Look at your wrist, see the blueish veins? The blood flowing through them contains hemoglobin, a protein that has four iron atoms incorporated into its structure. Iron is only naturally produced in one place, it can only be forged in the core of dying stars.
Every time you look at your veins, remember that you are built from, and kept alive by, pieces of stardust.
This is actually a thing, to the very best of my knowledge! Iron might not be only produced in the heart of a star on its way to going supernova (I would need someone with, y’know, actual degrees to say that for certain), but that’s certainly a major source! The way stars work is through fusion, or taking two atoms of an element (or different element) in an environment of massive heat and pressure and joining them to create a new element. Fusion gives off massively more energy than fission, which we’re more familiar with and can actually do ourselves with elements like uranium, but the hiccup in fusion is that there’s a point at which the energy gain is no longer high enough to offset the density of the atom created. So, fusion works GREAT on things like hydrogen or helium, which are both very small and therefore easily fused to give massive energy yields–this is why the biggest stars tend to burn very hot (not an absolute rule), because they have so much of these smaller elements available. These enormous stars–the sort of stars that die with a bang (nova/supernova) rather than a whimper (petering out)–burn hot and build up enormous pressure in their core, so the deeper you go the bigger the elements are.
Iron is the turning point, the point where you stop getting energy from fission and start getting it from fusion instead. As you work up toward iron from hydrogen on the periodic table, you get less and less energy from fusion, and as you get further from iron, into the higher numbers, you get steadily more energy from fission until you reach what we recognize as the radioactive elements, which break up easily enough to be practically applied for energy gain. Iron, however, is basically neutral: it won’t give energy either way, and managing either one would require a massive energy output. So, suppose you have a really huge star, a giant of some kind, and it’s been burning away happily for time immemorial (I don’t really have the time to go get data for star lifespans, I’m supposed to be studying for my organic chemistry final), fusing hydrogen into helium and helium into lithium and so on and so forth. And now it’s reaching the end of its life and the elements it’s creating are getting up to the teens and twenties, and it fuses two oxygens into an iron atom. That’s the cutoff: the star has now started to die. The dense iron building up at the core of the star causes it to collapse inward, building pressure, and when the pressure inside gets too much…boom. Supernova.
So yeah. Iron is the element that kills stars, and it’s the element that keeps us alive. It’s…it’s pretty damn cool.
“1/4? Really? Who writes a measure of ¼. WHY would you write a measure of ¼?” “Because fuck you that’s why.”
“I will literally trade you my sandwich for that practice room.” “Dude you should eat your lunch.” “I won’t be able to eat it if my teacher decapitates me for not practicing JUST TAKE IT.”
“I always wanted to look inside the percussion room. It’s like Narnia, but noisier.”
“Satan created piccolos to punish the trumpets for their pride.”
“I’m thinking about dropping music history.” “But why, don’t you need that class?” “Yes but half of it is non-music majors and two people were having a discussion about why there were hashtags at the beginning of the music.”
“So my teacher convinced me to take the History of Rock and Roll over the Summer but it was an online course and he found the webcam filters and inevitably the first unit ended up being taught by a talking dinosaur on my webcam. This man teaches college theory.”
“SHH. Don’t say the theory teacher’s name. He’s like Beetlejuice. If you say it three times he’ll appear behind you and fuck your shit up.”
“I found out Mozart had a butt fetish and I’m never going to be able to stop calling him Mozfart.”
“If I see a drink within 100 feet of that Steinway I will track you down and beat you with my harpsichord.”
Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.
If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne'er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.
stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.
i dont get offended at white people jokes even though im white because:
i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live
most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person
im not a pissbaby
my white friends that have reblogged this give me life
4. Sometimes I am a shitty white person and the jokes remind me to FUCKIN STOP
If ur white and like this post I fux with u
^absolutely
5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.
i fucks with u heavy if ur white and you reblog this
apparently some guy named mark was trying to tell my mom he needed to speak with my dad about any financial transactions my mom was making because he was the man of the house and she did not take kindly to his implying that my dad was the primary breadwinner/person in charge in our family so
A lot of pets will ignore you, but only a cat will follow you from room to room and check your lines of vision to make absolutely certain that you can see them ignoring you.
fun fact: cats actually have very good peripheral vision and do a lot of checking things out with it. full-frontal staring into your face is, for them, an aggressive statement. hence they do that a lot when they’re trying to make you do stuff, like feed them or play with them.
if a cat sits with you but at an angle and won’t meet your gaze, they’re not ignoring you at all! they’re hanging out. they’re having chill bro time.
if you want to smile at your cat, look at them till they see you, then give a slow blink. this is a cat smile. if a cat only glances at you to give you a blink and then looks away, that is a warm greeting, like, ‘hey there, buddy’. be polite right back at them and don’t seek out or hold sustained eye-contact in friendly, casual situations.
