I think this is an incredibly important video to watch

Just this.

Watch it, its fucking important.

This is your warning.

I know Brett Favre and calling him a cocksucker is an insult to the fine art of sucking cock.

I have finally read Blue Wraith and Dark Fortress and I literally do not understand people who think Fenris was out of character, or had regressed in his character development throughout the comics.

Firstly; mages. Yes, when Fenris first meets Francesca he is weary of her, but I wouldn't say Fenris ever truly got over being weary of mages in da2. He came to understand that some mages can be trusted (Hawke, Bethany) but was willing to fight for the innocent circle mages (dependent on Hawkes choices) but he ALSO saw a close member of his friendship group blow up a chantry, and he perceives that what happened to Merethari (and possibly the whole clan) as Merrill's fault for her blood magic.

Besides which, Fenris is shown to be WAY LESS weary of mages than he used to be!! He begins to trust Francesca almost immediately, is telling her she has a good heart by the end of Blue Wraith, defending her when she needs it. He does not look at her and see "evil mage" or even "dangerous mage" like he would have about a mage of her power from TEVINTER no less, at the beginning of da2. Instead he gets close to her rather quickly.

Secondly; I know people get upset about this panel:

But Fenris has legitimate reasons to feel prickly about joining a new friendship group. In his old friendship group, he found love and friendship in Hawke and Isabela, in Varric, Aveline, Donic, Sebastian, Bethany and even perhaps Merrill, Carver and Anders. And then that friendship group ripped itself apart from the inside out. It exploded into chaos taking Fenris's home which he had built for himself; the first true home he could remember, with it. Fenris has every right to feel anxious about getting involved with new people. He has every right to feel "used" in some ways, particularly if he was brought on any of the "Justice" quest lines in Act 3 of DA2.

Fenris isn't a static character who's fully healed by the end of da2. He deserves to feel upset that he and his friends had to go their separate ways. He deserves to feel betrayed by what happened, by the destruction of his home.

And besides that, Blue Wraith and Dark Fortress both showed all the ways Fenris has grown. He has the same emotionally maturty he would display in da2, quickly apologising when he needs to. But he ALSO directs that sort of emotional maturity outwards now. He is not directly antagonistic to mages, or to those who defend them, like he was with Anders and Merrill. He offers comfort to those who need it, particularly at the end of the book, and seems to fill a "tired Dad/Older Brother" energy.

Also I cannot believe people don't see what happened with the Person He Does Not Kill in Dark Fortress as showing his character development throughout the end of da2 and blue wraith, when its basically an exact parallel to what happens in A Bitter Pill except he MAKES A DIFFERENT DECISON THIS TIME. like!!! Come on!!!

Overall this duo of comics was wonderful! I haven't even touched on the extra characters who I would 100% die for (particularly Sir Aaron and Francesca). I seriously recommend it and am just ??? At anyone who thinks it does Fenris dirty. I thought it was a perfect depiction of Fenris, I could even hear his dialogue in Fenris's voice it fit him so well.

Re-reading Dark Fortress for my summary of events prior to DA:D and got hit right in the fucking chest with this scene again. I just... it's so chilling. It's so chilling and explains even more about Marius's character, you know? Because it's like Fenris says: "But that can be worse." Marius is a guy who was enslaved and trained to be a killing machine, and him saying that killing gets easier is so haunting because you know the sacrifices forced on him for that to be true.

Reminds me of the scene between him and Dorian in Magekiller, where Marius explains that he holds no hatred for mages, it's just that he doesn't think he's good for anything other than killing them.

Dark Fortress time… (live blog under the cut)

Keep reading

NEIL GAIMAN NEW COLLEGE ALT-GRAD SPEECH 2023

Neil Gaiman, Author and Professor of the Arts at Bard, addresses New College of Florida Students, who organized their own Alt-Graduation Ceremony in defiance of the hostile takeover of their college and attack on their Academic Freedoms. www.SaveNewCollege.org

It’s less than 5 minutes. If you can, please watch it.

We are blessed to have Neil Gaiman as a part of the Tumblr community.

