do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light
sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this
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.
look just gonna be really ndn about it for a moment but no one can claim to know the internal experience of animals. no one can claim to know the internal experience of plants. no one can claim to know the internal experience of the earth. theres a part of my heart that is always the girl telling my philosophy professor that we cant know the flower turning towards the sun is “purely instinct.” and if u disagree then thats fine idc its just My Soulful Opinion in afraid
its frustrating doubly to talk abt on here bc not only is everyone gonna laugh me out of the room like they did when i tried to bring up animism in my white philosophy classes but also like. i know people are gonna get mad like “oh so animals can have morals?” etc of like. look i Knowww and i agree that the anthropomorphism of animals by people is harmful absolutely! but this colonial empirical stance of that nothing feels emotion or has desires in this world except for human beings is so sick to me. what a terrible rotten world to live in where plants dont love the sun and love the shade and love the rain. “they dont have the brain synapses firing to-” 1) thats not all that emotion is oh my lord 2) constantly they are coming out with more science that proves that plants communicate with each other in Scientifically Proven ways. your need to have the world fit an aristotelian victorian bullshit diagnostic criteria is sick
sometimes i forget not all fanbases are on the same page and there are people out there who were shocked and blindsided by canon garashir in lower decks like andy robinson hasn’t been saying for years he wanted to smash so bad that rick berman sent him to conversion camp gooner jail with dukats daughter
i made yellow curry for dinner last night and prepped the leftovers to take to lunch for work with my NEW THERMOS and it worked perfectly and I’m a genius. Just checking in thanks
all these measurements are very loose since I estimate them each time, so you’ll have to make adjustments to the seasoning as you go, BUT
1-2 tbsp coconut oil
1 onion, chopped
a couple cloves of garlic, minced
3-4 carrots, chopped
3-4 sticks of celery, chopped
4 med/large gold potatoes chopped
2 chicken breasts cut into cubes
2-3 tbsp yellow curry paste (I use Mae Ploy)
1-2 tbsp turmeric powder
1 tbsp lemongrass puree
1 tbsp ginger puree
1 tbsp Thai fish sauce
1 tbps honey
2-3 cups chicken broth (enough to cover your veggies in the pot. I like making my own with better than bouillon paste)
1 can coconut milk
cooked jasmine rice
optional: green grapes, cherry tomatoes, fresh cilantro and soft boiled egg for garnish
melt coconut oil in a large pot. add onion, garlic and curry paste and cook for a few minutes. add chicken and cook until onions are transparent and chicken is basically fully cooked (any extra pink bits will be cooked in the curry so dont sweat it)
add carrots, potato, and celery. pour in the chicken stock, enough to cover all the chicken and veggies so they can boil. add turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce, and honey and stir. bring to a boil then reduce heat to med/low and allow to simmer for about 10 minutes until the veggies are tender, stirring occasionally
taste for seasoning. honey will cut spice and salt, fish sauce adds some good depth and umami, and you can also add more curry paste if its not spicy or strong enough, or anything else you think it needs. once youre satisfied with the flavor, add the coconut milk and cook for just a few more minutes. dont boil it with the coconut milk cos it can separate.
serve with jasmine rice! I always like it with a soft boiled egg, raw cherry tomatoes and cold green grapes. the grapes may sound crazy but the cold sweet crunch is amazing with the soft, spicy heat of the curry! and if you dont like cilantro, use Thai basil instead :)
I also make my own Thai tea at home in big 64oz batches lmfao you can scale it down if you dont want that much (I always do):
11 tea bags of Thai tea (idk the loose leaf equivalent, theres a brand i always buy cos it tastes great and it’s sold in tea bags, its called ChaTraMue Brand?)
64 Oz water
1 cup sugar
half and half to taste
boil water in a pot and dissolve sugar in it. it might bubble up when you add the sugar so be careful !
remove from heat, add the tea bags and allow them to steep for whatever. usually I just leave it for a couple hours, until the tea is still hot but not dangerously hot and I can do the next step safely. I also like my tea really strong so I dont worry about it steeping for too long
fish out the tea bags and transfer to a carafe. refrigerate overnight
to serve, pour over ice and leave a few inches at the top of the glass, then add half and half. it looks really pretty like this but stir before you drink it !
Being a crafty person and making a bunch of things often prompts people to ask “oh wow did you make that?” And like, the short answer is: yes I did, but the long answer is: well, no, the pattern isn’t mine, but I did choose and buy the fabric/yarn and sewed it together/crocheted it/knitted it myself. I used a reference for that drawing/painting, I didn’t come up with it myself. That ceramic piece was insired by a poem and a painting made by different people. What I’m trying to say is, everything I make requires other people to make their own thing first, and then I get inspired by them to do my own thing. So I can’t really call anything truly mine, because really it’s just a bunch of inspirations and experiences of others (and me) put together by my hands. Does that answer your question
This yarn came from sheep raised in New Zealand and was spun by a woman in Peru. The pattern was created by someone in Germany. My needles were made by a craftsman in China and my stitchmarkers came from the lady at the local fiber festival.
I may have knit this sweater but it contains the souls of people from around the world.
This is my finished miniature oracle deck! It’s made purely from sigils, and that was a very purposeful decision. I wanted something small and easily referenced; just one card to pull every morning to see what the day will bring, or if pulled upside down, what it will be missing. It can tell me what sigil to wear that day or what to be on the lookout for. So it’s nothing fancy, just a fun idea I had and went for it.
Sigilwork is by far my favourite way to do magick other than kitchen witchcraft and it brings me a lot of joy. I didn’t use any of my personal sigils on these cards just because I wanted something I could throw together within the last two days, but in the future I plan to remake this deck or make a normal sized one complete with all personalised sigils.
I absolutely love art and I always have so that will be a joy to do. and if any of y’all have been considering making your own oracle decks or means of divination, I say go for it! I had a great time and I feel like I’ve made something that i’ll get some true use out of and something that i’m proud of.
But yeah! I just wanted to share it and since I didn’t use any of my personal sigils, i’m not afraid to share the full pictures of each card. the backs are nothing special, just some swirls to represent each card’s energy. Let me know what you think and I might be occasionally sharing what card I pull each day.
“The ambiguous power dynamics that Cassandra exposed when she stripped herself of Apollo’s symbols in the Agamemnon appear to have here [in the Troades] been turned into a proud act of faithfulness towards Apollo, who will now not be dishonored by Agamemnon’s violation of Cassandra’s body. This might mean that Ajax cannot have raped Cassandra earlier, as Lee argues, though Athena’s furious volte-face in the preface would seem hard to justify without such a strong trigger, and repeated horrors are implied by Andromache’s later description of Agamemnon as Cassandra’s ‘second Ajax’ (618). In fact, the very repetition of Cassandra’s undressing from the scene in the Agamemnon is a sign that the prophet, like Euripides’ entire text, is engaged in a process that repeats events in an endless loop which make it difficult to argue for a ‘before’ and ‘after’, a ‘first’ violation or a ‘second’ violation. However, the point here is that at this moment, when Cassandra consents to her union with Agamemnon, she acknowledges a betrayal of her relationship with Apollo. Not even necessarily (or solely) in sexual terms, but because her relationship with Apollo thus far has been predicated upon her failure to communicate his prophecies. In becoming such a willing agent in Euripides’ play, she makes a claim to influencing the course of action, not to obstructing it through endless narrative complications, so she unwinds the tortured linguistic power that Apollo has purportedly held over here.”
— Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature
saturn. queer. godless desert pagan. witchcraft, space, ecology, and whatever else I arbitrarily decide to put on this blog instead of my main (icon by autumnalwood)
