me wrong—but she’s not going to be able to do anything terribly useful in ballet shoes in the middle of a French provincial village.”

The original Belle may have been an assistant inventor, but Emma was an assistant costume designer for this movie it seems.

Maturing from Hermione to Belle is a true coming-of-age story for her. “When I finished the film, it kind of felt like I had made that transition into being a woman on-screen,” she says. Belle is “absolutely a Disney princess, but she’s not a passive character—she’s in charge of her own destiny.” What’s more intriguing, however, is how Watson observed a similarly strict code in her real life, too, from what parts she plays to what she reads in bed at night and what clothes she puts on in the morning.

“Emma has an incredible sense of integrity,” says Livia Firth, the founder of Eco-Age, a sustainable-fashion consulting firm. “You can’t marry activism and then do something in your life that is not in agreement.” Firth praises Watson’s choice of dress for last year’s Met Gala: it was designed by Calvin Klein and made almost entirely from recycled plastic bottles. For her Beauty and the Beast press tour, Watson created a PowerPoint presentation that her stylist sent fashion designers. It included a questionnaire about how their garments are produced, what their impact is on the environment, and the moral reason why she should wear one on the red carpet.

Wow.

As Steinem honors Watson’s high moral standards and relentless activism, I ask her if there’s a risk of becoming, well, annoying to the general public. Is she too much of an ethical Goody Two-Shoes? After all, what other starlet assigns fashion designers homework before she wears their clothes? Steinem is not amused. “Let me ask you something: If you did a story on a young male actor who was very private and involved in activism, would you think he was too severe or serious? Why do women always have to be listeners? Emma is interested in the world, she is caring, and though she is active she is also joyous and informed.” At this point I’m backpedaling—“I think she’s wonderful!”—but Steinem still digs in. “It’s possible to be both serious and fun, you know. That response is why men will ask a woman, ‘Why don’t you just smile, honey?’ ”

The actor Kevin Kline, who plays Belle’s father in Beauty and the Beast, agrees with Steinem. “When someone has a feminist point of view, we tend to think she’s no fun at all,” he says. “But a feminist can be feminine, delicate, vulnerable, sweet—and still demand to be taken seriously. Emma fits the bill perfectly.” A big grin forms on his face as he asks, “Has anyone told you about the dancing scene yet?” In the film, there’s an over-the-top ball, which required the entire cast and scores of extras to waltz in period costumes for hours and hours. “Ater a long, long day, suddenly Pharrell Williams’s song ‘Happy’ comes on, blasting, and everyone just starts jumping around,” Kline recalls. “It became kind of a wrap party, really celebratory. And I asked, ‘Who did that?’ It was Emma.”

[talabib]

How To Inspire Confidence In The Workplace.

We live in a knowledge economy where success is a matter of solving problems and coming up with the next big idea. It’s not enough to be smart or hard-working, either. Organizations need their employees to collaborate, experiment, and respond to business needs that are constantly changing. 

But in many offices and boardrooms, people lack the confidence to do exactly this, silenced by the fear of failure, judgmental colleagues, or unapproachable bosses. 

This post introduces the concept of psychological safety and why it should be a feature of every work environment. Through research and examples from prominent businesses, this post breaks down the ways in which a culture of openness and support enables success, and what leaders can do to develop this in their own organizations.

Worrying about how we’re perceived prevents us from doing our best work.

Imagine you’re sitting in a strategy meeting. Your boss has shared some of the challenges that need to be addressed, and now she’s asking the team to come up with suggestions. You’ve got an idea, but you’re worried that others will think it’s no good. So, rather than risk it, you keep your thoughts to yourself.

Whether it happens in a meeting, a classroom, or even around a dinner table, most of us have experience of having something to say but holding back in case it made other people think less of us. We learn to do this early; as children, we start caring what our peers think and avoid saying or doing anything that could make us look silly, weak, or not as cool as everyone else. 

