Everytime I Feel An Epiphany Coming I Have To Seriously Question Myself If I Want To Let It In. I Like

holy fucking shit op this is raw emotion

Any suggestions/inspiration for a STEM-focused, dark academia aesthetic? I'm something of a reformed humanities student finishing an engineering degree this time around.

I think STEM in Dark Academia is an underappreciated aesthetic. The humanities seek to understand what it is to be human, and this is a complex venture indeed. But studying STEM means you seek to understand the world around you. And my God, are there mysteries to be uncovered. Let’s go down the list together, shall we?

SCIENCE.

Latin words fall from your lips as easily as a prayer, and isn’t there piety in this? Devotion, worship? There must be, for you to be able to dig your hands into the breathing body of the world around you and have it speak back. Messily scrawled chemical equations are practically tattooed onto your arms and hands, and sometimes you wake with the molecular structure of a human red blood cell drawn carefully on your heart with no memory of putting it there, but it moves with the pulse of your heart. Bubbling beakers and plumes of emerald, cobalt, violet flame. Faded lab coats. Hair cut short or pulled back neatly, not a single tendril hanging down. Dirt under fingernails, sleeves rolled up and out of the way. You know poisons, toxins, you know the pump of blood through arteries, you know how close we are to death, and you know how it feels to hold the hand of human long dead, still cold from the cooler. Death hates you, because you are helping humanity evade it.

TECHNOLOGY.

Lines and lines of code stare back at you from the over-bright screen of your monitor. You know, you know that we could be more, that the future is a few keystrokes away if only you can organize your tumbling thoughts and the wall of symbols in front of you. You like the way robots move; tiny, carefully planned, yet oh so jerky motions that can’t help but remind you of when a baby deer takes its first quivering steps. You think humans were like this once, in the beginning. You think the movement in a motor resembles the inner workings of a human heart. You imagine the veins that pump blood through your body as wires on a circuit board delivering electricity from one place to another. Leather shoes laced as tightly as possible, tiny blueprints doodled on the soles. Bronze bells hanging from a bedroom window, a crumbled silk shirt. How far can you push at the boundaries of what is possible before something breaks? Will it be you or reality that gives first?

ENGINEERING.

What is it about the smoothing of clay into shapes that makes humanity stop and say, “This must be what it feels like to be God”? How much more can you feel it, with the power in your fingertips and in the corners of your mind to make things humans could never do? To push civilization past its breaking point and remake it anew, better, stronger, more than God ever did? What is the difference between man and machine, and should you even care in the first place? You are like God alright, you are participating in something divine, something holy. You double check every equation and think about what it means to be alive. You decide that, in the ever moving cogs of this great clock, you will be the first piece that moves, the one that pushes the others to succeed. Pencils stabbed into messy buns, lipstick stains on pale coffee cup rims. Your eyes are sharp and focused, but your thoughts are ever moving and desperate with desire to create, to bound forward into the future you are oh so carefully envisioning, every piece laid out and pinned down within an inch of its life. Children are starving, the world is burning, and you can do something, you can fix this, because if you don't, who else can? Who else will?

MATHEMATICS.

What is math? A meaningless formal game. Above the door at Plato’s Academy were inscribed the words, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” How can it be that both are true? A secret language exists that no one is born into, but is available to all willing to learn. Astronomy, the constant ever cycling of the universe around us, our own home a puzzle piece in a cosmic dance. Meandering lines of equations that are beautiful, beautiful, because you know what they mean and they speak to you, they sing. You write them with calligraphy pens and hang them above your desk, they are as much an expression of the human condition as a Picasso; show our creativity more than a Monet. Hands dirty from dragging them over cramped pages of numbers and graphite dust, equations traced into the foggy glass of your favorite coffee shop, messy hair and bitten down nails, math pun t-shirts under tweed blazers, the theory of relativity scrawled sloppily on your knee, the world around you the sum of shapes and numbers and you can see it, you can hear it.

STEM in Dark Academia is nonstop in its restlessness. There is always more to be discovered, further to push, limits that can and will be broken. There is a darkness to that beauty, a madness that permeates the cracks of every field. A historian could have told you not to make the atom bomb. A scientist can’t help themself from seeing how much destruction is possible.