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

i'm losing my mind @ this thread......historie......

also please note that this scientist is in fact the retired man who invented the xbox.

oh fuck i listened to a podcast that was interviewing him and the process he went through to make this bread, ologies with allie ward like he went through full on clean room levels of prep to ensure that this was 100% yeast from old egypt and had to bend over backwards to ensure everything involved was uncontaminated he then revealed that the original xbox logo...

is a sourdough boule

seamus blackley is a gem of a human and is very supportive of new bakers! one time he gave me feedback on how to get a better ear on my batard and dang if he wasn't right

Yep. Seamus blackley is hella cool. He's given me flour recommendations on several occasions. Generous nerds are my people. @adulthoodisokay

Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful

Image is a picture of page 42 from The Sunday Times in the UK (undated). The page is called Style Voice, and the segment is called Dear Dolly, subtitled: “your love, life and friendship dilemmas answered by Dolly Alderton.” At the bottom of the page, there is a note that says “To get your life dilemma answered by Dolly, email or send a voice note to deardolly@sundaytimes.co.uk or DM @theststyle.

Text of the segment reads:

[submission]

Dear Dolly,

I was already a little overweight, but things spiralled during lockdown. As a home-schooling, working-from-home single parent to two children, there was little time for contemplative yoga or solo mini-marathons around the park. After contracting the virus (it dragged on and on) and then not being able to leave our tiny flat much due to the lockdown, the only excitement of the day seemed to be a gin and tonic at 6pm, rounds of Netflix and peanut butter on toast.

I eat when I’m stressed and when I’m bored, and I was very stressed and very bored. And now the buttons are popping off my jeans. My clothes don’t fit, I don’t want to spend a fortune buying pretty new things in “L” when I have to get back to “M.” And how will I ever feel glamorous and attractive again after piling on the pounds and covering my face with a mask? Please help. I don’t want to be single for ever.

[response]

As I read your letter, the first thing I thought was what a challenging time you’ve been through in the past six months. You’ve had to educate, entertain and care for not one but two young children, all day, every day, without the help of a partner, while being mostly confined indoors in a tiny living space. You contracted an illness that was largely unknown and potentially debilitating. All this happened during a time when you couldn’t see friends or extended family, or go to the pub, or go away, or go anywhere for that matter. I want you to read that back and acknowledge what a difficult set of circumstances you’ve been living through recently.

With that in mind, I’m going to present you with a possibility: you haven’t overindulged at all. You haven’t eaten too much, you haven’t messed up a routine. You have been giving yourself exactly what you’ve needed in a time of immense stress – you have been in complete communion with your mind and body. You’ve allowed yourself the gentle anesthesia of a cold gin and tonic after a long day with kids, and restful nights with a comforting and familiar food as you prepare for the following morning. You’ve used your few spare hours to recuperate, instead of flinging yourself around your small flat in front of a YouTube exercise video or making complicated kale salads. All of this makes complete sense. You have not made any mistakes.

A clever thing the diet industry did to the collective consciousness is attach morals to eating: certain foods are bad (peanut butter on toast), certain ways of eating are bad (in front of Netflix). And if we are to believe the fallacy of “you are what you eat,” every time we put food in our mouths, we give ourselves permission to rate our morality. But our chosen meals aren’t proof of our goodness or badness. Deprivation or hyper-control doesn’t equate to health and virtue, appetite isn’t something feral and dangerous to be disciplined. Food is an inanimate object that we can use as we like – to nourish, energize or comfort. How we eat will always be in flux depending on our circumstances, whether that be emotional or physical.

I think the best thing you can do is acquaint yourself with the idea of intuitive eating. It’s a seemingly simple concept that many of us have to relearn at some point in our lives. Intuitive eating is about tuning in to your body, listening to what it wants and responding compassionately. It’s about quietening the chatter you’ve been absorbing your whole life – all the contradictory rules and convoluted calorie counting – and instead focusing on the requirements of your appetite and tastes. We are all born with an innate ability to do this (you never see a toddler leaving 20 per cent of its meal on a plate because it read an article saying this is what French women do), but tragically it is a skill that is stolen from so many of us.

Because another clever thing the diet industry did was make us believe that our instincts are wrong, that if we ate what we want when we wanted it, we’d live off a mountain of éclairs, a river of Baileys and nothing else. That’s just not true. If you can find a way to eat intuitively, without any cycles of restriction and reward, your body will find its way to the weight where it is naturally most comfortable.

And if all that fails, try this: every time you go to feed yourself, imagine that you are feeding one of your children. Every time you finish a meal and you want to berate yourself for the decisions you made: imagine you are speaking to one of your children. If they came to you – tired, anxious or ill – would you give them a calorie-counted meal, or would you give them what they were craving? If they ate something that brought them joy, would you remind them afterwards that they could have eaten something that was less pleasurable but lower in fat? Would you tell them to take notice of the letter on the label in their clothes and attach a sense of self-worth to it? Would you let them believe that the letter on that label was an indicator of whether someone will fall in love with them?