By the time we’re adults, the habit of silencing and restricting ourselves is almost unconscious, and it prevents us from speaking up when we have ideas, questions, or concerns at work. 

In a 2003 study into people speaking up in the workplace, academics Frances J. Milliken, Elizabeth W. Morrison, and Patricia F. Hewlin found that 85 percent of study participants felt unable to approach their bosses with concerns about work. The most common reason for this? The participants didn’t want their bosses to see them in a negative light. 

Even seemingly confident people experience this. Take business innovator Nilofer Merchant; she was labeled a visionary by CNBC, and in 2013, she was awarded the Future Thinker Award by Thinkers50. But in a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Nilofer shared that while working at Apple, she would keep quiet about problems she noticed because she didn’t want to be wrong. She’s quoted as saying, “I would rather keep my job by staying within the lines than say something and risk looking stupid.” 

When fear gets in the way of people speaking up at work, it’s not only the individuals keeping silent who miss out. Companies also lose opportunities to generate new ideas, and this is especially dangerous in a world where businesses need to innovate if they want to succeed. 

Psychological safety leads to better performance by both individuals and teams.

Let’s revisit that strategy meeting you were sitting in. But this time, instead of worrying that your idea won’t be received well, you know for sure that your boss and colleagues will respond positively. If they like the idea, they’ll tell you so. And if it doesn’t hit the mark, they’ll give you constructive feedback. 

In this ideal scenario, you and your colleagues have psychological safety – the shared feeling that you can freely express your thoughts and ideas, or make mistakes and ask for help without receiving negative reactions. 

Author, Amy Edmondson came across the concept of psychological safety in the 1990s while studying medical errors in hospitals. At first, she was surprised to find that the best medical teams seemed to make more mistakes than lower-skilled teams. But a closer look revealed that they weren’t making more mistakes; they were just more open and willing to report them, which led to discussions about better ways of working. 

Refined work processes aren’t the only benefit of psychological safety – it also helps unleash creativity and innovation. A 2012 study by Taiwanese researchers Chi-Cheng Huang and Pin-Chen Jiang demonstrated this. They surveyed 60 research and development teams whose work demands innovative, outside-the-box thinking, and learned that teams with psychological safety performed better, while members of the other teams were too scared of rejection to share their ideas. 

For further proof, consider one of the world’s most innovative companies – Google. In 2016, a New York Times article shared the tech giant’s research on what factors made the best teams. After studying over 180 Google teams, researchers found that the most important characteristic of a good team was, in fact, psychological safety. 

Now, innovating is difficult no matter what; when you then add different personalities who often have to work across distances and cultures, it becomes significantly harder. But where there is psychological safety, these challenges are easier to navigate. 

Why? It comes down to communication. In 2006, Professor Christina Gibson of the University of Australia and Professor Jennifer Gibbs of Rutgers University studied innovation teams with members scattered across the world and found that psychological safety helped teams communicate more openly. When teams can not only share their thoughts openly but work through them together, they’re much better prepared to tackle whatever challenges come their way.

The absence of psychological safety can have terrible consequences for a company, its employees, and its customers. 

Have you ever noticed something not right at work? Maybe your supervisor has made a mistake in a presentation. But she has a reputation for being harsh, so instead of pointing anything out, you go along quietly, afraid to rock the boat. 

Unfortunately, many bosses think fear is a good leadership strategy. While the atmosphere that this creates is no picnic, there can be far worse consequences. 

When leaders use fear to motivate, people can turn to extreme and sometimes dangerous methods to get the job done. Take the employees at Wells Fargo. In 2015, Wells Fargo was the leading bank in America thanks to its community banking division’s impressive sales. On average, every customer was signed-up to about six banking products, around double the industry average.