There was a baby in the breakfast place this morning, probably about… 8 months old? Sitting in one of those attached-to-the-table sling chair things? And this baby was excruciatingly cute. Fat little cheeks and soft cloud of cherubic blonde curls and big, sparkly manga eyes.
And the baby kept crossing their little bare feet and every time they did Jack was like “!!!!!!!”
And he kept like, pausing breakfast and looking at the baby and like ??? cooing. Saying “Ooooooooo,” and smiling at this baby.
Finally we get up to go and he walks right up to this baby and puts his hands into this baby’s little soft cloud of baby curls and he looks at baby’s mom and says “This baby is the cutest baby. This baby is so sweet and I want to snuggle it.“
And I was like “OMG SORRY MY BIG KID IS TOUCHING YOUR BABY” and Jack’s like “PLEASE NO LET ME KEEP TOUCHING THIS BABY” and I pull him away and go pay and he is like, watching this baby like a hawk the whole time
And he says bye and blows a kiss to the mom and says, “Please give this kiss to that baby from me.” and she says she will and she’s like, nearly crying, and I’m like beet red, and we go outside.
And we’re standing there in the middle of the square, bustling with people, and Jack yells at the top of his lungs “I!!! REALLY!!! LOVE!!! BABIES!!!”
And I’m like “I totally know, dude, babies are great” trying to hustle him to the car and he’s like “Mom, mommy, did you see that baby it was so cute and sweet and soft and I know we can’t have one but I want one and I want to hold it and keep it and it to be my brother or sister and it’s so hard because I just want to touch all babies.”
It’s like a run-on-paragraph of babylove. And I’m like “I know I know I know” trying to strap him into his car seat before he takes off and decides to rub his grubby big kid hands all over this precious babyskin again.
We finally get in the car and we’re like getting ready to take off and he says, “Don’t worry Mommy. I will get you a baby someday.”
And this is why I am now concerned my five year old son is going to kidnap somebody’s infant.
If you’re a Non-Muslim and you see a Muslim praying in public, could you please not pass in front of them?
Go behind them, but not in front. 👍
Oh, signal boost! I didn’t know this.
Okay, but also: if you see a Muslim praying in public and they have something in front of them, like a purse or a bag or something like that, you can pass in front of them, but pass in front of that object.
it’s called a sutrah, and it’s meant to act as a physical barrier between the person praying and someone who might happen to pass in front.
Also, if you did this and didn’t know, please don’t beat yourself up over it. Now you know! Muslims aren’t supposed to pass in front of Muslims praying, either, because prayer is communication with God and you don’t want to break that connection.
Spread culture, respect customs, be good people. Simple as that.
Didn’t know this.
Okay! I didn’t know this, thank you for educating us
So Donald Trump is staying down the street from where I live. And today was an unusually warm day and some lady, lord help me, some lady in the store I work at told me it was unusually warm today because the devil was here.
I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao
There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows??
It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!
Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!
So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))
Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration.
With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results:
As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right:
In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:
There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.
Well, then I add this to my search:
Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:
Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!
You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”.
I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better.
Good luck!
An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!
omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game
An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!
You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:
my favorite thing about 101 dalmatians is that, when faced with the realization that there were now 101 dogs in their apartment, their reaction was “i guess we’re gonna need a bigger house” which is entirely illogical and exactly how i would respond in that situation
in stories featuring aliens, they’re always like “on my planet this never happens!” or “in my culture, this differs from your human culture.” and that’s neat and all because i like worldbuilding and all that jazz but wouldn’t it be fun if they just. couldn’t do that?
i want a story where humans encounter an alien who frustrates them because they don’t know enough to tell them anything concrete
like humans will ask “tell us about politics in your planet!” and the alien’s all “uh… hold on it’s been a while since i took gov. um….”
“what sorts of plants grow on your planet?”
“i dunno i grew up in the suburbs. they’re like… purple? idk what you want me to say”
“tell us about the culture on your planet!”
