#friendpresents

[sciencefordragons]

23, 37

oh my GOD this was so FUN

The first, a clandestine forest ritual! So named “we float on inches of air”:

https://pin.it/qwjrhugatav4ka

The second, within the theme ‘dark academia’! So named “the night class”:

https://pin.it/d5p3dqu2yoptr7

thank you for the ask, dearest!!

[sciencefordragons]

Top 5 dragons and top 5 science

ohohohohoHOOOO ~rubs hands together~ sO

DRAGONS (in no particular order of favoritism)

1.) The Kind People from Kill Six Billion Demons. They are a race of Servants created to be porters, couriers, and guards. The one below is Mammon, and he has been outcast from his kind due to his unnatural ambition. I’m…fully obsessed with this comic and I find Mammon’s backstory and position as a major god of the Seven-Part World fascinating.

2.) This person really has character creation nailed DOWN and it’s so impressive. I shout “BA!” to myself every once in awhile thinking about these guys. https://theveryworstthing.tumblr.com/post/182900691873/anoki-wanted-me-to-think-up-some-tiny-things-that

3.) all of the dragons drawn by Stutterhug, but most especially these two: https://stutterhug.tumblr.com/post/144309575002/ignition-trouble-full-disclosure-i-might-have

4.) I stumbled on this person’s art and I love their Rin so much, she’s small and wily and a big bastard: https://pocketss.tumblr.com/post/167851545251/is-there-anything-rin-wont-eat and https://pocketss.tumblr.com/post/167602882691/rin-is-small-and-bitter-and-bad-at-carrying

5.) Haku from Spirited Away, big soft river dragon boy:

I love pretty much anything that portrays dragons as friends, bc I think dragons would be friends.

NOW, SCIENCE (’m gonna try to make these not all astro but might not win)

1.) Okay so data sonification is super fucking cool, and some NASA scientists did this with an image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field! Almost all of the data we use in astronomy is visual, so it’s great for accessibility reasons that we’re thinking of other ways to interact with astro data!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Ci_YwfH04

2.) This video of a “cannonball pulsar”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pGXqrovaFo&list=PLVn7j0daoTIJ2u8yqVrJ5HmXFyHwgZKlk&index=2&t=0s

3.) okay so gravitational lensing is pretty sick. Gravitational lensing describes the effect a massive object in space has on the light that travels past it. Light is affected by gravity, so sometimes a heavy object bends the light from something behind it and changes its path. Thanks to this we can sometimes see light from objects directly behind something really heavy! This image shows how the path of light from a galaxy changes as it travels through space!

4.) The Event Horizon image taken just over a month ago. I don’t know how well it reached the general public that this was an incredible breakthrough: the array of radio telescopes that collected all the data to turn into this image covered the surface area of the entire earth! So like, imagine a telescope with a mirror the diameter of the earth, except radio astronomy is weird as hell. We took an actual picture of the shadow of a black hole. Any time we do anything that makes the universe a little clearer, my heart flutters a little.

5.) So I did a project on this once, there’s a really cool thing you can do to show what the large-scale structure of the universe looks like. If you look at an image of all the galaxies that can be detected in the sky without worrying about how far away from us they are, it looks like they’re pretty uniformly distributed across the sky. Maybe there are some clumps here or there, but not much. When you take redshift into account (you can sorta correlate redshift to distance from us, the observer), you can see that light matter in the universe actually gathers in filaments, like this:

Look at that!! You can see that galaxies (the green, yellow, and red parts) gather in filaments that stretch across massive distances, and in between them are what are called void bubbles!! There are some really interesting things that have been noticed from images like this one, namely that elliptical galaxies (aka the blobby ones) tend to be in the red areas, where a lot of galaxy mergers occur. Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way tend to be found far away from other galaxies. The theory is that elliptical galaxies have had their structure disrupted by crashing into other galaxies, whereas spiral galaxies still look like spirals because they haven’t crashed into other galaxies.

Thank you so much for this ask, this was so much fun!!!!

[sciencefordragons]

Automattic: Best item you’ve found at a yard sale/secondhand store? | Staff: Is there any advice you wish you’d listened to, but never did?

Automattic: WELL. Do YOU know the story of the long red pirate coat I found at goodwill for five dollars that has served me immensely well for several years? No?? We’ll go with no.

Look at this coat. Look at this outfit. My god. This was from my first LARP! How times have changed. This was so many years ago and I have Learned Some Things about costuming. But this COAT. What an absolute glory. This picture doesn’t do it justice.