The mechanisms iceberg

I am humbly asking the fandom and older fans for entries on this iceberg because it really bugs me that there is so so much lore and even easter eggs thrown around the internet yet to be brought together to light

5/100

ayoo so i actually did do something ngl

academically speaking

so i know i started by doing some maths

after that i played some chess and tried to remember some stuff but im too impacient djsdkfjg

then i took some astronomy notes

and in the end i just started reading a genetics book because ngl the subject is pretty interesting

ill be gone to the countryside for a couple days so im not sure how much ill manage to do

Free places to learn astronomy from

Making this for my fellow broke passionate people

https://www.coursera.org/learn/astro

https://www.teachastronomy.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/astropedia/videos

(these first 3 are basically the same shit but different platforms)

I will keep reblogging each time I find something new

recently i've been suffering from homosexual tendencies

Medieval Astronomy resources 🚀👽🌌

there’s a tiny bit of a tendency in resources on medieval astronomy to ignore either:

the contributions of any medieval thinkers towards ideas that gained traction in the scientific revolution (i.e. ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ is a medieval concept in and of itself! and it applies here!! the Great Man understanding of scientific history really cherry-picks what we remember about the past!!)

the immense contributions and genius of Islamic thinkers towards medieval understandings of astronomy, let alone the fact that Persian and Indian ideas were tied up in all of this 

the close relationship between science and religion in medieval Christianity and Islam (it was seen as a way of understanding God’s creation!! it wasn’t seen as bad unless it contradicted established doctrine!! in which case yes sigh the church would scold/ban/burn your ass, depending)

all of the above

and there’s often this undercurrent of “the Greeks and Romans had it sorted and all this knowledge was lost in the ~Dark Ages~ and until Aristotle was ~rediscovered~ the world backslid into ~primitive~ ignorance” 😪

TLDR: these links aren’t as nuanced as they maybe could be, but they’re better than some, so feel free to try mush them together in your brain and see what emerges 😂:

Medieval astronomy | Medieval Science History part 3 (10 mins)

The Medieval Islamicate World: Crash Course History of Science #7 (13 mins)

Religion and Science History in Medieval Europe | Medieval Science History part 5 (11 mins)

Podcast interview with Seb Falk - the guy in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s video above ^^ (19 mins)

Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World (essay/article)

India, the Islamic world, medieval Europe, and China (essay/article - did not give any person or time period before Copernicus enough credit tbh)

anyway astronomy and astrophysics are so SO interesting to me and i love a cheeky bit of overlap with my other One True Love (medieval history) so enjoy the vibes ❤️❤️⭐

Learning to like Physics

I actually cannot believe how much I used to hate Physics until last year, but then I actually took the time and effort to understand it and?? it’s so cool and fun and easy?? unreal.

It literally seemed impossible for me and I legit thought I wouldn’t be able to graduate because I was never gonna pass Physics (I’m a Math major so we actually have 4 required Physics courses). I don’t know what the point of this is but, don’t be afraid of Physics guys!! (or any other subject!!) yes it’s frustrating as hell and you feel dumb for not having a clue about what is happening or how to work out the problems but I swear once it clicks for you (and it will) it’s gonna be great.

So if anyone needs a step by step (for college/uni), here’s one:

Google is your best friend, the internet has plenty of videos/papers/worked out problems for you to check out. The most important thing to look for is drawings and videos that help you visualize what’s going on. In most of general physics, the key is to see what forces are acting, and from that follows everything else.

Know your core equations. Honestly it’s always the same ones in the end.

For mechanics: you absolutely gotta know Newton’s Laws, Work and its relation to Kinetic/Potential Energy. Momentum is also important.

For thermodynamics: First and Second Law of Thermodynamics; pV = nRT, Boyle/Gay Lussac etc (note that they’re all connected), Carnot’s Cycle.

For electromagnetism: Maxwell’s equations. This is as far as I’ve gotten in my studies.

Understand where the formulas come from, rather than learning them by heart. For me, this was necessary because my memory is absolutely shit so there was no way I could remember every variation. But most of the formulas actually do make sense, and once you’ve drawn out a diagram of what’s happening, you can work them out yourself.

For the previous point, I suggest you watch and rewatch your professor’s explanation until you get the gist. Don’t get discouraged if it’s not immediately crystal clear, seek out other explanations if you need to. Then try to do it yourself.

ASK. FOR. HELP. I cannot stress this enough, do not feel ashamed about asking questions in class or during office hours. There are no stupid questions, and you’re paying thousands every year for people to teach you. Also physics is hard, so you’re pretty much expected to not understand immediately. Moreover, I can guarantee there’s at least one other person in the room with the same question who’s too afraid to ask. I was that person, and I failed the class because of it. Don’t be me.

Practice until you’re able to do most variations of standard problems. Once you’re able to do a certain problem, try to change it and see what happens. You don’t have to crunch the numbers all over again, go with your intuition first. Then you can calculate everything and see if you were correct.

