#solar wind dynamics

[wayti-blog]

"Recent studies have shed light on a fascinating phenomenon occurring in the outer atmosphere of the Sun known as switchbacks. These switchbacks, or solar jets, may hold the key to understanding complete magnetic field reversals and their implications for space weather and Earth's magnetic field.

Switchbacks are sudden and drastic changes in the direction of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun into the solar system. These switchbacks appear as sharp bends or reversals in the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind, creating a complex and dynamic environment in space.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the origin and nature of switchbacks, as they defy conventional models of solar wind behavior. Recent observations from NASA's Parker Solar Probe have provided new insights into the formation and characteristics of these enigmatic solar jets."

"Understanding switchbacks is not only crucial for unraveling the mysteries of solar wind dynamics but also for gaining insights into complete magnetic field reversals. Magnetic field reversals, also known as geomagnetic reversals, are periodic events in which the Earth's magnetic field flips its polarity, with the north and south magnetic poles exchanging places."

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[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

A Comet's Tail

A comet's tail changes from day-to-day depending on how much material the comet is losing and how strong the solar wind it's facing is. (Image credit: Shengyu Li & Shaining; via APOD) Read the full article

[sasheemo]

Revenge and Reconciliation

Pairing: Ex gfs Bound!Agatha x Witch!Reader

Summary: When the hex shatters, the bond between you and Agatha reignites with a force too raw to ignore. Confronting her after decades of anger, betrayal, and yearning, you’re determined to make her pay. Power, passion, and a collision of unresolved emotions blur the line between vengeance and surrender.

Tags: Bitter Ex Gfs, Smut, Revenge Sex, Emotional Angst, Power Dynamics, Magic-Infused Sex, Magic Strap, Magic Cum, Magic Wrists Restraints, Slight Degradation, Cum Powered Reconciliation, Revenge Gets Sticky, Sub!Agatha (I know, wtf), Writing Sub Agatha Feels Illegal, Is It Subbing If She Still Wins Tho?

Word count: 6.6k

A/N: I wrote this fic as an attempt to wrestle my way out of the creative block that’s been clinging to me like an overly affectionate stray cat. I don’t think it’s the best thing I could have written, and I’m not entirely convinced by it, but the idea had been gathering dust on my list for a while, so here we are.

The concept of sub!Agatha has always intrigued me—mostly because, in my mind, it’s about as rare as a solar eclipse. I usually stick to writing Dom!Agatha, but hey, I think sub!Agatha is canon-compliant too… just in that “blink and you’ll miss it, alignment of the magical cosmos” kind of way.

For this fic, I decided to throw caution (and some very own personal hcs) to the wind and see if I could somehow make that dynamic work in an x Reader setting. Did I nail it? Definitely not. Do I feel like I truly captured the elusive sub!Agatha vibe that lives rent-free in my head? Eh, we’ll call it a work in progress. Maybe I’ll take another swing at it someday. For now, here’s my first attempt—enjoy! 💜

MASTERLIST

Read on AO3

It’s subtle at first—a faint ripple in the air, like a string pulled taut and suddenly slackened. But you feel it, deep in your body and soul, as if the ground beneath you shifted. 

The hex is broken. 

Agatha.

Her name lingers in your mind like a curse, dragging with it a torrent of emotions you’ve spent decades trying to bury.

Fury, white-hot and all-consuming, surges to the surface, clawing at the walls you’ve built around it. You can feel it all, the bitterness, the pain, the endless ache of betrayal.

Yet everything feels shushed by the unmistakable pull of her magic, faint but familiar, like the distant hum of a melody you can’t forget.

You’ve tried to sever this bond more times than you can count, poured every ounce of power into cutting the thread of magic that still ties you to her. 

But it never worked. Years of spells, rituals, and desperate attempts to scrape her magic from your soul couldn’t erase that connection, that cruel reminder of the love you once shared.

You don’t want to feel her. You don’t want to feel anything.

But with the hex shattered, she’s there—everywhere. The memories rise like a tide, drowning you in the ghost of what once was. 

The warmth of her fingers, trailing just long enough to leave a fire in their wake. Her voice, low and teasing, laced with promises that made your heart race. You remember the way she laughed, genuine and unguarded when she let herself forget the world, or the way her lips curled into a smirk when she caught you staring, daring you to look away. Those stolen nights, when her touch was tender and her kisses slow, felt endless, like she was giving you pieces of her no one else had ever seen.

And then… nothing. 

She left. Without a word. Without a reason. Without even a shred of decency to say goodbye. She disappeared like smoke, leaving only the cold, bitter truth: it meant nothing. You meant nothing.

The memories crash to a halt, mocking you, shaming you, for ever believing she could be anything more than one of her masterly crafted lies. 

Your magic surges in response, wild and vengeful, begging for release. You clench your fists, trying to ground yourself, but it’s futile. Her presence—or the absence of it—calls to you.

It’s been decades, but the wound is as raw as the day she abandoned you, as sharp as the moment you realized she wasn’t coming back. 

But you won’t give her the chance to run this time.

Without hesitation, you focus your energy, feeling the familiar pull of teleportation. The world shifts, and when you open your eyes, you’re standing outside her house in Westview. It’s dark and unassuming, the air around it heavy with the remnants of the hex’s magic.

The door slams open with a burst of energy, the wood groaning under the force of your magic. The faint remnants of Wanda’s hex still cling to the air, a metallic tang that pricks at your senses, but they’re nothing compared to the oppressive weight of her presence.

Agatha is sprawled on the couch as if she hasn’t a care in the world, her posture loose and unbothered despite the clear signs of exhaustion clinging to her. 

Her dark hair, longer than you remember, tumbles around her shoulders in wild, mussed waves, catching the light like ink kissed by moonlight. Her clothes are rumpled, the lines of her blouse wrinkled and her jeans have clearly seen better days, but somehow the disarray only adds to her maddening allure. 

