#Sai Ananda

[discgolfmindset]

Sai Ananda continues to dominate FPO Division in DGPT Silver - Discraft's Cascade Challenge

The FPO division of the A-Tier DGPT Silver – Discraft’s Cascade Challenge presented by GRIPeq in Shelton, Washington has witnessed an impressive performance by Sai Ananda. As the tournament enters its third round, Sai continues to dominate the fpo division, sitting in first position with an impressive score of -7. However, fierce competitors Lisa Fajkus and Kat Mertsch are hot on her heels with a…

[littletroubledgrrrl]

[cerebralisis]

I decided to make my analysis of So High School into a separate post, because I can’t help but think of this song every time I see photos of Taylor at the games. And sure, it sounds like a love song on the surface until you remember that Taylor was bullied in high school and start to dig a little deeper. Feeling "so high school" is not something a 34 year old woman wants to feel.

Let’s look at the lyrics.

"I'm sinking, our fingers entwined, cheeks pink in the twinkling lights" = To me this sounds like drowning, embarrassment, and diving in with the sharks

"Tell me 'bout the first time you saw me" = You mean her first Chiefs appearance when they 'slid off in the getaway car' at the end? Nothing good starts in a getaway car, babes.

"I'll drink what you think and I'm high from smoking your jokes all damn night" = I mean...

“I'm watching American Pie with you on a Saturday night" = What do we know about this movie? We know that it is renowned for its high school immaturity and misogyny. It’s about a bunch of horny boneheaded men who treat women like sex objects instead of people. Sounds a lot like football culture to me.

"Your friends are around so be quiet. I'm trying to stifle my sighs." = I'm in the box with your friends and family. I need to hold it together so I don't offend them, but I legit hate this.

"Cause I feel so high school" = SHE HATES THIS.

"Bittersweet 16 suddenly" = I don't think she was a fan of high school, you guys.

"Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me? It's just a game but really, I'm betting on all 3." = A clear reference to that kiss/marry/kill interview with Travis, while also saying "we're gonna get together, put on a show for everyone, and I'm going to slowly die inside until we're done."

"Get my car door, isn't that sweet. Now pull me to the backseat" = All I hear with this is Movie Director Taylor giving instructions to her leading man so they can get a good reaction from the audience.

"You know how to ball, I know Aristotle." = You're a jock. I'm a nerd. We are not compatible.

"Touch me while your bros play grand theft auto." = The official song lyrics on Spotify put grand theft auto in lowercase the first time and capitalized the second time. The capitalized GTA could refer to Travis's friends playing the video game, sure. But also - you know who was arrested in August 2023 for grand theft auto? Bashaud Breeland, a cornerback for the Kansas City Chiefs who played with Travis in the 2020 Super Bowl.

"It's true, swear, Scout's Honor" = Look it up, I dare you.

And my absolute favorite:

"On the brink of a wrinkle in time" = This is TTPD, folks. Of course there's going to be a literary reference. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. The main character is a girl named Meg who is incredibly bright but struggles in school because she doesn't fit in with the other kids. After meeting a trio of badass witchy women, Meg travels to far-off worlds (a sort of deep portal time travel, you might say) where she joins the battle of light vs. darkness. What do we know about Taylor’s usage of light and darkness throughout her discography? It's giving… Reputation vs. Daylight? Shrouded in secrecy vs. out in the open? Based on everything else that Taylor has been hinting at through TTPD (not to mention Evermore and Midnights), it sounds like she is on the verge of diving into a much larger battle. And if I had to guess, I would bet that this battle will start during the Reputation re-release. Around Halloween. 🎃 When exile ends. Almost exactly 2 years after the Bejeweled music video was released. Maybe the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now cause she's dead?

I'm just speculating, but I will add that the 3rd book in the Time series is called A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There is a poem referenced through the book that goes like this:

With Ananda in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along its path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the Earth with its starkness, All these I place with God's almighty help and grace between myself and the powers of darkness.

The word ‘Ananda’ mentioned above is the name of a character in the book, which is significant to the story because it’s a Sanskrit word that describes the eternal bliss that accompanies the ending of the rebirth cycle. If this series is what Taylor is referencing then it’s sounding more and more like she’s going to kill off Taylor TM and be done with the games, done with the reinvention. The plot summary of A Swiftly Tilting Planet says that it’s a book about "going back in time and changing might-have-beens." What decisions would she have made differently if she could do it all over again?

