#same with all my other mer-mits so far

[cadcreates]

Day 4.... By the rules I made for myself, this isn't a fail. But god it feels like one. This was one of those days were NOTHING would look right. The hands took the longest and I ended up copy pasting them so I could end up with a LITTLE more than a mess of a sketch. But the hair didn't work, the face looks mildly wrong, I don't wanna talk about the poncho/cape thing. The tail looks kinda nice, though I'm pretty sure I messed it up at the end a bit On a brighter note... NOBODY TOLD ME LEOPARD SHARKS ALSO COME WITH TINY SPOTS ONLY??? THEY'RE SO CUTE????? I LOVE THEM????

[aurora-daily]

For Nor­we­gian singer-song­writer Aurora, mu­sic was the key to un­lock a long-held sense of dis­con­nec­tion

Interview by An­drew McMillen for The Weekend Australian (June 1st, 2019).

Mu­sic writer An­drew McMillen meets Ice­landic sen­sa­tion Aurora ahead of her al­bum re­lease

As a child, Aurora Ak­snes grew up in a town not far from Ber­gen, in south­west­ern Norway, sur­rounded by a for­est, ocean, space and plenty of si­lence — fer­tile grounds in which to plant seeds of imag­i­na­tion.

Her two older sis­ters, Mi­randa and Vik­to­ria, were wor­ried that her strange­ness — es­pe­cially her out-there dress sense — would make her a tar­get for bul­lies. “We were so scared that it was go­ing to be tough for you to go to high school,” her sis­ters say in a video pub­lished in 2016. “But ev­ery­body loved you.”

Singing, song­writ­ing and play­ing piano be­came her three fas­ci­na­tions; all ac­tiv­i­ties she could in­dulge on her lone­some. This be­gan in child­hood and con­tin­ued into her ado­les­cence, when she was plucked from ob­scu­rity and es­sen­tially asked whether she wanted to pur­sue a ca­reer in mu­sic. She said yes, and she hasn’t looked back. In that same video from 2016, filmed in Ber­gen with her friends and family, and re­leased to co­in­cide with her de­but al­bum, Aurora says, “Mu­sic is not some­thing that you should keep for your­self. It can’t be put in a cage be­cause it’s wild and alive.”

On stage in Bris­bane on a Mon­day night early last month, the blue-eyed and blonde artist is mid­way through a pow­er­ful 90-minute set. Dressed in red and flanked by a live band that pro­duces pul­sat­ing elec­tronic pop, the 22-year-old pauses be­tween songs to ad­dress the 800-strong ca­pac­ity crowd at the Trif­fid.

“I feel like I’m in this room with friends,” she says. “It’s a nice feel­ing be­cause I feel so of­ten dis­con­nected to humans. I feel very lucky be­cause I don’t know how the hell I got here. I don’t know how I be­came an artist — but I do know that it’s 90 per cent be­cause of you guys.

“With­out you, it’s an empty room; with­out you, there’s no one that gives my words power.”

Then, with a nod to her drum­mer and co-producer Mag­nus Skyl­stad, the band kicks into the next track as the lights change colour and the crowd thrills to her mu­sic.

She does not so much per­form as in­habit these songs, as if singing them for the first time. There’s not a trace of self-con­scious­ness; in­stead, the young woman danc­ing centre stage, mi­cro­phone in hand, ex­udes a con­ta­gious free­dom and vi­tal­ity. Here, among friends, she is adored. Two days later, in the hours be­fore another Groovin the Moo fes­ti­val sideshow in Fre­man­tle, Aurora perks up when re­minded of her phi­los­o­phy that mu­sic can­not be caged.

“Oh, yes, it’s very true, and that’s why I know I have to share it,” she tells Re­view. “When I per­form, that’s why I’m so ex­cited; it’s like the mu­sic is too big for my tiny shape of a body. I feel very ex­plo­sive when I per­form. That’s the whole point in why I started shar­ing the mu­sic: if you have the gift of making mu­sic, it’s like we’re on a mis­sion, we peo­ple who can trans­late the mu­sic into some­thing that the rest of the world can un­der­stand.”

In a rel­a­tively short time, the rest of the world has come to un­der­stand and ap­pre­ci­ate Aurora’s art. While the story of her as­cent from small-town anonymity to filling clubs and play­ing fes­ti­vals on the other side of the planet is some­what typ­i­cal of the stream­ing era, the re­sults are cer­tainly not.

