Stranger Things season 1: beneath the superficial image of “peace and prosperity” in 1980s small-town America, there was the painful legacy of countless atrocities committed by the American government in the name of ‘freedom.’

Stranger Things season 4: evil Russians (not Soviets) have sent our All-American Hero to the gulags which apparently still exist in the 1980s and it’s up to us to save him 🇺🇸🦅🫡

gf got this fortune and ur damn right panda express she has EXCELLENT taste

Americans really cannot help themselves being racist while complaining about racism

ALT

The thing about character design theory is I really think we shouldn’t just keep reinforcing our “this is what a sneaky and untrustworthy character looks like, this is what a threatening and intimidating character looks like, this is what an innocent character worth protecting looks like, this is what a smart and competent character looks like, this is what a man looks like vs what a woman looks like” conventions like they’re innate human wiring that we tap into scientifically and not like, heavily societal

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.

Sorry, if you try to gatekeep piracy websites you're standing on the side of publishers. Open access means open access. Don't be a bitch

person who assumes maleness as default and refuses to interrogate this: yeah this character has no gender, they're just a little Guy

PLEASE HELP A DISABLED LESBIAN WHO IS GETTING KICKED OUT INTO BELOW FREEZING TEMPERATURES

sorry if this is all over the place, my head is still pounding from yesterday but i tried my best to be coherent. this is the worst my situation has been in a long time. my father has a history of being violent and aggressive when he’s drunk, this time he went too far. i try not to get involved with anything involving my family, but last night i heard screaming from the kitchen and it sounded bad. my siblings and i all came to see what the commotion was just in time to see him swing a frying pan at my mother’s head. 

my youngest brother disappeared and me and my other brother tried to get in between our parents to stop it because my mother was already bleeding but he fought back against both of us, i don’t know what specifically happened to my brother but his face is all bruised and swollen and i got my head slammed against the wall multiple times. my phone ended up shattered on the ground broken beyond repair and i somehow got glass in my foot that i've since removed

idk if my younger brother called the cops or if the neighbors heard what was going on but they showed up, my father told them everything was fine even though several of us were bleeding and obviously not fine. my mother refused to say anything but my siblings and i spoke up and my father is now in jail. my mother told me that i shouldn’t have said anything, i’m a horrible influence, this is my fault as the oldest, i should’ve known better, and that i have until the new year to find somewhere else to live. i have three weeks to scrounge up enough change to try and survive in below freezing temperatures and i have no fucking clue what i’m going to do. 

i’ve reached out to a couple shelters to no avail and i don’t really have IRL friends who can help me. the only thing i can think of is my grandmother or extended family, but they all live 300 miles away and my parents sold my car without my permission so i can’t drive down there myself. i don’t know what to do. i’m so scared and i have nowhere to turn and i have less than a month to figure this out.

i’m going to reach out to my grandmother/family but if all else fails, the cheapest motel in my area is $45/night. i have $13 to my name at the moment. in the next few weeks, i need to secure a place to sleep at night, as well as transportation to get out and away from here, and at least a burner phone from the store, a flip phone will absolutely do and those are like $10-$30 i think. please PLEASE help me monetarily if you can, if not, you can also help just by boosting this post so more people see it. thank you for reading

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it doesn't matter how much it costs or how far you have to go or how arduous the journey there and back becomes, the transfem t4t meetup is always worth going to