But as it turned out, these impressive figures were the result of sketchy sales tactics. Employees were under pressure to hit an incredibly ambitious target of eight products per customer, and those who failed were publicly ridiculed or even fired. Scared of speaking up about the unrealistic targets, they instead opened accounts for customers without permission or lied about certain products being package deals. Two million accounts and credit cards were set up this way, and when the practice was discovered, the scandal cost Wells Fargo $185 million in settlements. 

Fear in the workplace doesn’t always lead to unethical practices, but it can prevent staff from being upfront about a company’s challenges, stopping them from finding solutions before it’s too late.

Nokia learned this the hard way. During the 1990s, it was the top cell-phone manufacturer globally, but by 2012 it had lost this spot, along with over $2 billion and 75 percent of its market value.

How did this happen? Well, in 2015, graduate business school INSEAD published a study of the company’s fall, revealing that Nokia’s executives didn’t communicate openly about the threat from emerging competitors Apple and Google. At the same time, managers and engineers were afraid to tell their bosses that the company’s technology couldn’t compete in an evolving market. As a result, Nokia missed the opportunity to innovate and soon became irrelevant.

Businesses like Nokia and Wells Fargo are cautionary tales for any leader who thinks fear is the best way to get the most out of their teams. So, if fear has taken root in your workplace, the first step in creating psychological safety is to root it out – for good.

A fearless workplace starts with reframing failure and redefining the boss’s role.

How many times have you been told to do your best? We get this advice throughout our lives, from parents, teachers, coaches, friends, and even anonymous quotes on the internet. Rarely are we ever told to fail.

But being OK with failure at work is the first step in creating a fearless environment. When team leaders and bosses start talking about failure as something that happens often and as a learning opportunity, people become comfortable with taking risks, trying out new things, and openly discussing their mistakes.

While failure seems like the opposite of what any company wants to do, some of the most successful ones have made the belief that it’s OK to fail a key part of their work practices.

Animation studio Pixar is behind 15 of the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time, and co-founder Ed Catmull makes a point of telling staff that every movie is bad in the early stages. This reduces their fear of failure and makes them more open to feedback. And in a completely different industry, Christa Quarles, CEO of restaurant reservation company OpenTable, encourages her team to fail often and early so that they can quickly find new strategies. 

In fact, being comfortable with failure is so important that Smith College and other schools in the United States now offer courses to help students understand failure not as a setback but as a step toward learning.

Failure isn’t the only thing we need to redefine. In many workplaces, leaders are seen as authorities who know best, giving instructions, and judging how well they’re carried out. But in a fearless workplace, leaders instead set the direction and goals, then encourage people to contribute their own ideas and insights.

A great example of this approach is Cynthia Carroll, a former CEO of the mining company Anglo American, who wanted to lower the number of mining injuries and deaths. But instead of just sending an order down to workers, Cynthia chose to organize meetings with thousands of the mine’s employees and find out what they felt was needed to improve safety. This input shaped new safety guidelines, and after these were implemented, mining deaths reduced by an impressive 62 percent between 2006 and 2011.

When leaders are curious and admit that they don’t know everything, people are encouraged to speak up.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “No one likes a know-it-all,” and it can definitely be annoying to be around someone who thinks they have all the answers. 

However, when the know-it-all is your boss, they’re not so much annoying as they are intimidating. Leaders who think they know everything intimidate people out of expressing ideas and opinions. And so a key component of a fearless workplace is a boss who openly says that they don’t have all the information or all the ideas. This makes it clear that they’re open to learning and hearing from other people.

Former chairperson and CEO of Xerox Anne Mulcahy was so comfortable with saying she didn’t know the answers that people nicknamed her the “Master of I Don’t Know.” This gave Xerox employees the confidence to engage fully in tackling the company’s challenges, and under Mulcahy’s leadership, Xerox came back from the brink of bankruptcy.

However, even when the boss admits they need help, getting people to share their thoughts and ideas isn’t as simple as asking them. 

