mrrrp? @blackosprey - Tumblr Blog

DELTARUNE

TODAYYYY

I am a grown ass adult and I still get nausea when I feel like I'm in trouble. They're gonna send me to the principals office and take away my toys for a week. Can you just fucking kill me instead of making me stew in my fucking anxiety

karvina

the really crazy thing about cooking is that once you practice it enough (for all the gamers reading this: "grind enough exp") your threshold for wuat counts as a low effort / depression / I Dont Really Want To Cook meal rises steadily and you can feel yourself becoming the kind of person whose "chill dinner" takes 1h45 and involves three pans

wonders-of-the-cosmos

M72 is a collection of stars, formally known as a globular cluster, located in the constellation Aquarius roughly 50,000 light-years from Earth. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives globular clusters their regular, spherical shape. There are roughly 150 known globular clusters associated with the Milky Way galaxy.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, G. Piotto, M. Libralato

druid-for-hire

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

ambrosial-sunshine

For the painting especially there’s a beauty in depicting some of our most advanced technology as synonymous with the most ancient. Very few people throughout history have had the privilege of seeing the face of Jupiter but many would recognize the sling thrower immediately.

milanesa42

Stolen from reddit kjjjj

rainyydoves

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

rainyydoves

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

gutterselkie

Me: ah shit, I misidentified that yellow rumped warbler as a female goldfinch, I should literally be hung at the gallows for this. I'm such an IDIOT

My friend, pointing at a vulture: check out that fucked up crow lol

redfagdiver

masteraqua

losing my shit over this line

iloveluxu

im going to go to hell for this probably

sparrowlucero

honestly i think a huge part of getting better at creature design is gaining an appreciation for "normal boring" animals and realizing that they also have evocative character designs that are just as good to draw from as tigers or deer or vultures or piranhas or anything else on the whole have deemed more charismatic or interesting looking in some way