Ya Meme // Nine Quotes

Clouds Around V1331 Cyg Processing by Judy Schmidt

A complex nebular fountain-like structure that appears to originate from the star it was found around. The morphology of the nebular structure is quantified and discussed. Evidence for secular outflows is found from the optical data.[**]

I know you guys want me to draw different characters, but I love Nita so much :’)

[GWP said something about her wearing a floofy flowery dress so I had to] 

I have a 'fairest and fallen - greetings and defiance' coffee mug, and I needed/loved/was inspired by it even more than normal today... just to let you know and say thanks!

You’re very welcome.

sigh) Today has been a more effective than usual reminder that entropy is indeed running. Our job now: To run faster.

NGC 4725, NGC 4747, and NGC 4712

So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane

I’m a little nervous about doing a review of this book, actually. For one thing, it’s one of the foundations of my ethical code today. Who I am is, in a large part, based on this novel and the ones that come after. That makes it a little hard to be objective and give a nice unbiased review, but I’ll do my best. Another thing I’m nervous about is that the author, who I (obviously) respect, is a regular Tumblr user, and is probably going to see this at some point. Finally,this series has a devoted fandom comprised of intelligent, wonderful people who know a lot about the series.

Still, all those reasons to be nervous should make it clear that this is a series you really shouldn’t miss!

So You Want To Be A Wizard is the first book in what is, at the moment, a nine book series. The tenth book, Games Wizards Play, is due out… sometime… Well, we know it’s coming! Recently, the series got a revamp. The first book is copyright 1992, so the timeline needed a bit of help after twenty-two years. If you’re looking to get into the series, starting with the NMEs is a good choice.

But let’s talk about the book itself.

It opens with Nita Callahan, reader extraordinaire and space devotee, running away from bullies from her middle school. She manages to duck into the library, and as she’s hiding, her finger is snagged by a book - when she pulls it out, it’s a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard. Naturally, she thinks it’s a joke, but. Well. It doesn’t read like a joke. And if she was a wizard, if she had magic, maybe she could stop getting hurt. So she takes the Wizard’s Oath, and though momentarily lulled into a sense of complacency by finding another teen wizard and learning about exciting magic things and meeting a white hole, presently finds herself engaged in a struggle against the forces of entropy, embodied in the form of the Lone Power, where the stakes are the Earth itself.

But that’s the plot. What makes this series so exceptional is the motivations of the characters, wizardly and otherwise, and the level of responsibility with which they interact with their world. In retrospect, that first scene with the bullies is pretty telling for the series as a whole. It’s seriously treated - Nita is a victim, and she is not responsible for their actions or what happens to her. She is, however, responsible for her own actions; she chooses to antagonize the bullies to claim some power from the situation. What her Ordeal (the quest when you accept the Oath) lets her realize is that she already has power - she controls her own choices, her anger and what she does with it - and it shows her how to claim it. As a wizard, she has the power to terrify those who want to hurt her; as a human, she has the power to break the cycle of violence. The very nature of wizardry in this universe demands that she choose to “guard growth and ease pain”, but it doesn’t require her to forgive the bullies. That she does choose to use her power for forgiveness shows how strong she is as a person. 

Choice is in many ways the center of the book, and of the series. A species makes a Choice that defines their relationship to wizardry and entropy. Each wizard chooses to take the Oath. In the course of wizardry - and life in general - choices come up all the time. There are consequences to all of the choices you make, but what you do with your free will is in the end up to you. Figuring out what to do with your free will isn’t easy, though, and it becomes increasingly difficult as the series progresses and the characters age - the choices we make as children are always more straightforward than those we make as adults, when our ability to see the complexities of a situation grows, which is another thing I appreciate about the series. The characters are in no way static, and the books do become more difficult as the characters gain the age-appropriate abilities to handle the problems that come up.

Those problems aren’t always wizardly, either! There’s at least one very long-running romance subplot between Nita and her best friend Kit, not to mention a plethora of truly excellent sibling and parental contretemps. The familial relationships are absolutely phenomenal, by the way, and are pretty varied. Both Nita and Kit have complex, realistic, and person-specific sibling relationships. And the parents! One problem I often have with YA literature is that parents are very sketchily characterized, mostly a name and a figure to rebel against. Which makes sense - one’s perspective as a young teenager is limited, and one’s ability to see other people as people is also limited. Part of adolescence is learning to recognize that other people are distinct individuals, and in their lives, you’re on the periphery if you register at all. In this series, the parents are well-characterized from our perspective, and as the kids age, how they perceive their parents also changes. I’d like to see more of Kit’s parents - we get some of them, but not nearly so much as we get of the Callahans. There’s a good reason for that, but it’s a spoiler.