It goes like this: af­ter up­load­ing a song on­line in 2012, when she was 16, what was in­tended as a Christ­mas gift for her par­ents found its way to the ears of an agent, which set in mo­tion an un­ex­pected but wel­come record­ing ca­reer. Since 2015, she has re­leased an EP, a de­but al­bum — 2016’s All My Demons Greet­ing Me as a Friend — and a fol­low-up LP that has been split into two halves, re­leased last year and this year.

As well, a cou­ple of well-cho­sen cover songs have helped to high­light her ex­traor­di­nary, sin­gu­lar vocal abil­i­ties and opened up new au­di­ences.

First in 2015, her stark take on Half the World Away by Oa­sis fea­tured in a prom­i­nent Bri­tish Christ­mas ad­ver­tise­ment; it re­mains one of her most-played songs on stream­ing ser­vices. Then on an Aus­tralia visit in 2017, she recorded a spell­bind­ing cover of Mas­sive At­tack’s Teardrop for Triple J’s Like a Ver­sion segment. It has since at­tracted nearly seven mil­lion YouTube views.

In turn, the global response to her mu­sic dur­ing the past four years has led to a pleasant awakening: her work mat­ters.

“I want to do this as long as I feel like peo­ple need me to do this,” she says. “Right now, I feel very needed. It’s a job that the world needs be­cause be­ing a hu­man is so hard and mu­sic some­times makes it eas­ier. As long as I feel needed, I’ll do it. I’ll be an artist for­ever; I’m a very hungry woman, and I like to dance and paint, and I want to ex­plore and even­tu­ally share that with the world, too.”

In con­ver­sa­tion, Aurora comes across as re­mark­ably grounded and in­se­cu­rity-free. A month out from the re­lease of A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Hu­man (Step 2) — usu­ally a time of peak anx­i­ety and un­cer­tainty among record­ing artists, who will soon learn whether their lat­est work is judged to be their great­est or oth­er­wise — she shrugs and says that she doesn’t re­ally have any par­tic­u­lar hopes or ex­pec­ta­tions for it. “Whatever will hap­pen will hap­pen,” she says. “I’m al­ready work­ing on my next al­bum; I feel quite far away from this al­bum. I hope at least one per­son will re­ally love it. It is quite di­verse, with many dif­fer­ent moods and per­son­al­i­ties. I am quite ex­cited to per­form the songs live, but it doesn’t re­ally mat­ter how peo­ple per­ceive it.

“Some peo­ple will al­ways un­der­stand it and ap­pre­ci­ate it, and that’s enough.” Be­tween songs at the Trif­fid, Aurora talks a lot, and she’s of­ten funny and en­dear­ing.

‘ In the be­gin­ning I didn’t re­ally talk be­cause I didn’t have any­thing to say. But then I learned that if you do talk to the au­di­ence, peo­ple tend to feel more safe and more connected to you’ Aurora Ak­snes

“We’ve been doing all these shows in Aus­tralia, and it’s so strange we can have our own show in Bris­bane and there are peo­ple here wait­ing for us,” she says at the be­gin­ning. “From the bottom of my huge heart and small tits — ac­tu­ally, no, they are quite big — thank you so, so much for com­ing tonight.”

Later, she ad­mits to feel­ing some snotty con­ges­tion: “It’s kind of loos­en­ing up now as I’m danc­ing and making its jour­ney down my throat. It tastes like salt and I don’t know how I feel about that.” But while in­tro­duc­ing Through the Eyes of a Child, she turns se­ri­ous for a few mo­ments.

“Some­times it’s hard to find peo­ple to talk to about your pain be­cause it makes us feel like a bur­den, or we are taught to feel like a bur­den when we are not happy,” she says. “I know you’re all here for a rea­son. Maybe you’re a bit like me: you’re emo­tional or you look a bit dif­fer­ent on the in­side or the out­side. This next song is for you if you’re go­ing though a hard time.”

This con­nec­tion with her au­di­ence is real and rare, but it wasn’t al­ways this way.

“In the be­gin­ning I didn’t re­ally talk be­cause I didn’t have any­thing to say,” she tells Re­view. “But then I learned that if you do talk to the au­di­ence, peo­ple tend to feel more safe and more connected to you. You show them a spe­cial thing they don’t usu­ally see un­less they go to my show. It’s like they’re my friend or I’m their friend. I do have mouth di­ar­rhoea be­cause I tend to talk way too much, but it just hap­pens. I do what I want and, at the mo­ment, I feel like talk­ing a lot.”