Look upon baby Kira.

___

Staff: Oh goodness, probably. The thing that comes to mind is that brand of post that says the gays must submit to the mortifying experience of being known if they’re to find love and joy? Like you have to be vulnerable to find love? That’s actually really good advice. And something I’m struggling with right now!

This is a hard one! I think the way that I think of advice is sort of like how I think of a present someone has given me. Like I will most likely internalize it in some way. Though I also know when advice is trash and should be discarded immediately. I’m a dumbass bastard but like, a considerate one.

Thank you for the ask, dear!!

[sciencefordragons]

Ads, Automattic

Ads: Dumbest thing you’ve done for attention?

Oh god I really don’t know...probably something in high school, over a crush. Which of course is a very understandable thing to do, but even now I sometimes want to look baby me in the face and go, “do you know that you’re very impressive by yourself without pretending at anything and anyone would be lucky to have a conversation with you?”

Automattic: Best item you’ve found at a yard sale/secondhand store?

Let me think about this, because I think you’d probably guess my answer to be that floor-length red coat with the black velvet trim, and you’d be correct.

Actually...my current work table/desk cost $10 at a surplus store and it’s just like a woodshop table or something, but it’s turned into such a lovely space in my room and I’m just so pleased about it. Here is said desk, obviously covered in plants and other things.

Thank you for the ask, dearest!! <3

[sciencefordragons]

What would you wear as a vampire deity to dance the night away at the fae's royal masque in the garden of the castle ruins on the moon?

the LENGTHS i went to, okay here we GO

[sciencefordragons]

the Devil, the World

!!! well hello!!!

I already answered the devil’s prompt in the ask from eldritchwyrm, so I’ll refer you to that ask! (it should be just below this one)

the world: do you like waking up early?

I do! I have a hard time of it, though. I really like being awake when most of the world is still asleep, and the earlier I wake up the better I feel about tackling the coming day. I love the colors of the sunrise, especially out in the desert when you gotta take every not-bone-drying hour you can get. Mornings can just be a very soft time, and if I was better at my sleep habits I’d take advantage of them more.

Thank you so much for the ask!! <3

[sciencefordragons]

tarot questions -- the devil?

the devil: do you enjoy thunderstorms?

my DEAR, I am woefully ill-equipped to express how much I love thunderstorms. Like I wish I could somehow show everyone how wonderful the desert smells after/during a thunderstorm, it’s the most emotionally filling smell I’ve ever experienced. It feels like river mud is settling in your lungs and you could just sink into the ground and go back to what you were made of in the first place.

Best thunderstorm I’ve ever experienced was during the summer before senior year of high school. I was staying up really late, like 2am late, to work on an online physics class, and took a break to go walk around in the rain out the backdoor. The rain was very gentle but steady and felt surprisingly warm, and suddenly I looked to the northern bluffs and a massive, roaring rumble that sounded like the announcement of the arrival of the god of all creation went off and the entire sky went blinding white for a second. I took that as a sign that if I stayed outside any longer I would be vaporized on the spot and decided I wanted to live on in the safety of my house.

Thank you for this ask!!! <3

[sciencefordragons]

wheel of fortune: first three songs that come on shuffle? | death: what are three things you want to do before you die? | temperance: can you describe a strange dream you’ve had?

wheel of fortune: oh this is absolutely fascinating, so for reference I went into “Liked Songs” on Spotify, which I treat as a sort of “Listen Later” playlist

1.) Where’d U Go - Illenium/Said the Sky

2.) Some of My Best Friends are Windows - Squalloscope

3.) Better Than That - MARINA

death: I have a hard time thinking of my long-term future, but man, if it can be anything...

1.) Learn to play the guitar as beautifully as my favorite music artist, Yvette Young

2.) Adopt kids and teach them how to harbor hope.

3.) I’d love to go into space and just be able to see how small and fragile the earth is, but also be able to look out into the vastness of space in the clearest place to see it.

temperance:

I think the strangest one I’ve had was a horror dream, and it’s particularly strange because I had it more than once when I was small, like five or six years old. I was basically zooming through a sequence of darkened rooms, pausing over a movie theater and a living room in particular. In the movie theater, it looked like a crowd had just run out in a panic and there was stuff thrown all over the walls. I finally got stuck in the living room, and a shadow casts across the wall. I try to make myself move to hide behind the couch, but I’m too slow. The monster (that looks sort of grinch-like with tusks) comes in and goes to bite my head off, and then I wake up.

Thank you for this ask!!!