I don't know, friends. Take from this what you will. All I know is, this woman and all her brilliant duality is going to send me to a padded room. ✌🏻

[regexkind]

It is an age-old question: "would putting pop rocks on your pussy feel like anything?" And while the spirit of adventure and curiosity means that in the Action Potentials¹ of my mind, this pushes me closer to vaginoplasty, I think we actually have the knowledge necessary to answer this question in the negative—I have seen a number of nsfw blog posts saying that they didn't feel anything at all when doing this, beyond maybe slight mechanical perturbation. But why?

I think the main reason is that pop rocks are basically tiny candy fragments with even tinier pockets of compressed CO2 gas. When the candy dissolves, the CO2 is released. "But Ananda," you say, "pop rocks taste sort of sourish!" Indeed, and I think a major component of why is that the CO2 dissolves in your spit, which has a pH of around 6.7²—nearly neutral. But vaginal secretions are typically far more acidic, at around 3.8-5.0³. The implication is that we should expect CO2 to be far, far less soluble in vaginal secretions. In particular, in this paper⁴ we expect the dominant dissolved species to be CO2, not HCO3 (-) (bicarbonate) or CO3 (2-) (carbonate). This means the effect on pH of the pop rocks should be quite low.

¹Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect style. IYKYK

²Baliga S, Muglikar S, Kale R. Salivary ph: A diagnostic biomarker. Journal of Indian Society of Periodontology. 2013;17(4):461. doi:10.4103/0972-124x.118317

³Lin Y-P, Chen W-C, Cheng C-M, Shen C-J. Vaginal ph value for clinical diagnosis and treatment of common vaginitis. Diagnostics. 2021;11(11):1996. doi:10.3390/diagnostics11111996

⁴König M, Vaes J, Klemm E, Pant D. Solvents and supporting electrolytes in the electrocatalytic reduction of CO2. iScience. 2019;19:135-160. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2019.07.014

[4dkellysworld]

Slow down your mind

Most of us have been going around saying, "I am absolute awareness, I am emptiness, I am nothing, I am this and I am that." But when we get down to the nitty gritty, the first problem that confronts us, we become angry. So we're really not that at all and they're just dry words. But when you slow down the mind first, then a statement of truth will come to you automatically. And then you can make your confession, like I do every week. "I am not the body." "I am not the doer." "I am not the mind." "I am not any condition." "I am unconditioned pure awareness." "I am absolute reality." "I am ultimate oneness." "I am that I am." "I am Sat-chit-ananda." And it's not you making this confession. You're not doing it, it is your Self, that's making the confession. You do nothing, you've gotten yourself out of the way. The point I'm trying to make is, don't allow your ego to make you think that you're something you're not. Your ego mind is very powerful. It'll fool you all of the time. Be careful, always watch it. So remember, you do not have to make statements of truth at all. Why? They will come by themselves. All you have to do is to concern yourselves with slowing down the mind. And how do you do this, either through self-inquiry, observation, mindfulness, witnessing or self-surrender. Whatever way suits you. What happens when the mind slows down? Truth takes its place. When you learn to slow down your mind, the reality will rush in of its own accord because your true nature is reality. Your true nature is emptiness. Your true nature is pure awareness, pure intelligence. That's what you really are. You don't have to try to find it, you've got it. Simply let go of the other. To the extent your mind becomes quieter, to that extent does your reality become seen or felt and it's intuitive.

from Robert Adams satsang

[gorgeouslypink]

hi pink! i hope you’re doing well! i wanted to ask for your advice regarding something that seems more so like a physical symptom that i can’t seem to ignore.

Usually when people talk about entering the void they mention all the symptoms like floating, spinning and this and that but what happens with me, is that, i get this REALLY intense pressure around my forehead. Like it feels like my soul is being pulled out of my head. It has happened way too many times. The common advice that i have gotten is to either ignore it or just manifest the symptom away.

I have tried to ignore this symptom for quite some time now and also come to realise that a friend has been having the same pulling symptom too! For me, this pulling sensation seems too strong so i can’t say that i have been successful at ignoring it completely. :((

if that (ignoring it) is the only thing that can be done to enter the void then of course i’ll keep practising but i thought maybe you have come across this somewhere and have some advice related to this? if not, i understand!

thank you for your time!!

Hi love! I think you would benefit from reading this^ Hope this helps 💗

[girls--complex]

Been enjoying your art for quite a while now! I really need to see and know more about transgender warriorprince, it almost could be a drawing of current me irl, and i'm amab. Definitely one of my goals in a sense, long story. Thanks!

Well I was actually going to do a lore sheet of the current character "within" that archetype soon I'll do this later I'll say a few things though...

