exposomes

personal blog | INTJ | fledgling adult | bits of LOTR/HP/ACOTR/SOC/CK thrown in | prose i enjoy | people i find beautiful

[bigandlong]

If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

[jae-felidae]

Oh hey! Haven’t seen this in forever! Didn’t reblog it when it came across me before, not gonna skip it this time, I need some good vibes.

[gqa1]

Reblog In 5 seconds for good luck

[nullelemental]

​this worked last night lets go for round two

[helloitsbreeisnotonline]

I really need some good luck rn

[beardedmrbean]

[theman]

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

[dduane]

Always reblog the potato. 😄

[monarobot]

Bless me, potato of luck!

[bugbyte]

Here it comes again, do your thing, Potato.

[greenappleeyes]

Rant about fanfiction writing

I was just informed by my brother (who thinks he’s a better writer than anyone else because he has some fancy degree in writing) that fanfiction “doesn’t count” as “real writing” because you aren’t using your own “ideas.”

He doesn’t know that I write fanfiction. He probably wouldn’t have admitted his opinion if her did. But it has pretty much solidified that I will never tell anyone I know in person what I write.

I’ve already been told by several family members that my obsession with a “stupid tv show” is ridiculous and that I’m “too old” to fangirl.

Sigh. /rant

[thelightningstreak]

In Defense of Fanfiction

I am a professional writer and editor in real life. I have a double degree in English and writing and am currently in school once more to obtain a master’s degree. If your brother’s fancy writing degree was worth anything at all, he should be able to admit that the vast majority of all literature is in fact fanfiction of someone else’s story and its elements. In other words, no one’s idea is, by definition, original.

Let’s take a look at just a few examples to support my theory that some of the most important or well-known pieces of literature ever created qualify as fanfiction:

Ancient/Old Literature

·        Around 2000 BCE: The Epic of Gilgamesh was inspired as a fanfiction of a historical King of Uruk, mixed with Mesopotamian mythology. The story includes the character Utnapishtim, who lives through a world-wide flood by building a ship per the instructions of the god Enki and ultimately landing on a mountain in the Middle East, similar to Noah’s story from the Bible (dates for the book of Genesis vary anywhere from 1400 BCE to 800 BCE). Many historians suggest that the story of Noah was directly inspired by Gilgamesh’s story of Utnapishtim. Other historians suggest the two were simply inspired by a similar source. Either way, there’s too many startling overlaps to classify Utnapishtim and Noah as only a coincidence.

·        20-ish BCE: The Roman author Virgil wrote The Aeneid, which is a direct sequel to the previously created epic The Iliad attributed to Greek bard Homer. Virgil was also known for writing pastoral poems based off and inspired by the work of the great poet Theocritus (280 BCE). As a fun addition, Theocritus himself was known for rewriting the cyclops villain (Polyphemus) of Homer’s Odyssey into a love-sick idiot in his work, Idyll XI.

Medieval Era (500-1500-ish CE)

·        700-1000: The Alphabet of ben Sirach was an anonymous Hebrew collection of satires that included a parody of the biblical Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The story gave Adam a totally different wife by the name of Lilith, the character of which was inspired by Babylonian mythology. The whole of the collection is additionally wrapped in a fictional account of telling the stories to the historical figure of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar—another real person fanfiction of a celebrity from that time.

·        Around 1000: The world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, inspired the massive outpouring of Japanese Noh theater plays involving characters from the novel, such as Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), which has been attributed to a few people (Zeami Motokiyo and Inuo). This play appropriates the Lady Aoi from Shikibu’s psychological novel to explore her death and is only one example of the available fanfictions of the novel.

