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— Me (JNH)// my poetry is a graveyard of memories

I scratch this today at my class because I was so bored. I put some effects on it to make it...look good. BTW hats off to @xstarsarewrong for the fic...I almost cried in front of my class after reading it🤦‍♀️

✨stockings✨

Okay, so this made me want to write about stockings, but then I got inspired by that one scene from Brooklyn (2015) and my own grandparents and here we are. 

A 1930s Everlark 🌹:

1938

The only reason Katniss agreed to the Friday night dance was because Prim had promised to do all her Saturday chores if she’d come. “Mama won’t let me go unless you come,” her sister had pleaded, crawling across their shared bed, hands folded together. “Please please please, Katniss?”

“I hate those dances,” she argued, shoving her sister off her notes. “Plus I have an exam next week that I need to study for. Why can’t Mama take you?”

Prim looked aghast at the suggestion. “I can’t take my matka to the dance! I’d be the laughing stock at school! Katniss, please? I’ll do all your Saturday chores and take care of Babcia all night instead. Please?”

She likely would have gone without the promised bribe, but if Prim was offering to batter out dirty rugs and polish their mother’s silver and deal with their strict grandmother for a whole Saturday evening, then Katniss wasn’t going to bypass it. So here she sat in her church’s basement, huddled in the far corner where the girls with no dance partners sat, counting down the minutes until 9 o’clock.

The room was crowded with kids from the neighborhood, excited to congregate together without total parental supervision watching over them, and she saw Prim near the band with some fellow she recognized from church, her head thrown back in laughter. The guy’s face was a bit too close to her sister’s neck, but Prim would never forgive her if she stepped in and played matka. Katniss crossed her arms and sighed, slinking down in her seat.

Sixty-seven minutes to go.

“Not much for dances?” a boy next to her asked, causing her to jump. He hadn’t been there a moment ago.

She frowned. “Am I that obvious?”

“Most girls over here are scoping the dance floor for fellas. You, on the other hand,” he said, eyeing the clock, “keep checking the time. Got a hot date or something?”

Her cheeks flushed at his forwardness. “Gee, you talk to all the girls you’ve just met like that?”

“No,” he smiled, leaning closer to her, “but I think it’s important to make sure I’m not stepping where I shouldn’t be stepping. So is there a lucky fella? Or are you free to dance with me?”

Katniss gave him a hard look, amazed at just how forward this guy was. She hadn’t been asked to dance often, but she’d seen the bashful way boys usually asked Prim and Leevy. They were never as forward! She sniffed the air. “Why would I tell you such a thing? I don’t even know your name.”

“Peeta Mellark,” he said, holding his hand for her to take. Katniss lightly grabbed his fingers, gave a halfhearted shake in greeting, and put her hand back in her lap. “What’s yours?”

“Katniss Everdeen.”

“Everdeen?” he frowned. “That don’t sound Polish. Are you crashing this dance, too?” She tried her best not to notice how his blue eyes seemed to twinkle in the church’s poor lightning when he smiled at that.

“That’s because it isn’t. My mother’s Polish, but my father wasn’t.” She checked the clock and held back another tired sigh. Only five minutes had passed.

“Time would go faster if you danced,” Peeta suggested teasingly, leaning back in his seat. “I’d be happy to fill that time.”

Her fingers drummed on her knees, considering his offer. She still had an hour left of this thing and he wasn’t wrong about time moving faster if she was doing something.

“Okay,” Katniss agreed, holding her hand out. “One dance and you leave me alone for the rest of the night.”

He hurried to stand and grabbed her offered hand, bowing dramatically at the honor. She rolled her eyes and told him to move it along, before she changed her mind.

They walked to the dance floor just as the band was starting a new song. It was a swing tune, one the whole room cheered to as couples started to sway to the rhythm. It took Katniss a moment to pick up the new steps, unfamiliar with this particular dance, but with Peeta’s laughing encouragement, she was soon dancing and laughing along with him. He shook his hands to the side as the gentlemen in the talkies did and spun her around until her head spun. He even convinced her to take center floor with him as they kicked and stepped to the beat, the couples around them cheering around them.