The sad truth is women are conditioned to feel like physical failures if they don’t conform to an impossible specification, so the language of self-hatred is easily accessible to us. I don’t want to pretend that this propaganda isn’t incredibly powerful, and I don’t want you to feel even more self-hatred for taking it on and believing it. So, for now, try a trick instead: imagine you are your own child and care for yourself accordingly. That might be the only way you’ll allow yourself the logic and kindness you deserve.

This made me cry.

What fabulous advice this is. Ye gads.

TAKE THE TIME TO FUCKING READ THIS. ITS TERRIBLY IMPORTANT AND MAY MAKE YOU CRY.

honestly a lil emotional about the met description of their famous faience hippopotamus like. people loved a little ancient ceramic hippo enough to give it a name and they named it william

for reference (for those who don’t want to click through), this is William

Pictures of William are posted occasionally in the behind the scenes corridors of the Met to help idiots like me navigate the never ending, look exactly the same, Shining-esque maze that is the basement of the museum.

My 90yr old Irish Catholic grandpa doesn’t miss with my gender. He’s never gotten my name wrong, or my pronouns, never even faltered over it.

It’s all so natural too: son, big man, young man…

We’ve never talked about it. He’s the only one who hasn’t pushed for details. He just accepted it and carried on because it’s not a huge deal.

It’s so comforting.

My dear that’s called Alzheimer’s

I wasn’t going to respond to this, I looked at your blog. Your irrational hatred and bile directed towards trans people is palpable and pathetic. This was intended to upset me. 

But I now have a chance to talk about who my grandfather is. 

You see, I find it interesting that you claim the only way my 90yr old grandfather could possibly be so accepting is if he was dying of one of the most horrible diseases known to man, a condition which eats your brain from the inside out and turns you in an angry, scared shell of the child you once were while your family has to grieve you long before you’re dead. 

You find it easier - and evidently prefer - to believe that to accept me, my grandfather must have Alzheimer’s rather than any other reason. 

Why is that easier to believe than a man who lived through (not was born during, not was around for, lived through) the Second World War and the aftermath, seeing footage of the concentration camps and meeting refugees would be accepting? 

A poor builder and a farmer who worked alongside queer men and deaf men and the few people of colour in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and was himself barred from many places of employment and education due to his religion?

This man, whose oldest son was born the year the British army began occupying his country, who lived through the Troubles and was automatically considered suspicious and dangerous through an incident of birth? A man who helped raise six children - most of them boys and therefore in great danger of the army turning their guns on them for playing kid-games - in a time of civil war where it didn’t seem to matter which side you were on, the bombs and shootings could get you either way? A man who once was taken hostage by the IRA? 

My grandfather’s oldest son - my dad - was the first in his family to go to university and there he met and fell in love with a Protestant woman. This was before the Good Friday Agreement, when the civil war was still happening, and if my grandparents had a problem with it - they never let said to my mum. 

(My grandpa and my mum don’t really get along, but that’s more to do with me being a premature baby and tensions over my survival and disagreements on how to look after me. My mum and my Nana? Thick as thieves.) 

They certainly never let it slip to us when we came along because it wasn’t important anymore that we were something many people in Northern Ireland would have preferred to not exist. It didn’t matter. 

He voted in the Good Friday Agreement in hopes of stopping the conflict. He spent a lot of time listening to me about the bullying I was facing for being - unbeknownst to me at the time - queer and disabled. He just told me that being happy was far more important. 

Being trans? It does not matter. Of course it doesn’t matter to him because he’s seen worse things in the world. 

He’s ninety years old. He’s still out on the farm, he’s still studying history, he’s still sharp as fuck. I’ve seen someone die of Alzheimer's. I know every bit of it and it’s not him. Besides, I’ve not medically transitioned in anyway yet. He’s only seen me presenting fully masc for six days in person. Two years in total. If he had Alzheimer’s he’d be calling me by my deadname and using she/her. 

And he’s not unusual. Outside of your echo chamber, most people are fine with trans people. Most people don’t care. Most people are accepting. They may not understand, they may not use the right words, but they’re accepting. 