·        1308-1320: Dante’s Divine Comedy (known most famously for the Inferno) is a literal OC self-insertion of the Italian Dante Alighieri himself into the hell, purgatory and heaven from Catholic / biblical texts. Its format is in an epic, in an attempt to outdo the Aeneid and Iliad before it. It also includes an insertion of a ghostly Virgil, who copied the Iliad to write the Aeneid. Furthermore, Dante’s work includes insertions of real historical people that Dante didn’t like. It’s possibly the most self-indulgent fanfiction ever created while also being named one of the greatest poems in literature.

·        1392: Geoffrey Chaucer (known as the father of English literature) wrote a  famous collection called The Canterbury Tales. The collection takes its basic format and inspiration from Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (written in 1351). It’s suggested that some of the tales Chaucer uses actually originated from Boccaccio’s work.

Renaissance Era (1550-1660-ish CE)

·        1590: English poet Edmund Spenser borrowed the legend of Arthur of the Round Table in his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In it, Arthur is pretty love-sick over the fairy queen.

·        1597: English playwright Shakespeare borrowed various mythologies and historical figures and mixed them together. Not even his most popular play, Romeo and Juliet, was original. He took the idea from a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, called, “The Tragicall Hystorye of Romeus and Iuliet.” Even more interesting, Brooke had taken his idea from the 1554 Giulietta e Romeo by Italian author Matteo Bandello. (Shakespeare repeatedly sourced other people’s ideas or historical existence for his plays.)

Enlightenment Era (1660-1789)

·        1667: English poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, a fanfiction epic of the biblical story in the book of Genesis about the fall of creation and humankind into imperfection.

·        1712: English poet Alexander Pope wrote a mock-heroic epic called the Rape of the Lock to make fun of all the serious epic writers before him, borrowing such images as the way epic warriors put on armor and connecting it to the way rich people put on rich clothing and jewelry. He used other standard epic elements as repeated throughout The Iliad, Aeneid, and so forth.

·        1759: French writer and inventor, Voltaire, wrote a satire Candide. It borrowed various elements from Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales from the Islamic Golden Age.

Romantic Era (1789-1850)

·        1819: In Don Juan, English poet Lord Byron took the pre-dated legend of Don Juan, which was about a man who seduced a lot of women, and reversed the original plot so that Don Juan ended up seduced by a lot of women.

·        1820: English poet John Keats wrote a poem as a retelling of the Greek mythological creature called Lamia, which was a half-woman and half-monster (description varies depending on the Greek source). A lot of his works borrowed heavily from Greek mythology and literature, and he idolized the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, to a point where his first work was called, “Imitation of Spenser” (1814). In it, he borrowed various images from Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene.

·        1843: English writer Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, based off the various stories compiled in the 1841 and 1842 The Lowell Offering, a publication magazine written by a group of intellectual but mostly anonymous women. He borrowed the certain pieces of plot, language, and descriptions for Scrooge’s ghostly encounters from the stories “A Visit from Hope” (anonymous), “Happiness” (anonymous), and “Memory and Hope” (by someone named Ellen). A Christmas Carol is additionally littered with biblical allusions all over the place.

·        1844: French writer Alexander Dumas borrowed The Three Musketeers, as well as many of the story’s side-characters, from The Memoirs of Monsieur d'Artagnan by French author Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. He didn’t even change the names or who the villain, the Cardinal, was.

·        1845: American author Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, in which he has the mythical Scheherazade from the Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights telling another story about the legendary Sinbad the Sailor.  

·        1861: Hungarian author Imre Madach wrote The Tragedy of Man, which reverses the biblical moral principles of God and Satan: In this story, God is the violent and evil ruler, and Satan is the jaded/trickster victim just trying to open humanity’s eyes to the truth.  

Modern Era (1900ish-1950s)

·        1922: Irish novelist James Joyce wrote his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses, which was based off of Homer’s Odyssey, to a point where he took the characters and simply renamed them, as well as aligned the structure of his book to the various episodes in Homer’s work.

