“When You Talk, You Are Only Repeating What You Already Know. When You Listen, You Might Learn Something

How do you fall back in love with life?

clean your room.  clean space, uncluttered space, space that doesn’t have miasma clinging to it can work wonders.  clean the dishes.  sweep.  take out the trash.  peel the clothes off the floor and wash them, and then actually fold/hang them.  take a long shower.  scrub behind your knees.  brush your teeth.  (this can be utterly exhausting, but try to get it done in a day, if you can.  the end result is worth it.)

pull out your notebook.  it doesn’t need to be a new notebook, but preferably one that you don’t usually write in, or that you haven’t touched in a while.  fuck moleskins.  the yellow legal pad will work fine.  sit in your room, or in the park, or in the library, and write a list.  count clouds.  describe all the colors that you see, and note patterns that arise.  sketch the cracks in the walls.  note the shape light makes when it enters a space.  talk about what the air tastes like, smells like.  what sounds are there?  even the white nose, break that down: air planes, fans, cicadas, anything.  remind yourself that you are sitting in the middle of a space brimming with detail.  remind yourself that you are not in nothingness and emptiness.  your world is fathomless.  it has potential.

drink cold water and try to eat something that isn’t processed.  it does not need to be fancy.  buy yourself an apple with the change between your couch cushions.  eat it outside.  if you’re someone who walks, walk somewhere afterwards, just to stretch your legs.  take your fucking meds.  remember that its a good thing that you are inside your body.  your body is a fantastic and endlessly intricate machine, and even though society has smacked a bunch of poisonous ideas on it, that doesn’t change its inherent worth and splendor.  take care of it.

read a novel.  underline your favorite lines, and write phrases that twist your heart inside your chest on the back of your hand with an ink pen.  read a novel like it’s poetry.  read poetry, something decadent but unpretentious.  watch a movie you haven’t seen before.  if there are free art galleries near you, walk through one.  take your time.  let yourself bask.  if there are patterns in what makes your soul ache, write those patterns down – marbles arches or soot crumbling bricks or dandelions or descriptions of dresses or whatever it is, write them down.

your chosen family is important.  remember, they picked you as much as you picked them.  the love has no obligation.  it is given freely and it is given from a place of compassion.  you are not a burden.  if you need to breathe, take a minute by yourself and just exist, but remember to go back to your people.  when they need you, listen and be gracious.  always be gracious.  the universe sometimes remembers things like that.

listen to new music.  link jump on youtube or related artist jump on spotify or ask the chap beside you in the cafe what their favorite band is, and listen to that.  listen to something that you don’t usually listen to.  we tend to tie up a lot of memory with music.  we are falling in love again.  the soundtrack needs to be specific to that.  

allow yourself to indulge in romantics.  press flowers in old books.  play movies with subtitles and mouth the words.  dance in your room.  wear something that makes you feel good, even if you wouldn’t wear it in public.  write your chosen family letters, even if you hand deliver them.  write poetry, even awful poetry.  revel in its awfulness.  eat dark chocolate and when your chosen family want to go out, try to go out with them sometimes, even if its just to the market.  

“You inspired me. For that, you are worth every inch of love I had to give.”

— Bianca Sparacino, Seeds Planted in Concrete (via thoughtkick)

2021-10-10

Canon EOS R6 + RF15-35mm f2.8L IS

Instagram  |  hwantastic79vivid

Hole in the Ground, Oregon. Commonly mistaken for a huge impact crater, the eponymous hole in the ground formed as the result of the interaction between magma and shallow groundwater about 13,000 years ago. This event is called a phreatomagmatic eruption, and the resulting crater can be a maar, tuff ring, or tuff cone; depending on the composition and structure. This one is a tuff ring, and large blocks of lava and stuff were thrown hundreds of meters from the hole’s rim.

The crater is one mile across, and about 100 meters deep, making the climb down and back up quite the trek!

