Latest Posts by outofambit - Page 4

whenever i see great meta like this, i feel the need for a reread <3

Some thoughts on Kit Rodriguez

So pretty much every time I re-read or re-listen to any part of the Young Wizards series, I discover new things about the books and myself in relation to them, despite the fact that I have been reading them for over half my life now. 

This morning I was walking back from yoga and listening to my audiobook of So You Want to Be a Wizard, and I was just at the part where Nita and Kit meet for the first time, and I was feeling all sorts of warm fuzzies and just wanting to jump into the novel and hug these kids and tell them that it really is going to be okay in the end because they will make it be okay, together.

And then I realized that I’d never, in ten years, thought about this first encounter from Kit’s perspective – or really thought at all about what Kit was doing before Nita came along. We know that he took the Oath about a month before meeting her, that he’s done a few small wizardries and they’ve worked, but he’s still getting bullied and the fact that even Nita knows about the recent bullying suggests that, if anything, it might have escalated since his taking of the Oath.

So put yourself in Kit’s shoes for a second. You’re smart, but you’re small and you don’t talk like anyone else, your teachers like you because you’re dedicated to your work but that only makes it harder to get along with everyone, you’re twelve years old and yet you don’t have any friends to go out and play with, so you wind up in the city on a weekend antique-hunting with your parents (horror of horrors), and you’re more or less trying to make yourself unseen in the back of the store while they haggle over the price of some armoire that you find to be, frankly, a little hideous. You’re looking halfheartedly through the meager collection of boos, the only things in this place worth a second glance in your opinion, and then suddenly one of them bites you and you think, “God, just my luck, could this day get any worse?”

And then you pull out the book. And you open it. And the universe holds its breath for a second. Exhales: slowly, cautiously. Watches to see what it is you’ll do.

You take the Oath before you leave the shop.

And then you wait. 

At first it’s not so bad. You’re light on your feet, heart fluttering in anticipation, can’t wait to get home to try some of this out.

A week later, you’ve done a few spells, nothing major, but you believe in the power now, the way you hadn’t allowed yourself to at first. You marvel in it, you spend all your free time sunk in the sensation of truly and deeply knowing the world around you in its own language. You talk to your dog, which in itself is sort of usual, but now your dog talks back.

But. There is always a but. Because the bullies are noticing that you’re happy, and they may not understand why, but they don’t approve. You say the wrong thing in class, correct one of them, high on the power the wizardry’s given you – only to find yourself, an hour later, with face pressed to asphalt, grit in your eyes, and the knowledge that even a wizard can’t do everything.

This is not the noble Ordeal the Manual talks about. This is just the pressure of the everyday, pushing and pulling you out of shape. And life’s starting to feel a bit like it did before you ever found that book. The wizardry works, but every night before bed when you check your status and it still says “probationary” you start to wonder if you’re ever going to have an Ordeal, or if maybe the Powers That Be are starting to regret the energy they expended on a beat-up broken-down kid like you.

You think, sometimes, about giving it up before They can take it away.

Every time, you say to yourself, not yet. Just one more shot. There’s always another spell to try, another chapter of the Manual to read. Maybe if you work harder the Ordeal will come. Maybe the hard work is the Ordeal. Maybe it’s only natural to feel these doubts – to wonder, at times, if you’re just dreaming it. To wish for someone with whom you could share that dream, so you could know that it’s real and that it’s really worth it.

When the girl appears, just as your spell has ground to a standstill, you’re terrified – you don’t know how to talk to girls! – but you also start to hope again. Because what if, all this time, she’s been what you were missing?

You spell with her and the world goes quiet and you know that nothing will ever be the same again and you are so unbelievably ready for that.

(Brief thought on Deep Wizardry ramifications of this potential Kit characterization behind the “read more,” since one of my followers has just started reading SYWTBAW and I don’t want to spoil her!)

Keep reading

your fave is problematic: diane duane

subsists on the tears of her fans

married to a guy who knows everything about everything

knows the ways of the force and wont share

creates delicious-looking food and uses the wrong measurement system. no one likes metric, diane. #1776

writes fanfic of her own characters

does the ff.net thing where she talks to her own characters in her fanfic of her own series

makes us wait forever for new books and has the nerve to make it worth it

has worked on all of your childhood faves. ALL OF THEM

Nita: I came out to find my pen and I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now.

‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake,I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—till Universe’s end.’

I teleport into Rirhath B

luggage: spoken to

alien: exploded

non-humanoid bathroom: entered

I am forcibly removed from the Crossings Intercontinual Gating Facility

I have a 'fairest and fallen - greetings and defiance' coffee mug, and I needed/loved/was inspired by it even more than normal today... just to let you know and say thanks!

You’re very welcome.

sigh) Today has been a more effective than usual reminder that entropy is indeed running. Our job now: To run faster.

Twice a year, you may experience some degree of television interference due to sun outages.

RCN I have news for you, if the sun goes out I am not going to be worried about missing Wheel of Fortune.