First I have a Tezuka star system or Fate/like saber face type way of looking at this where there's the visual archetype that forms the basis of different mind soldiers... So maybe the more interesting thing to you is the archetype versus the specific guy.

Also that I think amab Tboy can be a real gender if you want. It also doesn't matter if you're a real thing or if someone else tells you you're a real thing or not bt I want to put it out there the reality that sometimes a Tboy is a Tboy regardless of the mundane realities we consider essential to Tboy izm

Transgender warrior prince guy as an archetype is someone who Has kind of an earthen perspective and an emphasis on well-being and balance that can translate to pragmatism or to reductive worldview. A great capacity for nobility and valor and also like greed and reactionary patterns and violence. He's broadly solar. If I want to learn more about his medicne I have to let him ferment longer in my mind bunker I think. Here's some of the "in character" knowledge:

In his capacity as Michal's yaoi consort (momentary scizzoring and crying based yaoi that collapses amicably due to incompatible goals/both being stone (?)) he functions as both relational ground to reinvent herself after first 20ish years of her life overshadowed by weapons grade socially fuckin shattering mental illness and also an initial object of compassion that disrupts tha cluster B malicious destroyer patterns. Conversely she as his yaoi consort demonstrates a human soul with ready access to the absolute fucking depth of misery and despair and the golden gleaming heights of ecstasy and genius which disrupts his sort of comfortably narrow affect N points him to inward spiritual portal ....

Oh his name is Gregory "Gory" Slaughter with the baptismal name "Ataraxio", selected by Michal as translation of masculine Sanskrit name Ananda, one of her hobbies is pretending to understand linguistics. Begins to practice syncretic woodland catholicism on tail end of 1st saturn return.

Helping? Interesting? Maybe. It's a cartoon so modular glyph that can be ensouled by spirits peculiar to each viewer (grimoire on metaphysics of cartooning forthcoming). Interested in your response or elaboration but it's allowed to be secret. More pictures?

Playfighting with lunar syzygy (want to do a real version of this pic sometime)

Girl and boy forms, as Gory

Thank you for aksing me ? Love excuse to rant and rave

[dailydemonspotlight]

Day 1 - Shiva

Race: Fury

Alignment: Light-Chaos

March 20th, 2024

Today’s Demon Spotlight is Shiva from Hinduism, the destroyer who breaks for more to create. One of the primary deities in Hindu Mythology alongside Vishnu and Brahma, Shiva serves a very unique purpose- he’s worshiped as someone who participates in a cycle of life and rebirth, the god who destroys so more can be created by Brahma. As such, he’s far from inherently evil, and is actually one of the most worshiped in the Trimurti. There is a lot to Hinduism, and admittedly I’m not very knowledgeable about it, but Shiva’s role in it has always caught my interest, and has actually inspired quite a bit of my own work- he’s actually the chief inspiration for Nil!

In the Megami Tensei games, Shiva serves as a very powerful demon in almost all of them, appearing at very high levels and even serving as a superboss in V. Design wise, there isn’t much to say- he’s rather accurate in all incarnations, what with his blue skin, four arms, and dancer-like attire. His theme song in V, the trippy, almost acid-like song Battle -Destruction- has a rambling, choppy beat fronted by spacey sounding instruments and percussion that gives way to a surreal and oppressive atmosphere, one incredibly fitting for his boss fight in V given his deific role. The bizarre time signature and vocals make it feel like a waltz, which is incredibly fitting given how Tandava is literally just him busting a move. Speaking of which…

His signature skill, ‘Tandava,’ actually originates as a divine dance performed by him in the mythology, likely being what inspired quite a lot of depictions of him as a belly dancer. The Tandava is the method by which Shiva carries out his destruction to reshape the world, a dance so filled with fervor that it represents the eternal cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction. There are several types of this dance, those being “Ananda Tandava, Tripura Tandava, Sandhya Tandava, Samhara Tandava, Kali (Kalika) Tandava, Uma Tandava, Shiva Tandava, Krishna Tandava, and Gauri Tandava.” Each of them represent both different gods and different parts of the cycles in Hinduism, and the one that Shiva himself performs most often (and thusly is named after him) is described as being the originator of the cycle in the first place. In the Megami Tensei games, the Tandava dance depicted appears to be either Rudra Tandava or Shiva Tandava, both of which representing his destruction, though I personally lean more towards it being Rudra Tandava, as the move is a severe almighty attack that destroys all foes on screen.

Overall, Shiva is one of my favorite demons in the series on account of his design, gameplay, and lore. He’s one of the most interesting mythological figures in history in my opinion, and SMT does him justice.

