I’m still just completely obsessed with Good Omens
horror movie trope where dumb teens summon a demon for funsies except it actually works and it’s just, crowley in pajamas all inconvenienced or something and then, you know, shenanigans ensue or whatever
Ooooohhhhhhhhhh
Areyougonnawriteit?
I was gonna try to summon him for a pajama party but just writing about it might be safer
Crowley was bored and peckish, but also feeling lazy, and not sure if he was peckish because he was bored or if he was actually hungry. Probably for company–he he had come to associate eating with Aziraphale, but there was the matter of being lazy. He thumbed through his phone contacts. “Pizza…angel…or mice. I do have those mice in the freezer. Could always put the mice on the pizza.” Aziraphale liked pizza, but there was also the prospect of spending an evening watching Alton Brown humiliate trained chefs on TV and eating demonic junk food, two things the angel didn’t really enjoy. He had just reached the mental compromise of a cupcake decorating show and two different pizzas when the ground opened up beneath him.
His first assumption, that Hell had seen fit to recall him in the most efficient way possible, didn’t seem to be correct. Hell had linoleum floors that were often sticky, but it usually didn’t smell like a combination of popcorn and cucumber melon body spray, and it also usually didn’t have cheap wood siding and a pool table. Summoned, then. He looked at the hand that had landed in the sticky. The sticky stuff on the floor had glitter in it. Glitter was also not especially infernal, no matter how hard it was to get out anything you didn’t want to have glitter on it.
There was normally a whole script you’d have to go through for a summoning–it was very impressive and contained a lot of threats, promises, and thees and thous–but Crowley hadn’t gotten through millennia on Earth by indulging a work ethic. Also, his summoners had used glitter glue. And they were wearing pajamas with cartoon characters instead of proper black robes. Professionalism could probably be dispensed with in this situation. He let the glitter glue disintegrate off his hand, then glared at the girl holding the bowl of popcorn. “That had better be for me.”
Her mouth dropped open, revealing half-chewed popcorn stuck to braces. Crowley decided he didn’t really want popcorn. He turned to a short redhead holding a large leather book. She wore Miss Piggy pajamas and a smug expression. Probably the leader. “Look, it’s Friday night, I’ve got places to be, just tell me what you lot want so I can get out of here.”
They didn’t hesitate.
“So, I really need to pass this test–”
“Does Bobby like me?”
“I need my braces off in time–”
“–or else they’re going to ground me for LIFE–”
“I mean, does he LIKE me like me–”
“–I’ll look like a dork in my bat mitzvah pictures–”
“Can you make it so I pass all of my tests, actually–”
“–and if he doesn’t like me can you tell me who does?”
“It doesn’t have to be all A’s, I’m okay with a B-plus–”
“–and can you make me a blonde?”
The redhead slammed the book shut. “Lauren, that is such a dumb thing to ask a demon. You can just dye your hair.”
“But my mom won’t let me!” Lauren wailed.
Crowley ran his fingers through his hair. He wanted a drink, snapped his fingers, and got one. It was pink and had an umbrella in it and a curly straw. He hadn’t intended that. “She’s got a point. You can’t let your mother tell you what to do all your life. Go blonde, you’d look good. Dye your hair blue if you want.” Disobeying your parents was one of the big ten, that was a very good one. He pointed at the girl who’d been worried about her test. “In fact, screw what your parents think, and screw grades. You want tests all your life? Don’t even bother with that test. Run off and–” What did kids run off to do today? “Become an Instagram influencer.”
“Um, I actually want to be a marine biologist.”
“Oh! Saving the whales. Better study, then. No way ‘round it. Sorry.” He sipped the drink. It tasted like coconut. “Who was asking about Bobby?”
“I don’t think I want to know now.”
“Yeah, good choice.” Crowley had no idea who Bobby was, how he felt about the girl with the bright orange fingernails and bunny slippers, or how he’d go about finding that out. He turned to the leader. “What about you, Miss-Piggy-with-the-book? You must want something. Or did you summon me up to braid my hair?”
“I want magic powers,” she said firmly.
Crowley gestured to the glitter glue. It was a mess. “You’ve already got them. This really shouldn’t have worked. Just…practice.” He pulled one of Aziraphale’s business cards out of thin air, which was really impressive because Aziraphale had absolutely refused to get business cards printed up, and handed it to her. “Loads of occult books in this shop. Bring your pocket money.”
She looked dubious, but pocketed it. Hopefully she’d stop by and Crowley would have a good afternoon’s entertainment watching the angel try and get rid of a very determined, very powerful little witch.
“All right,” Crowley said, “show’s over? Can I go now?”