(Sun Outages are actually when the sun moves directly behind a TV satellite and interferes with its signal, which makes it sound like the sun is photobombing my TV, but “sun outages” just made me lol.)

It started out as a quick sketch… 4 days later! It’s a scene from one of my favorite books, #SoYouWantToBeAWizard by #dduane #ballpoint #sketch #illustration #dragon #youngwizards

The Chart of Cosmic Exploration Elegantly Details 56 Years of Human Adventures into Space

The city breathing, burning, living the life they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life- how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects- not the reason, the purpose.

PART TWO AT LAST

okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.

i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.

all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!

feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.

thanks, cousins!

What Have We Learned About Pluto?

This month (March 2016), in the journal Science, New Horizons scientists have authored the first comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby. These detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto and reveal the former “astronomer’s planet” to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons.

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve learned about Pluto:

1. Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. The age-dating of Pluto’s surface through crater counts has revealed that Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. Further, the surface of Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum, a massive ice plain larger than Texas, is devoid of any detectable craters and estimated to be geologically young – no more than 10 million years old.

2. Pluto’s moon Charon has been discovered to have an ancient surface. As an example, the great expanse of smooth plains on Charon is likely a vast cryovolcanic flow or flows that erupted onto Charon’s surface about 4 billion years ago. These flows are likely related to the freezing of an internal ocean that globally ruptured Charon’s crust.

3. Pluto’s surface has many types of terrain. The distribution of compositional units on Pluto’s surface – from nitrogen-rich, to methane-rich, to water-rich – has been found to be surprisingly complex, creating puzzles for understanding Pluto’s climate and geologic history. The variations in surface composition on Pluto are unprecedented elsewhere in the outer solar system.

4. Pluto’s atmosphere is colder than we thought. Pluto’s upper atmospheric temperature has been found to be much colder (by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) than had been thought from Earth-based studies, with important implications for its atmospheric escape rate. Why the atmosphere is colder is a mystery. 

5. We know what Pluto’s atmosphere is made of. The New Horizon spacecraft made observations of sunlight passing through Pluto’s atmosphere. We see absorption features that indicate an atmosphere made up of nitrogen (like Earth’s) with methane, acetylene and ethylene as minor constituents.

6. We might have an idea for how Pluto’s haze formed. For first time, a plausible mechanism for forming Pluto’s atmospheric haze layers has been found. This mechanism involves the concentration of haze particles by atmospheric buoyancy waves, created by winds blowing over Pluto’s mountainous topography. Pluto’s haze extends hundreds of kilometers into space, and embedded within it are over 20 very thin, but far brighter, layers.

7. There isn’t much dust around Pluto. Before the flyby, there was concern that a small piece of debris (even the size of a grain of sand) could cause great damage to (or even destroy) the spacecraft. But the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (an instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft) only counted a single dust particle within five days of the flyby. This is similar to the density of dust particles in free space in the outer solar system – about 6 particles per cubic mile – showing that the region around Pluto is, in fact, not filled with debris.

8. Pluto’s atmosphere is smaller than we expected. The uppermost region of Pluto’s atmosphere is slowly escaping to space. The hotter the upper atmosphere, the more rapid the gasses escape. The lower the planet’s mass, the lower the gravity, and the faster the atmospheric loss. As molecules escape, they are ionized by solar ultraviolet light. Once ionized, the charged molecules are carried away by the solar wind. As more Pluto-genic material is picked up by the solar wind, the more the solar wind is slowed down and deflected around Pluto. So - the net result is a region (the interaction region), which is like a blunt cone pointed toward the sun, where the escaping ionized gasses interact with the solar wind. The cone extends to a distance about 6 Pluto radii from Pluto toward the sun, but extend behind Pluto at least 400 Pluto radii behind Pluto - like a wake behind the dwarf planet.

9. Pluto’s moons are brighter than we thought. The high albedos (reflectiveness) of Pluto’s small satellites (moons) – about 50 to 80 percent – are entirely different from the much lower reflectiveness of the small bodies in the general Kuiper Belt population, which range from about 5 to 20 percent. This difference lends further support to the idea that these moons were not captured from the general Kuiper Belt population, but instead formed by the collection of material produced in the aftermath of the giant collision that created the entire Pluto satellite system.  

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

Chapter Titles: So You Want To Be A Wizard

Parallel universe theory

you’ve done the fandom a vital service with this pun

why did I do this

He had a long, fair-skinned face with a very thoughtful expression. This was partially concealed by surprisingly long, blond hair, most of which was tied behind his head, but he also had very long bangs, which he was probably always pushing out of his eyes, and a long lock of hair hanging down in front of each ear. The eyes were a startling green, a shade not normally achieved on Earth without the assistance of contact lenses.

ya meme // nine quotes

the wizard’s oath (young wizards by diane duane)

With the new book being out and my never having read "A Wizard of Mars" I decided to pick up the New Millennium ebook editions. I'm getting close to the end of "So You Want to be a Wizard" and while I haven't gotten to the part where Nita reads from the bright book I know it's coming and I can already feel my heart breaking. It made me wonder: are Nita's and Kit's experiences with the Lone Power singularly unique? Do other wizards have opportunities like when Nita writes in the bright book?

