I Have A 'fairest And Fallen - Greetings And Defiance' Coffee Mug, And I Needed/loved/was Inspired By

book character fancast for repfest: #5

Xolo Maridueña as Kit Rodriguez, Young Wizards by Diane Duane

Today’s Cards Against Errantry card!

Like this card? Wish you could use it in a real-life game with fellow cousins? Then make sure to get your badge (and reserve your room) for CrossingsCon 2016.

PART TWO AT LAST

okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.

i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.

all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!

feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.

thanks, cousins!

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. 

Getting to Crossingscon: International travel

Hopefully people have started thinking about getting their travel documents in order, but how they’re actually getting to Montréal is still a big question. We’ve summarized some options on how to get to Crossingscon 2019, hopefully they help you figure out how you’ll be getting to con.

Driving to Montréal - what license do I need?

Travellers from the US do not need anything more than a valid driver’s license (learner’s permits are not sufficient) to drive in Canada. Travellers from any other country who intend to drive in Canada need a driver’s license from their home country, as well as an international driving permit (IDP) also obtained in their home country.

One important thing to note is that it is illegal to drive anywhere in Canada without car insurance, even for travellers. Make sure you bring proof of insurance with you if you are driving to Canada.

Getting to Montréal by air

The only international airport in Montréal is Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL). Montréal-Trudeau has frequent direct flights from many cities in the US and Canada, and a few direct flights from certain European cities. Many North American airlines have flights to Montréal, however Air Canada has by far the most.

Getting to Montréal by land

Being a somewhat remote city, there are only a few main arteries to get to Montréal. Most travellers coming from northern or north-eastern US will find themselves routed through one of New York, Albany or Toronto. For those considering routing through Toronto, there are several coach busses and train lines that will get you there from locations like Buffalo, Rochester and Detroit.

Travelling by bus

A few coach bus companies service Montréal, notably Greyhound, TrailwaysNY, and the Canadian branch of Megabus. Both Greyhound and Trailways have similar routes, starting in New York and making stops in Albany and Plattsburgh before crossing the border. There is a Megabus route from Toronto to Montréal, however travellers from the US will need to find some way to get to Toronto first.

Travelling by train

There are two main train lines of interest for travelling to Montreal, the Amtrak Adirondack route (NYC-Montréal), and the Toronto-Montréal VIA rail route. The Adirondack train runs daily and the VIA multiple times a day, however it’s worth noting that the Adirondack train is substantially slower than several coach bus options (11.5 hours versus 9).

Getting to Montréal by worldgate

Unfortunately the closest major gating complexes are located in Toronto and New York, as Montréal doesn’t quite have the population for gates to spawn naturally. Travellers who are planning to worldgate will need to perform their own transport spell, or use one of the more mundane forms of transport after reaching Toronto or New York.

Getting to the venue after arriving in Montréal

The Montréal-Trudeau airport is a little bit outside of the city; the best route in is the 747 shuttle which makes a stop just outside the Hyatt Regency, where the con will be held.

The Greyhound and TrailwaysNY bus lines will drop you off at the Berri-UQAM bus station, a 10 minute bus ride on bus 15 to the Hyatt.

The Megabus as well as VIA and Amtrak trains will drop you off at Montréal’s Central Station (Gare Centrale), which is a 10 minute bus ride on bus 150 to the Hyatt.

CrossingsCon ’19 will take place June 21-23 2019, at Hyatt Regency Montreal, Montreal, Canada. Badges are on sale here!

This is awful. I just looked it up and Koi fish can live more than 200 years, the oldest on record being Hanako Fish who died at age 226.

Tom and Carl will die before them.

Celestial Monsters by Chris Keegan

The thrill of outer space is that we really just have no goddamned clue what’s out there. Aliens? Sentient planets? Intergalactic space police? Probably all of these, plus unfathomably more bizarre creations we couldn’t possibly produce with our earthly imaginations. Chris Keegan took a pretty good stab at it though, manipulating images from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory of floating space debris and vast, lightyears-spanning nebule into dark and majestic forms, surely just an echo of the monolithic entities just beyond our telescopic grasp…

Artist: Website (via: Wired / io9)

ya meme // nine quotes

the wizard’s oath (young wizards by diane duane)

rebloggable by request - what exactly is young wizards?