And then there’s her face—those sharp cheekbones, that pale, smooth skin, and the glint in her icy blue eyes that even now refuses to dim. 

She looks up at you, her smirk curling with the same audacity that’s haunted you for decades, and for a moment, you hate how effortlessly breathtaking she is, how your heart still skips a beat whenever her eyes meet yours. Even now, even when she’s powerless.

“Well, well.” she drawls, tilting her head, her voice laced with a defiance she has no right to feel. “Come to gloat?”

You take a step inside and the air shifts, charged with the force of your presence. For the first time in decades, you’re the one with the power, and Agatha—bound, powerless, and alone—is at your mercy.

“You look terrible.” you say, your voice sharp, cutting. “What happened to the all-powerful Agatha Harkness? Shouldn’t you be out scheming, manipulating, destroying lives? Oh, wait—”. You step closer, savoring the way her smirk falters, “You can’t.”

Agatha’s smirk snaps back into place, but there’s a flicker—tiny, fleeting—of something behind her eyes. Fear? No, she wouldn’t let you see that. Regret? That would be even more shocking. Whatever it is, it’s gone in an instant.

“You’ve got quite the mouth on you.” she says, leaning back against the couch. “I guess that hasn’t changed.”

Your jaw tightens, so hard you’re lucky you don’t chip a tooth. The sheer audacity of her, lounging there like she hasn’t single-handedly fueled centuries of your bitterness, makes your magic flare. 

The air around you hums with tension, a wave of heat radiating from your skin, but she doesn’t even flinch. Of course she doesn’t. Why would she? Agatha has always been maddeningly immune to the consequences of her actions. 

“Don’t you dare pretend nothing happened.” you snap, stepping closer until you’re towering over her. “You left, Agatha. You abandoned me without a word. No explanation, no goodbye—just gone. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

“I had my reasons.” she murmurs, voice quieter now, almost too quiet.

Your laugh is cold, bitter. “Reasons? That’s the best you can come up with? You destroyed me, Agatha. For decades, I tried to understand why, to make sense of how I meant so little to you.”

Her lips part as if to speak, but no words come out. For a moment, just a moment, you see something raw in her gaze—a vulnerability she’s trying desperately to hide.

“Don’t.” you say sharply, your magic flaring brighter. “Don’t you dare try to justify what you did. You don’t get to play the victim.”

Her smirk falls back into place, but it’s weaker now, almost brittle. 

“You’re really milking this righteous fury thing, aren’t you?” she quips, though her voice lacks its usual bite. “What do you want, then? Revenge? Closure? Or did you just miss me?”

The last question catches you off guard, her tone teasing but her eyes searching. Your magic is screaming at you to be unleashed, the rage bubbling so close to the surface as you lean in closer, your face inches from hers.

“What I want,” you say, your voice low and dangerous, “is for you to feel even a fraction of the pain you caused me.”

The heat of your fury presses down on her, forcing her back into the couch. Her sharp tongue falters, her bravado slipping just enough for you to see it: the crack in her armor, the shadow of fear in her eyes.

“Give me one good reason,” you hiss, venom drenching your tone, “why I shouldn’t end this now. Why I shouldn’t take everything from you the way you took everything from me.”

“Because you still love me.”

Five words, and everything you’ve built comes crashing down.

It festers like an old wound torn open, flesh ripped apart to reveal something gory beneath, bleeding and pulsing. It’s a visceral pain that feels like it might consume you whole, a dark, twisting ache that blooms in your chest and radiates outward.

Your grip on your magic falters, and for a fleeting second, you see her as she was all those years ago—the woman who once held your heart in her hands, who kissed you like you were the only thing that mattered.

The memory bleeds into the present, stark and jarring, clashing with the image of the woman before you now. She’s still breathtaking, but there’s a hollowness in her now, a shadow where the fire used to burn brightest. 

The contrast churns something bitter and broken inside you—resentment, grief, yearning, perhaps all three at once. It’s unbearable, the way the past and present collide, leaving you adrift in the space between what was and what is.

You force yourself to recoil, your magic snapping back to you as if burned. 

“Love?” you spit, the word a venomous hiss that cuts through the charged air between you. “You think I could still love you after everything you did? I fucking hate you, Agatha.”

Her laughter startles you—a sharp, bitter sound that carries no joy, only a rawness that sinks deep under your skin. It’s the laugh of someone who’s long since made peace with their own destruction.

“Hate’s just love that’s been shattered to pieces.” she says, her voice cracking, the edges sharp enough to draw blood. “And we both know you’ve been holding onto those shards for decades.”

You want to deny it, to unleash every ounce of fury you’ve carried for all these years, to rip her apart for daring to speak such a painful truth aloud.

But you can’t.

And it’s in this moment of hesitation, of vulnerability, that the rage in your chest shifts—twisting into something far more dangerous.

The bond between you roars, electric and alive, as if responding to your emotions. It’s always been there, tethering you to her no matter how much you tried to sever it. And now, it’s pulling you closer, wrapping around you like dense smoke.

It’s infuriating. It’s intoxicating. And you fucking missed it.

Even bound and powerless, Agatha looks at you as if she’s still in control, as if the years of pain and betrayal you’ve carried mean nothing.

Her eyes narrow, a glint of recognition flashing in that unnervingly sharp gaze. She sees it, she feels it, the way her words have struck a nerve. And, of course, she pounces on it.

“What’s the matter, hon?” she purrs, her voice a sickeningly sweet mockery of concern. “Can’t decide whether to kill me or fuck me?”

The words land like a match to gasoline, igniting a fire it’s far too late to extinguish. The line you’ve been toeing shatters, and before you can stop yourself, you close the final distance between you in one swift movement, your hand wrapping around her throat as you press her back against the couch. 