Before Katniss knew it, they had danced four more times together. He didn’t ask if she wanted to stop after that first one and she didn’t bother to deny him as he kept pulling her back for more. Her hair was a bit disheveled now, her curls coming loose due to the room’s humidity and her own movements, and her feet hurt in her heels, but it’d been awhile since she’d had this much fun. Prim was never going to let her live this down.

Finally, the priest announced the band would be playing one last song, even though it was past 9 now, because they’d all been such a great group tonight. It surprised her, how fast time really did go by when she wasn’t sitting in the corner, pleading with the clock to move faster.

The band started one last time, crooning a slow ballad. Couples paired up and she saw her sister on the other side of the room with the same guy as earlier. Were they serious, she wondered, Prim and this guy? Peeta’s hand on her lower back pulled her back to them, their bodies pressed together now. She rested one hand on his shoulder, realizing just how tall he was as she looked up at him, his smile causing something in her to flutter, and she smiled back. Peeta smelled nice, she noticed, pressed against him so close now. Like fresh baked bread and a seasoning she couldn’t place. Dill maybe? His body felt warm against hers, but she welcomed it, despite how hot she was after all the dancing.Their hands laced together as the music swept through the room, couples spinning slowly to the tune.

“This is nice,” he said near her ear. “Glad you said yes, Katniss Everdeen.”

“It is,” she agreed, deciding it wouldn’t be a bad thing to rest her head on his chest. The other girls were doing it and well, Prim always said these dances were for meeting fellas.

“Hey, Peeta?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Hey, Katniss?” he asked in return, that smile of his still there, looking down at her.

“What’d you mean when you asked if I was crashing this dance?” It’d been bothering her since about their second dance. “Are you crashing?”

He laughed and spun them around. “Does Mellark sound Polish to you?”

“Well, no,” she frowned, not even thinking of that when he introduced himself. “I guess I just figured you were like me.” She couldn’t be sure, but it felt like he pulled her closer. Not that she was complaining about that.

“Both parents are German,” he said, his cheek pressed on top of her head. “As hard German as you can make them, really strict, you know?”

“So what were you doing at a Polish dance, then? Don’t the Germans have their own dances?”

“Oh yeah” Peeta said, laughing, “We do, but I like coming to your dances. They’re more fun and well, I really like Polish girls.”

Katniss tucked her face into his shirt to hide her blush. “German boys aren’t so bad, either.” If it was at all possible, his smile grew.

“I’ll take you to one, if you’d like,” he promised. “You can see for yourself how much more fun your dances are.”

“Are you asking me out on a date, Peeta?”

“Would you say yes if I was?”

Katniss bit her bottom lip. “I would, yes.”

He spun them around one last time before the song ended, resting his forehead on hers. The music had stopped, the couples around them breaking apart, but Katniss and Peeta stood there, still holding on to each other. “When can I take you out?” he asked. “Please say soon?”

Glancing over at Prim, who had clearly noticed where she was and giving thumbs up in approval, Katniss smiled. “You free tomorrow night?”

greek mythology | cursed images v

Hey, what do you think about Medea? I know people portray her as a cruel witch but I think she never had someone besides her than her aunt; Circe. She really deserved to be happy, right?

This is the story of the wicked villain’s daughter who whispers in the hero’s ear and teaches him how to overcome every trial. Through her magic she transmutes the most insurmountable labor into triviality, she foils the villain’s pursuit so that her father cannot catch them in their flight.

(she chops her brother into pieces and casts the pieces to the sea, so that her father’s fleet must be hindered dredging up every bloody portion so that their king might bury his son)

She is wise, and she is good, and she is wonderful, filled with wonders, and the story never thinks to ask:

Why, with all her knowledge and her power, in all the years before the hero came, did she do nothing to curb her father’s wickedness?