·        1930: The Nancy Drew series was created under the penname Carolyn Keene, who did not exist. Instead, an American man named Edward Stratemeyer would write three pages of a story, then send it to one of several ghostwriters who wanted to write Nancy Drew. The ghostwriter would take the story and expand it. The anonymous group of ghostwriters all writing about the same character still exists today. Each individual ghostwriter has made changes to Nancy’s personality, looks, and age, as well as the type of plots said character engages in.

·        1937: English writer JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. He borrowed the names of characters and places after those seen in the Icelandic sagas Poetic Edda and Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. Tolkien admitted he based the physical appearance of Gandalf off of the Norse god Odin. He modeled the character of Aragorn directly after Beowulf, from the old English epic (700-1000 BCE) Beowulf. Aragorn himself even paraphrases the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Wanderer,” as an example of a verse created by his people of Rohan. Another fun fact is that Tolkien specifically borrowed the phrase “my precious,” from a Middle English poem called Pearl. Additionally, Tolkien was a big fan of romantic prose/poetry writer William Morris and wanted to write like him, so he borrowed a lot of phrases, aesthetics, and even names from such works like the 1888 The House of the Wolfings by Morris, including the place called “Mirkwood.” Of curious note is that Morris’s work was massively influenced by Virgil’s Aeneid.

·        1938: African-American author Richard Wright wrote a collection of stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, with an obvious borrowing of the title from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.

·        1930s-present: DC and Marvel comics mostly just updated the mythological gods and goddesses for a modern era, appropriating their names, special relics, and abilities for their heroes, and then mixing them with some modern-day cover identifies. As an example, Wonder Woman was originally a nod to the Greek goddess Diana, a nod to the female Amazon warriors, and a redesigned image of Rosie the Riveter. As another example, the Flash is a reproduction of the Greek god Hermes, his winged helmet further clarifying the connection. Even the name Superman was not entirely original. 1938 Illustrator of Superman, Joe Shuster, took the name “Superman” from the German “Ubermensh,” a term coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As a final example, sometimes the appropriation from mythology is incredibly obvious, as in the case of Thor.

·        1949: English author George Orwell reviewed a book called We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. He wrote a rave review on it and declared that he would try to write something similar, which ultimately became 1984, sharing many similar plot points and concepts while bringing the story of We into a more realistic environment. The novel We also inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, for which Vonnegut admitted he also borrowed concepts from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

·        1950s: The Chronicles of Narnia by British author C.S. Lewis was based on biblical stories conveyed through various mythological elements as well.

Postmodern Era (1950s-Present, debatably)

·        1977: African-American author, Toni Morrison, wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Song of Solomon, which took its title name, as well as the names of several characters and plot points, from the Bible.

·        1988: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammed. Its title is a direct reference to controversial verses once placed in the Quran but then removed. These highly controversial and sensitive connections to Islamic and Old Testament personalities of Gabriel and Satan resulted in the banning of Rushdie’s book from several regions.  

·        1997-2007: The Harry Potter series by British author JK Rowling borrows heavily from historical alchemy, including the age-old legend of the philosopher’s stone and the 1652 book Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, which was about the medicinal and occult properties of plants, which helped her build how magic was used in her stories. Rowling also admits the 1652 book inspired many of the character’s names. She appropriates several historical figures as well for her own purposes (as a sort of real-person fanfiction), including references to alchemists Nicolas Flammel and Paracelsus. She even admits to, while writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, dreaming about Flammel showing her how to make a philosopher’s stone.

·        2003: American author Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its twisting conspiracies are based almost entirely on the books of Margaret Starbird, most of which were written between 1993 and 2003.

·        2009:  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by American author Seth Grahame-Smith, is a rehashing of Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice. But with zombies.

·        2015: American writer of critically acclaimed The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, claims that she has posted anonymous fanfictions of her own novel, as well as at least four Supernatural fanfics, being a huge fan of the show and of the paranormal.