Her smirk doesn’t leave her lips—if anything, it deepens, her breath catching just slightly as her eyes gleam with something dark and infuriatingly pleased.

You can feel her pulse under your fingertips, quick and unsteady, and it only feeds the chaos roiling inside you.

“You don’t get to say that.” you hiss, leaning closer until your face is inches from hers. “You don’t get to act like this is a game.”

“And what if it is?” she murmurs, her voice low, almost daring. “What if that’s all we’ve ever been?”

The anger in your chest twists, warping into something raw and untamed. You hate her. You want her. The two emotions bleed together, inseparable, consuming.

Your grip on her throat tightens—not enough to hurt, but enough to remind her who has the power now. She doesn’t fight you, but she doesn’t look away either.

“You have no idea what you’ve done to me.” you say, your voice shaking with the weight of everything you’ve held back. “No idea what it’s been like to carry this—this anger, this pain, this fucking bond I can’t escape.”

Of course, you don’t expect her to apologize, she never would, but the flicker of regret in her eyes is louder than words.

The bond between you hums again, relentless and unyielding, pulling you closer even as you try to resist. You do hate her, but you also can’t deny the way her presence calls to you, the way her magic—even diminished—feels like a part of you.

“Why, Agatha?” you demand, your voice breaking as you lean in closer. “Why did you leave? Why did you—”

She cuts you off by brushing her lips against yours in the barest hint of contact. It’s not a kiss, not yet, but it steals the breath from your lungs all the same. 

As her breath mingles with yours, the world collapses to the infinitesimal space between your lips, a charged, aching void that demands to be closed.

And then, as if honoring that demand, she closes the distance. 

Her lips crash onto yours in a kiss that isn’t tender—it’s a storm, a battle, a clash of wills. Her mouth moves against yours with a desperation that feels like surrender, but there’s no mistaking the way she bites at your lower lip, as if daring you to take more.

You growl low in your throat, the sound vibrating against her lips as your hands find her hips, pinning her harder against the couch. She arches into you, her body a perfect, infuriating fit against yours, and the bond between you flares alive, pulling you deeper into the chaos of her.

Her tongue meets yours, and it’s molten—hot and demanding, tangled in a rhythm that feels like a fight for dominance neither of you is willing to lose. The couch creaks beneath you as you press her down, your weight covering hers completely, your hand sliding up to tangle in her hair, tugging just hard enough to make her gasp into your mouth.

This isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t reconciliation. It’s unfiltered emotion, punishment and possession, everything you’ve bottled up for decades exploding in a collision of anger and desire that leaves no room for restraint.

With a flick of your wrist, her clothes dissolve into shimmering wisps of magic, vanishing like smoke into the air. What’s left behind steals the breath from your lungs despite every part of you screaming not to react, not to let her affect you like this.

The sight of Agatha’s bare body, a masterpiece of soft curves and sharp angles, reignites memories you thought you’d buried—the way her skin once felt beneath your hands, how her body moved in perfect synch with yours, every sound she made etched into your soul.

It’s been decades since you last saw her like this, but time has done nothing to dull her power over you. 

Your pulse thunders in your ears, heat spreading like wildfire through your veins as your gaze trails over her, lingering on the lines of her collarbone, the swell of her breasts, the way her thighs tremble ever so slightly.

She’s bound and powerless in every possibile sense of the words, yet somehow she still holds the upper hand.

Her lips curl into the faintest smirk as if she knows exactly what she’s doing to you. “Still as easy to impress as ever, I see.”

The words snap you out of your trance, a surge of irritation mingling with the desire coursing through you. 

With another flick of your wrist, ropes of magic coil around her wrists, pulling them together and suspending them above her head. The glowing bonds crackle with energy, casting faint light over her bare skin. 

Her smirk falters, just slightly, as she tugs against the restraints, her muscles flexing in defiance and testing their hold.

And it’s that—that small attempt at resistance, her futile struggle against the bonds you’ve created—that makes something snap inside you. 

It’s not just power—it’s the realization that she, the woman who’s haunted your every waking thought and dream, is finally yours to control. The intensity of it almost scares you, the way it spreads through your chest like spilled ink, staining every corner of your mind in pitch black.

It’s a visceral, consuming need to claim her, to fill her, to mark her in a way that will sear into her soul, leaving no room for doubt or escape. The hunger burns through you, fierce and unrelenting, every ounce of your power thrumming with it, shaping itself into something tangible, something undeniable.

Your lower clothing dissolves into shimmering magic, leaving you partially bare—but not fully. The vulnerability of complete nakedness is a luxury you can’t afford. Not right now. Not with Agatha. You want the contrast to be stark—her, stripped of everything, exposed and powerless beneath you, while you remain in control. It’s a statement, a reminder, that here, now, you’re the one with the upper hand.

And then, as though summoned by your need, the strap materializes. And it’s not just magic—it’s a part of you, an extension of your body. 

The weight of it settles against your hips, grounding you, the connection immediate and intimate, as if it’s always been there.

Your gaze drops for a moment, drawn to the way your cock stands proud and commanding, and a smirk tugs at your lips. You take in its size, the thick, substantial girth that demands attention. You make no effort to hide your satisfaction as your hand wraps firmly around its base, stroking it in slow, deliberate movements that make your intent unmistakable.

Agatha’s eyes widen, her own gaze falling to your cock before flicking back to your face. Her lips part slightly, and her tongue darts out to wet them in a motion so instinctive, so sinful, that it sends a fresh jolt of heat through you.

For once, she seems utterly at a loss for words, the sharp wit you’ve come to expect from her silenced by the weight of the moment, and by you.

“Speechless?” you ask, your tone dripping with mockery. “Not like you.”

