Outofambit - Out Of Ambit

It started out as a quick sketch… 4 days later! It’s a scene from one of my favorite books, #SoYouWantToBeAWizard by #dduane #ballpoint #sketch #illustration #dragon #youngwizards

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own. 

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

NASA Is Considering The Use Of Soft Robotic Squids To Explore Europa

NASA has chosen its next batch of proposals under its advanced concepts program, including the use of soft-robotic rovers for exploring gas-giant moons, and autonomous robots capable of crawling, hopping, and rolling around the surface of the Moon.

follow for more soft robotic squid

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

Neil deGrasse Tyson in response to “Aliens can’t exist because we haven’t found them yet” (via meggannn)

<3

Young Wizards meta: In "So You Want to Be a Wizard", where is the Lone Power's HQ?

At the Top of the Rock observation deck, and I’m debating with my sister over which building was probably the one that held the Dark Book in the overshadowed Manhattan…

Does the Lone Power have… an en-trophy wife?

At Ebooks Direct: Our Pride Month Bundle is 50% off!

Caution! These works contain: homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, pansexuals, asexuals, polyamorous folks, genderfluid humans and nonhumans, and two (or maybe three) varieties of queer magic-users, as well as gay science-users, wizards, and Dragons.

And they’ve all been there since 1979.

Welcome to one universe where whom you love and how your genders intersect is between you, your lover(s), and the Goddess. And another where wizards come in so many species and sexualities that getting sniffy about something as wildly variable as local sex and gender may well be seen as kind of provincial… when you’re just one more of a million kinds of humanity, and the serious question is: “Never mind the tentacles—do you think we can date?”

The Pride Month Bundle contains:

The Door Into Fire*

The Door Into Shadow*

The Door Into Sunset*

Tales of the Five #1: The Levin-Gad

Tales of the Five #2: The Landlady

Sirronde’s World #1: The Span

Sirronde’s World #3: Parting Gifts (SW #2 not yet written)

Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #1: Lior and the Sea

Additionally, it contains the Tales of the Middle Kingdoms novella, Overdue—available only at Ebooks Direct as a standalone purchase, in this collection, and in the whole-store “I Want Everything You’ve Got” collection.

And finally, from the Young Wizards universe, the Pride Month Bundle contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the series—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo—on their first canonically-“out” (ad)venture as a couple:

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Click here to get the 2024 Pride Package!

(And if you've got one already, or aren't interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging for the attention of others? Please & thank you!)

UK friends: due to Brexit, we regret that we are no longer able to sell ebooks into Britain. Our apologies that this offer is therefore not valid in the UK.

*Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winner

yall arent ready yet but one day were going to talk about how the young wizards series is better than harry potter. the language is more complicated but trust me, its better 

fave reads of 2017: Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane

“And we will cause it to be well-made, this Sacrifice. You, young and never loving; I, old and never loved. Such a Song the Sea will never have seen.”

read if you like: middle grade fiction, male-female friendships, a blend of science fiction and fantasy, magic that has real and lasting consequences, and crying over large sea animals