Bunny slippers raised her hand. “Actually…Can I braid your hair?”
“How are you going to do that? I’m in a magic circle. I can’t get out, and you really shouldn’t step in.”
“Okay, well I don’t know everything about how magical circles work, and you don’t need to be a jerk about it.” Bunny slippers rolled her eyes.
“Demon,” Crowley said. “It is part of my job description to be a–look, do any of you want to sell your soul?”
A chorus of noes. There was a reason that bit normally came earlier in the spiel, but he had never been a very good salesman.
Ray, I love you with all my heart.
People acting like I'll get over Good Omens after the show has been out a few months, as if I'm not over here, still posting about a show that aired in 1966
We run goddamn Star Trek blogs with posts about the OG series guys we don't just get over things
NASA’s Dragonfly Will Fly Around Titan Looking for Origins, Signs of Life
NASA has announced that our next destination in the solar system is the unique, richly organic world Titan.
Advancing our search for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will fly multiple sorties to sample and examine sites around Saturn’s icy moon.
Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034.
The rotorcraft will fly to dozens of promising locations on Titan looking for prebiotic chemical processes common on both Titan and Earth.
Dragonfly marks the first time NASA will fly a multi-rotor vehicle for science on another planet; it has eight rotors and flies like a large drone.
It will take advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere – four times denser than Earth’s – to become the first vehicle ever to fly its entire science payload to new places for repeatable and targeted access to surface materials.
Titan is an analog to the very early Earth, and can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet.
During its 2.7-year baseline mission, Dragonfly will explore diverse environments from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together for possibly tens of thousands of years.
Its instruments will study how far prebiotic chemistry may have progressed.
They also will investigate the moon’s atmospheric and surface properties and its subsurface ocean and liquid reservoirs.
Additionally, instruments will search for chemical evidence of past or extant life.
“With the Dragonfly mission, NASA will once again do what no one else can do,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
“Visiting this mysterious ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe.
This cutting-edge mission would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago, but we’re now ready for Dragonfly’s amazing flight.”
Dragonfly took advantage of 13 years’ worth of Cassini data to choose a calm weather period to land, along with a safe initial landing site and scientifically interesting targets.
It will first land at the equatorial “Shangri-La” dune fields, which are terrestrially similar to the linear dunes in Namibia in southern Africa and offer a diverse sampling location.
Dragonfly will explore this region in short flights, building up to a series of longer “leapfrog” flights of up to 5 miles (8 kilometers), stopping along the way to take samples from compelling areas with diverse geography.
It will finally reach the Selk impact crater, where there is evidence of past liquid water, organics – the complex molecules that contain carbon, combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen – and energy, which together make up the recipe for life.
The lander will eventually fly more than 108 miles (175 kilometers) – nearly double the distance traveled to date by all the Mars rovers combined.
“Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for Science at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington.
“It’s remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment.
Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.”
Titan has a nitrogen-based atmosphere like Earth.
Unlike Earth, Titan has clouds and rain of methane.
Other organics are formed in the atmosphere and fall like light snow.
The moon’s weather and surface processes have combined complex organics, energy, and water similar to those that may have sparked life on our planet.
Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system.
As it orbits Saturn, it is about 886 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away from the Sun, about 10 times farther than Earth.
Because it is so far from the Sun, its surface temperature is around -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius).
Its surface pressure is also 50 percent higher than Earth’s.
Dragonfly was selected as part of the agency’s New Frontiers program, which includes the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, Juno to Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx to the asteroid Bennu.
Dragonfly is led by Principal Investigator Elizabeth Turtle, who is based at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
New Frontiers supports missions that have been identified as top solar system exploration priorities by the planetary community.
The program is managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Planetary Science Division in Washington.
“The New Frontiers program has transformed our understanding of the solar system, uncovering the inner structure and composition of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, discovering the icy secrets of Pluto’s landscape, revealing mysterious objects in the Kuiper belt, and exploring a near-Earth asteroid for the building blocks of life,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
“Now we can add Titan to the list of enigmatic worlds NASA will explore.”
when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest
broadchurch is just olivia colman and david tennant yelling at each other until they become codependent bffs
NO BUT THESE ARE THE THINGS I WAS TALKING ABOUT HERE: https://elodieunderglass.tumblr.com/post/185703978243/okay-so-we-all-agree-lawns-suck-are-outdated-and
See how the slyly worded, rather weaselly marketing claim for CityTrees claiming that these panels of moss contain “The cleaning power of 275 trees” got changed, in people’s minds, to “each panel of moss ABSORBS AS MUCH CARBON DIOXIDE as 275 trees”, a completely ridiculous and impossible claim?? And then see how people immediately decided that moss is therefore somehow more “eco” than trees and that “moss lawns” will magically solve global warming? See how everyone did that, by themselves? The important facts, like ‘when plants absorb carbon dioxide, they release the oxygen and use the carbon for their own construction; therefore, plants only absorb as much carbon as they physically need to grow’ have been utterly discarded in the rush to believe something more viral and exciting.