Aurora’s cover of the Mas­sive At­tack hit Teardrop, per­formed for Triple J’s Like a Ver­sion segment, has at­tracted nearly seven mil­lion YouTube views

There’s another as­pect of her artistry that has changed in re­cent years, too. “I used to feel ner­vous be­fore shows, but then it stopped be­cause I re­alised it’s ob­vi­ous I know what I’m doing,” she says. “I know why I’m here; I know how to do this. Now, I find it more scary to be among peo­ple or to have a one-to-one con­ver­sa­tion with some­one. I know what to do on the stage and it feels like it’s im­por­tant.”

With shows booked up to De­cem­ber, in­clud­ing an ex­ten­sive 20date tour of Norway, her re­cent Aus­tralian trip will soon be in the rear-view mir­ror. While travelling here, how­ever, she was par­tic­u­larly in­spired by our na­tive trees, which she found to be vastly dif­fer­ent com­pared with those in her home­land, so per­haps the sights and sounds of our coun­try may feed back into her fu­ture art.

Yet watching her on stage, be­fore an au­di­ence completely in tune with her voice and body, the phi­los­o­phy she out­lined in that video a few years ago comes to mind. Aurora can’t be put in a cage, be­cause she is wild and alive. Luck­ily for us, her mu­sic is not some­thing she has kept for her­self.

A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Hu­man (Step 2) is re­leased on Fri­day via Glass­note Records.

[kristablogs]

A night in the life of a professional stargazer

A fascination with the stars is part of our human nature, but studying them is a complex task. (Pexels/)

The following is an excerpt adapted from The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque.

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

This phrase, repeated by weary IT specialists the world over, had pos­sibly never prompted such horror. First of all, it was one in the morning, and I was sitting in a chilly control room on top of the highest mountain in Hawaii. I was nearly fourteen thousand feet above sea level, twenty-four years old, and desperately fighting through sleep and oxygen deprivation to salvage several hard-won hours of PhD thesis research time on a piece of broken equipment.

Second, the equipment in question was the Subaru Telescope, a 630-ton beast housed one floor above my head in a fourteen-story dome. It cost $47,000 per night to operate, and after submitting a twelve-page science pro­posal to the professors in my department, I had been granted one of these valuable nights—tonight, the only night allotted to me in the entire year—to point this telescope at a handful of galaxies five billion light-years away.

No, I had not tried turning it off and back on again.

The evening had been going excellently until one of the control room computers had produced an unsettling bloonk sound and prompted the telescope operator—the only other person with me on the mountain—to freeze in her seat. When I asked what was up, she cautiously informed me that one of the mechanized supports holding up a mirror had just failed, but “it’s okay. I think the mirror is still on the telescope.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t, we would have heard a crash.” Solid reasoning, if not exactly reassuring.

We put in a nervous call to the Subaru members of the day crew. The Japanese crew member we reached cheerfully informed us that he had, in fact, seen this happen earlier in the day, that the mechanized supports were probably fine and it was probably just a false alarm, and that turning the power off and then on again would probably fix the problem. It seemed impolite to point out that we were talking about a multimillion-dollar tele­scope and not a modem.

I didn’t know what four hundred pounds of glass hitting the concrete floor above my head would sound like, but I knew I didn’t want to find out. I was also quite sure I didn’t want to be forever known as “the grad student who killed Subaru.” The cautious thing for me to do would be to call it a night, drive back down to the observatory’s sleeping quarters, and have the day crew carefully check things over the next morning.

On the other hand, this was my only night on the telescope. Tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter whether I’d experienced a mechanical failure, a false alarm, or even just some poorly timed clouds; telescope time is strictly scheduled months in advance, and another astronomer would be arriving with a completely different science program. I would have to submit a whole new proposal, hope for another hard-to-get yes from the telescope committee, wait an entire year—a full trip of the earth around the sun—until the galaxies were back up in the night sky to try again, and hope that night wouldn’t have any clouds or telescope problems.

Of course, having the largest piece of glass in the world sitting in pieces on the dome floor wouldn’t help matters either.

I looked at the operator, and she looked back at me. I was the astron­omer, so with all of my twenty-four-year-old, third-year-grad-student, still-had-to-pay-the-young-driver-fee-to-rent-a-car wisdom, this was my call.

I turned the power off and back on again.

The Last Stargazers is out this week. (Sourcebooks/)

The simple act of stargazing is an experience shared by almost every human on the planet.

