Coldest Star Found—No Hotter Than Fresh Coffee

You know, I think the biggest disappointment of my childhood was not failing to receive my Hogwart’s letter (or the American equivalent). I mean yes, there was a stretch the summer I was eleven where I was hopeful, but September first came around and I sort of shrugged and accepted it (possibly with some relief because I didn’t want to go so far away from Mama and Da).

No. The real disappointment was that the Wizard’s Oath from Diane Duane’s Young Wizards never took. I don’t know how many times I read that oath out loud and then held my breath and hoped. Hoped, hoped, hoped that I would wake up the next morning and the book wouldn’t just be Nita and Kit’s adventure, but would be in the Speech. It never was.

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Twice a year, you may experience some degree of television interference due to sun outages.

RCN I have news for you, if the sun goes out I am not going to be worried about missing Wheel of Fortune.

(Sun Outages are actually when the sun moves directly behind a TV satellite and interferes with its signal, which makes it sound like the sun is photobombing my TV, but “sun outages” just made me lol.)

book character fancast for repfest: #5

Xolo Maridueña as Kit Rodriguez, Young Wizards by Diane Duane

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?

Orbital Mechanics by Tatiana Plakhova 

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

Astronauts just found life in space, we kid you not

Russian cosmonauts have discovered something remarkable clinging to the outside of the International Space Station: living organisms.

“Results of the experiment are absolutely unique" | Follow micdotcom

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. 

The Wizards' Oath changes from novel to novel in the Young Wizards series. Do you think you'll ever have a final version of it, or do you see the Oath continuing to grow and change for as long as the series continues?

There won’t ever be a “final” version, no. Whenever the series ends (or its author does), there will always be an understanding that there would always have been versions of the Oath we’d simply never see (or have time to see).

It’s not so much an issue of the Oath itself changing. At the start of a wizardly career, it’s offered to each probationer in the form that will best express to them what their responsibility to the Universe, the One and the Powers that Be is going to look like, at least at the outset. It tends to be simple and clear to start with: people need to be certain about what they’re signing up for. But afterwards, Oaths can change and become more complex as their users change, and as their understandings of that responsibility grow.

There are versions of the Oath that have become very popular across cultures, across regions of a world, or sometimes even planet-wide or further, depending on the species. But everyone understands that each wizard has the right to restate the Oath for himself/herself/itself/whatevergenderself so that it best expresses that responsibility to minimize the growth / effects of entropy, including the most basic strictures: don’t end life if you can avoid it, don’t handle finite resources thoughtlessly, don’t interfere in working systems unless the system itself is under significant threat, don’t change things without permission / fix what’s not broken (a dual simplification/restatement of the Troptic Stipulation: see Tom’s discussion of it and other aspects of the Oath here).

But outside of that, there’s room for considerable elaboration. Some wizards over time evolve personal recensions of the Oath that are quite long. In fact mention is made in future-canon of a species somewhere a long way off whose entire wizardly practice consists in recitation of the Oath in one of its most involved and complex forms. They spend their whole lives, these wizards, in an ecstasy of expression that we’re not remotely equipped to understand… continually reminding the Universe how it’s meant to be cared for. They don’t actually do anything — or so it would seem to us at first (or second or tenth) glance. But our perception of the never-ending intervention that is their lives is necessarily limited by the (all-too-)human perception that to matter, you have to be doing stuff. As their species reckons things, they are the most recklessly active and adventurous wizards extant. And who are we to judge them as being otherwise? 

The above is just one of many worlds or other kinds of places (I think this gets mentioned in AWoM somewhere) where, in this mode or others, the Oath appears in forms that would make no sense whatsoever to a human. Yet these still fruitfully express the relationships of the species in question with the Powers and with the Universe they’re helping to take care of. And even when using what we consider one of the conventional local wordings, inside a human wizard’s head — over the course of their practice — images and concepts get attached to the mere words that are evocative of the interventions you’ve participated in, the lives you’ve saved, the friends you’ve lost, the causes you’ve won. In fact you could probably make a case that no matter how many times you repeat the words, even if they’re the same words, it is impossible for you ever to speak the same Oath twice. You are not the wizard you were a year ago, or three, or ten: or an hour ago, or five minutes back. You are in constant change, as is the Universe you serve (since you’re stuck inside Time together). Your work in that Universe changes you further, and your constant commitment and re-commitment — as itself manifested in the Oath — changes you further still. It’s all flux, from a wizard’s first breath to the last: and that’s as it should be.

So, no… no “final” versions of the Oath: not until the last quartz molecule stops vibrating. By which time, it’ll no longer be any problem of mine. :)