“Well,” she manages, clicking her tongue, her voice laced with an edge of forced confidence, “you’ve certainly… outdone yourself.”

You press the tip against her thigh, watching as her body tenses and her breath hitches. Slowly, teasingly, you trail it upward, letting it graze her glistening folds but never quite giving her what she wants. 

You see all of her defiance falter the second you tap the tip against her clit. You do it multiple times, teasing her until she’s a panting mess, her chest heaving as her body completely betrays her. 

And yet, her eyes stay locked on yours, burning with a mix of frustration and longing.

“Look at you,” you murmur, your hand sliding back to her throat, wrapping around it just enough to keep her grounded. Her pulse races beneath your fingers, and you feel her body relax into your touch, her submission becoming more evident with every passing second. “You’re supposed to be the powerful one, remember? The one who’s always in control. How does it feel to be at my mercy?”

She doesn’t answer—not with words. Instead, a broken moan escapes her lips as you finally push the tip of your cock into her. The sensation shoots through you like lightning, raw and electric, and you can’t stop the low hum that escapes your lips.

“So wet for someone who acts like she’s above it all.” you say, your voice carrying a teasing lilt. “Tell me, Agatha—do you always get this needy when you’re powerless? Or is it just for me?”

Her cheeks flush, and she glares at you, but the humiliation in her eyes only makes your smirk deepen. She tilts her hips toward you in an attempt to take more, the motion drawing a smug chuckle from your throat.

“Pathetic.” you mock, “You used to have me on my knees, begging for you. And here you are now, so desperate for my cock you can’t even hide it.”

Her lips part in a sharp, trembling intake of breath, her chest rising and falling as her wrists strain futilely against the glowing restraints above her head. 

“You think you’re in control now?” she spits, though her voice trembles. “That this makes you powerful?”

You laugh, cold and merciless, leaning in until your breath fans across the shell of her ear. 

“Oh, I don’t think.” you whisper, your words nothing but a cruel taunt. “I know.”

To drive the point home, you push deeper, and the wet, obscene sound of her body yielding to you fills the room. 

She’s molten, deliciously tight, and her slick heat draws you in like a drug. Every inch you sink into her feels like a conquest, you can feel how her body stretches to take you, how her walls tremble and clench around the pleasurable intrusion, pulling you deeper as if begging for more. 

The sensation is so vivid, so overwhelming, that a loud, unrestrained moan tears from your lips.

“Seems like I’m not the only needy one.” she murmurs, her voice trembling but cutting nevertheless. “Such pretty sounds for me.”

Her words strike a nerve, and the moment they register, your hips snap forward in one sharp, punishing thrust, driving the strap so deep your hips collide with hers. 

The impact sends a jolt through both of you, her sharp cry echoing through the air before it’s cut off as your fingers tighten around her throat.

“Is that what you wanted? Mmh?” you hiss, your voice trembling with the effort to stay in control. “To be fucked like this? To feel what it’s like to be under me for once?”

She doesn’t respond, her voice swallowed by a series of breathless moans as you pull back and thrust in again, setting a slow, languid rhythm that feels more like a claim than a motion. 

You want to break her—but not physically. Even now, even with the all this anger coursing through you, the thought of truly hurting her is unthinkable. You know you’re big, and despite everything, you couldn’t forgive yourself if you let the fury bleeding into your movements cause her pain.

Instead, you pour that intensity into control, into precision, into the way you angle your hips just right to drag your length against every sensitive spot inside her. The sound of her wetness grows louder with each thrust, mingling with the faint creak of the couch beneath you.

“Gods.” you murmur, your free hand gripping her hip to steady yourself. “You feel that, don’t you? How wet you are for me? How much you want this?”

Her head nods slightly, the motion almost instinctive, as if her body answers before her mind has time to process, before the final syllable of your last question even hangs in the air.

“Yes—fuck.” she whispers, the word trembling on her lips. “Yes, I—”

“Louder!” you command, your tone sharp as you feel it—a fresh gush of wetness enveloping you, slick and hot, pulling you in. 

“Yes!” she screams, her voice cracking under the weight of her need. “I want it—I want you.”

Her admission is a spark to the inferno raging inside you, and you give in to it, your magic surging wildly. 

Your pace quickens, your hips snapping forward with growing intensity, each thrust deeper and harder than the last, the slap of your hips against hers a relentless cadence of possession that blends with her cries.

Her wrists pull at the restraints while her back arches and her moans rise higher, each one a testament to your power over her, a surrender you claim with every punishing thrust.

Your gaze drops involuntarily, drawn to the mesmerizing rhythm of her breasts bouncing in time with your movements, and the sight instantly makes your mouth water. The memory of their softness, the way they felt against your tongue and lips, rushes back unbidden, igniting a primal urge to lean down and take one into your mouth.

But you catch yourself, clenching your jaw against the temptation. This isn’t about her pleasure. You’re not here to make her enjoy herself. You’re here to ruin her, to make her crumble under your control.

“Fuck, don’t stop.” she whispers, her voice breaking. “Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

Your eyes snap back to hers, a wicked grin spreading across your lips as your grip on her throat loosens, your hand sliding down to join the other on her hips. With both hands anchoring her in place, your pace grows ruthless, each thrust drawing louder and more desperate sounds from her.

Her walls tighten around you, squeezing your cock as the connection between you deepens, your magic tangling with hers in a way that feels both chaotic and inevitable.

And then, just as you feel teetering on the edge of release, you pull back, slowing to a maddening pace. 

Your thrusts become shallow, deliberate teases that barely fill her, leaving her gasping and writhing beneath you. Her frustration is palpable, her hips bucking in search of relief, but you hold her steady, a cruel smirk curling your lips.

“You’re so close, aren’t you?” you purr, each word dripping with satisfaction. “Just say the word, Agatha. Beg me, and I’ll let you come.”

