“‘It Never Gets Old, It’s Always Thrilling,’ Said Celia Ackerman, A Naturalist With American

Thank you for the welcome! This is one of my oldest fandoms (started reading around the time Wizard's Dilemma came out) and I can't believe it took me this long to make a blog for it... :) I love this fandom's tumblr presence. You're all such lovely people!

Started this blog because everyone needs a place to dump their space porn and YW fandom stuff….right?

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

- Mark Twain

This is honestly my favorite quote. It’s changed how I look at life and religion.

(via the-bitchextraordinaire)

So this quote seemed very familiar when I saw it earlier, and I just realized why. 

The power was burning in her tears, an odd hot feeling as she wept for Fred, for Kit’s Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that day- all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to!

For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way- and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound in the same way.

Kit was still reading. Nita turned her head in the nova moonlight and looked over her shoulder at the one who watched. His face was set, furious and bitter, but yes, weary too. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated again, and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked back down to the reading feeling sorry even for him, opened her mouth and along with Kit began to say his name-

Don’t be afraid to make corrections!

Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her space pen that Fred had saved and changed, and clicked it open.

The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the book and, with he pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that change could happen- if, only if- and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real.

- So You Want to Be a Wizard, Diane Duane

So, in the history of all of the universe, who prays for the one sinner that needs it the most? Her name is Juanita Callahan, and at age 13 she has more mercy in her soul than I could ever hope to strive for.

(via professorsparklepants)

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. 

Good News Network

Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around the Seychelles is First in Decades – 'Phenomenal'

It's the first time they've been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it's a wonderful milestone in a long and perhaps successful recover

"The Seychelles has become a major tourist destination for beachgoing and scuba diving, but it’s not only humans that are beginning to flock to this island.

In what marine biologists have described as a “phenomenal finding,” a survey of whales around the territorial waters of this archipelagic nation revealed the presence of blue whales—over a dozen.

It’s the first time they’ve been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it’s a wonderful milestone in a long and increasingly successful recovery for the world’s largest animal.

The Seychelles are located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, and they were historically a stopover point for Soviet whalers en route to Antarctica. The years 1963 to 1966 were particularly difficult for whales here, and many were taken before the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling put an end to the practice of hunting baleen whales in 1973.

Since 1966, no dedicated investigation of whales in the Seychelles had been made until 2020, when a partnership of four universities conducted an acoustic survey over the period of two years.

They made five different sightings of groups of up to 10 animals.

“This was a phenomenal finding,” Jeremy Kiszka, a co-author of the paper from Florida International University, wrote in The Conversation. “We were prepared to not see any blue whales due to the high level of hunting that occurred fairly recently and absolutely no information was available since the last blue whale was killed in the region in 1964.” ...

The team behind the survey sent images taken of the whales’ dorsal sides to a database to see if any of them had been recorded before, and amid the reel, not a single one was a match with any other photographed whale.

This, the team suggests, means they have probably never been seen before, which for a species that big might seem strange, but along with there being only 5,000 to 15,000 on Earth, they migrate vast distances while diving deep, making recording their movements incredibly challenging.

The survey identified 23 whale species in total using hydroponic mics over 2 years with peak activity coming between December and April. This is a fascinating finding that suggests something about the seas around the Seychelles makes for excellent whale habitat."

-via Good News Network, April 30, 2024

The city breathing, burning, living the life they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life- how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects- not the reason, the purpose.

gUYS VOYAGER 1 IS CONFIRMED OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM WE’VE BROKEN OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM THIS IS REALLY COOL

My friend made a uquiz that assigns you a whale species. Take it. Take it now.

Epic map reveals Mars’s geography in unrivalled detail

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