As a professionally educated and trained writer and editor myself, I had to study the intertextualities of several of the pieces I mentioned above. But this is not an exhaustive world list by any means and is missing some other fantastic and influential writers—I’ve included only what has come to my mind in a short time. Plots and characters and ideas have been largely passed around throughout the history of literature. Without fanfiction, a solid portion of well-known literature would not exist.   

In fact, many authors and even inventors will say that there is no such thing as an original idea. Certain pieces get touted as creative because they combine previously suggested elements in a different or thought-provoking way. (Don’t even get me started on how science fiction is a driving force behind many scientific advancements today!)

If you’re writing fanfiction, then you’re participating in a tradition that spans millennia. There is no piece of literature created in some “original” vacuum. That is precisely why literary critics, and those who have professionally studied fiction in an academic setting, use the word “intertextuality” to describe how works of fiction are ultimately interrelated in some way or another.

Therefore, fanfiction is the legacy of literature. If Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Keats, Poe, Dickens, Tolkien, and Brown can write fanfiction about and expand other people’s works, you can too. So the next time someone tells you to stop writing fanfiction, or tells you that it’s not a valid form of art, tell them that they obviously have never read the most important historical works of fiction, or even many popular modern stories, which are all rehashed fanfiction stories, borrowing characters and names and setting and even syntax.  Rant written for @greenappleeyes and everyone else unfairly shamed for writing fanfiction. Content was retrieved from my own class notes, as well as publically available online interviews and articles. 

[greenbergsays]

Anyone who wants to say that fanfiction isn’t “real writing” can fucking FIGHT ME

[prismatic-bell]

Neil Gaiman will straight up tell you he writes fanfiction.

[samatedeansbroccoli]

A friend of mine who is a professional editor once told me that they find fanfiction writers tend to take more care with their story and their worldbuilding, and just overall tend to have better engaging stories. And I’ve noticed that myself, having beta read both original stories and fanfiction.

[humorblr]

Dame Maggie Smith as Lady Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey (2019)

[deadpoetwilde]

dear god the sheer magic of being so invested in a book you just sit and read half of it feverishly without any ability to stop, just gulping down word after word like it's water in a desert and your eyes aren't fast enough for your mind and when you reach the last page you look up and realize you're not decades and miles away but in the space of your own room,,,, truly unmatched by any other human experience

[books]

Absolutely magical.

[a1-b2c3-deactivated20230114]

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

[wearethesparkk]

I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

So many missed opportunities with cool ass things on Earth, Lucasfilms smh…

[memcjo]

Earth is effing amazing!

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tianzi Mountains, China

[bunjywunjy]

these would make amazing Star Wars planets OR fantasy material:

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

anyway I really like caves thanks for coming to my ted talk

[whattywhatwhat]

This post just made my day.  How gorgeous our planet is.  Please vote the idiots out so we can keep inhabiting it.  We talk about saving the planet, but it’s really us that we’re trying to save.  The planet will go on without us with no problem at all.  It will recover, eventually, from a lot of the damage we’ve done. Probably not all, but a lot. We however, are not going to survive if we keep going the way we are.  Vote them out.  Please.  Start with the racist dog catcher and the bigoted town manager or whomever you have locally, and work your way  up.  That’s exactly how they got power.  They started small and worked their way up until now they are systematically destroying our country and our democracy with their perverted view of how things should be.  

[captainlattes-deactivated202008]

Turn on/off: pining

Let me tell you something, friend. Come closer. Let me pour you a beverage of choice (I’d go with rich black tea and biscuits, since we’ve both been oh so very ineffable lately) and tell you a not particularly well-guarded secret.

Pining is so my jam it feels so good sometimes it nearly hurts. Pining is very possibly the best trope of all, when done right. Pining usually gives you the priceless chance to explore all shades of devotion, of breath-taking, lip-biting, brain-scattering desire, of delicious heartache. It gives you the chance to describe the soft awe we should all be treated with by our significant other - a background marvel at the privilege of being chosen again and again by our lover. Pining is torture and distress and release and redemption all wrapped in one, possibly hilarious, seriously adorable, heart-wrenching package.