One sly bit of marketing that the public has been widely encouraged to misinterpret, verbally repeated from a random person to a random Guardian blogger at a garden show, who blogged about it as if it was a fact, has now gotten so scrambled that people on tumblr honestly believe that 12 square meters of moss absorbs as much carbon dioxide as 275 trees.
These screencaps show the actual claims about the CityTrees, which are that the moss, having a lot of surface area for its mass, can filter the particles in air pollutants more efficiently than equivalent-sized plants that are smoother.
You will see the effects of this for years. Years from now, people will insist that moss has the ability to simply erase carbon molecules from the universe. And you’ll know differently, but because it won’t match what people prefer to believe, nobody will listen to you.
Okay which one of you is going to write the Ineffable Husbands college professor AU with the extremely sweet and over-sharing professor fawning over their spouse and the standoff-ish secretive professor who reveals absolutely nothing about their private life who turned out to be married?
Everyone at Nutter University loves Dr. Crowley. He's so popular that they've had to beg him to teach two lecture hall courses each term to keep up with the sheer number of students who want to take his class. His fellow biology professors can be quite grouchy about it, pointing out the high percentage of male-attracted students who sign up for his class. He just lets it slide off him like water off a duck's back.
The most he's ever said about it is "Oh, please, Dagon. I never shut up about Ezra. The students know I'm taken."
This is 100% true. Part of Dr. Crowley's popularity stems from the fact that he seems physically incapable of saying the words "my husband" fewer than three times in each lecture. His students have no idea who this mysterious "husband" is, but they know that he loves Shakespeare, sushi, Beethoven, and tulips. They've even started trying to draw police-sketch-artist-style pictures to figure out what "Mr. Crowley" must look like, although Dr. Crowley mostly just describes him physically as "adorable". Rumor has it that there are photos in Dr. Crowley's office, but he always holds office hours in the greenhouse, so no one is sure.
Dr. Fell is less popular with the general student body, but no student who has taken his Introduction to Literary Criticism class has managed to leave without becoming a little attached to him. He's an absolute expert in his subject--passionate and utterly devoted to it. He seems so obsessed with literature that his students have come to the conclusion that he doesn't really have a social life. He never discusses his personal life or alludes to romantic partners, even when covering Shakespeare's sonnets. There are no photos in his office at all.
His students feel a little sorry for him, assuming he must be lonely. His students have taken to suggesting things he should do in his free time or places where he might meet people. They really do love him.
Then two students headed back from a late night astrology lab see him snogging Dr. Crowley in the back of Dr. Crowley's car.
Suddenly, Dr. Crowley's students are quite chilly towards him. They seem bothered by his sweet stories instead of charmed by them. The lecture hall gets a little less crowded each time. It's sad, really, and Dr. Crowley starts worrying about how he's offended so many students at once.
Dr. Fell's office hours are suddenly going by without a single appointment. Students stop telling him about wonderful new restaurants and seem just as interested as he is in skimming over Jane Austen. It's very disconcerting, and he decides to cheer himself up by going to sit in on Crowley's horticultural bio lab one day.
"Hello, Alicia!" Dr. Fell says cheerfully, "I didn't know you were taking Dr. Crowley's class."
"I'm in Astronomy 208, too," she replies, with surprising frostiness.
"Erm, that's nice? I don't know much about stars, but AJ--that is, Dr. Crowley--enjoys reading about them."
Alicia looks like she's about to say something scathing when Dr. Crowley walks in. He lights up like the sun the moment he sees Dr. Fell.
"Hello, angel!" Dr. Crowley exclaims, "To what do I owe the visit? We're past ferns, you know."
Dr. Fell grins back, "I don't have another class until five and thought I'd like to see you before I get home tonight."
"Well, I suppose I can waive the audit fee just this once," Dr. Crowley teases.
"And you might get odd looks at the bank, trying to deposit a check from your own account."
"Wait, DR. FELL is your husband?" Alicia practically shrieks.
"Where have you been?" Dr. Crowley asks, "I talk about him all the time."
"Oh do you, my dear?" Dr. Fell blushes.
"Let me guess, you've never mentioned me once."
cosmosully