I’ve been thinking about this line a lot. And I’m not sure it’s given all the credit it deserves. It is well overshadowed by Thor’s immediate response (”surrender’s not in mine”), and by the line that steals this whole scene: “Trust my rage.” 

But there’s something about this line that gets me, and I think it’s because it is probably the truest thing Loki has ever said about himself. 

Loki, as we well know, is a master of avoiding his own problems, or else manipulating them to look like everyone else’s. He has told himself so many lies that he has begun to believe them: that he is hated, that he is alone, that he will never be anything but Loki. Frigga even points this out: “Always so perceptive, about everyone but yourself”. Loki can read everyone else, but when it comes to reading himself? Oh, Hel no. Those are dangerous waters, and he would rather not drown there. 

And that’s why this line is so surprising and just so good. The fact that Loki is never satisfied is, when you think about it, pretty much the root of all his problems (at least ones that he can control). As a child and young adult, he appears to have mastered magic, but that was never enough, because it wasn’t like Thor, it wasn’t what Asgard wanted, it wasn’t what Odin wanted (or so he thought). He wants to be Thor’s equal, little realising that in many ways he is, but that, too, is not enough. He tries to be Thor, and is never satisfied. He tries to be Loki, and is never satisfied. He goes out of his way to prove himself to his family, and still he craves more. And so it escalates. A throne. A planet. He keeps reaching and reaching, oblivious to the fact that whilst he is grasping for the mountain’s peak, the rocks beneath him are slipping away. 

And now we come to Ragnarok, and Loki has what he claims he has always wanted: the throne. A chance to rule. And I don’t think for a moment it is what he expects. Because once he has something, it no longer fulfills him; and he is stuck without a family, bearing the weight of the kingship, and I’m nintey-nine percent sure all he can do is sit there thinking ‘Well. Now what?’

And this is why happiness is so foreign to Loki, and always will be, and why he has doomed himself: for contentment, he must learn to settle, and because he is Loki, he will never settle. And so the cycle continues, and he proves time and time again that Loki’s worst enemy will always be Loki. 

OMG The city of echoes sounds thrilling! Idk why but I feel like there are many parrallel stories in myths for these two... I love your other fics too but this one already hunted me down😭

introducing you to: all my WIPs

It’s the second time I’m writing this post because tumblr hates me and deleted it for no reason. Ugh. So, since I have to put some order in my brain, I’ll list here all of the wips I’m currently working on. But here comes the funny part: you get to choose one of these, and I’ll start working on it as soon as I can—and you’ll get a dt when I post it here and on ff.net. Also yes, you got it right; this is basically a way to make me start working on them faster. Here we go.

Olympus (chapter 5). If you know me and have read some of my fics, you probably already know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, “Olympus” is a bookshop AU, in which Reyna is the owner of a cute second-hand-books shop in San Francisco, and Jason is just some guy who happens to be maybe a little too in love with the shop (and its owner).

Sugar paper (chapter 1). You’re probably so sick of me talking about this fic. This is the fake dating AU I’ve been talking about for months, perhaps?, but never wrote. I’ve already started writing the first chapter, but I don’t like it at all, so I think I’ll just delete all I’ve got and start again from the beginning. Anyway, it features Percy, Nico, Jason’s and Reyna’s families and the fabulous Hazel Levesque.

The three times Reyna fell in love with Jason (and the one time she didn’t). If you think this title screams angst, you’re totally right. Slightly—highly, actually—inspired to my shitty love life, this fic is set in the canonic universe, and takes place before HoO. I think the title is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t give you any details; only that New Rome plays a huge role in this fic. Oh and it’s a one-shot.

Rewrite the stars. Rey is going to hate me because I promised I’d write this ages ago and I still haven’t begun. This is a Star Trek AU in which Jason is the captain of a starship, and Reyna is his cold, stonefaced, calculating first officer with Romulan origins. When he asks her out for dinner, she has to remind him of the Code they had agreed to respect back when they were at the academy. Also a one-shot.