“do you have any idea how many fucking countries are back home, i don’t even know where to begin”
“your planet is obviously much more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours. is it possible for you to enlighten us on certain matters concerning space travel, or would that be a form of interference you must avoid?”
“naw it’s cool, it’s just that, um, i’m a philosophy major”
OOH OOH AND
“take me to your leader”
“…we have like hundreds of leaders like which one? my country’s leader? another country’s leader? the director of our space program? my country’s military leader? my mom??”
No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.
Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.
None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.
This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.
Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….
I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.
Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item.
People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”:
Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity.
Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.
The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.
Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.
This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.
What I get from this is that we should equally distribute ourselves among all fields until we’ve ruined absolutely everything.
Cooking as well; Men moved into the field and now we hear things like “women belong in the kitchen” when we talk about marriage and domestic life, but cooking shows full of “do you think you can keep up with the guys in the kitchen” simultaneously.
Wherever there is prestige and money, women are forced out.
The majority of english majors are female yet we’re studying a literary canon made up of stories about men written by men.
there has been a petition signed by over 300,000 british people to ban donald trump from britain and because it’s so popular they’re having to seriously consider debating it in the house of commons. it’s the best news i’ve heard all week.
I’ll be honest, whenever a work of speculative fiction (fanmade or otherwise) goes out of its way to describe an intelligent species with bizarre and complicated reproductive biology, the first question that invariably pops into my head is: “How do these critters masturbate?”
what if masturbation was uniquely a human experience though
Okay, I know that you meant “what if humans are the only intelligent species that’s anatomically capable of masturbating?”, but now I’m picturing a universe where humans are the only ones that ever thought to try it.
Human masturbation specialists traveling the galaxy to offer our gift, undertaking rigorous study and enormous personal risk to teach weird-ass aliens how to rub one out.
Calculating the exact harmonic frequencies to allow ancient, vacuum-dwelling crystalline intelligences to self-stimulate.
Descending into the crushing atmospheres of gas giants in specially constructed aerostats to design sex toys for the vast, jellyfish-like super-predators that prowl the hurricane slipstreams.
Wanking is our genius. Our legacy.
That last addition is possibly my favourite thing Tumblr has ever done for the world.
buffy: do not fight buffy. the entire show is dedicated to the fact that you should not fight buffy. she will kick your ass. do NOT fight buffy.
xander: fight xander. please just fight xander. everyone is rooting for you! if you do decide to fight xander, call me. let me watch. please fight xander.
willow: what the fuck ???? why would you fight willow. willow skinned a guy alive. do NOT fight willow. i repeat, do NOT fight willow.
giles: you could fight giles i guess, but why? he’s just a kind librarian. except for his ripper days and when he suffocated ben to death, but regardless. why would you fight giles?
cordelia: cordelia will TEAR YOU APART. not physically, but socially. she willdestroy you. do not fight cordelia.
angel: you could fight angel and you’d probably lose. but this man has already been through enough. get him some coffee. hug him. don’t fight angel.
spike: please fight spike. please just take one for the team and kick spike’s ass. he would probably kill you but i bet you could beat him up enough to give him a black eye or a scratch or something. fight spike.
faith: do not fight faith unless you have a death wish
tara: why the fuck would you fight tara??? tara is a cinnamon roll. love her. protect her. don’t fight tara. if you fight tara, i will fight you.
anya: girl was a venegance demon for over a thousand years. do not fight anya.
I want to see Zeus in a tailored suit and shaggy beard, a
walking disparity of the loud, brash, post-graduate frat boy variety who can’t
pass a woman on the street without catcalls, who has more one-night stands than
he could possibly keep in his head, for whom adultery comes as naturally as the
weather he predicts on the Channel 4 News—with startlingly accuracy, and an
endless wealth of charisma.
I want to see Hera walking tall, six-inch heels and not a
wrinkle in her skirt, knowing her boyfriend is cheating, and knowing with equal
certainty that she is better, stronger, fiercer than he will ever be, a wedding
planner with an eye of steel, spotting vulnerability, slicing it open, teaching
every woman who crosses her path to value themselves over any mistake made in
the name of men and love.
I want to see Poseidon in Olympic prime, a gym rat who
skives off class to shatter backstroke records, who spends his summers
lifeguarding at the city pool, who keeps an ever-expanding aquarium in his
bedroom and coaxes all the pretty girls up to visit his fish, his charm as
impressive as the earth-rending temper he generally uses to fuel his competitive
nature.