Yes. And no. Except sometimes. In fact, always.(See also, “go not to the writer for advice, for she will say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘wait two seconds while I come up with some proto-canonical material that I’ve never had reason or opportunity to mention to anybody before.’”)

Ordeals serve a number of purposes. Primarily they help the Powers that Be determine, in the simplest and most straightforward way, whether or not the wizard to whom they are potentially entrusting a lifetime of energy will actually commit to use that energy in moments of crisis. Equally primarily (if that phrase makes any sense at the human level, while remembering that from the Powers’ point of view, “all is done for each”) they routinely serve to solve or at least illuminate interior issues that the new wizard needs to get handled. This is besides actually solving a problem or concluding an intervention that some part of the local space-time continuum needs enacted / sorted out.

So you understand that no two Ordeals are ever alike, but every single time their effect is identical to that of saving the world — because when you save a part of it, even a very small part of it, “saving the world entire” is nonetheless exactly what you’re doing. Existence is, in this particular mode of analysis or expression, holographic: intimately interconnected at the quantum level, in such a way that — in what may be the best possible use of this phrase — “size doesn’t matter.” When (for example) instead of squashing a bug in the house, you get a glass and a piece of paper and catch it and put it outside, it may seem like nothing in particular… but on levels we are not even remotely sensorially equipped to perceive, when one chooses to spare life instead of taking it, existence quakes to its roots as living experience is kicked just a wee bit further into the Life direction. Choice always matters. And Ordeals are a particularly acute form of choice; both an expression of personality and a shaping of it – the iron in in the fire, submitting to the hammer, willingly. (And possibly, ideally, dragging the Lone Power into the fire with it, in just one more tiny little change.)

So the immediate answer is that all wizards have such opportunities. They may not look so earthshaking — but appearances deceive. One Ordeal or another may not seem dangerous, they may seem to involve very small changes in the local environment… But without fail, when passed, they are enough to convince the Powers that Be that the wizard in question is one who, for their definition of wizardry, is going to get the job done. And that’s what counts.

Hope that answer makes sense. :)

I just realized that the first antagonist Kit and Nita faced together was a helicopter parent.

I’m like halfway through GWP and so far Mehrnaz is my new fav. I’m loving the character diversity, I mean I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a Muslim girl character where the whole book wasn’t centered around her being Muslim, thank you DD <3

Blessing your dash with a Nita because the world needs more Nita tbh. The world also needs more Kit, I’ll get on that.

Parallel universe theory

This is a simulation of what scientists believe Jupiter’s atmosphere looks like from the inside. Source

don’t be afraid to make corrections

don’t be afraid to lend a hand

and don’t look down

Woo Woo keeps walking around the house whispering “I know.” But he won’t tell us what he knows…

Are invisible things visible to invisible creatures? Are invisible creatures visible to each other, themselves? Discuss.

Some magical sisters from my absolute favorite book series of all time: the Young Wizards series! It’s really under-appreciated tbh and I, 10/10, recommend it!! Anyway, even if you haven’t read it, you still can appreciate the art I guess  ◕ ‿ ◕

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

- Mark Twain

This is honestly my favorite quote. It’s changed how I look at life and religion.

(via the-bitchextraordinaire)

So this quote seemed very familiar when I saw it earlier, and I just realized why. 

The power was burning in her tears, an odd hot feeling as she wept for Fred, for Kit’s Lotus, for everything horrible that had happened all that day- all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to!

For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way- and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound in the same way.

Kit was still reading. Nita turned her head in the nova moonlight and looked over her shoulder at the one who watched. His face was set, furious and bitter, but yes, weary too. He knew he was about to be cast out again, frustrated again, and he knew that because of what he had bound himself into being, he would never know fulfillment of any kind. Nita looked back down to the reading feeling sorry even for him, opened her mouth and along with Kit began to say his name-

Don’t be afraid to make corrections!

Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her space pen that Fred had saved and changed, and clicked it open.

The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the book and, with he pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that change could happen- if, only if- and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real.

- So You Want to Be a Wizard, Diane Duane

So, in the history of all of the universe, who prays for the one sinner that needs it the most? Her name is Juanita Callahan, and at age 13 she has more mercy in her soul than I could ever hope to strive for.

(via professorsparklepants)

YA Lit Meme: 5 Protagonists: 1/5

NITA CALLAHAN 

“My childhood? What about it?” Nita said, now becoming actively annoyed. Up until last year, her experience of her childhood was that it swung unpredictably but too routinely between painful and boring. Only recently had it improved. And while wizardry might occasionally be painful, at least it wasn’t ever dull. “Mom—you don’t understand. This isn’t something you can just turn off. You take the Wizard’s Oath for life.”

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own.