Sher

Miraculous Ladybug blog, love square | pofile picture by salty-french-fry | 

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[adhd-alien]

42 days to go!!! So happy with how the cover turned out, posting a making-of soon! Pre-order available in most book stores: https://linktr.ee/adhdalien (Literally, they even have this in Thalia in Germany etc???!!)

[nasa]

Meet Dr. Nancy Grace Roman

A photo of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman holding a model of the Hubble Space Telescope.

You have to be a pretty big deal for NASA to name a space telescope after you, and that is certainly the case for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman — our Roman Space Telescope’s namesake. She’s sometimes called the “mother of Hubble,” but she’s really the mother of all space-based observatories and NASA science in general. As NASA’s first chief astronomer, Dr. Roman's vision and leadership supercharged space science and helped make NASA the world-class scientific institution it is today.

Nancy Grace Roman as a young child.

Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16, 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee. She was naturally curious about the world, a trait she attributed to taking nature walks with her mother as a child. By seventh grade, she had decided that she was going to be an astronomer. 

She later recounted, “I certainly did not receive any encouragement. I was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists.”

A 1972 photo of Dr. Roman at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Nancy received her bachelor’s in astronomy from Swarthmore College in 1946 and her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949. She specialized in spectral classification, which involves spreading starlight out into a rainbow to see the individual colors. She would decode these rainbows to learn about the temperature and brightness of the stars, and their distances and movements.

In 1959, just six months after NASA was founded, someone at the agency asked Dr. Roman if she knew someone who might be interested in creating a space-based astronomy program. She sure did — she applied for the job herself, and she got it!

Dr. Roman works with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO).

Creating a whole space program from scratch was no small feat. Dr. Roman quickly set her sights on the stars, determined to make space-based telescopes a reality.

Scientists had been batting around the idea of Hubble for generations. Today, after more than three decades in orbit and thousands of discoveries, it’s hard to believe that Hubble was ever a contentious idea. But in the mid-20th century, a budget-starved NASA and a post-World War II government were hesitant to follow the ambitious ideal of a giant new telescope.

But Dr. Roman knew how transformative it would be to observe the cosmos from above Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which blurs images from even the best ground-based telescopes. So she gathered astronomers from around the country and sat them down in a room with NASA engineers to hash out the possibilities. 

Then she championed the idea to Congress, saying that “for the price of one night at the movies each year, each American would receive 15 years of exciting discoveries.” (And she actually undersold it, since we’ve now received over 36 years of discoveries from Hubble!)

In this 1965 photo, Dr. Roman (center) conducts a demonstration with Smith College students during a visit to NASA.

With leadership experience stretching back to at least the fifth or sixth grade, when she organized her friends into an astronomy club, Dr. Roman paired a personable approach with unwavering commitment to the mission, regardless of who or what stood in her way. And now we have her to thank for not just Hubble but for every other space telescope that has followed.

A portrait of Dr. Roman with the Stratoscope II balloon in the background.

In less than a month, the observatory named in Dr. Roman’s honor will journey to the heavens to transform our view of the universe. Read more about the woman behind the mission’s name here: https://science.nasa.gov/people/nancy-roman/. Follow along with Roman’s road to launch at nasa.gov/roman, and virtually tour the Roman observatory here.

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

[shubbabang]

its not funny but i do think about it a lot

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

This made me think about this panel from Calvin and Hobbes:

But unlike the adult in this strip, Calvin’s dad actually APOLOGIZED for yelling at him when he saw how guilty his kid was:

[ijustliketoreadstuff]

Families

One thing I'm really glad season 6 is doing is showing different family dynamics and that not all families are loving and supportive, so many young people out their are going through circumstances with their families that only ever seem to be getting worse, but amidst it all, we get to see that these characters try to face a hard line many people would rather not face, which is that they are not responsible for the things that hurt them in their childhoods, but they are responsible for what they can do with their lives now.