To encourage participation, leaders should ask questions in a way that shows genuine interest in what others have to say. This can be accomplished by avoiding questions that only have ��yes” or “no” answers, and asking thought-provoking ones that motivate people to reflect and think creatively. 

The art of asking questions also involves knowing that different situations call for different kinds of questions. If you want to widen your understanding of an issue, ask people what they think is missing or invite those with different perspectives to chime in. If your aim is to get a deeper understanding, ask people to share the reasons behind their thinking or to give examples. 

Another way leaders can create a culture of participation is by setting up structures specifically for sharing information. These can be regular workshops, focus groups, or meetings. 

When the food company Groupe Danone started holding conferences to encourage information sharing between different departments, management noticed that people not only started generating new ideas, they were also more comfortable with speaking up and asking for help.

Once people start taking action and providing input, the feedback they receive is key to maintaining psychological safety. 

When people take risks and speak up, it’s important for leaders to respond productively. 

Picture a group of five-year-olds learning about shapes. Their teacher asks if anyone can name the shape on the chalkboard, and when a child shouts out the wrong shape, he’s instantly and bluntly dismissed. Do you think that child will try again? Probably not. 

In the same way, people in the workplace can be discouraged if leaders don’t respond to input in the right way. 

A good place to start is by showing appreciation. Speaking up or taking action takes courage, so whether the outcome is good or bad, first thanking people for their effort helps maintain the feeling of psychological safety.

For instance, imagine a nurse who isn’t sure that the doctor is giving a patient the right treatment. The nurse is nervous about speaking up because he’s heard the doctor respond negatively to questions from other colleagues. But if he were to say something despite his reservations, and the doctor thanked him for the input before going on to explain her decision, the nurse would feel more confident and continue sharing his thoughts.

In the same way that input requires the right response, so does failure. But it’s important to keep in mind that failure comes in different forms, and there are appropriate ways to respond to each one. 

When people fail because they tried something new and didn’t get the results they hoped for, they should be encouraged, and their experiences discussed and learned from. At the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, they go as far as throwing parties to celebrate and share failed experiments. This may seem extreme, but cementing the idea that failure is a positive thing ensures that people don’t continue to waste time and resources on experiments that aren’t going anywhere. 

On the other hand, there are preventable failures, and learning from these means trying to make sure they don’t happen again. This can be through training or putting new systems in place. But if the failure happens because set processes weren’t followed or company values and boundaries were ignored, then the response should be a fair consequence like a sanction, suspension, or even firing, if necessary. When employees know that they always face fair feedback and consequences from their leaders, the feeling of psychological safety is strengthened.

You don’t have to be a leader to help create a fearless work environment.

What would you do if you ruled the globe for a day? You probably have lots of great ideas for how to improve things if you were in charge but can’t imagine making a difference in the real world because you’re not in a high enough position of authority. 

This frustrating feeling happens in the workplace, too. But the good news is that if you want to work in a less fearful environment, there are small steps you can take to help make this happen, even if you’re not the boss. 

For one, you can show your colleagues that you’re curious about what they have to say and slowly create safe spaces for them to speak up. Make a point of regularly asking them for their input and expertise; this works especially well when you direct your questions to specific individuals. The next time you speak up in a meeting, hand the baton over to someone else by asking them what they think.

Now, sharing an idea or voicing an opinion doesn’t mean much if no one is listening. And so another way you can contribute to psychological safety is by actively listening to people, whether or not you’re the one asking the questions. When your colleagues speak up, listen attentively and respectfully, even if you don’t necessarily agree with them. This shows interest and appreciation for the effort they made, as does providing feedback and building on their ideas.

Finally, you can improve the feeling of safety and support in your work environment by allowing yourself to ask for help when you need it, and letting others know that you’re available to help them. Start using phrases like, “I need help,” “I don’t know,” “I made a mistake,” “What challenges are you facing?” and “What can I do to help you?” 

When people realize that others around them can be vulnerable and that there’s always help at hand, they’ll eventually start sharing ideas and being bold enough to reach their full potential. 