Yes, I have really strong feelings about pining.

And there are so many - so many -  ways to do it right. Mutual pining – two dorks growing from uneasy acquaintances to bickering friends to basically soul mates and still not seeing the other is dying at every shared touch and lingering look just as much as they are? Yes, please. Would you like a side of fake dating to go with it - of course I would. The whole torturous dance of I’m not good enough for thems and clandestine brushing of hands and disgruntled friends being one step from slamming their heads together in a half-hearted final effort to make them work this out - I’d take that and a coke, thank you.

But also - long-term pining. Victorian-style pining, slow and simmering and catching fire in the cracks between things - the sidelong glances, the heartbeat-long lingering of eyes on the curve of lips, the inch of space left between hands: desire built out of small absences. Devotion and admiration and yearning growing for years, centuries, winding up tight enough to snap lungs, and yet - if it’s the right kind of pining, the best kind - morphing into the sublime: a moment when the piner would make their beloved laugh, or lovingly stare at them being their silly self, and be speared through the hearth by the thought, Oh yes: Yes, please, this, forever. Just let them thrive, and be happy, and let me stay here to see them be happy. If I can never have anything else, anything more, I would still take this any day of my life.

This is the climax of pining: the realization that living with this ache is miserable and occasionally absolutely fucking shitty, but not having it - not having them in your life, no matter in what capacity - wouldn’t be miserable: it would be simply impossible to conceive. Unfathomable like the airless darkness between stars. And call me a sap, but that’s really one of the purest, most selfless types of love that humans (or things that work roughly like humans when it comes to feelings and aching and other complicated stuff) are able to feel.

And of course - I’m utter trash for the release, too. A first kiss, the beloved leaning in and seeking touch and pouring buckets of love onto the piner, pinning them to the ground with the sheer enormity of what’s happening. The piner shivering and shattering and being held together by nothing but the arms around them, until they stop reeling from the vertigo of being loved back. I adore the way the utter simplicity of one hand lacing fingers with another or a head pressed to a shoulder can grow to such brightness, grow coruscating, if the waiting was done right.

On a slight less romantic note - because occasionally my salty inner gremlin claws its way to the surface - one of the reasons I love pining so much is that it works only if you leave the object of your desire completely free. You can yearn for them; you can sigh over them and agonize over every interaction you’ve ever had and the way that one time they asked you if you wanted ketchup or mayo on your fries, and you can grow half-mad with longing whenever they’re away, but - you never do a single thing to keep them from enjoying their lives, or from meeting people, or from doing their job. If you do that - if you’re trying to manhandle your beloved so they would stay in the carefully cutout of Perfection you’ve out them into and never grow, never change - then that’s not pining. That’s manipulative and disrespectful and not even in the same realm of anything approximately romantic. (Choosing the parts of a person that you fall in love with and trying to methodically make them excise the rest is plain evil.)

Send me a trope or a kink and I’ll rate it as turn on/turn off!

[nildespirandum]

A Carol of Final Chances - An Incubus (and Angelic) Loki AU - Chapter two is up!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17003592/chapters/40187186 

So, if I could make a request of anyone who is following me who likes this story or the first two in the series if they could reblog this, since I am apparently in Tumblr limbo while they review my apparently too naughtiness.  Thanks.

“Nora sat up stretching, feeling nearly rested for the first time in weeks.  Maybe months.

“That aqua regia was good stuff. Weird that she didn’t have a hangover.   

“She also realized that her bed wasn’t listing slightly to the front or shifting precariously on the stack of books she was using in place of the broken leg.  And that the sheets were fresh, also smelling faintly of lilies of the valley and incense - not a combination she’d smelled before but it was quite beautiful. They weren’t any sheets she recognized, nor the piles of fluffy pillows, all trimmed with gauzy flounces.

