love that ilya is actually kinda confused when he meets shane for the first time but then as soon as shane goes for the SECOND handshake in a 2 minutes interaction his whole body language changes and hes like oh. OH hes flirting with me,, and he was !! ! (sighs) shane hollander youre so cute and lovable. ilya didnt stand a chance
“In The Locker”, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, & Scott Hunter [Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, François Arnaud], Heated Rivalry [Promo Image]
Jan, 2026
Soo.. I was so excited to post this that I posted an image that wasn’t ready to post, and now I can’t do a switch-out without deleting the whole thing.
(For those playing spot the difference, half of the “8” on the right-hand side was in a hidden layer when I was drawing the overline, and I forgot to bring it back to the front before I exported it and uploaded it to tumblr. I made a mistake. I’m only human. Please, have two for the price of one).
I don’t know how many times people have to say it, but you have to actively go looking for the good. It has been proven again and again that the more you actively think of the good outcomes and the good things in life and see the beauty in things and learn to appreciate things, the more these things happen, the more you rewire your brain into seeing more good things than bad, the more you notice good things happening around you and to you. It is called Neuroplasticity. It is neuroscience.
There’s this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I’m still not over the terminology of “gravity assist,” the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to “slingshot” them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.
“Gravity assist.”“Slingshot.” Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We’re getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a “slingshot,” because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can’t be sure about the exact physics).
Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. “Black hole?” Damn yeah it sure is. “Big bang?” It sure was. “Galactic cluster?” Buddy you’re never gonna guess what this is. I think it’s an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like… idk, botany.
But, like. “Gravity assist.” I still can’t get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.
We are assisted.
And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:
“… You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. …”
Gravity assist.
For the painting especially there’s a beauty in depicting some of our most advanced technology as synonymous with the most ancient. Very few people throughout history have had the privilege of seeing the face of Jupiter but many would recognize the sling thrower immediately.
someone just literally interrupted me mid conversation to tell me “what wonderful big dark eyes i’ve got” and on the one hand extremely flattering that she couldn’t even wait until the end of my sentence to comment on this, on the other hand did she have to say it like im the big bad wolf