Their parents aren’t the only adult figures in these kids’ lives, either. Tom and Carl are Senior wizards who live just up the road, and provide an excellent sort of hands-off mentorship. They’re very clear from the beginning that they don’t have all the answers. The kids can ask for aid and answers, but they might not get them. I’m making a note of their care in establishing themselves as fallible early on, because the kids do forget this, and I feel like they should get some recognition for the effort. Good try, guys!

It’s an eminently quotable book, funny and heartbreaking by turns. It’s a great book to give kids - magic and mystery! Travel the universe, meet the gods! Be scared witless and thrilled breathless! Develop a strong ethical code based around the Hippocratic Oath, individual responsibility, empathy, and the strength of forgiveness, belief, and second chances! Save the world, with or without magic!

That last is actually the last thing I really want to talk about. Although it doesn’t come up much in the first series, one of the things that makes this series so very influential is the idea that you don’t actually need magic to change things. The wizards get to play in the grand scheme of things, but regular folks are no less important or influential. Sure, we can’t stop a sun from exploding, but we can slow entropy in a thousand other ways. We can conserve energy, spread order and kindness and cooperation, help the hurt, counsel the despairing, and if all that fails, we can stare evil down and refuse to go along with it because that, too, is a choice we have the capacity to make.

tl;dr - amazing book, with surprisingly nuanced discussion of ethics and excellent characterization. Purchase it for one and all! The only content warning I have for this one is bullies, though feel free to contact me if you want content warnings for the remaining books. This book is available as a multi-format package from Diane Duane’s ebookstore for $6.99. Hard copies can be purchased from Amazon for $7.19, but it’s not the NME, so be warned! You can also get the hard copy from your favorite local bookstore! If you want an ebook, I recommend getting it straight from the source. They’re excellent quality ebooks, reasonably priced, and frequently on sale as well.

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to //tune// his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

Warren Ellis » How To See The Future (via ultralaser)

#oh my god everything about this article is hitting me where I live     #forsake manufactured normalacy and look at how extraordinary the world is right now     #there are six people living in space and we can /print/ organs and control satilites with apps     #”Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck”     #the internet itself is a goddamn miracle in the making in that humanity—vast swathes of otherwise unconnected humanity—gets together     #to watch cat videos and talk about television and laugh at each other’s jokes     #if the world isn’t thrilling you YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION     #god     #I’m all     #yeah  (via notbecauseofvictories)

Don’t forget the fact that two robots on another planet have Twitter accounts and people here on Earth can follow them and their discoveries. Astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield—my favorite Canadian—has a Tumblr and posted images from space so that we could see what he was seeing. We can watch videos of galaxies merging on YouTube. And we are making so many scientific discoveries that there’s actually a blog called World Science Festival that details discoveries made each WEEK.

Yes, the world is still fucked up in any number of ways, and the problems need to be fixed. But the world’s also amazing.

(via gehayi)

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (via thorosofmyr)

Just a quick reminder that the "All The Wizardry" bundle is still available at Ebooks Direct! (Curiosity rover not included...) :)

Contains nineteen DRM-free ebooks:

The nine New Millennium Editions of the main-sequence Young Wizards novels

The Feline Wizardry trilogy

The two collections of interstitial fiction: Interim Errantry and Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

The only two Young Wizards short stories (as the title item and "Theobroma" in Uptown Local and Other Interventions

The non main-sequence novel Young Wizards: Lifeboats and the standalone novella Owl Be Home For Christmas (These last two works are included as independent ebook volumes even though they also appear in the Interim Errantry collections.)

The "CD extras" work The "How Lovely Are Thy Branches" Advent Calendar, featuring outtake dialogue from How Lovely Are Thy Branches (which appears in Interim Errantry)

The Young Wizards OTP Challenge, Days 1-17: short fiction in the OTP format

...And as always, should you misplace any of these, or need to change platforms, we'll replace them for you free! Details here.

So stop in and grab yourself an armful of wizardry!

Get the "All The Wizardry" Bundle

(For our UK friends, the normal sad caveat: we can't sell directly to you from the Ebooks Direct store any more due to Brexit. Our apologies.) :(

On Wednesday February 26th, NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified planets orbit 305 stars, many have multiple-planet systems like our own. Interestingly, 95% of these planets are smaller than Neptune in size, which is 24,622 km in radius (15,299 miles). NASA states that this discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified planets.

Since the first discovery of a planet outside our Solar System was made two decades ago, Kepler has been able to speed up the process of confirming planets. These multiple planet systems are important for scientists to study because they are fertile grounds that give us clues on planet formation. Four of these confirmed planets are 2.5 times the size of Earth and they lie within the habitable zone. The possibilities seem endless on what may lie on these planets or what life could exist there.

Without doubling NASA’s budget it’ll take us a lot longer to answer the age-old question, “Are we alone in the Universe?” Let’s take action today and help NASA double their budget. penny4nasa.org/take-action/

Never understood why I love black holes so much, there’s something about them that just pulls you in.