[stargengen]

I miss the four sages, so here some HCs

-Jesus is just introvert, and like any introvert, he says the most bizarre things about heaven to his friends (Like how the angels really are) -Buddha have a special nickname for each one -Confucius can carry each one with no difficult -Socrates can stand in a corner for hours because he can enter such an inert state of philosophical thought that he forgot to eat, sleep or even breathe -Buddha and Jesus eyes can glow (Socrates almost had a heart attack when Buddha was picking food at 3AM) -All of them receive gifts or phone calls from their disciples (mainly from Ananda, John, Plato and Yan Hui)

[ctrlmay]

╭₊˚ ๑︰warnings: smut, dirty thoughts

Ushijima is second-guessing doing yoga with you; he should've never suggested it. All he can see from behind is you bent over in front of him, and he can't take it. His dick that has been twitching in his pants since the beginning can't take it. Right now, he's in absolute control directing you in every position as you follow everything he says. Even if it's yoga, and he's your trainer, and you're supposed to follow what he says. The circumstances of it all have awoken a feeling throughout his body. An uncontrollable urge to run his hands all over your body and put you into certain positions himself but with his cock sunken deep inside your cunt, stretching out your walls. He can hear it. He can see it. Your face pretty and fucked out, moaning his name with each thrust plunging his cock into you.

 "Ushijima?" You asked innocently, peering from the side of your legs where you were lying on your back and holding your feet in the air. Ushijima says it is called the "Ananda Balasana"… He said it would be good for your back and thighs, which is true, but what is also true is that he just wanted to see you in the position because of the view he had of your clothed pussy barely covered with a thong seen through your leggings. 

"Yes?" He answered quickly, averting his view from your crotch to your face. "How long should I be in this pose?" He had been so busy daydreaming he forgot about the training session. "Until you get it right." He lied. You had been doing it right the entire time. But the view he had of you in this position drove him crazy. "What am I doing wrong?" "Push your legs back more." Ushijima had moved over to you, bending down on his knees to be on the same level as you, laying his hands on the back of your thighs, pushing your legs back more. An innocent moan escaped from your mouth, reacting to the deep stretch felt in your thigh, ringed through Ushijima's ear like a melody and shot down to his cock, which had grown in length. "Aah, you're right; it does feel better. Could you push a little more, Ushijima ?" The way his name flowed out of your mouth while you lay in such a lewd position; made the tight feeling in his pants unbearable. Fuck. he couldn't take it. He pushed as hard as possible to shift his focus from the tight feeling in his pants (and possibly earn a few moans from you). 

He stops when he hears A loud rip echoing throughout the gym, paired with a gasp coming from you as you quickly try to cover up the hole that ripped right in the middle of your crotch. But, unfortunately, it was too late; Ushijima had already seen your pussy glistening with sweat and a mixture of arousal that suffocated your thong between the lips of your vagina. 

"AAAaaaa, please don't look!!! I forgot my tights were too tight. I should've known it would've ripped!!" You had squeezed your arm between your legs, trying your best to cover yourself; however, Ushijima disregarded what you said and, without reply, lifted your legs back up to the position they were in before and removed your hand to reveal the beautiful sight again. 

"No need to apologize, Y/n. This makes things much easier." He glances up to see your shocked face with your lips slightly open. Subtly smiling to himself, he glances back down, gliding down your slit and traveling back up to your clit, rubbing his fingers side to side, pressing gently on your clit.

"Ushiji—fuck," you gasp. The hole in your tights ripping out of nowhere was embarrassing enough. Now your pussy is on full display, and Ushijima is fingering you. "Mmmm, please…" Suddenly the pleasure had gone away Ushijima abruptly paused what he was doing, removing his fingers from your clit. 

"Are you sure this is what you want, y/n? I'll stop if you want me to." He figured that you enjoyed what was happening but wanted to be sure this was what you wanted. 

Although this is what you wanted, yearned, dreamed, and hoped for, and more. So it feels refreshing and kind that Ushijima asked if you wanted to have sex, but you were also a bit frustrated; he stopped out of nowhere and left you hanging, abandoning your clit.

Wrapping your legs around Ushijima’s torso, bringing him closer, pressing his now fully erect cock against your crotch, wrapping one hand around his neck to bring him in closer to whisper in his ear, "Ushijima, this is what I want." You assured, rubbing your crotch gently on his erection, earning a soft moan from Ushijima against your skin. "So please fuck me."