---

When Medea excoriates Jason for his betrayal, he snaps back in retort:

“You exaggerate your favors,” he sneers. “Should I thank you? Did you act purposefully? Or was it not the shafts of Eros, as Aphrodite willed, that compelled you to save my life?”  

---

Medea loves her children dearly, and she kills them, and in that she is beyond compulsion.

---

We might ask instead what purpose Jason served in the story, if Medea and the Argonauts accomplished all his feats for him. Did Jason on his own slaughter the six-armed Gegenees? Did he know how to withstand the fiery breath of the Kolkhis Bulls? Did he know the dangers of sowing the dragon’s teeth, how to lull the sleepless dragon into sleep?

Could he have outplayed the sirens, killed the bronze man Talos on his own initiative?

What was the point of him, then?

(the answer is: it was his story)

---

When Medea returns to her home of Colchis many years later, after all the unpleasantness with Jason is well and done, she discovers her tyrannical father has been overthrown by his brother Perses, the new king.

Unfortunately for her, this is no happy ending. Perses hopes to purge her father’s bloodline and eliminate all other claimants to the throne.

So, she kills him.

(she is good at that, killing family)

It was said that when the Golden Fleece was removed from Colchis, so too would the king be removed from his throne. Medea returns, years later, and kills her uncle and restores her father to the throne, and the old wrong is finally set right.

.

The dead are all still dead, of course.

---

After Medea kills her brother, the gods demand she must be cleansed.

The Argo sails through storm and hellish steam and darkness, and finally docks at Circe’s island. Circe slits the throat of a piglet, stains their hands with its blood. The hearth fires blaze bright, and many cakes are brought out to be burnt as offerings to Zeus.

“There,” Circe says afterwards. “All done.”

Medea sits next to her on the polished chairs, looking at the thin dark line of pig’s blood still beneath her fingernails. “I don’t know that I can ever be cleansed of this.”

Her aunt smirks. “Too bad,” she says. “Ceremony’s over. You are.”

“I just -” she says, and looks towards the Argo where Jason is waiting, and feels her throat close up with emotion. “I feel like I’m going insane. I don’t know what I’ve done. I feel like I would do anything for him.” 

“The only morality in the world is love,” Circe says. “Everything else is mere ambition. Falling headlong into someone else’s story, and selfishly living out your own.”

“I helped kill him,” Medea says. “I killed my brother.”

“He was hunting you down. They would have killed you both, if they caught you.” Circe looks meditatively into the fire. “The gods have done worse, for worse reasons. Zeus, the Cleanser of Sins, once tried to devour his own daughter.”

They are silent for a time. The fire crackles cozily, and the burnt fragrance of cake hangs in the air. “I don’t deserve any of this,” Medea says.

“Ah, that’s the cruelty of it.” Circe sighs. “You are part mortal and part divine, a truth unto yourself, consequence unmoored from judgement.” She lays a hand over Medea’s. “You don’t deserve a damn thing.”

---

When Medea kills her children, she weeps.

(but she has wept before, and gone on to do more wickedness, and so tears are neither salve nor salvation)

After her children are dead, Helios sends down a golden chariot from the heavens to carry her away, to carry away with her the bodies of her children, so that she might bury them with her own two hands in Hera’s sacred grove, safe from any further indignity or harm.

(as a sign from the gods, this might be taken as approval)

---

This is how Medea’s story goes: Time passes and wounds slowly heal. She falls in love again, and has another child. She falls into old habits and once again tries to kill her lover’s son, but this time is unsuccessful. She is forced to flee, and at last returns to her father’s kingdom. She kills her uncle. More kinblood is shed.

Her son Medus grows up to take the throne, and he is so renowned in conquest that the Aryans rename themselves the Medes, in his and his mother’s name.

He is her darling son. She loves him dearly.  

.

This is a happy ending, perhaps.