Nino has a mother and father who no longer share the same love for each other they had in the past, they fight every day, letting their emotions run wild, unable to cooperate to make a decision together and failing to see that their children are in the room listening to every word they yell out. Nino dislikes that his parents fight, but he had fallen into a state of denial over the relationship between his parents, wanting to believe they still love each other as he carries the heavy burden of shielding his little brother from the fear of their parents possibly divorcing, all the while struggling to deal with it himself too to the point that he quickly projects his fears onto his own relationship with Alya. Nino was so afraid of one little argument potentially leading to a lifetime of discourse that he was willing to pretend to like everything Alya likes to avoid arguing, feeling that despite not having any control in helping his parents get along, he does have control in connecting with Alya and in turn helping his friends connect better to never fall down the same path as his parents. However, by the end of the episode, Nino comes to the sad realization that he needs to let his parents' relationship run its course and let it end. As disheartening as it was for him to not be able to help save his parents' relationship, what was happening between his parents was never his or his little brother's fault and neither was it their responsibility to fix. While they would have loved for their parents to work things out to stay together, it was only when they remained tied to one another that they were becoming terrible people no one in the family liked. It wasn't until his parents were finally agreeing on one thing, to divorce, that Nino noticed some stability returning to the house, choices were being made, plans were being set and although it would take him and his brother getting used to going back and forth between his mother and father, at the very least he can feel at ease in knowing he could finally leave his room without hearing arguing on the other side of the door.

Ivan has a father with a deep criminal and supervillain background, his mother did too, but despite not agreeing with what his father said or did throughout his life, Ivan was kind and couldn't help but still have love for him, visiting him in prison when the opportunity came along, but all the while wishing his father could have followed a better path to be the parent he wanted to look up to as a role model. As much as Ivan did not like his fathers idea of taking advantage of Ms. Bustier's program to steal the Mona Lisa, saying no was difficult considering crime was the only way he could connect with his father and that such a refusal was essentially him talking back to his dad. Sure the heists failure and the heroes reasoning over Raul's akumatization allowed him to stay in Ms. Bustier's new chance program, but it was Ivan who came to the realization that it was ok to not easily forgive his father for being so selfish and nearly ruining the program that would give him a chance to leave his life of crime behind, a program no doubt many people in prison were also depending on to get a fresh start and build better lives for themselves. Ivan will always love his father, but at the end of the "El Toro de la Piedra" episode, Ivan accepted that his dad had to be left to take responsibility for his own problems and promises. Despite being family, it was ok to put some boundaries in place between him and his dad, that being that he will always love his family, but their families cycle had to end, and it would end the moment Ivan decided to step away from his parents shadow and not participate in the chaos they were used to living in. While that choice made Ivan seem like a villain to his father, a weakling who abandoned his family at a time he was asked to do something, in truth it meant Ivan was stronger than his father and all those before him in the family ever were, by making the choice that following his own gentler path meant his parents were not the ones in his life to look up to.

Kagami came to learn of one very cruel fact of life, that not all children are born because their parents wanted a child to love. Kagami grew up with all the money and resources in the world, she was given an education not many are able to have and the way she carried herself with such discipline and manners made her seem like the perfect daughter any person would want. But exitence alone in her family was measured by perfection and the more Kagami noticed other families carried each other with love and support, always willing to be there to give hugs to show that they cared, was all the more Kagami realized love didn't exist in her family and may not have been present when Tomoe used the peacock miraculous to create her. Tomoe wanted a child to fulfill her own selfish desires of having a perfect child that would not be like anyone else, a child that would uphold the family name the way she intended, love had no place in their training or the lessons Kagami was taught. Kagami may still want to try and talk reason with Tomoe to convince her to change her ways, but the more Tomoe continues to be set in her ways, the more Kagami realizes that the best thing she can do for their family and herself is to treat herself as someone who wants to carry a loving heart and not be the trophy her mother wants to show off. At the end of "The Dirtifiers", Tomoe believed that Kagami only accomplished creating such a giant storm to cover all of Paris because it was thanks to her strict training and education pushing her past her physical and mental limits, but it wasn't, it was because Kagami received the love and support of friends who considered her family that gave her the motivation to push past her limit and make that storm, helping her realize that although she can't choose the family she was born into, she can choose who in her life to consider her loving family.