Her body tenses beneath you, every muscle taut as she fights the command with everything she has, struggling to cling to the last fleeting semblance of control. Even as her thighs quiver and her hips twitch uncontrollably, her pride holds her back, refusing to surrender to you so easily.

But as each thrust reminds her of what she’s being denied, drawing out her torment, her nails curl into her palms, her jaw tightens, and her resolve cracks little by little under the relentless pressure. 

Finally, her head tilts back, her voice breaking as the words tear from her throat. “Please—fuck… please, let me come.”

Her words ignite something feral and all-consuming. Power surges through your veins, setting your every nerve ablaze as you answer her desperate plea and resume fucking her with renewed vigor. 

You slam into her with brutal force, each thrust hitting that soft, devastatingly perfect spot inside her that makes her entire body jerk beneath you. Her eyes roll back, her cries turning into incoherent, panting moans that fuel the raw, insatiable need driving your every motion.

“That’s it.” you growl, your hand sliding down to her clit. You circle it with fast, precise movements, your fingers slick with her arousal as you push her closer to the edge. “Come for me, Agatha. Come on my cock.”

Her moans climb higher, until they peak in a scream that tears through the air as the tension within her shatters all at once. 

Agatha’s orgasm bursts forth like a supernova, bright and devastating, her walls clenching and spasming around you in rhythmic pulses that leave you breathless. She cries out your name, her voice splintering into a sob as her body quakes with the force of her release.

The sight of her—head thrown back, lips parted, her chest heaving as she trembles in the throes of ecstasy—is almost enough to undo you. But you don’t stop. You keep pounding into her, forcing her to take every inch over and over as you drive her higher, helping her ride out each wave of her climax.

And then, as you revel in the way she’s gripping you as though she never wants to let you go, and your own release threatens to overtake you, you falter.  

Because her eyes—half-lidded, blown wide, and dark with need—lock onto yours, piercing through the haze of control you’ve clung to. Her lips part, trembling, and her voice cuts through the storm.

“Fuck—please, baby.” she gasps, each word breaking into a whimper that makes your stomach tighten and your magic throb. “Come inside me. I need it—need to feel it, need you to fill me up.

That’s it. Her words, how she begged for it, the pet name falling so effortlessly from her lips, the raw desperation in her voice, the sheer thought of filling her up with your cum, of watching her take every drop like she’s made for it. It’s all more than enough to tip you over the edge.

How utterly ruined she looks beneath you only adds to it, and whatever fragile grip you had on your restraint shatters instantly, obliterated by the force of her need.

Your hips snap forward in one last devastating thrust, burying your cock into her as deep as it can go, your climax slamming into you like an explosion. 

And then it happens.

The magic within you surges implacably, a relentless flood that erupts deep inside her in thick, scorching waves. Each pulse of your cock forces more of your release into her, a molten rush that fills her completely. The bond between you roaring with life as your magic claims her from the inside out, leaving no part of her untouched.

Beneath you, Agatha’s body goes taut, her back arching violently as the blue in her eyes gets rapidly swallowed by a swirling, familiar, luminous purple. 

You can feel her magic pouring back into her, she gasps as it all overtakes her, her body trembling violently as another orgasm tears through her. But this one is unexpected, different, and even more powerful than the first. 

Her cry pierces the air, a sound of pure ecstasy and unrestrained power, unlike anything you’ve ever heard. It’s primal, otherworldly, and devastatingly beautiful. For a moment, you’re left breathless, unwillingly captivated by the sight of her. A vision that makes something inside you ache.

When the final waves of pleasure subside, you collapse onto her, your breath ragged, your body trembling with exhaustion and the lingering hum of magic. 

The restraints on her wrists dissolve, fading into shimmering sparks, and her hands hover for a moment, uncertain, before they settle gently on your back.

Her touch is light, not hesitant but careful, as though rediscovering something long lost. And as your bodies press together, it feels as if no time has passed at all since you last lay in each other’s arms.

Agatha’s chest rises and falls with uneven breaths, her lips parted as her hooded eyes lock onto yours.

Her gaze is a labyrinth, a tangle of emotions so layered and profound it’s impossible to unravel. There’s no trace of defiance, no smugness, no sharp wit lurking in the corners. Instead, disbelief and shock hum beneath the surface, while a glimmer of something softer—gratefulness, maybe even devotion—burns faintly. And yet, woven through it all is an aching, unguarded longing.

It’s a silent confession wrapped in questions, and the absence of her usual masks, the sheer vulnerability staring back at you, stirs something deep in your chest, a feeling too overwhelming to even begin to name.

As you pull out of her, you catch how her hips twitch instinctively at the sudden emptiness, and the sound she makes—a quiet, needy whine—makes your breath hitch. 

The cock dissolves in a flicker of shimmering light, fading back into the ether, but your eyes remain fixed on what it left behind.

You watch your cum drip from her, thick and glistening as it slides slowly down her folds. The sight is mesmerizing and utterly filthy, making a new rush of heat coil low in your stomach. 

Agatha notices the shift in your gaze, lazily tilting her head to follow it. When she sees what’s caught your attention, a smug grin spreads across her face, equal parts infuriating and intoxicating.

“Hmm.” she hums, her voice a sultry drawl that sends shivers down your spine. “You always did know how to leave an impression, darling.” 

She pauses, her grin deepening as her eyes flick back to yours, gleaming with sharp amusement. “Though I must say, I never expected to get my powers back this way… not that I’m complaining.”

As soon as you register her words your jaw clenches, a flush rising to your cheeks as frustration surges through you. 

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The thought echoes in your mind, relentless and deafening. You didn’t plan this—hell, you didn’t even know you could do that, and the realization leaves you stunned, reeling. 

You came here to break her, to strip her of whatever scraps of control she had left, to show her just how worthless she was without her power. You came here to make her pay.