Today, success at work means being able to take risks and have conversations that lead to innovation, but this is impossible to do when people feel unsupported and afraid. When leaders and colleagues alike start inviting other voices to the table and encouraging people to learn from failure, the result is a workplace in which people and ideas thrive. 

Action plan: Play to win. A lot of the time, we play it safe and avoid being vocal or trying new approaches because we don’t want to risk failing or being judged harshly. This mindset is called playing not to lose, and it’s the reason we miss out on opportunities that come our way. Start adopting a play to win mindset by focusing not on what you stand to gain if you step up to the plate, rather than what could go wrong. 

[themanuelruello]

How to Set Homestead Goals You’ll Actually Achieve

I currently can’t breathe when I walk outside…

That’s what below zero temps and crazy wind chills will do to ya.

Thankfully, even though the outside portions of our homestead are deep in hibernation at the moment, I have plenty to work on inside.

When I recently mentioned some of my favorite end-of-the-year rituals on Instagram, it prompted some interesting discussions around the things we do to set ourselves up for another 365-day stretch.

If you’ve ever struggled to set goals (that actually happen) for your homestead or future homestead, I made a video just for you.

We’ve been homesteading for almost a decade now, setting lots of goals, doing lots of projects, and have definitely figured out what does and doesn’t work. In this video, I’m sharing my best tips and practices that I use every single year to make sure our homestead goals turn into reality.

How to Set Homestead Goals You’ll Actually Achieve

(Keep scrolling if you prefer the written transcript version instead of the video!)

1. Keep Your Goal List Manageable (aka Don’t Go Crazy)

Don’t get me wrong: I love audacious goals, and dreams and big thinking, and we’ve been known to do some pretty crazy stuff, but I also know from personal experience that putting too many goals, or goals that are too big, on your list can not only cause you to feel scattered and overwhelmed, but can also cause you to feel really frustrated when you’ve been working your butt off, and then, only find yourself a quarter of the way through your list.

Make sure you have some quick wins built into your goal list so you can really feel that sense of accomplishment, which at least for me, is the very best motivator to keep going. The definition of manageable will really differ from person to person, but for us, I found it works best to break up our yearly goals into four different categories, and then, pick three to five specific goals, more than that in a minute, for each category. The specific categories that I like to set goals in are:

Family and Personal

Our Homestead

Our Blog/Online Business

Our doTERRA Business

The exact number of goals YOU set will depend on your situation, and it’s totally okay to go lighter in one area so you can focus elsewhere. We’ve done that many times.

The yard project that almost killed us.

Example: Last year I put way too many projects on our homesteading category of goals, and then come June when we were knee-deep in the middle of a huge yard remodel, and it was kicking our butt, and I realized it was gonna take the majority of our summer and the other things weren’t going to happen, I was really, really frustrated.

To remedy that from happening this year, I’m writing down a much more realistic list that I will be plugging into the calendar ahead of time so I know exactly how many months, or weeks, or whatever I have partitioned off for each homestead project.

2. Don’t Forget to Push Yourself (Great Things Never Came from Comfort Zones)

If a goal feels super safe, and comfortable, it’s probably not gonna be enough to really create the growth that you need. My rule of thumb is to keep expanding a goal until you feel a flutter of butterflies in your stomach. That’s usually a good sign that it’s enough to push me out of my comfort zone to get the development and growth that I’m looking for personally throughout that goal process.

3. Make Your Goals Specific and Measurable.

I’m guessing you’ve heard this one before, but it really is crucial– I promise. Vagueness in setting goals is not your friend. It might feel more comfortable at first to have a broad target to aim at, but what you’re really doing is giving your brain just a million ways to skirt around doing the work, and that will absolutely prevent you from taking a hold of that goal, and making it come alive.

Measurable just means that you’ll have a clear marker to know when that goal has been reached. It’s really easy to write something like cook more on your list, but what does that really mean? And, you need to break that down.