LOKIII

;)

your icon is hera??? ma’am.... pls tell me about peacocks and marriage 🥺🥺🥺

YES ANON ME TOO 💕

i fucking love hera so much!!! she and artemis are my two absolute favourite goddesses!!!

ahhh and look how beautiful they made her in Blood Of Zeus!!! she’s stunning!!

What’s Inside a ‘Dead’ Star?

Matter makes up all the stuff we can see in the universe, from pencils to people to planets. But there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it! For example: How does matter work when it’s about to become a black hole? We can’t learn anything about matter after it becomes a black hole, because it’s hidden behind the event horizon, the point of no return. So we turn to something we can study – the incredibly dense matter inside a neutron star, the leftover of an exploded massive star that wasn’t quite big enough to turn into a black hole.

Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is an X-ray telescope perched on the International Space Station. NICER was designed to study and measure the sizes and masses of neutron stars to help us learn more about what might be going on in their mysterious cores.

When a star many times the mass of our Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses under its own weight and then bursts into a supernova. What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Heavier stars (around 25 times the Sun’s mass or more) leave behind black holes. Lighter ones (between about eight and 25 times the Sun’s mass) leave behind neutron stars.

Neutron stars pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere about as wide as New York City’s Manhattan Island is long. Just one teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth!

These objects have a lot of cool physics going on. They can spin faster than blender blades, and they have powerful magnetic fields. In fact, neutron stars are the strongest magnets in the universe! The magnetic fields can rip particles off the star’s surface and then smack them down on another part of the star. The constant bombardment creates hot spots at the magnetic poles. When the star rotates, the hot spots swing in and out of our view like the beams of a lighthouse.

Neutron stars are so dense that they warp nearby space-time, like a bowling ball resting on a trampoline. The warping effect is so strong that it can redirect light from the star’s far side into our view. This has the odd effect of making the star look bigger than it really is!

NICER uses all the cool physics happening on and around neutron stars to learn more about what’s happening inside the star, where matter lingers on the threshold of becoming a black hole. (We should mention that NICER also studies black holes!)

Scientists think neutron stars are layered a bit like a golf ball. At the surface, there’s a really thin (just a couple centimeters high) atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. In the outer core, atoms have broken down into their building blocks – protons, neutrons, and electrons – and the immense pressure has squished most of the protons and electrons together to form a sea of mostly neutrons.

But what’s going on in the inner core? Physicists have lots of theories. In some traditional models, scientists suggested the stars were neutrons all the way down. Others proposed that neutrons break down into their own building blocks, called quarks. And then some suggest that those quarks could recombine to form new types of particles that aren’t neutrons!

NICER is helping us figure things out by measuring the sizes and masses of neutron stars. Scientists use those numbers to calculate the stars’ density, which tells us how squeezable matter is!

Let’s say you have what scientists think of as a typical neutron star, one weighing about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass. If you measure the size of the star, and it’s big, then that might mean it contains more whole neutrons. If instead it’s small, then that might mean the neutrons have broken down into quarks. The tinier pieces can be packed together more tightly.

NICER has now measured the sizes of two neutron stars, called PSR J0030+0451 and PSR J0740+6620, or J0030 and J0740 for short.

J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and 16 miles across. (It also taught us that neutron star hot spots might not always be where we thought.) J0740 is about 2.1 times the Sun’s mass and is also about 16 miles across. So J0740 has about 50% more mass than J0030 but is about the same size! Which tells us that the matter in neutron stars is less squeezable than some scientists predicted. (Remember, some physicists suggest that the added mass would crush all the neutrons and make a smaller star.) And J0740’s mass and size together challenge models where the star is neutrons all the way down.

So what’s in the heart of a neutron star? We’re still not sure. Scientists will have to use NICER’s observations to develop new models, perhaps where the cores of neutron stars contain a mix of both neutrons and weirder matter, like quarks. We’ll have to keep measuring neutron stars to learn more!

Keep up with other exciting announcements about our universe by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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