Whether we’re peering through the stifling light pollution of a bustling city, struck motionless by the riot of stars arcing over our heads in a remote corner of the globe, or simply standing still and feeling the enor­mity of space waiting just outside our planet’s atmosphere, the beauty and mystery of the night sky has always entranced us. You’d also be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t admired the dramatic astronomical photo­graphs produced by the world’s best telescopes: the sweeping vistas of stars, galaxy pinwheels, and rainbow-hued gas clouds that supposedly hold the secrets of the cosmos.

What’s less well-known is the story behind where these photos come from, how and why we’re taking them, and who exactly is extracting those secrets of the universe. Astronomer sounds like a romantic and dewy-eyed sort of job, and its practitioners are a unicorn-esque rarity: of the 7.5 billion people on our planet, fewer than fifty thousand are professional astrono­mers. Most people have never even met a professional astronomer, let alone contemplated the details of such a strange career. When thinking about what an astronomer does (on the rare occasion that it’s thought of at all), people tend to imagine their own experiences with stargazing taken to an obsessive level: a nocturnal geek peering through a really big telescope in a really dark place. The handful of astronomers in movies also become a go-to reference: Jodie Foster hunkering down with headphones to listen for aliens in “Contact” or Elijah Wood peering through a suspiciously powerful backyard telescope to discover a planet-destroying asteroid in “Deep Impact”.

This was certainly the mental image of astronomy that I had in mind when I claimed it as my future career. I’d come to astronomy in the same way as countless other amateur and professional space enthusiasts, through a childhood of backyard stargazing in a New England factory town, Carl Sagan’s writing on my parents’ bookshelf, and those jaw-dropping pho­tographs of nebulae and star fields that seemed to always show up as the backdrops of TV specials and science magazine covers. Even when I arrived at MIT as a freshman and blithely declared myself a physics major in my first step toward an astronomy career, I had only a vague sense of what I’d be doing all day in my chosen profession. My daydreams were about contacting aliens, unraveling the mysteries of black holes, and discovering a new type of star. (So far, only one of these has come true.)

I did not daydream about being the final decision point for keeping one of the world’s largest telescopes intact. I never imagined that one day, I’d be shimmying up the support struts of a different telescope to duct-tape a piece of foam across its mirror in the name of science, researching whether my employer carried experimental aircraft insurance, or willing myself to somehow fall asleep next to a tarantula the size of my head.

I also had no idea that the field I was entering was changing as rapidly as the rest of the world. The astronomers I read about and imagined—swathed in fleece, perched behind an impossibly large telescope on a cold mountaintop and squinting into an eyepiece while the stars wheeled above them—were already an endangered and evolving species. In joining their ranks, I would fall even deeper in love with the beauty of space, but to my surprise, I would also wind up exploring my own planet and learning the stories of an incredible, rare, and rapidly changing—even vanishing—field.

Excerpted from The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque, published by Sourcebooks. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.

[scootoaster]

A night in the life of a professional stargazer

A fascination with the stars is part of our human nature, but studying them is a complex task. (Pexels/)

The following is an excerpt adapted from The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque.

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

This phrase, repeated by weary IT specialists the world over, had pos­sibly never prompted such horror. First of all, it was one in the morning, and I was sitting in a chilly control room on top of the highest mountain in Hawaii. I was nearly fourteen thousand feet above sea level, twenty-four years old, and desperately fighting through sleep and oxygen deprivation to salvage several hard-won hours of PhD thesis research time on a piece of broken equipment.

Second, the equipment in question was the Subaru Telescope, a 630-ton beast housed one floor above my head in a fourteen-story dome. It cost $47,000 per night to operate, and after submitting a twelve-page science pro­posal to the professors in my department, I had been granted one of these valuable nights—tonight, the only night allotted to me in the entire year—to point this telescope at a handful of galaxies five billion light-years away.

No, I had not tried turning it off and back on again.

The evening had been going excellently until one of the control room computers had produced an unsettling bloonk sound and prompted the telescope operator—the only other person with me on the mountain—to freeze in her seat. When I asked what was up, she cautiously informed me that one of the mechanized supports holding up a mirror had just failed, but “it’s okay. I think the mirror is still on the telescope.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t, we would have heard a crash.” Solid reasoning, if not exactly reassuring.