Hi everyone! This is my first time writing something like this, so if you have any tips, let me know. Also, this is a preview for a fanfic I'm working on called "Work it out!" that I'll be posting soon ♡ *:･ﾟ

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sharon Salzberg

+

I’m mostly in denial that I’m about to turn 70 years old. I often find myself saying, “Let’s just not think about it. I’ll pretend it isn’t going to happen.”

But of course, as I contemplate my upcoming birthday with disbelief, I remember that I’ve spent all these years in a Buddhist tradition that encourages reflecting on your own death every day. So maybe it’s not something I should put off anymore!

When I do this reflection, I think about letting go. During the pandemic, I let go of many things: travel, seeing friends, and much more. And so I ponder what it would mean to let go of everything.

Of course, aging is a mixed bag. Wisdom, perspective, gratitude—so many things grow stronger as we get older. But there are also distressing, growing incapacities from one’s body; the fear of what a moment of forgetfulness might mean; the sheer indignity of being treated as unimportant by some; even the frustration of having to scroll down for a long, long, long time on some websites to get to the year of your birth (my personal pet peeve).

And then there is the painful fact, so relevant recently, that one’s body tends not to mount as strong an immune response to illness.

I do also feel the joy of aging. For example, I don’t feel ambitious. If someone asks me what I’d like my legacy to be, I think, “I’ve done it.” Hopefully I can still accomplish things and make things happen, but I don’t feel competitive. I don’t feel haunted by the folly of youth as I might have been at one time.

I once attended a retreat focused on aging led by the Tibetan master Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Although he was still a fairly young man at that point, Rinpoche had noticed that many of his students were confronting the challenges of growing older. One afternoon, someone in the retreat was waxing on about the tremendous joys and delights of growing older. Exhilarating insights, followed by a litany of pleasures, followed by impressive triumphs, all spoken faster and faster (“What is she running from?” I thought darkly), until Rinpoche interrupted her.

“Don’t just make a poem out of aging,” he said. “It can be really hard sometimes.”

He wasn’t encouraging cynicism or despair—more an invitation to see and openly acknowledge all aspects of our experience. We don’t want to deny the difficult, of course, but we also don’t need to be completely defined by it. Being enveloped in and defined by what’s difficult is relatively easy to do, so it takes some intentionality to recognize all aspects of our experience and remember the positive forces in our lives.

So how might that work in practice?

First, while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them. For example, I have seen, throughout my life, the tendency to rehearse some catastrophe and thereby live it several times. So I think the first question is always, “What are we adding onto a situation which is already hard enough?”

Not being able to do something I used to be able to do, or being in physical pain, or losing people we love – these are already very hard. But we often add more suffering onto them, like thinking it shouldn’t be this way, or feeling shame or fear. One possibility of mindfulness is to notice where we’re adding to the suffering that’s already there, and try not to fall so much into it.

Second, I learned an interesting form of lovingkindness meditation from Ananda Matteya, then an energetic, 94-year-old Sri Lankan monk visiting the Insight Meditation Society in 1993. He taught us what he described as his favorite meditation: combining loving-kindness meditation and a body scan. He would go through the body, part by part, wishing each part well: may my head be happy, may my eyes be happy, and so on through the whole body. Even “may my liver be happy!”

I’ve taught that meditation to people with injuries, scars, diseases, difficult diagnoses, and all kinds of things, and it makes a difference. It can help counteract our tendency to add bits of shame or resentment, even subconsciously, to whatever is already there.

Finally, there’s the perspective of wisdom.

I first met Joseph Goldstein at my first meditation retreat, in India, in January, 1971. Just before lunch, I was in a madly frustrated state, because I couldn’t keep my attention on the breath. I said to myself, “If your mind wanders one more time, you should just bang your head against the wall!”

Fortunately, the lunch bell rang just then, saving me from that fate. This retreat was not silent, so waiting in line for lunch, there was a conversation going on between two people behind me. One asked, “How was your morning?” And the other replied, “I couldn’t concentrate at all, but maybe this afternoon will be better.”

He was so casual about it that I was horrified. I thought “This guy doesn’t understand how extraordinary these teachings are – he’s being so glib!”

Of course, ‘this guy’ was Joseph Goldstein. The difference, of course, was that I had been meditating for four days, while he had been meditating for four years and had a kind of perspective on change, on the inevitable ups and downs of meditation, that I was nowhere near having.

Now I feel that way about life in general. Things change, there are ups and downs, and with practice, we can learn to let go, again and again.

[miraculousturtle]

Please reblog or back this lovely children's book by a wonderful Chicana poet from Los Angeles!