[crownedinmarigolds]

I have a big folder on my desktop of inspirational pictures/memes/etc to keep me going so I shall share them with you here.

[3motionally3xhausted]

More Chat Blanc because do I even need to explain myself? It's Chat Blanc. He's sad blorbo.

Ignore that he's underwater without any kind of breathing mask

[partywithponies]

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

[partywithponies]

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

[partywithponies]

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

[dizzyghoast]

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case

[magmatagura]

Rusted Forbidden Zone

Félix stands alone in the untouched industrial forbidden zone.

[fieldexplores]

Never Learned - Gator Days

[twenty-fourth-order-simulacra]

...the alt text?

[virtualgirladvance]

i love alt text that itself is a part of the art

[celestial-fang]

Recommending some of my favorite non-English movies with beautiful visuals:

Farewell my Concubine (1996) 🇨🇳

The doomed relationship between a beautiful male China opera actor who is forced into a feminine role and his fellow star. Set against a backdrop of regime changes from the Republic Era, Japanese occupation to the modern PRC.

Gabbeh (1998) 🇮🇷 🇹🇯

Named after a type of Persian rug- the art form through which we experience a girl’s life, from her family’s nomadic culture to her romance and marriage.

The Silence (1996) 🇮🇷 🇹🇯

A blind boy who repairs instruments sees the world through music. Explores concepts of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) as seen in Rumi’s poetry. (Same director as above)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring（2003)🇰🇷

A young monk lives with his elderly master in a floating temple on a lake. We follow the seasons of his life, told via Buddhist symbolism and philosophy.

Death of a Beauty/ 美人之死 (1986) 🇨🇳

Based on an Uyghur folktale. A woman who was once renowned for her beauty now lives in an old castle, hiding her burned face even as the prince who loves her searches for her.

On the Silver Globe 🇵🇱

Surreal sci-fi film about space travelers who crash on a primitive planet, starting a religion among the inhabitants as divine figures even as they long for the heaven that is old earth. A ‘parody’ of the origins of the Abrahamic faiths(?)

[unwillingstars]

GOD I LOVE THEM THE PARALLELS ARE SCRATCHING MY BRAIN

[godblesskurt]

[godblesskurt]

[knight--error]

CANNOT take credit for these, my sister in law made them. Behold.

[magicratfingers]

i need this completed or ill die who is kitty?? WHO IS LYDIA

[fishing4stars]

@scyllas-revenge this has your name written all over it. twice.

[scyllas-revenge]

Ahh my two favorite things smushed together!!

[godblesskurt]

as op of this post this had me laughing truly out loud @scyllas-revenge

my bro in law: I hope they fold their gowns properly

[scyllas-revenge]

Hell yes I'm getting a good grade in reblogging

something that is normal to want and possible to achieve

[spacemomnephmoreau]

I gotta throw in a tag for @bethanydelleman because I hope you can hear this as clearly as I can!

[lytefoot]

@hillnerd

[elodieunderglass]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a group on an adventure must be in want of a hobbit.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So, lately I've been finding myself feeling... annoyed with very modern reimaginings of Greek myths being presented as like the "secretly TRUE versions of the myths before they were warped by the patriarchy."

Like, I don't really have an issue with #GirlBoss Persephone retellings (even if I find them a bit tired because they so often have to rely on villifying Demeter to do so.) But to act like that very modern interpretation of the character and story has any basis in the classical sources is just untrue, and it is frustrating because it refuses to engage with the difficult or uncomfortable aspects of stories that are 3000 years old. It refuses to engage with the cultural differences and history of these stories that still find ways to speak to us today. Instead it just seeks to sanitize and erase the bits that don't fit into our modern sensibilities.