“Stretching more and confused, she noticed something else.

“Not only was her hair brushed and laying over her shoulders, perfect and gleaming like satin, but she was dressed in a long white nightgown made of the softest cotton, trimmed in swaths of silken lace, with a very high, buttoned neckline.  It was made of acres and acres of material. It was like a highly romantic snuggy.”

[hobbit-hole]

if i had to get in a fistfight with any member of the fellowship it would be Frodo because i would easily win

[hobbit-hole]

all i am saying is that he would ostensibly be the easiest one to take on in a fight given that he’s like three feet tall and has led a life of (physical) leisure compared to all of the others due to his standing as a gentlehobbit

legolas, aragorn, and gimli are all used to combat, sam works as a gardener, merry and pippin often gallivant off and get into mischief so they have the advantage of experience in whatever it is they’ve gotten up to/would possibly fight dirty, gandalf is gandalf so while weapons are out of the question i suppose that depends on if magic is involved. i don’t think i could take him without magic even if he IS old because he’s a very large guy, but maybe

it would be my knuckles against Frodo’s baby soft poet hands, plus i’ve got the additional height and fighting experience. i just think that he would be the easiest to win against in hand-to-hand combat out of the rest of them. also he isn’t real so he can’t offer a rebuttal to my claim

[penny-anna]

you’re absolutely correct BUT wanting to fight Frodo makes you a monster D:

[hobbit-hole]

this has nothing to do with WANTING to fight Frodo, i just think he would be easiest for me to beat in a fight with no weapons. unless he utilized his very large feet, but i think he’s too polite to do that because it’s a fist fight and that would be considered playing dirty

[penny-anna]

for someone who doesn’t want to fight Frodo you sure have put a lot of thought into fighting Frodo……….

[animate-mush]

OP is wrong though: you fight Pippin.

First off, Pippin has it coming, so you won’t be fighting your conscience at the same time.

Secondly, Pippin is a spoiled rich kid. He’s no less gentry than Frodo is, but Frodo works out and is shown to have better stamina, at least at the outset. Pippin is also both the stupidest and the slowest of the hobbits. They both nearly beat one (1) troll, so that’s comparable, but Pippin appears not to have got a single hit in against the orcs that captured them while Merry was cutting off hands like a boss. Pippin also straight-up tell Bergil that he’s not a fighter.

Also there’s a nonzero chance that Frodo will just straight up curse you (if the guilt of fighting Frodo isn’t enough if a curse by itself).

And, of course, if you try to fight Frodo, you will 100% end up fighting Sam, and he will wreck you (and you’ll deserve it, you monster)

[penny-anna]

Also: if you fight Frodo you’ll have a very angry Sam & possibly also the entire Fellowship to deal with BUT if you fight Pippin they will probably cheer you on.

[westrons-deactivated20200930]

Bold of you to assume one could attempt to fight Pippin and NOT instantly be killed by Boromir.

[feynites]

So here’s the thing - you absolutely DO NOT want to try and fight Frodo or Pippin because they are going to be protected by the rest of the Fellowship, which basically exists to stop asshole Big People from picking on the hobbits. Folk might talk a big game but when the chips are down, you are not going to lay a single hand on any of the hobbits. Either you’ll find yourself immediately fighting all four of them or else you’ll move to land your first hit and suddenly Aragorn will side-tackle you into the trees. And he probably hits like a freight train tbh.

So here’s what you do:

You fight Legolas.

The thing about fist-fighting Legolas of course is that you will lose. This is not a fight you’re gonna win no matter what. But Legolas has his standing competition with Gimli, so once the challenge is issued, he’s not gonna let anyone else step in and fight you either. No one is liable to volunteer on his behalf, either, so you will only end up fighting the one member of the fellowship. If you are lucky he might also take his shirt off. Bonus!

Anyway.