In order to set yourself up for the maximum success, clearly define each goal to make it attainable for your situation. Rather than putting “cook more this year” on your list, try putting down specific action items such as “bake a loaf of bread each week”, or “learn how to make homemade broth.”

Do you see how the first goal felt really lifeless and vague, but the second one felt more alive with purpose and meaning? That’s exactly the same sort of feel that you’ll want to create in your own homestead goals for this year.

4. Write, Date, and Tell!

Every time I say this, someone argues with me, and says, “I don’t like writing goals down. That’s not how my brain works. I like to go on spur of the moment. It feels just scary.”

I get it–promise! But if you’re really serious about making your goals a reality, you’ve gotta get serious enough to write them down and give them a due date. There is something just magical about putting something on paper. I don’t know what it is, but it works.

It’s crucial to assign a date to your goal, and it doesn’t have to be a super tight deadline, but the human brain takes action the best when there’s an element of urgency, or some sort of date attached. Also, when you speak your goals out loud, it gets it out there in the universe, and not only can the person you’re telling help to hold you accountable, but when it comes out of your lips, you tend to take it more seriously as well.

5. Break it Down, Then START.

Even if you set the very best goals in the world, and spend all sorts of time making them just right, none of them will work unless you put this next tip into action immediately. You gotta start, and yes, it’s usually the hardest, and I wish I could tell you some magical tool, or secret sauce that would make starting just as easy as pie, but guess what? If it was easy, then everyone would do it, and they don’t. Do they? But, you will.

My best tip here is to START FAST. Do it before your brain can talk you out of it, and have all those excuses bubbled to the surface. It is the hardest part, but once you get that momentum going I promise it gets easier and easier. I still struggle with this, a blank page, an empty piece of bare dirt, a barren garden plot.

They all tend to make me feel a little bit stressed, and a little bit paralyzed. It’s really normal. What I’ve learned to do is to never demand any sort of perfection from myself on Day One. The mission on the first day is to simply get something, anything started.

I might hammer some words out on paper without punctuation, or spelling just to get it out of my brain.

I might map the garden out on paper, and then, get my first round of seeds ordered.

I might research the materials I need for our next building project, and then, put them on a supply list, or maybe even call the building store, and get them shipped and coming my way.

(That time we ripped down a million old pheasant pens on our property)

The first step does not have to be epic, or magical, or special, or perfect. It just has to be something. If you do something on day one, when you come back on the subsequent days, you’ll find it gets easier and easier.

Lastly, remember: it’s okay to be flexible in your goals. Sometimes plans shift and change, and you gotta give yourself some grace. There has been many years where our epic list of projects just didn’t happen the way I wanted to, and I had to be okay with it. The only thing is, promise me that you’ll be honest with yourself, and know the difference between procrastination, and just flexibility, because there is a difference.

A Few of Our Personal Homestead Goals for 2019:

ONE: Redoing our pens and corrals. Our homestead theme for this year is refinement. We’ve done a lot of construction, a lot of building, a lot of creating, and some of those systems worked really good when we first put them in 8 or 10 years ago, but they’ve stopped being efficient and productive, and so, we’re going back into some of those places that we built awhile back, and making them better.

The first element of that is our pens and corrals. We have a cattle chute and a few alleyways, but when we built them, we didn’t understand how the cattle would best flow, or the most efficient way to work them. The plan is to redo all of our cattle handling facilities this year so they’re safer and more efficient.

TWO:Building a Milking Parlor 

I’ve milked out in the open barn on the cement pad for a long time. It worked fine at the beginning, but I’m ready for a more efficient system. I’m tired of dealing with mud, or a big sloppy pile of manure, or the horses chasing the cow around every time I try to milk. It’s just not working anymore.

I’m ready for a designated milking area that I can keep more sanitary and organized. I need a place where I don’t to wrestle manure or the other animals, or whatever.