This is all I’ve got at the moment. It applies to General Physics because I’m still pretty shit at Mathematical Physics (Rational Mechanics?) lmao, which is why I don’t talk about Lagrangians and such here.

If anyone has any other tips (for Mathematical Physics as well!) , please feel free to add them. Note that I’m from Italy, and this is what it was like for me. Other countries might have different ways of testing or focus on some formulas that I haven’t included. Do what works for you, obviously.

Good luck STEM students, I know it’s hard, but hopefully worth it in the long run :)

My much requested list of resources for studying astrophysics. Happy learning!

The poetry of the ineffable husbands

It’s me ya boi I gotta go to bed in an hour so I’m writing it as fast as I can so I don’t lose my idea tomorrow. 

So, what do I mean by that? Literally what it says. I’m just going to ramble about how beautiful and full of metaphors their relationship is and how it just gives me a reason to live. It’s not going to be good rambling. Just rambling with a little bit of passion in it.

Ight imma start with the classic things. As a former Wattpad loyal user I know all the angel x demon tropes. And I am sick of them to my stomach, I can’t stand one more uwu baby angel corrupted by demon. And this is what is surprising but does make sense about them husbands. They cannot, in my opinion, be called angel or demon, they literally became 2 halves of the same entity, the supernatural entity that watches over humans and makes sure there is a balance between good and bad. Like Yin and Yang. Good and evil, black and white, light and darkness. Not opposing, but complementing each other.

 Aaaand they were like that from the beginning. Remember when Crowley said  "Funny thing is, I keep wondering whether the apple thing wasn’t the right thing to do, as well. A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing. Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?". They somehow knew it, Crowley wasn’t evil and Aziraphale wasn’t as obedient as an angel should have been. From the first time they ever got in touch in each other (we do not have any information on the times before Crowley’s fall) they somehow ended up thinking they didn’t do the thing their roles assigned them to. And this just shows how interesting their relationship that would come will be. In their relationship they always ended up stepping on their values that were assigned and for what? For the sake of each other.

Now, I got into the light-darkness thing and I feel the need to extend it. I somewhere saw a theory that angel’s halo’s are so bright that it blinds them, the angels having to rely only on God’s word. Meanwhile, the fallen angels, the demons, had their halo’s broken, forming the shape of the horns, being able to see and think on their own but not having any form of guidance. Now that we uncovered that doesnt a relationship between a demon and an angel just make sense? Like, the angel, blinded by the divine light, would rely on the demon’s words and rationalizing. The demon would then be guided by the angel’s light, this way both benefiting for each other and having to bond to each other. It just makes me so soft to think about that need of each other, and just a silly little thing my brain just said: “the angel could guide the demon through the darkest of times’’ (yes I just quoted my brain deal with it). I am just a succkerrr for this kind of soft thing and many people would probably not empathize and thats okay.

Now the really corny shit. Like the “forbidden love” kind of. This is, again, a well-known trope, but this time one that didn’t lose as much value as others did. When you think “forbidden love” there are so many posibilities. Like... gays during the history, a maiden and a prince, a gay knight and a prince, mafia gang leader harry styles and crime detective, the entire plot of hannibal, drunken me and a laptop to write, hold on I’m going too far, just young people in love and not affording it aaannndd 2 people from opposite sides. Heaven/Hell I mean. Obviously very opposite. And what we have learned about this forbidden love kinda stuff? They almost always end up running away together. Yes I am proving Crowley is head over heels but like, isn’t that poetic as fuck? Being so sick of having to do your work, to hide your feelings, to just hide yourself and the person you would die for that you just want to dull off together and live the perfect life without being judged?

Related to the past point, even if this was an innevitable choice, just the fact that Crowley chose Alpha Centauri is just making my brain and fingers go nuts. Alpha Centauri is a triple star system, 2 of them forming a binary star, basically two stars that are pretty close to each other. Now I know this doesn’t really make any sense, but what if those 2 stars represent Crowley and Aziraphale, and the 3rd one represents Adam? Like in that moment they went during the time before the world was created. I just think it would be cool as fuck that there would actually be an association made.

Also just the ship’s name: Ineffable. What does it mean? Beyond words, beyond understanding. What we always try is to put our feelings into words, and we more than usual fail. Because feelings aren’t something to be shown by words. They are ineffable.

Where did I go with this? Absolutely. No. Idea. I just poured all I my thoughts on a tired keyboard until my fingers have gone cold. It’s just that there are small details or just small ideas that maybe aren’t that revolutionary or special, but why not randomly post them on the internet?

*screeches in happy*

ace culture is being absolutely enchanted by ineffable husbands (f/ good omens) cause there’s barely any physical touch but they’re still best friends and ultimately in love so