Legolas will mop the floor with you, but he’s also already convinced you’re weaker than him anyway because you’re not an elf, so he’s gonna go kind of easy on you. And when you lose he will be all snide and superior about it, which means everyone in the fellowship is gonna sympathize with you, and Gimli will probably challenge him on your behalf afterwards, but here’s the key thing:

You will have lost a fist-fight to an immortal warrior prince.

That’s a way better loss to cop to than that time you tried to fistfight a pudgy gentlehobbit and got beaten to the point of unconsciousness by his gardener, yeah?

[nasa]

May the 4th Be With You

Happy May the 4th! 

How many connections does America’s space program have with the fictional world of Star Wars? More than you might think…

Join us as we highlight a few of the real-world TIE-ins between us and Star Wars:

Space Laser

Lasers in space sounds like something straight out of Star Wars, but it’s also a reality for us. Our own GEDI (yes, like Jedi) instrument will launch later this year to the International Space Station.

GEDI stands for the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar. It will study the height of trees and forests, using three lasers split into eight tracks, and create a 3D map of forests around the planet.

With GEDI’s new tree maps, we’ll get a better understanding of how much carbon is stored in forests all over Earth, and how forests will be able to absorb increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Jedi knights may help protect a galaxy far, far away, but our GEDI will help us study and understand forest changes right here on Earth.

Another JEDI

There’s another Jedi in town and it happens to be orbiting the planet Jupiter. Our Juno spacecraft, which arrived at the gas giant in July 2016, has an instrument on board that goes by the name of JEDI - the Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument. 

While it doesn’t use a light saber or channel “the force”, it does measure high-energy particles near Jupiter. Data collected with the JEDI instrument will help us understand how the energy of Jupiter’s rotation is being funneled into its atmosphere and magnetosphere. 

Death Star Moon

We know what you’re thinking…”That’s no moon.” But actually, it is! This is a real picture taken by our Cassini spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Mimas. In this view taken on Cassini’s closest-ever flyby of Mimas, the large Herschel Crater dominates, making the moon look like the Death Star. Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide and covers most of the right of this image. 

We Actually Do Have the Droids You’re Looking For

We have robots roving and exploring all over the solar system, but it’s our own “R2” that’s most likely to resonate with Star Wars fans. Robonaut 2, launched in 2011, is working along side humans on board the International Space Station, and may eventually help with spacewalks too dangerous for humans. Incidentally, an earlier version of Robonaut bore a strong “facial” resemblance to enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett.

Another “droid” seen on the space station was directly inspired by the saga. In 1999, then Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor David Miller, showed the original 1977 Star Wars to his students on their first day of class. After the scene where hero Luke Skywalker learns lightsaber skills by sparring with a floating droid “remotes” on the Millennium Falcon, Miller stood up and pointed: “I want you to build me some of those.”

The result was “SPHERES,” or Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites.  Originally designed to test spacecraft rendezvous and docking maneuvers, the bowling-ball size mini-satellites can now be powered by smart phones.

A few more TIE ins…

When space shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station after 2007’s STS-117 mission, it caught a view of the station that looked to some like a TIE fighter. 

The “TIE-ins” go beyond casual resemblance to real engineering. We already use actual ion engines (“TIE” stands for “Twin Ion Engines”) on spacecraft like Dawn, currently orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres. In fact, Dawn goes one better with three ion engines. 

Want more Star Wars connections? Check out THIS Tumblr to learn about the REAL planets we’ve found outside our solar system that resemble planets from the movie. 

Take THIS quiz to see if you know more about the Milky Way galaxy or a galaxy far, far away. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

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NGC 6960: The Witchs Broom Nebula via NASA https://ift.tt/2HgwHV1

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“You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled—not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it.”

—Leigh Bardugo

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This quote arose from my own experiences with depression and it’s been really beautiful to see it cropping up in the tags.

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Written excerpt featured in Margaret Atwood’s preface of “Negotiating with the Dead,” (x)

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