#it’s about space

[river-raven]

Crowley would listen to Vide Noir

[whiteshipnightjar]

Zoozve, my beloved

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[teaboot]

Fifteen year old me, deeply in denial: Im sure all girls wanna look like that

That:

[iscariotapologist]

today in church one of the priests referred to trans people as "those who are growing into the gender they were called to be" and i'm kind of enjoying the idea of like....divinely ordained top surgery

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

historical drama/sitcom where two gay best friends (woman and man) get lavender married--and proceed to spend the Fancy European Honeymoon their parents paid for acting as each other's wingman

[hanjoj]

their ship name might as well be theseus the way there's not a single original characteristic left there

[ink-the-artist]

Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an  adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol 

[supertaliart]

A continuation of my previous Skywalker Twins comic - feat Yoda part 3

[cat-in-a-mech-suit]

Being forcefully raised as a woman is not any less traumatic and emotionally repressive as being forcefully raised as a man. Femininity is not inherently pure and safe. Coercing someone to perform femininity is not any less toxic than coerced masculinity. Being dysphoric around femininity or having trauma from women doesn’t make you a misogynist.

[sadclowncentral]

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the "question only a human can answer" which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

[the-faultofdaedalus]

magic system where “dark magic” and “light magic” are literal terms - dark magic consumes photons, making an area around the spell visibly darker, sometimes to an Extreme extent, and light magic releases photons.

because of this most dark mages tend to work in very brightly-lit areas (either artificial light or outside in the daytime) to fuel their spells and wear and use lightly coloured clothes and tools so that they’re easier to see in the dimness their spells create, whereas light mages wear heavy, sometimes leaden robes (depending on the work being done) and the magical equivalent of welding masks to protect themselves from what can be an extreme amount of light, and sometimes other kinds of electromagnet radiation!

needless to say this is incredibly confusing for anyone unfamiliar with the culture

[moghedien]

Lae’zel’s romance arc is literally everything like it’s a one night stand. It’s a two night stand but she pretends she isn’t dying to be with you again. She’s a domme. She’s a bottom. She doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t like to cuddle. She thinks you’re weak for showing interest in her. She thinks she’s weak because she can’t stop thinking about you. She wakes you up in the middle of the night and makes you duel her because she doesn’t know what else to do about being obsessed with you. She cries and confesses her devotion to you if you win. She cries and confesses her devotion to you if you lose. She will tell everyone about your sexual exploits without shame. She’s embarrassed if you try to kiss her in public. She growls at you if you stop kissing her public. She is extremely possessive of you. She wants you to be as extremely possessive of her and is the most visibly heart broken if you cheat on her. She takes half the game building up the courage to ask you to cuddle. She changes her entire perception of the world because you showed her to was ok to approach things differently. She gives you multiple terms of endearment. She’s terrified that your relationship will end after all of this is over. The climax of her romance is holding her hand.

[cloudcastor]

We finish this, Together.

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.