We put in a nervous call to the Subaru members of the day crew. The Japanese crew member we reached cheerfully informed us that he had, in fact, seen this happen earlier in the day, that the mechanized supports were probably fine and it was probably just a false alarm, and that turning the power off and then on again would probably fix the problem. It seemed impolite to point out that we were talking about a multimillion-dollar tele­scope and not a modem.

I didn’t know what four hundred pounds of glass hitting the concrete floor above my head would sound like, but I knew I didn’t want to find out. I was also quite sure I didn’t want to be forever known as “the grad student who killed Subaru.” The cautious thing for me to do would be to call it a night, drive back down to the observatory’s sleeping quarters, and have the day crew carefully check things over the next morning.

On the other hand, this was my only night on the telescope. Tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter whether I’d experienced a mechanical failure, a false alarm, or even just some poorly timed clouds; telescope time is strictly scheduled months in advance, and another astronomer would be arriving with a completely different science program. I would have to submit a whole new proposal, hope for another hard-to-get yes from the telescope committee, wait an entire year—a full trip of the earth around the sun—until the galaxies were back up in the night sky to try again, and hope that night wouldn’t have any clouds or telescope problems.

Of course, having the largest piece of glass in the world sitting in pieces on the dome floor wouldn’t help matters either.

I looked at the operator, and she looked back at me. I was the astron­omer, so with all of my twenty-four-year-old, third-year-grad-student, still-had-to-pay-the-young-driver-fee-to-rent-a-car wisdom, this was my call.

I turned the power off and back on again.

The Last Stargazers is out this week. (Sourcebooks/)

The simple act of stargazing is an experience shared by almost every human on the planet.

Whether we’re peering through the stifling light pollution of a bustling city, struck motionless by the riot of stars arcing over our heads in a remote corner of the globe, or simply standing still and feeling the enor­mity of space waiting just outside our planet’s atmosphere, the beauty and mystery of the night sky has always entranced us. You’d also be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t admired the dramatic astronomical photo­graphs produced by the world’s best telescopes: the sweeping vistas of stars, galaxy pinwheels, and rainbow-hued gas clouds that supposedly hold the secrets of the cosmos.

What’s less well-known is the story behind where these photos come from, how and why we’re taking them, and who exactly is extracting those secrets of the universe. Astronomer sounds like a romantic and dewy-eyed sort of job, and its practitioners are a unicorn-esque rarity: of the 7.5 billion people on our planet, fewer than fifty thousand are professional astrono­mers. Most people have never even met a professional astronomer, let alone contemplated the details of such a strange career. When thinking about what an astronomer does (on the rare occasion that it’s thought of at all), people tend to imagine their own experiences with stargazing taken to an obsessive level: a nocturnal geek peering through a really big telescope in a really dark place. The handful of astronomers in movies also become a go-to reference: Jodie Foster hunkering down with headphones to listen for aliens in “Contact” or Elijah Wood peering through a suspiciously powerful backyard telescope to discover a planet-destroying asteroid in “Deep Impact”.

This was certainly the mental image of astronomy that I had in mind when I claimed it as my future career. I’d come to astronomy in the same way as countless other amateur and professional space enthusiasts, through a childhood of backyard stargazing in a New England factory town, Carl Sagan’s writing on my parents’ bookshelf, and those jaw-dropping pho­tographs of nebulae and star fields that seemed to always show up as the backdrops of TV specials and science magazine covers. Even when I arrived at MIT as a freshman and blithely declared myself a physics major in my first step toward an astronomy career, I had only a vague sense of what I’d be doing all day in my chosen profession. My daydreams were about contacting aliens, unraveling the mysteries of black holes, and discovering a new type of star. (So far, only one of these has come true.)

I did not daydream about being the final decision point for keeping one of the world’s largest telescopes intact. I never imagined that one day, I’d be shimmying up the support struts of a different telescope to duct-tape a piece of foam across its mirror in the name of science, researching whether my employer carried experimental aircraft insurance, or willing myself to somehow fall asleep next to a tarantula the size of my head.

I also had no idea that the field I was entering was changing as rapidly as the rest of the world. The astronomers I read about and imagined—swathed in fleece, perched behind an impossibly large telescope on a cold mountaintop and squinting into an eyepiece while the stars wheeled above them—were already an endangered and evolving species. In joining their ranks, I would fall even deeper in love with the beauty of space, but to my surprise, I would also wind up exploring my own planet and learning the stories of an incredible, rare, and rapidly changing—even vanishing—field.

Excerpted from The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque, published by Sourcebooks. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.