But the one that *really* gets me is Medusa. Because as modern audiences, the idea that Medusa being turned into a monster was *punishment* by Athena for being *raped* by Poseidon is really upsetting. And I've seen people legitimately try to say that *actually* Athena would never do that. Athena was actually *protecting* Medusa by making her a monster so that she wouldn't be assaulted again. #feminism

But HERES THE THING- the entire idea that Medusa was transformed by Athena after being raped? COMES FROM FUCKING OVID.

(Ovid is a Roman writer who HEAVILY REIMAGINED the Greek myths in Metamorphoses because he was working with a Roman world view and political agenda.)

All EARLIER classical (and actually Greek) sources have Medusa being *born a Gorgon.* (whether the Gordons as a rule are beautiful or monsterous varies, and Hesoid does mention in the Theogny that Poseidon and Medusa had a thing, but he doesn't describe it as rape. But that they "lay in a meadow of soft flowers", and theres no description of her being transformed because of this.)

So like.

No.

no.

Obviously, the idea that there is some "true" Canon Orthodox version of these myths just...isn't true. That's just not how that worked.

But no. There is no classical support for any of that.

Thanks.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Side note- speaking of myths that have Athena just wildly lashing out at people- Ovid also may have just... invented the myth of Arachne.

We have 1 reference to Arachne that predates Ovid, from Virgil (Also Roman), and he doesn't name her. "The spider, hateful to Minerva, hangs in the doorway her loose-woven nets."

There is no surviving earlier Greek references or even Greek art depicting Arachne at all, at least that I can find reference to. 🤷‍♀️

Which, again, there is no "Greek Mythology Orthodoxy" or anything. Buuuuuuut.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So I just want to let yall know how deep of a rabbit hole I have fallen down.

So here is the question- did Ovid, or at least Romans around Ovids time if not Ovid directly, invent the myth of Arachne? Does it have any basis in Greek oral tradition at all?

And the answer seems to be...we have no idea. The lack of art seems particularly weird to me, right?

But like, ok, I found 1 website (a museum IN GREECE) that claims to have 1 vase from 500BCE which depicts the myth of Arachne.

But this is the vase.

Here is a scan of that image

... why has this been identified as Arachne and Athena? One of the women is larger (the one they have identified as Athena) but she doesn't have any of Athenas traditional iconography- the helmet the shield, even an owl. Anything. And why is that Arachne? There's no spiders, and the tapestry isn't detailed enough for illustrations to be seen. Unless I'm missing something, this is just a scene of 2 women weaving. Maybe with some funky proportions. Why not say it is Penelope and one of her slave girls? Or anyone else? Weaving was pretty popular.

But this isn't a well known or well studied piece. And I'm not an archeologist. What do I know?

But having proof of the Arachne myth from a Greek source in 500BCE would be super interesting, yeah?

So. What do you do when you're hyper-fixating at 11:30pm on an unknowable historical question?

I emailed the museum and asked.

I'll let you know if I find anything interesting.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So it's been a few months, and...to the best of my knowledge, this is just where we stand on this.

The museum never got back to me. I posed this question to a classics professor on TikTok who said basically the same thing - the references from Virgil and this specific vase seem to imply that there was *some* version of the myth that existed before Ovid.

But even he was like "...yeah, they are identifying this vase as Arachne but... it seems a bit speculative."

He also added that Arachne having a Greek name, not a Latin one, makes it more likely that Ovid was adapting something rather than just making it up himself (since he otherwise might have just used a Latin name?)

So. Unless someone digs up another villa or temple at some point and finds new evidence.... this is just... the state of things.

Which is kind of frustrating, but still very cool. If anything, it kinda hammers home HOW we, as modern audiences, know about these myths, how much of that tradition has been lost to time, and how we always need to be thoughtful about our sources and what assumptions we make based on them.

