Bright and Shiny Things

tinagodiva:

The 3rd oldest Astronomical Clock Tower in the world.

🏛️Prague, Czechia.

femalestunning:

SALMA HAYEK photographed by Rankin for Madame Figaro | May 2023

cloudbustng:

statler and waldorf pt. 1

the muppet show (1976-81)

dropkickslurpee:

Gather the Posse — Yeehawgust #1

bogleech:

Garfield canonically has the psychic power to invade your horny thoughts

dykearchive:

some butch and stud portraits from Nothing but the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image by Susie Bright and Jill Posener (1,2,3,7,8,9,10) and Sublime Mutations by Del LaGrace Volcano (4,5,6)

therottengirl:

24-year-old tommy lee jones as hank in love story (1970)

tagging: @brunette-smurfette 😘

hometoursandotherstuff:

Retro art deco bathroom got a mosaic snake floor and new black plumbing fixtures. Interesting.

circular-time:

leohttt:

the aesthetic romanticism of this episode. the deep love for discovery. the decolonization allegory which is not so much a 1-to-1 allegory, so to speak, because sisko proving that ancient bajorans had not only the technology but the sheer Wonder and Curiosity to venture into space is a metaphor for speaking against any number of white supremacist “histories” deriving from imperialistic paradigms since the age of colonization—

to provide the counter-colonization narrative with a space-ship that sails on the impulse of photons (a very real and possible engineering for space-flight–like NASA is building ships like that) is wonderful. this story about the ancient people who thought to travel to space and push their spacecraft through space off the force of light, and then sisko proving to everyone not only its possibility but its historical fact, was sweet and interesting and full of feeling.

it’s all as if to say: to engage whole-heartedly with an episteme of decolonization is to engage whole-heartedly with an episteme of curiosity and discovery and love for What Is.

I love this reading. I loved that episode anyway, almost as much as The Visitor — the Jake and his father episodes are some of my favorites — but I missed this angle, and it’s perfect. I wonder whether the scriptwriters did it on purpose, or if it was a happy accident?

As a coda, when NASA kept cancelling solar sail programs due to budget cuts, a private citizens’ group founded by Carl Sagan and now headed by Bill Nye said, “Fine, we’ll do it.”

After years of crowdfunding, frustration and one exploding rocket nixing our chance of launching the first solar sail in 2005— that honor goes to Japan’s Space Agency with IKAROS in 2010 — the first private-citizen-funded spacecraft, Lightsail 2, reached full Earth orbit in July 2019 and orbited for 3 successful years. Unlike NASA’s 2010 passive reflector, the Planetary Society managed to, y'know, actually sail ours, at least a little bit.

And now NASA is working on a lunar mission building on Lightsail’s design, and there’s other solar sail projects out there, not all on the commercial, colonialist resource-extraction paradigm.

Because while we can’t build without materials, they are a means, not an end. Some of us grew up on Star Trek. And we just want to fly, to seek, to discover, to learn, and to explore.

Lightsail 2 fisheye lens camera view over Baja, California, Jul 23, 2019 (I can see my house from here!)