Annotation Of All The Known Globular Clusters In Messier 31 By Michael Van Doorn

Ed’s Lullaby Masterpost

Unanimated version here, stitched version here. End of project freedom is a great feeling…

last night i dreamed i was an orca, and my pod needed me to find out why there were no more fish in our part of the ocean, so i dove down really deep, to where i could draw spell circles on the ocean floor, and performed whale magic to find out.

i don’t remember why there weren’t any fish, but i think the whole point of this dream is that i was a whale wizard, and that’s basically awesome.

It was our destiny to walk in the light of other stars.

Available now for free download: "Herself"

Since tomorrow's the start of the Irish national holiday weekend with what many Irish people will refer to as The Day That's In It, this urban fantasy novella is for the next few days free for download from the Ebooks Direct store!

Set mostly in the Dublin of 2004, it contains Irish mythology, abused civic statuary, famous cemeteries, celebrated dead people, the much-mourned sushi place behind the Brown Thomas department store, seriously cranky deities, and the mysterious serial murders of numerous Fair Folk.

…By the way, though this isn't a Young Wizards work, it's set in the same universe. One scene unfolds in a space that'll be familiar to YW readers as "[the pub] where the wizards drink".

Interested?

Just head over here, shove a copy in the cart, and go through the checkout process. You won't be charged.

...And one other thing! Some of you will have seen our "Get Our Whole Store For $44!" offers, and for one reason or another haven't been able to avail yourself of them. Well, starting right now, our Tumblr folk have got another chance! (Ahead of everybody else, as the sale's not being announced to the general public on other platforms until midnight US/EST.) ...And you can even see the animated promo before everybody else! (Go on, try not to jig. I dare you.)

Details about how to get the "I Want Everything You've Got" package are over here:

Please note that if you get the Whole Store package, you won't need to download Herself separately: it's part of the package.

The usual frustrated note for our British friends: unfortunately we can't sell to you. It's a Brexit thing. Info about that is here. As always, our apologies.

And now for the jiggy bit!

NGC 4725, NGC 4747, and NGC 4712

hologram: Saturn’s rings, photographed by Cassini, 18th January 2007.

Images taken as Cassini moves from one side of the ring plane to the other, neatly showing how the rings look in reflected and transmitted light (brighter and darker, respectively).

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation: AgeOfDestruction.

whenever i see great meta like this, i feel the need for a reread <3

Some thoughts on Kit Rodriguez

So pretty much every time I re-read or re-listen to any part of the Young Wizards series, I discover new things about the books and myself in relation to them, despite the fact that I have been reading them for over half my life now. 

This morning I was walking back from yoga and listening to my audiobook of So You Want to Be a Wizard, and I was just at the part where Nita and Kit meet for the first time, and I was feeling all sorts of warm fuzzies and just wanting to jump into the novel and hug these kids and tell them that it really is going to be okay in the end because they will make it be okay, together.

And then I realized that I’d never, in ten years, thought about this first encounter from Kit’s perspective – or really thought at all about what Kit was doing before Nita came along. We know that he took the Oath about a month before meeting her, that he’s done a few small wizardries and they’ve worked, but he’s still getting bullied and the fact that even Nita knows about the recent bullying suggests that, if anything, it might have escalated since his taking of the Oath.

So put yourself in Kit’s shoes for a second. You’re smart, but you’re small and you don’t talk like anyone else, your teachers like you because you’re dedicated to your work but that only makes it harder to get along with everyone, you’re twelve years old and yet you don’t have any friends to go out and play with, so you wind up in the city on a weekend antique-hunting with your parents (horror of horrors), and you’re more or less trying to make yourself unseen in the back of the store while they haggle over the price of some armoire that you find to be, frankly, a little hideous. You’re looking halfheartedly through the meager collection of boos, the only things in this place worth a second glance in your opinion, and then suddenly one of them bites you and you think, “God, just my luck, could this day get any worse?”

And then you pull out the book. And you open it. And the universe holds its breath for a second. Exhales: slowly, cautiously. Watches to see what it is you’ll do.

You take the Oath before you leave the shop.

And then you wait. 

At first it’s not so bad. You’re light on your feet, heart fluttering in anticipation, can’t wait to get home to try some of this out.

A week later, you’ve done a few spells, nothing major, but you believe in the power now, the way you hadn’t allowed yourself to at first. You marvel in it, you spend all your free time sunk in the sensation of truly and deeply knowing the world around you in its own language. You talk to your dog, which in itself is sort of usual, but now your dog talks back.

But. There is always a but. Because the bullies are noticing that you’re happy, and they may not understand why, but they don’t approve. You say the wrong thing in class, correct one of them, high on the power the wizardry’s given you – only to find yourself, an hour later, with face pressed to asphalt, grit in your eyes, and the knowledge that even a wizard can’t do everything.

This is not the noble Ordeal the Manual talks about. This is just the pressure of the everyday, pushing and pulling you out of shape. And life’s starting to feel a bit like it did before you ever found that book. The wizardry works, but every night before bed when you check your status and it still says “probationary” you start to wonder if you’re ever going to have an Ordeal, or if maybe the Powers That Be are starting to regret the energy they expended on a beat-up broken-down kid like you.

You think, sometimes, about giving it up before They can take it away.

Every time, you say to yourself, not yet. Just one more shot. There’s always another spell to try, another chapter of the Manual to read. Maybe if you work harder the Ordeal will come. Maybe the hard work is the Ordeal. Maybe it’s only natural to feel these doubts – to wonder, at times, if you’re just dreaming it. To wish for someone with whom you could share that dream, so you could know that it’s real and that it’s really worth it.

When the girl appears, just as your spell has ground to a standstill, you’re terrified – you don’t know how to talk to girls! – but you also start to hope again. Because what if, all this time, she’s been what you were missing?

You spell with her and the world goes quiet and you know that nothing will ever be the same again and you are so unbelievably ready for that.

(Brief thought on Deep Wizardry ramifications of this potential Kit characterization behind the “read more,” since one of my followers has just started reading SYWTBAW and I don’t want to spoil her!)

Keep reading

Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own. 

rebloging from my main blog.

This is the first place I ever found Young Wizards fandom

And I don’t want to lose you, cousins, so I’ve made us a Lifeboat, if you will.

https://discord.gg/83Fz8KM

I’ve never heard of us having a discord server, but if an established one already exists, please someone link me.