Kickstarter closes ends on June 14th and she is only at 17%.

🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

BUTTONZ FINDS HIS MOJO is a story about a black cat named Buttonz...

He is the only cat - among humans and dogs! - until one day he comes across two black kittens just like him in his family's backyard...

But when Buttonz's cat fam unexpectedly grows, even more, they seem to have all the fun in the world in the wild cat jungle of the backyard. Then, some strange feelings come up inside Buttonz's otherwise purrfect heart. Soon, his tail begins to sag, and, alas, he loses his appetite! Something's gone missing. Will Buttonz ever find his mojo again?

Why Mojo? Why now?

Kids have been struggling in a post-pandemic world in their key formative years. Mental health specialists have encouraged concerned adults to help our children name their feelings and find healthy ways to manage them during difficult times. BUTTONZ FINDS HIS MOJO was written to serve as an important reminder to children that even though not every day is ameowzing, we can still nurture our mojo and find new ways to build relationships and support networks with those in our community.

Kickstarter Goal

Our Kickstarter goal budget of $8,500 is designed to offset the cost of illustrating 100% of the book and carry us right into book production. Book production includes a professional layout, cover design, and ebook conversion. There are other costs associated with publishing and merchandise development (see rewards) that are covered within this goal.

You can help Oh My Gatos! Books unlock two more books in the series - Mama Mittens Magical Tails and Lady Lemons the Library Cat - when you help us reach our stretch goals. Check out the details down below to see how!

From the Author

Hi! My name is Brenda Vaca and BUTTONZ FINDS HIS MOJO is my first children's storybook. I am a writer who fell in love with stories - reading and writing them! - from a very young age. I published my first book, a poetry collection for grownups called Riot of Roses, last year in December 2021 with incredible support from the Kickstarter community. I'm back again this year because my first experience was so incredible, I wanted to do it all again. This is my family's first cat, Buttonz. He's the inspo behind this new children's book series.

About the Illustrator

Sucy Ananda, known professionally as "SucculentFleur," is an incredible artist and illustrator from Indonesia. Brenda was a big fan of SucculentFleur on Instagram so when it came time to find an illustrator, Sucy agreed to help! And we're so thrilled she did. Her bright artistry and imagination really capture the spirit of Buttonz and his family.

The Rest of the Team

Ana Karen is a fantastic stationery designer and producer. What can we say, she loves paper! And, of course, other wonderful essentials to make learning, writing, reading, and creating fun. Ana Karen is designing a special pencil, especially for Buttonz's book launch!

Paola Gutierrez, otherwise known as "La Piedrita Feliz" and "El Libro Feliz y Yo" is a children's book writer and poet who loves to paint beautiful stones with encouraging messages and affirmations. She graciously agreed to be part of our campaign by designing several sets of Mojo Motivations and we couldn't be more thrilled!

Naynay the Cat Lady is a mysterious gal who loves to crochet and is so so crafty. She has created a prototype of a Buttonz stuffy using her fabulous crocheting skills that are available exclusively for this campaign. How very boutique of her! Recommended for older children. Limited supply, so snatch yours up before they're gone!

[wisdom-and-such]

“Let one mold himself in accordance with the precepts he teaches…”.

Section 12: verse 3

Dhammapada (oldest surviving sayings attributed directly to the Shakyamuni Buddha).

(This version translated from the Pali Cannon by Ananda Maitreya).

[jcmarchi]

MIT researchers discover the universe’s oldest stars in our own galactic backyard

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/mit-researchers-discover-the-universes-oldest-stars-in-our-own-galactic-backyard/

MIT researchers discover the universe’s oldest stars in our own galactic backyard

MIT researchers, including several undergraduate students, have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe, and they happen to live in our own galactic neighborhood.

The team spotted the stars in the Milky Way’s “halo” — the cloud of stars that envelopes the entire main galactic disk. Based on the team’s analysis, the three stars formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, the time when the very first galaxies were taking shape.

The researchers have coined the stars “SASS,” for Small Accreted Stellar System stars, as they believe each star once belonged to its own small, primitive galaxy that was later absorbed by the larger but still growing Milky Way. Today, the three stars are all that are left of their respective galaxies. They circle the outskirts of the Milky Way, where the team suspects there may be more such ancient stellar survivors.

“These oldest stars should definitely be there, given what we know of galaxy formation,” says MIT professor of physics Anna Frebel. “They are part of our cosmic family tree. And we now have a new way to find them.”

