Technically, Ice Is A Mineral. Minerals Are Defined By The Presence Of A Uniform Chemical Composition

From death, life.

They stand before her, and they brandish their weapons callously, carelessly. She knows they mean to kill her – she’s of no use to them. “Don’t run and we’ll make it quick, little girl,” one of them says. “You can join your family.” She knows that he is lying. The world is open before her, and she knows all that may be known.

She can see the silence behind them, the darkness. Death. The void awaits.

The men smirk. They are empty of life and humanity, worn to blood, bone, and sharpened teeth by violence. They expect her to beg. They do not know.

She stands before them, small. Her spine is straight, and her head is high. She meets his eyes.

“No,” she says, and her voice is strong and clear. It is still a girl-child’s voice, but there is something more behind it.

He is taken aback, but something nasty quickly enters his eyes. “More fun for us then,” he tells the others.

“No,” she says again.

“I am not afraid to die.” She tells them, and there is a universe under her skin. She feels her life like a star in her chest, and death like tides in her blood.

They roar with laughter and start forward. They step with heavy feet on soil rich with death. They do not know.

The darkness is behind them, within them, between every atom in the air and in the earth. It is within her. The silence.

“I am not afraid to die,” she repeats, “but today is not my day to die. It is yours.”

The raucous laughter enters the air again, but she can see something like fear rising in the eyes of the wiser ones.

The time for words is over. The silence is here.

She closes her eyes - and breathes. Life is here, she thinks. Death is here, she thinks. Truth rings strong in the silence.

The darkness rises in her like the tides. The empty space between the stars is here, between the pieces of the universe. Void calls to void. The hungry dark will devour all. The shadows grow, and –

She opens her eyes, but there is nothing to see. The dark presses like a living thing against her skin, but she is not afraid. She is part of it, and it a part of her. There is no sound, because the dark and silence swallow all. But she can feel them. She can sense their light growing dim. Their fear grows, as the darkness within answers to the call of the darkness without.

She holds both death and life, light and dark, silence and sound, void and star – in her hands and in her heart. Her light does not fade as the darkness grows. There is no fear in her. She has already passed through the void and emerged.

The lights in the darkness are gone. The sense of nothing presses against her skin. She waits. She knows it is not yet done.

She waits, and the dark waits also, hungry. It is restless and chaotic, and it would consume her given the chance. She remembers the star in her chest. And waits.

And in the consuming darkness, the void of chaos and nothingness, something starts to grow. She smiles in the blackness, and breathes in, bringing air into her lungs where there was none. The light in her chest flares. Her star fills her whole self. The shadows recede. She blinks in the sunlight. There are no men in front of her. There are no more bodies in the streets. There is only rich black soil.

She steps forward and kneels, brushing the dirt away from a bright green seedling. Life.

Kinosaki, Japan | Nishimuraya Kinosaki Onsen

My sister just said “We’re all gonna die because people are stupid and want to go to college and have parties” and I looked over at her and said “We’re all gonna die because corporations value profit over lives - and so does the government” 

SO I designed this osprey pattern for a stained glass piece, but I cannot for the life of me decide on a color scheme. Thoughts, anyone?

(And by the way, if it occurs to anyone, my profile picture is indeed a stained glass piece that I designed and made myself.)

(Also an osprey is my patronus on pottermore so if I’m being entirely honest that’s what inspired this lol)

What is going on with the world??

I am so beyond impressed because I find rollerblades so clumsy and difficult to use compared to ice skates and I had no idea this was even possible

This girl is amazing

I could not figure out what this was about until the last sentence

The wrong Dodo went extinct

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

It’s funny that this post only just now got popular, nearly 15 years after being posted. A couple days ago, it had about 30,000 notes; a bit before that, only 20,000. Now it has more than 50,000. It looks like it’s getting 10,000 new notes every day.

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So in the new episode of The Flash, Failure is an Orphan, who else looked at older Grace Gibbons for like one second and immediately realized she was the same actress who played Alicia Baker in Smallville?