I want to see Hades, big, hulking, quieter than his brothers
would ever think to be, who dresses in neat dark clothes, and polishes his
boots, and spends more time reading than fighting, who debates eventuality and
ethics, who stoically reminds everyone how enormous, how terrifying, how
inescapable a thing like silentinevitability can be.
I want to see Hermes in a beanie, with watercolor splashes
of tattoo crawling up his arms and holes in his Chucks, a bike messenger with
no helmet, no regard for the rules of the road, all cataclysmic laughter, lock-pick
tricks passed along to every kid who thinks to ask, thumbing through his iPhone
without a care in the world.
I want to see Athena with reading glasses pushed high on her
head, six books in her bag and a switchblade in her back pocket, her clothing
as neatly ordered as her mind is feverish, brilliance and temper clashing and
blending, doing her best to look dignified—even when her brain chemistry
rockets ahead of her well-intentioned plans.
I want to see Apollo splattered with acrylics, board shorts
and Monster headphones and a beautiful classic car, busking on street corners,
not because he has no choice, but because the sunlight catching on a
sticker-patterned acoustic is summer incarnate, because music is blood, because
the act of creation is the ultimate in sublime.
I want to see Artemis in ripped jeans and haphazard topknot,
star of the soccer team, the track team, the archery team, who rides a
motorcycle, and keeps a tribe of girls around her at all times, and does not
care for men, for expectation, for anything but volunteer hours down at the
local animal shelter and falling asleep under the stars.
I want to see Aphrodite in sundress and scarf, homemade
jewelry and lavish amounts of bright red lipstick, who is excellent at public
speaking, at theater auditions, at soothing bruised egos and sparking epic
fights, who kisses as easily as she breathes and scrawls poetry onto bathroom
stalls.
I want to see Ares all but living in the boxing ring, cutoff
shirts and sweats, red-faced under a crew cut as he punches, punches, punches
until the noise in his head dims, a warrior with no war, all crude jokes and
blind fury, totally incapable of understanding what it is to sit, think, plan
before running screaming into the fray.
I want to see Demeter with the best garden you’ve seen in
your life, with a lawn care business she runs out of her garage, a teenage
prodigy grown into a joint-custody single mother, who teaches her carefree
daughter all she knows while scaring off the hopeful neighborhood boys with the
pet python draped across her shoulders.
I want to see Dionysus with a joint in one hand and a bottle
of wine in the other, baggy hoodies and three-week-old jeans, who brews his own
beer in his basement and greets all visitors with a fresh pack of Oreos and
half-stoned theories of the universe, of birth and death and partying mid-week,
because why not, man?
I want to see Hephaestus with a workshop taking up the
majority of his house, whose kitchen is overrun with blowtorches, whose bathrooms
are home to all manner of hodge-podge invention, who walks with a cane and
forgets his laundry for weeks at a time, and strings together the most
beautiful steampunk costumes at any convention at the drop of a hat.
I want to see wood nymphs fighting against climate change,
waving their signs and pushing for scientific progress. I want to see epic
heroes sitting down to Magic: The Gathering tournaments, poker brawls, Call of
Duty all-nighters with beer and snapbacks. I want to see Medusa working a women’s
shelter, want to see Achilles training for deployment, want to see Prometheus
serving endless community service stints for what he calls providing necessary welfare with stolen goods.
Give me modern mythology. I could play for hours in that
sandbox.
A push? It’s a wall. Pushing on a wall won’t do anything.
I’m sure your door will open once you’ve found the right key.
Walls don’t have locks…
Although maybe you should call a locksmith just to make sure everything is, you know, okay.
Nothing you are saying makes any sense. It’s a WALL.
Maybe yours is actually a pull door. And it’s okay, you know, if your door opens the other way. I’m sure you’ll feel better once you admit it to yourself.
Do you not understand what a wall is?
Did your fingers get caught in the door when you were younger? Because you shouldn’t let a trauma like that stop you from opening your door now.
No my fingers did not get caught when I was younger because IT’S A WALL AND NOT A DOOR.
You know, I don’t mind helping you with your door ;)
… I’m just going to go over here now…with my wall… yeah….
my kinda boyfriend person took me to build a bear today for my birthday and he chose a sound to put in it and like he wouldn’t let me know what sound it was and he said I couldn’t listen until we got in the car so I was kinda worried bc I thought it was going to be super vulgar or sappy and gross or whatever but we leave build a bear and I press my bear’s hand and it just makes this super loud velociraptor sound.