But instead, as always, in the end, Agatha got exactly what she wanted. 

The smugness etched into her face says it all. It’s infuriating. Humiliating. Maddening. Everything always plays out in her favor, no matter how the odds stack against her. The universe itself seems to bend for her, conspiring to deliver her victory, while you’re left choking on the ashes of your intentions.

And yet, even in your frustration, there’s a selfish, shameful flicker of satisfaction burning in your chest. You gave her back her power, yes—but you did it your way. Intimate. Indelible. Something neither of you can ignore or undo. 

No matter how powerful she becomes again, no matter how she wields what’s been restored, she’ll always know who gave it back to her and how. She’ll owe you, whether she admits it or not.

In that way, you did make her pay. And the twisted irony of it feels like a cruel, bitter triumph.

Agatha notices the shift in your expression, the way your gaze has drifted into the distance as if lost in thought, and her voice slices through the haze with a softness that catches you completely off guard.

“You’re so beautiful when you’re like this.” she whispers, her tone impossibly gentle, like a secret meant only for you. ”When you’re all mine.”

Her words land like a jolt, anchoring you back to the present and cutting through the fog in your mind. 

There’s something in her voice, an aching sincerity you didn’t expect, that makes something deep inside you twist painfully.

But even if her tenderness disarms you, it still strikes a nerve, clashing violently with the anger and resentment still simmering beneath your skin. You cling to that anger desperately, using it to shield yourself from the confusion clawing at the edges of your control and threatening to drag you under.

“I’m not yours.” you snarl, but the words lack conviction, and you know she hears it.

Her grin returns, sharper now, as if she’s savoring your futile resistance. 

“Oh, darling…” she whispers, her voice dripping with equal parts confidence and affection. “You’ve always been mine.”

You open your mouth to reply, to hurl another retort that might restore some semblance of control, but the words die on your tongue as her hand moves with startling speed. 

Her fingers curl around the back of your neck, her grip firm yet trembling, and she pulls you down roughly, her lips crashing against yours before you can resist.

The kiss is instant chaos, scattering your thoughts like leaves in a storm. Her tongue slides against yours, hot and insistent, tangling and teasing with a fervor that steals the air from your lungs. 

It’s wet, messy, the taste of her flooding your senses as she kisses you with the same confident, consuming intensity she always did. 

But beneath the confidence, there’s something unspoken. 

It’s in the way her body shudders beneath you, in the way her fingers dig into your neck, in the way her lips cling to yours as though letting go might unravel her completely. The vulnerability in her touch and the aching need in her kiss cut through the haze of anger, leaving you trembling and unsure whether the ache blooming in your chest is pain, longing, or both.

But right now, whatever it is you’re feeling, you refuse to linger on it. 

You won’t allow her another second of your time, your presence. The very air around her feels oppressive, making it harder to breathe, and you know that if you stay a moment longer it will be too late to resurface.

With all the strength and willpower you can muster, you push yourself up, breaking away from her touch and from her warmth. 

You wave a hand, conjuring back your underwear and pants in a blur of hasty magic, your movements jerky and unsteady while every fiber of your being screams at you to put distance between yourself and her. To leave.

Suddenly, the bond hums again, loud and persistent, gnawing and mocking at your resolve. You grit your teeth and force yourself to ignore it, taking a couple of steps toward the door, refusing to look back. 

You’ll leave. You need to leave. You want to leave.

But with Agatha, it’s never that easy.

“Wait.”

It’s not a command. It’s not teasing or smug. It’s quiet, almost unsure, and that alone makes you hesitate.

You glance back over your shoulder, your voice sharp with all the frustration burning hot in your chest. “What could you possibly want now?”

She sits up slowly, still completely naked, making no effort to conjure clothes with the magic now thrumming through her.

“Answers.” she says, her tone smooth but tinged with a sly undertone, her gaze locked on yours with unnerving steadiness. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To finally hear the truth you think I owe you.” 

She pauses, her lips curving into a faint, almost teasing smile as her eyes flick downward to her still-bare body. “Especially after… this.” Her eyes return to yours, glinting with amusement. “I suppose it’s only fair.”

You fold your arms across your chest, your anger warring with the pull of her words. 

“You owe me more than answers.” you bite back, your voice cutting and cold. “You owe me years of my life, years of trying to understand why you left.”

“And you’ll have them.” her voice softer now, almost disarming. “But not like this.”

Your eyes narrow, suspicion curling in the pit of your stomach. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She rises slowly, her movements deliberate as she closes the distance between you. Her nakedness robs her of nothing—if anything, it sharpens her power, her control. 

When she reaches you, her hand lifts to cup your cheek, her touch infuriatingly warm, a silent challenge wrapped in unsettling intimacy.

“Stay.” she says, her thumb skimming your skin with a tenderness that makes your breath hitch. “We’ll talk. Over dinner. But only if you stay.”

You bristle at the condition, your pride flaring. 

“Using my need for closure as leverage?” you ask, your voice biting. “How very you.”

Her grin returns, sharper now, but her eyes betray a flicker of something gentler. 

“Oh, darling.” she purrs, her voice dripping with confidence, “I know you want this, so, let’s not play pretend. I’d say we’re well past that point, wouldn’t you?”

Your jaw tightens, the weight of her gaze making it hard to hold onto your anger. You hate that she’s right. Hate that you want to stay, that the bond between you has wrapped itself around your heart so tightly you can’t bear to leave.

“Fine. Dinner.” you say, your voice clipped. “But no games, Agatha. You owe me the truth.”

Her smirk deepens for a moment, a glimmer of mischief flashing in her eyes, before softening into a genuine, almost nostalgic smile. 

“No games.” she whispers, her tone unexpectedly gentle. “Just dinner… like old times.”