We have a few other areas of the homestead that we’re working on improving and refining this year, but we’re keeping things fairly simple as compared to some years in the past, since we have some other projects in the works that will benefit YOU…

…Like our very first cookbook which launches in April and makes me so giddy that I’m almost speechless. There will be many sneak peaks and LOTS of bonuses and freebies coming along with its official launch, but for now here’s a sneak peek of the cover.

Alrighty my friends: your turn! What homestead goal are you most excited for in the coming year?

The post How to Set Homestead Goals You’ll Actually Achieve appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

from Gardening https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2019/01/set-homestead-goals.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[ntrending]

After 11 years, NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft is running out of fuel

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/after-11-years-nasas-asteroid-hopping-spacecraft-is-running-out-of-fuel/

After 11 years, NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft is running out of fuel

Running low on fuel, NASA’s Dawn mission is about to come to an end after 11 successful years in space. Dawn’s mission was a unique one in NASA’s roster of explorers. While slightly lesser-known than the Curiosity rover on Mars or spacecraft like New Horizons, which flew past Pluto some say Dawn was the first truly interplanetary mission because it orbited two planetary bodies during its journey—the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet, Ceres. It’s unusual in other ways too—unlike most other NASA missions, Dawn is not an acronym. Instead, it’s named after the missions goal—to look back into the dawn of the solar system.

To do this, the spacecraft orbited both Vesta and Ceres, two bodies that are wildly different from each other, but both may hold answers to questions about the earliest days of the solar system. Vesta is the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, and a majority of meteorites that have been found on Earth are believed to come from Vesta. Ceres on the other hand is unique in that it’s the largest body in the asteroid belt, after all it’s large enough to be classified as a dwarf planet. It’s believed that Ceres formed much further out in the solar system and spent millions of years migrating inwards, making it a perfect combination of outer solar system meets inner solar system.

Bodies like this haven’t been altered by weather or geological processes the way Earth has, with it’s windstorms and volcanoes. In some ways, Vesta and Ceres are time capsules of the earliest days of the solar system, so any chance to study them can teach us a lot about what sort of materials were around billions of years ago as well as the types of processes that eventually gave us the solar system we know today. Dawns Principal Investigator, Dr. Carol Raymond, says that Vesta and Ceres “represent two different chapters in the solar system’s history. Vesta is a good example of the inner solar system—it’s a dry rocky body whereas Ceres formed with much more water.”

Overall this mission with a relatively modest 500 million dollar budget, has delivered well beyond its expectations. Every part of the spacecraft is still working perfectly, but the hydrazine fuel that is used to keep the spacecraft oriented towards Earth is running dangerously low. If Dawn can no longer point its antenna towards us, then NASA engineers can no longer communicate with it, making any further observations useless.

NASA thinks that the mission will end sometime between mid September to mid October. Once they can no longer connect with the spacecraft, we will know the mission has ended. The spacecraft will remain in orbit around Ceres for 20 years or longer, but eventually it will impact Ceres. Because the planet turned out to have so much water and icy and might still be geologically active, planetary protection required that the spacecraft not impact the surface for fear of contaminating future research. Planetary protection guidelines say that they need to keep the spacecraft away from the planetary body for at least 20 years in order to give NASA time to launch a new mission. There is a chance we might go back to Ceres with new astrobiological glasses on to see if life exists there, or if it once did. And while every mission’s end is bittersweet, Dawn’s team are reflective and thankful for all that Dawn delivered. “It’s been a long and awesome journey,” says Raymond. Dawn’s mission director Marc Rayman agrees; “I’m both sad that its ending and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how successful it’s been.”