I do find it interesting that once again the TERF tactic is try and wrestle autonomy and self-control away from people who don’t follow your bigoted stances. Autistics must be being manipulated. Trans men are clearly confused little girls. Children obviously can’t understand their own minds and bodies. 

My grandfather must have Alzheimer's. 

Of course my view of a world I’ve seen in a Tumblr textpost must be more correct than the reality everyone else lives in. 

Have the day you deserve. 

Not gonna lie, used to shit myself as a child when this theme song came on. Also, fell all the way down shag green carpet stairs to get to the tv on time.

How an Armadillo gathers foliage for its nest.

When I'm carrying all the bags of groceries inside in one trip.

@paintedcowboy

He is mine.

and I shall name him Roomba.

And I shall name him Road Kill.

Caution: Universe Work Ahead 🚧

We only have one universe. That’s usually plenty – it’s pretty big after all! But there are some things scientists can’t do with our real universe that they can do if they build new ones using computers.

The universes they create aren’t real, but they’re important tools to help us understand the cosmos. Two teams of scientists recently created a couple of these simulations to help us learn how our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope sets out to unveil the universe’s distant past and give us a glimpse of possible futures.

Caution: you are now entering a cosmic construction zone (no hard hat required)!

One Roman simulation is helping scientists plan how to study cosmic evolution by teaming up with other telescopes, like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It’s based on galaxy and dark matter models combined with real data from other telescopes. It envisions a big patch of the sky Roman will survey when it launches by 2027. Scientists are exploring the simulation to make observation plans so Roman will help us learn as much as possible. It’s a sneak peek at what we could figure out about how and why our universe has changed dramatically across cosmic epochs.

As part of the real future survey, Roman will study the structure and evolution of the universe, map dark matter – an invisible substance detectable only by seeing its gravitational effects on visible matter – and discern between the leading theories that attempt to explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. It will do it by traveling back in time…well, sort of.

Seeing into the past

Looking way out into space is kind of like using a time machine. That’s because the light emitted by distant galaxies takes longer to reach us than light from ones that are nearby. When we look at farther galaxies, we see the universe as it was when their light was emitted. That can help us see billions of years into the past. Comparing what the universe was like at different ages will help astronomers piece together the way it has transformed over time.

The simulation demonstrates how Roman will see even farther back in time thanks to natural magnifying glasses in space. Huge clusters of galaxies are so massive that they warp the fabric of space-time, kind of like how a bowling ball creates a well when placed on a trampoline. When light from more distant galaxies passes close to a galaxy cluster, it follows the curved space-time and bends around the cluster. That lenses the light, producing brighter, distorted images of the farther galaxies.

Roman will be sensitive enough to use this phenomenon to see how even small masses, like clumps of dark matter, warp the appearance of distant galaxies. That will help narrow down the candidates for what dark matter could be made of.

Constructing the cosmos over billions of years

A separate simulation shows what Roman might expect to see across more than 10 billion years of cosmic history. It’s based on a galaxy formation model that represents our current understanding of how the universe works. That means that Roman can put that model to the test when it delivers real observations, since astronomers can compare what they expected to see with what’s really out there.

This simulation also shows how Roman will help us learn how extremely large structures in the cosmos were constructed over time. For hundreds of millions of years after the universe was born, it was filled with a sea of charged particles that was almost completely uniform. Today, billions of years later, there are galaxies and galaxy clusters glowing in clumps along invisible threads of dark matter that extend hundreds of millions of light-years. Vast “cosmic voids” are found in between all the shining strands.

Astronomers have connected some of the dots between the universe’s early days and today, but it’s been difficult to see the big picture. Roman’s broad view of space will help us quickly see the universe’s web-like structure for the first time. That’s something that would take Hubble or Webb decades to do! Scientists will also use Roman to view different slices of the universe and piece together all the snapshots in time. We’re looking forward to learning how the cosmos grew and developed to its present state and finding clues about its ultimate fate.

Roman will explore the cosmos as no telescope ever has before, combining a panoramic view of the universe with a vantage point in space. Each picture it sends back will let us see areas that are at least a hundred times larger than our Hubble or James Webb space telescopes can see at one time. Astronomers will study them to learn more about how galaxies were constructed, dark matter, and much more.

The simulations are much more than just pretty pictures – they’re important stepping stones that forecast what we can expect to see with Roman. We’ve never had a view like Roman’s before, so having a preview helps make sure we can make the most of this incredible mission when it launches.

Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!d

Not just because I am from Space City, but there is no better Tumblr than NASA.