As they uncover similar SASS stars, the researchers hope to use them as analogs of ultrafaint dwarf galaxies, which are thought to be some of the universe’s surviving first galaxies. Such galaxies are still intact today but are too distant and faint for astronomers to study in depth. As SASS stars may have once belonged to similarly primitive dwarf galaxies but are in the Milky Way and as such much closer, they could be an accessible key to understanding the evolution of ultrafaint dwarf galaxies.

“Now we can look for more analogs in the Milky Way, that are much brighter, and study their chemical evolution without having to chase these extremely faint stars,” Frebel says.

She and her colleagues have published their findings today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). The study’s co-authors are Mohammad Mardini, at Zarqa University, in Jordan; Hillary Andales ’23; and current MIT undergraduates Ananda Santos and Casey Fienberg.

Stellar frontier

The team’s discoveries grew out of a classroom concept. During the 2022 fall semester, Frebel launched a new course, 8.S30 (Observational Stellar Archaeology), in which students learned techniques for analyzing ancient stars and then applied those tools to stars that had never been studied before, to determine their origins.

“While most of our classes are taught from the ground up, this class immediately put us at the frontier of research in astrophysics,” Andales says.

The students worked from star data collected by Frebel over the years from the 6.5-meter Magellan-Clay telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory. She keeps hard copies of the data in a large binder in her office, which the students combed through to look for stars of interest.

In particular, they were searching ancient stars that formed soon after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. At this time, the universe was made mostly of hydrogen and helium and very low abundances of other chemical elements, such as strontium and barium. So, the students looked through Frebel’s binder for stars with spectra, or measurements of starlight, that indicated low abundances of strontium and barium.

Their search narrowed in on three stars that were originally observed by the Magellan telescope between 2013 and 2014. Astronomers never followed up on these particular stars to interpret their spectra and deduce their origins. They were, then, perfect candidates for the students in Frebel’s class.

The students learned how to characterize a star in order to prepare for the analysis of the spectra for each of the three stars. They were able to determine the chemical composition of each one with various stellar models. The intensity of a particular feature in the stellar spectrum, corresponding to a specific wavelength of light, corresponds to a particular abundance of a specific element.

After finalizing their analysis, the students were able to confidently conclude that the three stars did hold very low abundances of strontium, barium, and other elements such as iron, compared to their reference star — our own sun. In fact, one star contained less than 1/10,000 the amount of iron to helium compared to the sun today.

“It took a lot of hours staring at a computer, and a lot of debugging, frantically texting and emailing each other to figure this out,” Santos recalls. “It was a big learning curve, and a special experience.”

“On the run”

The stars’ low chemical abundance did hint that they originally formed 12 to 13 billion years ago. In fact, their low chemical signatures were similar to what astronomers had previously measured for some ancient, ultrafaint dwarf galaxies. Did the team’s stars originate in similar galaxies? And how did they come to be in the Milky Way?

On a hunch, the scientists checked out the stars’ orbital patterns and how they move across the sky. The three stars are in different locations throughout the Milky Way’s halo and are estimated to be about 30,000 light years from Earth. (For reference, the disk of the Milky Way spans 100,000 light years across.)

As they retraced each star’s motion about the galactic center using observations from the Gaia astrometric satellite, the team noticed a curious thing: Relative to most of the stars in the main disk, which move like cars on a racetrack, all three stars seemed to be going the wrong way. In astronomy, this is known as “retrograde motion” and is a tipoff that an object was once “accreted,” or drawn in from elsewhere.

“The only way you can have stars going the wrong way from the rest of the gang is if you threw them in the wrong way,” Frebel says.

The fact that these three stars were orbiting in completely different ways from the rest of the galactic disk and even the halo, combined with the fact that they held low chemical abundances, made a strong case that the stars were indeed ancient and once belonged to older, smaller dwarf galaxies that fell into the Milky Way at random angles and continued their stubborn trajectories billions of years later.

Frebel, curious as to whether retrograde motion was a feature of other ancient stars in the halo that astronomers previously analyzed, looked through the scientific literature and found 65 other stars, also with low strontium and barium abundances, that appeared to also be going against the galactic flow.

“Interestingly they’re all quite fast — hundreds of kilometers per second, going the wrong way,” Frebel says. “They’re on the run! We don’t know why that’s the case, but it was the piece to the puzzle that we needed, and that I didn’t quite anticipate when we started.”

The team is eager to search out other ancient SASS stars, and they now have a relatively simple recipe to do so: First, look for stars with low chemical abundances, and then track their orbital patterns for signs of retrograde motion. Of the more than 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, they anticipate that the method will turn up a small but significant number of the universe’s oldest stars.