Let’s take a look at a few highlights from the Dawn mission:

Spacecraft

The Dawn spacecraft is often referred to as a tie-fighter; think Star Wars meets actual space exploration. The Dawn spacecraft’s main propellant is made from an element called xenon and is used in an ion engine to accelerate through space. Ion propulsion is ten times more efficient than other types of propulsion used on Earth, even if it takes a while to get up to speed. While it takes Dawn four days to accelerate from 0-60 miles per hour, after 11 years of travel it’s managed to reach speeds of up to 25,000 miles per hour. The force of these charged particles of xenon getting pushed out of the engine is so weak that it pushes the spacecraft with about the same amount of force as a piece of paper resting on your hand. But that’s all you really need in space where gravity is non-existent. Keep that engine running longterm and it is one of the most efficient ways to navigate around space. Dawn proved how successful this type of propulsion can be and the blue glow of xenon is probably likely to appear in future missions as a result.

Global image of Vesta:

This is Vesta, nearly 300 miles across and made up of the primordial building blocks of our solar system. Until Dawn approached this large asteroid, it was just a blurry rocky body imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Throughout its time in orbit around Vesta, Dawn discovered that this asteroid actually resembled more of a baby planet, giving scientists hints about what proto-planets really look like. “Vesta is a time capsule of the very early days of solar system formation, “ says Raymond. After gathering data directly from orbit, the team can now trace the evolution of Vesta through modeling and what they found is Vesta likely formed within 1.5 million years of our solar system. That means that the first pebbles that existed around our star helped make the asteroid. As far as space rocks go, they don’t really get much older than Vesta.

Dark spots on Vesta:

After some initial exploration, Dawn spotted some strange features on the surface that were unexpected. “One of the things that really surprised us,” says Raymond, “was there was a patch of hydrated dark material on Vesta. “It was thought that Vesta was drier than the moon because of its gravity. The moon can hold onto more ice because of that, but what we found was this patch of hydrated material at the equator that was enriched in hydrogen.”

The team discovered that while it wasn’t exactly damp within that dark patch on Vesta, the actual minerals themselves were hydrated which they did not expect to find. Also called hydroxyl, hydrated minerals contain water within their crystalline structure. Hydrated minerals have also been found on Mars. While it’s not water, it’s evidence of a water-related history. “It’s not free water or ice but this was a big surprise and a big discovery.” says Raymond.

Global image of Ceres:

Ceres was once classified as an asteroid, but now joins in the ranks along the larger of the smaller bodies in our solar system next to Pluto, Eris, and other dwarf planets. Ceres is around 600 miles across (that’s a little less than the distance between New York City and Detroit.) While that might seem pretty small, compared to other planets, for something residing in the asteroid belt it’s enormous. After departing Vesta, Dawn entered orbit around Ceres and captured this image of the icy world. The team wasn’t sure what Ceres’s story would turn out to be, but it ended up being a lot more fascinating and complex than they anticipated. After some initial reconnaissance they found that Ceres likely once had a subsurface ocean and might even still be geologically active. Weird bright spots began to appear scattered in size around the planet and after closer examination were found to be hydrated salts.

Inside Occator Crater:

When Dawn first spotted these bright spots on Ceres, scientists wondered what could be causing such a difference in contrast from the surface. With closer study, they realized these were salty ice mounds getting pushed upwards, towards the surface of the dwarf planet. We know that Ceres likely formed in the outer solar system, where it was cool enough for water to freeze, instead of burning away in the hot sun. Over many millions of years Ceres migrated inward, but like many outer solar system bodies it has retained a lot of its water.

Ahuna Mons

Ceres has one enormous 13,000-foot-tall mountain and it is called Ahuna Mons. This striking landmark is evidence that the dwarf planet was recently geologically active—and it might still be. The white streaks along the sides are sodium carbonate. This material is not common in the solar system. It’s found here on Earth, in the plumes of Enceladus and on Ceres. What could those three have in common? We know life exists here, and researchers think there’s a chance it might exist on Enceladus. Could it exist on Ceres? There is only one way to find out. With Dawn about to run out of gas, another future mission will have to continue its mission of exploration.

Written By Shannon Stirone