Illicit affairs. Obviously inspired by Taylor Swift, because how can you be a jeyna shipper and not listen to Taylor Swift. In particular, this fic is going to be a three-shots based on her new album “Folklore”’s teenage love triangle. In fact, this is not exactly jeyna. It’s more a study of the Piper/Jason/Reyna love triangle in the books. Mhh I don’t know if I’m ever going to write this anyway, so let me know.

The city of echoes. I’ve been thinking about this idea for the last week and I’m so in love with it. The subtitle is “All the times Jason and Reyna came back to each other”; the main plot takes place after ToA, but I want it to have as many flashbacks as possible. This one is going to be hot and sweet and rude, all at the same time. Both smutty and angsty. It’s mainly based on the myth of Phosphorus and Hesperus—the morning and the evening stars—, always thought to be so apart, and yet being the same thing. Exactly like Jason and Reyna. Three-shots.

Keep reading

I like to laugh with myself, since I've no one besides me now. But that's alright, I still have me.

Yes please.

The Lives, Times, and Deaths of Stars

Who among us doesn’t covertly read tabloid headlines when we pass them by? But if you’re really looking for a dramatic story, you might want to redirect your attention from Hollywood’s stars to the real thing. From birth to death, these burning spheres of gas experience some of the most extreme conditions our cosmos has to offer.

All stars are born in clouds of dust and gas like the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula pictured below. In these stellar nurseries, clumps of gas form, pulling in more and more mass as time passes. As they grow, these clumps start to spin and heat up. Once they get heavy and hot enough (like, 27 million degrees Fahrenheit or 15 million degrees Celsius), nuclear fusion starts in their cores. This process occurs when protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, squish together to form helium nuclei. This releases a lot of energy, which heats the star and pushes against the force of its gravity. A star is born.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

From then on, stars’ life cycles depend on how much mass they have. Scientists typically divide them into two broad categories: low-mass and high-mass stars. (Technically, there’s an intermediate-mass category, but we’ll stick with these two to keep it straightforward!)

Low-mass stars

A low-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or less and can burn steadily for billions of years. As it reaches the end of its life, its core runs out of hydrogen to convert into helium. Because the energy produced by fusion is the only force fighting gravity’s tendency to pull matter together, the core starts to collapse. But squeezing the core also increases its temperature and pressure, so much so that its helium starts to fuse into carbon, which also releases energy. The core rebounds a little, but the star’s atmosphere expands a lot, eventually turning into a red giant star and destroying any nearby planets. (Don’t worry, though, this is several billion years away for our Sun!)

Red giants become unstable and begin pulsating, periodically inflating and ejecting some of their atmospheres. Eventually, all of the star’s outer layers blow away, creating an expanding cloud of dust and gas misleadingly called a planetary nebula. (There are no planets involved.)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

All that’s left of the star is its core, now called a white dwarf, a roughly Earth-sized stellar cinder that gradually cools over billions of years. If you could scoop up a teaspoon of its material, it would weigh more than a pickup truck. (Scientists recently found a potential planet closely orbiting a white dwarf. It somehow managed to survive the star’s chaotic, destructive history!)

High-mass stars

A high-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or more and may only live for millions of years. (Rigel, a blue supergiant in the constellation Orion, pictured below, is 18 times the Sun’s mass.)

Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

A high-mass star starts out doing the same things as a low-mass star, but it doesn’t stop at fusing helium into carbon. When the core runs out of helium, it shrinks, heats up, and starts converting its carbon into neon, which releases energy. Later, the core fuses the neon it produced into oxygen. Then, as the neon runs out, the core converts oxygen into silicon. Finally, this silicon fuses into iron. These processes produce energy that keeps the core from collapsing, but each new fuel buys it less and less time. By the point silicon fuses into iron, the star runs out of fuel in a matter of days. The next step would be fusing iron into some heavier element, but doing requires energy instead of releasing it.  

The star’s iron core collapses until forces between the nuclei push the brakes, and then it rebounds back to its original size. This change creates a shock wave that travels through the star’s outer layers. The result is a huge explosion called a supernova.