You shake your head, as if trying to clear the lingering warmth of her touch. But it stays with you as you watch her move toward the kitchen, humming softly to herself.

As you follow her, you can’t help but wonder if staying will be your salvation or your undoing. But with Agatha, it’s never a question of one or the other—it’s always both, tangled together in a way that, after all this time, you’re starting to realize you were never meant to escape.

[intermundia]

At first glance, modern Mars doesn’t appear to be a very dynamic place. With an average surface temperature of about minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit and an atmosphere just one percent as thick as Earth’s, it is a freezing desert.

Strange, overlapping lines, often dozens of feet wide, can stretch for miles. Unlike many of Mars’ features, these are not relics. We see them appear and disappear. What are these bizarre, shape-shifting patterns?

In the mid-afternoon sun, heating of the Martian surface creates towering vortices, which can grow miles-high dust devils.

You might think that there was this tornado-force wind coming towards a rover, and it might pick the rover up and spin them around and do all sorts of horrible things. But in reality, the Martian atmosphere is actually very, very thin, and so you can have a dust devil pass over you, and you would barely even notice it. It’s thought that as these whirlwinds travelled over the rovers, they sucked dust off the solar panels like a vacuum.

But the cleaning power of the dust devils doesn’t just work on rovers. As they travel, these huge vortices suck up dust from Mars’ surface, exposing the darker bedrock beneath, leaving trails so large, we can see them clearly from space. There are no Martians creating the lines. The culprit is the Martian atmosphere.

Solar System: Storm Worlds on NOVA

[apod]

2025 March 31

Parker: The Solar System from Near the Sun Video Credit: NASA, JHUAPL, Naval Research Lab, Parker Solar Probe; h/t: Richard Petarius III; Music: Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36 by N. Rimsky-Korsakov; Source: Musopen; Performance: Czech National Symphony Orchestra (via Musopen); Music Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Explanation: If you watch long enough, a comet will appear. Before then, you will see our Solar System from inside the orbit of Mercury as recorded by NASA's Parker Solar Probe looping around the Sun. The video captures coronal streamers into the solar wind, a small Coronal Mass Ejection, and planets including, in order of appearance, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Between the emergence of Earth and Mars, Comet Tempel 1 appears with a distinctive tail. The continuous fleeting streaks are high energy particles from the Sun impacting Parker's sideways looking camera. The featured time-lapse video was taken last year during Encounter 21, Parker's 21st close approach to the Sun. Studying data and images from Parker are delivering a better understanding of the dynamic Sun's effects on Earth's space weather as well as humanity's power grids, spacecraft, and space-faring astronauts.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250331.html

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[talonabraxas]

"The physical Sun is not more than a symbol of the Spiritual Sun, of the Christ-Sun. When the ancient ones adored the sun, when they culted him, they didn’t refer properly to the physical Sun. No, they paid homage to the Spiritual Sun, to the Midnight Sun, to the Christ Sun.

Unquestionably, it is the Christ-Sun who should guide us in the Superior Worlds of Cosmic Consciousness. All mystics that learn how to work at will outside of the physical body, is guided by the Midnight Sun, by the Cosmic Christ." - The Solar Logos, Samael Aun Weor: Kernunnos - Cosmic Horned God Talon Abraxas The Stag in Western Hermetic Tradition 1. Symbol of Vital Force and Fertility

In both Celtic and Hermetic lore, the stag represents the vital generative power of nature — a creature of solar fire clothed in earth's strength. His antlers, which grow and shed each year, are a clear symbol of renewal, resurrection, and the cyclical force of life.

In Hermetic Alchemy, such a symbol often stood for the Green Lion or the Red Stag — forces of vegetative vigor, solar force made physical. The stag thus reflects:Sexual potency Fertility of the fields Earthly embodiment of the Solar Logos The Spirit acting within the realm of Nature

2. Solar and Seasonal Link

The stag’s antlers rise like golden rays — a natural crown of light. They associate him with the Summer Sun, particularly the period ruled astrologically by Leo and Virgo — the exact decans ruled by the Knight of Disks (21° Leo to 20° Virgo). Thus, he becomes the Earth’s Crowned Fire, the one who brings light into the ripening fields.

In this sense, the stag becomes a Hermetic Hieroglyph of the Solar Self at peace in the natural body, walking among the harvest it called forth.

3. Stag and Chokmah: Creative Wisdom

In Qabalah, Chokmah (Wisdom) is the sphere from which the Knights descend. It is dynamic, masculine, and creative — and the stag is often associated with this first creative impulse of the Logos. The horns of the stag echo the Yod, the spark of divine light descending into form.

The helmeted stag on the Knight’s brow, then, becomes a metaphor:“I wear the crown of creative wisdom — not to conquer, but to cultivate.”

4. Stag as Psychopomp and Forest Guardian

In myth and mysticism — from the Horns of Cernunnos to Christian stag legends where Christ appears between antlers — the stag is a guide. It leads one deeper into the forest, i.e., the unconscious, the inner world, the earth’s secret chambers.

On the Knight of Disks, this echoes his role as a pathfinder: not in the clouds, but in the dense growth of daily life, fertility, and toil. He shows that the initiatory path also winds through the soil, and that the forest of incarnation is sacred.

5. Hermetic Crown of the Body-Spirit Union

Let us not forget the antlers as antennae, receptors of divine light made manifest in biology. The stag is not just strength and sex — it is a symbol of Spirit incarnating through form. He is the embodied Logos, the very Word made Flesh.

