Recently Finished Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness. I Don’t Remember The Last Time I Read

Massachusetts Driving Gothic

You don’t know what street you’re on.  Every intersection, there’s a street sign, but it only tells you the name of the other street.  Perhaps your street has no name.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.

The road has two lanes.  You thought it had three, but suddenly there are two.  Now three again.  Now one.

Construction workers close down a street.  They work for years.  No one says what they’re doing, but machinery moves back and forth and great clouds of smoke go up into the sky.  When they finally leave, the street looks as if they were never there.

Roads were named, back in the old times, by the city they went to.  A road that went to Boston was Boston Road.  But many roads lead to Boston.  So there are many Boston Roads.  They do not connect to each other.  They are all Boston Road.

You have forgotten what a parking space looks like.  You have forgotten what it means to park.  You simply drive forever, in circles.  It feels natural enough.

Blue lights flash in front of you, the street swarms with police; an accident?  A crime?  Some kind of disaster?  But at the heart of the blue-clad swarm there is nothing but a single man in a yellow vest, digging a small hole by the side of the road.

You have to be in the left lane to turn right, the sign says.  You have to be in the right lane to turn left.  The sign that explains this is hung directly over the intersection.

The pedestrians lurch out in front of your car, heedless of the danger, of their own soft bodies and the hardness of steel.  They may think your car would simply pass through them.  They may be right.

You are on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  You have always been, and will always be, on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  In the neighboring cars, babies are born, old people are dying, small tribes are forming.

You are on Storrow Drive.  Somehow, you do not die.

reblog if you were born in 1985 or earlier

for science

This is a turtle duck.

Reblog the turtle duck.

…

Why?

Because it’s a turtle duck.

Make the turtle duck tumblr famous.

For no reasons other than the fact that it’s a turtle duck.

Piyo Piyo Paradies and SUPERNOVA are both scanlated here:

http://arcanum-amare.livejournal.com/tag/chickens

with bonus peep!Ed icons.

Okay, so in another 20 mins, I’m gonna stream FMA 03. 

I don’t know how many of you will be there but I need someone to watch it with me because you bet I’m gonna get emotional over this show

Thank you Google for the great Doodle honoring Annie Jump Cannon today!

Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 - April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures. She was nearly deaf throughout her career.

(from Wikipedia)

we found love (1/1, 19811 words) Relationship: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield Rating: Teen Tags: Modern AU, Mafia AU of sorts, Romance, Fluff, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: In which Bilbo meets Thorin and life takes unexpected turns. —- Hey, if y’all enjoy this fic at all, please reblog this so more people can too!

This!

The mean girls of the White Council

The Whirlpool Galaxy - Sparkling with X-Rays

Nearly a million seconds of observing time with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way glittering with hundreds of X-ray points of light.

This galaxy’s official name is Messier 51 (M51) or NGC 5194, but it  often goes by its nickname of the “Whirlpool Galaxy.” Like the Milky Way, the Whirlpool is a spiral galaxy with spectacular arms of stars and dust. M51 is located about 30 million light years from Earth, and its face-on orientation to Earth gives us a perspective that we can never get of our own spiral galactic home.

By using Chandra, astronomers can peer into the Whirlpool to uncover things that can only be detected in X-rays. In this new composite image, Chandra data are shown in purple. Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope are red, green, and blue.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra/Harvard