What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Remember, a high-mass star is anything with a mass more than eight times the Sun’s — which is a huge range! A star on the lower end of this spectrum leaves behind a city-size, superdense neutron star. (Some of these weird objects can spin faster than blender blades and have powerful magnetic fields. A teaspoon of their material would weigh as much as a mountain.)

At even higher masses, the star’s core turns into a black hole, one of the most bizarre cosmic objects out there. Black holes have such strong gravity that light can’t escape them. If you tried to get a teaspoon of material to weigh, you wouldn’t get it back once it crossed the event horizon — unless it could travel faster than the speed of light, and we don’t know of anything that can! (We’re a long way from visiting a black hole, but if you ever find yourself near one, there are some important safety considerations you should keep in mind.)

The explosion also leaves behind a cloud of debris called a supernova remnant. These and planetary nebulae from low-mass stars are the sources of many of the elements we find on Earth. Their dust and gas will one day become a part of other stars, starting the whole process over again.

That’s a very brief summary of the lives, times, and deaths of stars. (Remember, there’s that whole intermediate-mass category we glossed over!) To keep up with the most recent stellar news, follow NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

till the storm passes

PJO RAREPAIR WEEK (DAY 4): Hurt/Comfort

Pairing: Jason/Reyna (Jeyna)

Word Count: 1124

This fic is based on Seven by Taylor Swift. Shoutout to @exqviseit for the idea ily bestie. Also they aren't exactly seven here but the vibes are there and that's what's important

Jason could hear them. Even over the deafening rain pounding on his windows and the winds rattling the trees in the lawn, he could hear the yells from next door. The sounds of a man raising his voice and the slightly shriller voice of a girl shouting back at him.

From his bed, he could vaguely make out the outlines of Mr. Avila and Hylla next door, both of them moving around the living room of their home. He hoped they would stop. He knew Reyna would be up in her room, head buried in a pillow, and talking to herself to drown out the noise. But today, that might not be enough.

He knew the situation was bad in the Avila household. Ever since Mrs. Avila had left the family one fine day last summer, Mr. Avila had spiraled into drinking. Jason was more aware of this than he wanted to be, thanks to the many, many times his infuriating step mother had brought it up during dinner, as she tried to fill his father in on the “neighbourhood gossip”. Ever since then, Hylla had been getting into more fights with Mr. Avila, some of them lasting well into the night.

Jason would always know whenever they fought. Even if he couldn’t hear them through his window, he knew by the dark circles under Reyna’s eyes the next day at school that she hadn’t slept all night.

Sometimes, he wished he could just bring her home and have her stay with him. But he knew his parents would never agree to that. That didn’t stop him from dreaming of a day when both of them could get away from their families and run. Far away from the little neighbourhood they lived in, far from the identical houses with picket fences and manicured lawns to places he could genuinely be free.

He was startled from his train of thought by a loud sound near his window. He blinked twice, thinking he had imagined it, when it happened again. He slowly got up from his bed, making his way to the window, wondering if a bird had accidentally landed on the sill and was now trying to get in. As he looked out the glass, he saw a small figure standing right below him, absolutely drenched by the rain, throwing tiny stones.

Reyna.

Jason quickly pulled open his window and called out, “Hold on, I’ll open the door for you,” just as another stone flew up, narrowly missing his cheek.

His brain had already started thinking of ways he could open the main door and smuggle Reyna into his room without his parents hearing him, but before he could turn around, Reyna had started climbing on the lean birch next to his window.

He knew Reyna could handle herself, having seen her climb the trees around their neighbourhood multiple times, but the storm outside was relentless. He gnawed on his lip slightly, hoping that she wouldn’t fall from the thin branches and break her arm, but again, this was Reyna. In a matter of minutes, she had pushed herself through his window and now stood in his room, dripping water on the carpet.