[honorthegods]

I find the assumption this weaving scene represents the competition of Athena and Arachne odd, to say the least, so I did some research.

Here is the description of Object CP 2038 by Gladys Davidson Weinberg and Saul S. Weinberg (1956):

See also: Williams, Charles Kaufman, J. Lawrence Angel, Peter Burns, and Joan E. Fisher. “Corinth, 1972: The Forum Area.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 42, no. 1 (1973): p. 13. https://doi.org/10.2307/147469.

Here's the description of the same vase from ASCSA: (https://ascsa.net/id/corinth/object/cp%202038)

woman to rt., weaving at vertical loom; long hair to below waist, wearing chiton and necklace; holds 2 rods. At rt. 2nd woman facing lt., standing on stool (?) with shorter hair, unbelted garment, holding 2 forked tools against loom. Loom: 2 uprights and horizontal cross-bar, loomweights holding warp threads, length of woven cloth at top with incised cross-hatching. Surface damaged to rt. of her: 3rd woman facing lt., possibly holding loomweights; 4th woman, very tall facing rt.; small 5th woman facing 4th; behind, 2nd loom like 1st.

As OP notes, there's nothing in this scene to relate it to the contest between Arachne and Athena. There are two looms and five women weaving, one of whom is apparently a child who has to stand on a stool to reach the weft.

Also, an aryballos is a container for perfume. It's hard to understand why such an object would be decorated with a cautionary tale, but makes better sense if the decoration is a domestic scene of women of various ages performing the normal household task of weaving.

I think that the Weinberg's interpretation of this scene is inaccurate.

I checked a few websites (the perseus.tufts.edu Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser, The Beazley Archive Pottery Database, the British Museum, and Wikimedia Commons - okay, not exhaustive, but still) and the only ancient depiction of the contest I could find is a frieze of Arachne and Minerva from the Forum of Nerva (built 85 - 97 C.E):

"Rome, Forum of Nerva, so-called "Colonnacce", detail of the frieze, scene with Arachne's punishment." Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RomaForoNervaColonnacceFregio2cAracne.jpg Image license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Interesting commentary on this section of the frieze and Ovid's myth here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/imperialfora/nerva/colonnacce.html

Good investigative work, OP!

If it's any consolation, I emailed a museum to ask about a particular object several years ago (it had been repatriated from the Getty and I was hoping they a photo) and never heard back from them, either.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Thank you! That's both validating and weirdly frustrating that this is the only Pre-Ovid depiction of the myth, and that it's so inconclusive at that.

I'm so interested in what the pre-Ovid version of this myth might have been like. His adaptations have a very specific thematic slant to them- the cruelty and foolishness of the powerful. As thinly veiled critiques of the political elite, he wasn't shy about radically changing the myths to suit that purpose.

So what would an Arachne story *without* that political goal be?

[fandomsandfeminism]

Thinking about this again.

I wish I could sit down with someone who identified that vase as an Arachne/Athena depiction and just....ask them.

Why was this identified as Arachne and Athena instead of, say Penelope and her slave girls? Which would seem to make more sense with some of the details?

[mafuyuh]

witch hat atelier | manga vs. anime

[retroscifiart]

Marc Hempel ‘Spaceman: Daydreaming Can Be Dangerous’. I originally posted only the first page of this brilliant comic. Now here is the full illustrated story. Scanned from short lived sci-fi magazine Questar, February 1980.

[70sscifiart]

I’m writing a science fiction art collection right now - gonna try to see if I can get this entire comic into it!

[tomirida]

Wake up babe new online game just dropped

Simulate language evolution through sound change; play puzzles or experiment with your own rules

1. The app generates a proto-language with its own vocabulary and phonology.

2. Sound change rules derive daughter languages and cognate sets.

3. You then try to reconstruct the proto-forms, like a historical linguist.