Frebel plans to relaunch the class this fall, and looks back at that first course, and the three students who took their results through to publication, with admiration and gratitude.

“It’s been awesome to work with three women undergrads. That’s a first for me,” she says. “It’s really an example of the MIT way. We do. And whoever says, ‘I want to participate,’ they can do that, and good things happen.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

[lunamagicablu]

Lascia che ogni definizione di te, che proviene da fuori, se ne vada e smetti di dare peso a quanto dicono di te. Lascia che ogni giudizio e anche ogni interpretazione arrivi e vada, senza crederci.

Guarda e vedi che tua vera e unica forza è autodefinizione. Fai molta attenzione qui: senza definizioni esterne e senza interpretazioni altrui ti accorgerai che non trovi più né nomi né concetti e le parole sono vuote.

Solo ora puoi iniziare ad autodefinirti. Ma come ?

Ascolta… Senti…

Da questo vuoto tu sei, senza poter dire cosa, ormai. Da questo vuoto emergi come Vitalità pura e il vuoto è come l’utero di una madre. Allora forse … anche tutti gli altri non sono quello che hai creduto. Anche loro sono solo Quello che hai ascoltato e sentito in te.

Dunque, da oggi, se qualcuno ti dira’ che sei uno stupido, potrai sorridere perché non ci crederai. Lo stesso quando ti diranno che sei intelligente. In verità sei molto oltre ogni idea e concetto.

Dunque, da oggi, un momento di esitazione bloccherà ogni tuo possibile futuro giudizio sugli altri e sul mondo. E invece che nelle storie di te e degli altri in cui hai creduto, starai nel vuoto e nel silenzio. Potrai ugualmente partecipare alla vita, ma come giocando. Potrai ugualmente gioire e soffrire, ma potrai fare un passo indietro, tirarti fuori dai drammi o dalle commedie a tuo piacimento.

Sarai semplicemente Signore nel tuo Regno. E questa è la vera forza e la vera Libertà. Non sentirai il bisogno di difenderti, né difendere alcunché, perché ti percepisci inattaccabile.

Ora, spontaneamente, questa forza di autodefinizione si riconosce attraverso di te anche negli altri.

Ecco, tu sei morto. E chi davvero sei è tornato. Ahahahahah… se mi hai seguito davvero puoi ridere anche tu, perché ti ho portato fuori di te, a TE. Qui in, CHI SEI, l’Intimità è totale e l’Amore muove ogni essere e cosa. Respiri finalmente davvero e senza fatica, ogni movimento sembra un volo.

Bentornato a Casa, Amore.

Ananda art by Mighty Oak AI *********************** Let every definition of you that comes from outside go away and stop giving weight to what they say about you. Let every judgment and even every interpretation come and go, without believing it.

Look and see that your true and only strength is self-definition. Be very careful here: without external definitions and without interpretations of others you will realize that you can no longer find names or concepts and the words are empty.

Only now can you start to define yourself. But how ?

Listen… Listen…

From this void you are, without being able to say what, now. From this void you emerge as pure Vitality and the void is like a mother's womb. Then maybe…everyone else isn't what you thought either. They too are only What you have listened to and felt within you.

So, from today, if someone tells you that you are stupid, you can smile because you won't believe it. Same when they tell you you're smart. In truth you are far beyond all ideas and concepts.

Therefore, from today, a moment of hesitation will block any possible future judgment you make about others and the world. And instead of the stories of you and others that you believed in, you will stand in emptiness and silence. You will still be able to participate in life, but as if by playing. You will still be able to rejoice and suffer, but you will be able to take a step back, remove yourself from dramas or comedies as you wish.

You will simply be Lord in your Kingdom. And this is true strength and true Freedom. You will not feel the need to defend yourself, or defend anything, because you perceive yourself as unassailable.

Now, spontaneously, this force of self-definition is recognized through you also in others.

Behold, you are dead. And who you really are is back. Ahahahahah… if you really followed me you can laugh too, because I took you outside of yourself, to YOU. Here in, WHO YOU ARE, Intimacy is total and Love moves every being and thing. You finally breathe really and effortlessly, every movement seems like a flight.

Welcome home, Love.

Ananda art by Mighty Oak AI

[mysticalblizzardcolor]

CC Antya 5.145 “Nescience, or māyā, may be called ‘bandhu’ because she entangles everyone in the material world. Therefore by using the word ‘bandhu-han,’ mother Sarasvatī says that Lord Kṛṣṇa is the vanquisher of māyā."