“Hold on,” Jason whispered, opening up his cupboard and bringing out his favourite towel, an old blue one with superman logos, hoping it would bring a smile to her face. He handed it to Reyna, who accepted it with a muttered thanks. As she wiped away the water from her arms, Jason couldn’t help noticing the separate tracks of water from her eyes, very obviously not from the rain. He wanted to comfort her but he knew a single wrong step could frighten her more.

Jason made his way to the bed, pulled back the covers and sat down. Reyna followed, taking a seat next to him. The room was dead quiet for a few minutes.

Then Reyna slowly moved closer to him, tentatively laying her head on his shoulder. Jason gave a small smile before wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Jason could feel her steady breathing on his skin as she meddled with the ends of her hair.

He murmured, “You know you’re safe with me, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, letting out a small sigh. “It’s just... I bother you too much.”

Jason shook his head, exasperatedly. “Rey, you know you’re not a bother. You need to understand that..”

She lifted her head from his shoulder, looking into his eyes with that desolate look that made his heart clench painfully. She whispered, “Then why do they always treat me like one?”

In that moment, Jason was tempted to go over next door and yell at her family till his voice became hoarse but that wasn't what Reyna needed. He gazed at her face, lifting his hand to her face to push away a stray strand of hair, and said, “I don’t know Rey, but they must be insane to do that. God, you’re one of the best people I know. I just…” he paused, wiping away a tear trickling from Reyna’s eye, “I just want to run away from here with you. Like far far away, where we can just be ourselves.”

Reyna let out a shaky breath. “I’d like that as well. Just you and me.”

She paused and silence fell upon the room again, silence that filled the little spaces between their bodies. Jason cautiously lifted his hand from Reyna’s shoulder to her hair, lightly running his fingers through her hair. He felt her tense against his chest for a second, before relaxing again. They stayed like that for a timeless minute, just the both of them in his small room.

The silence was broken when Reyna murmured, “I wish they’d stop yelling...I don’t think I can take it anymore. Day after day of both of them losing their minds and breaking things. I just wish I could have a day where I can fall asleep in peace and wake up to a normal house.” She let out a small sigh. “But that’s too naïve to hope for.”

Jason grabbed her hand, holding it in his hands as his words came out in a frenzied mess. “It's not naïve and one day, you’ll have it, I swear!”

She gave him a small smile. “What if I want you there?”

“Then you’ll have me too.”

Reyna wrapped her arms around him as he held her as close as possible. “I love you, Jay,” she said, her voice muffled against his shirt.

“I love you too, Rey Rey,”

Later that night, as they sat next to each other, reading his comic books, she asked, “You’ll stay with me? Till the storm passes.?”

He smiled. “Till forever.”

She smiled back.

Omg would you look at that....a not angsty jeyna fanfic from me....Anyways please do reblog and comment it really does mean a lot.

Masterlist || Taglist

Taglist:

@dragoncreek319 @naerysthelonesome @queerymiracle  @nyx-is-a-blanket-burrito @tothestarsandback @kuuhakublank00 @mango-pickle @xstarsarewrong @exqviseit @aadyeah @fanvergentinexistentialcrisis @knowitowl  @totallyforgotyouwerehere   @fractaldemon3 @hitchhiker-of-the-galaxy @pandora-allan @stars-triumphant @hayliemyers-agentofshield @dead-potato-monster @apocalyptic-cake @i-love-books-and-i-cannot-lie @seargentsargent @lifehas0meaning @doremifasolangelo @not-today-thx @outerviolety @crzyprsn42 @ohyoumeanher @ineedbackgroundmusicinmylife @mayplesyrup @idontknows-world @teenageshizz @rainbowsnowflake @whythefuckdoiexist @theoneandonlypanya @rosadiaz-givesme-bipanic @screechingnightchild @livelistenlove @overly-obsessed-over-nothing @verose-queen-of-hell @elysiansuns @nikeopolis @allys-creative-bubble @junebugzz @nacho08 @just-a-donut-who-reads @them-awesome-rarepairs

Safety glasses off, motherfuckers*.

*HE REALLY SAID THAT HE REALLY DID I WAS LOSING MY DAMN MIND