Crowley’s choice of the stag on this card’s helmet was not arbitrary. He is signaling:A heroic spirit of Earth A Solar Initiate who does not flee the world, but enroots his light within it The reverence of nature as temple — not separate from the divine, but its mirror

Final Insight: The Stag as the Crown of the Disc

The Disc is the final suit — the most physical, the heaviest. And yet atop the head of its Knight rests the crown of resurrection, growth, and divine virility. It is an alchemical teaching:“He who would master Earth must wear the Crown of Life.” “He who sows with strength reaps with grace.” - Knight of Disks, Tarot of Eli

[helmador]

Hello :D, ever since I saw the mentioning of Chains the Underdogs, as well as your comment about the dynamic between Silver, Turnbuckle, and Scroop, I have been very interested with how you interpret these characters. Is it okay for me to ask:

What are your headcanons and/or character analysis of Turnbuckle as well as your interpretation of the Zirrelian’s culture?

Hello! I actually have the most information for Zirrelians and Turnbuckle,, they’re my favorites, lol. I’ve been wanting to talk about CtU, but I haven’t been drawing lately xd. Here’s my headcanons for both (under cut) (I also didn’t proofread this so ignore the mistakes):

Zirrelians

According to the art book, Zirrelians are an octopus-based species, so I imagine they share many traits. The most prominent traits they share are the following:

Color changing - Originally for camouflage, it is now considered more of a traditional art form and extremely important communication device. Their color changing ability develops early in life as result of their diet. If a young Zirrelian had a good diet, their colors will be very vibrant; but if they had a poor diet, their color changing ability will be very dull or not even visible. Young Zirrelians use their colors to communicate personality and emotions to each other, making the skill extremely valuable to a young Zirrelians development and socialization. Radiation from solar winds can also cause defects in Zirrelians colors at any age, lessening their ability and colors as a whole- many Zirrelians in the Navy (aka, Battle at Procyon) have very dull skin for this reason.

Venomous bite - Like a majority of octopi, Zirrelians have a venomous bite. This venom is not fatal however, it is more of a paralyzing type, its effects were worse early on, but have died down since they found more “sophisticated” ways to hunt. Their venom is highly utilized in their society nonetheless, specifically for medicine, much like how rattlesnake venom is used for medicine.

Familial - Like female octopi, female Zirrelians are extremely overprotective of their young and defend them with their life. Naturally, Zirrelians are more on the solitary side of social practices, and when young Zirrelians reach their early teen years, they become independent.

(I also imagine that baby Zirrelians are very small, much like baby octopus, lol, someone depicted that here!)

For their home planet, Zirrelians are native to a (unnamed) oceanic planet. There is not many large land masses here, just islands scattered everywhere across the world. The terrain has many cliffs and the climate is Mediterranean based: arid-wet in most places with a handful of dry-desert islands. Due to the geography of the planet, they were originally a mostly aquatic species, but due to technology advances, they’ve now become more semi-aquatic.

Zirrelian culture is heavily based in Spanish- especially Southern Spanish- and Mediterranean culture (totally not projecting lol). Their architecture is very ostentatious, and they limit environmental damage as they hold nature at a high standard. Zirrelians are probably most well known for their cuisines, they are omnivores and their food is composed of mainly fish, insects, and native plants. In the film, I imagine the “Zirrelian Jellyworms” Sarah serves in her diner are a delicacy for the Zirrelians. Aside from food, they are a very creative species and utilize their color changing abilities in art. In general, their art history is very rich and they are definitely one of the more “colorful” societies.

Now, with that out of the way, here’s how I imagine Turnbuckle:

Turnbuckle

Backstory: Yoel Turnbuckle (full legal name oh ehm gee) was the only child of his mother, he is also unaware of who his father is. He grew up in poverty, and never developed his colors as a result of poor living conditions, leaving him a dull green color his entire life. This caused him to be isolated from other Zirrelians since he could never properly socialize with them without colors. Growing up, he felt very lonely and ended up forming a very strong bond with his mother.

After a few years, him and his mother eventually moved to a new planet since they could not afford much. This is where Turnbuckle ends up staying most of his life: Pelsanor, a prairie land planet covered in many small water sources (think the midwest region of the US in a way).

Unfortunately, his time with his mother was cut very short on this planet. Pelsanor may be a nice place, however, its poor society has resulted in much crime. Turnbuckle was separated from her after being perused by poachers in the reason (as Zirrelians are commonly poached for their color changing coats and venom). He never saw his mother again after this, and her whereabouts still remain unknown. He assumes she’s dead, as much as he doesn’t want to.

Being left with no one at such a young age really wrecked him, for most of his teen years he offered to aid sailors and was an engineers mate on a train. From his minimal cabin boy years, he learned how the helm of the ship works along with steering and galactic navigation, as an engineers mate, he learned basic properties of solar power and how it’s utilized on both trains and ships. Turnbuckle was never able to gain a ship of his own though, and being with practically no income or stable home, he was unable to get a real job. It wasn’t long until he resorted to stealing, at least this way he had some source of income and food, and as some of the others on Pelsanor, he became another bandit in the region.

Fast forward a few years, John Silver had been exiled from Ironbeard’s crew and had fled on a longboat after his old crew and Captain essentially thrown him out via attacking him . The longboat he’d fled on had been damaged in the process, where he soon crashed on Pelsanor.

Turnbuckle was the first one he met on this planet, he found Silver wandering the plains a few hours after his crash. They started off as strangers, Turnbuckle only bringing Silver to a nearby town so he could at least eat, but the two started staying near each other over time. One had what the other didn’t: Silver was a strong leader, savvy, brave, and had good charms and wits. Turnbuckle was loyal, introspective, cautious, and cynical.

With neither having a ship, they became a bandit duo Pelsanor, notorious for robbing many trains.

-

Overview: Turnbuckle was definitely and still is more fond of Silver than anyone else in the crew, that is why he was chosen as his First Mate (that and being the first one Silver fully trusted). However, Silver is too hellbent on finding Treasure Planet that he doesn’t acknowledge Turnbuckle’s presence commonly. Turnbuckle isn’t focused much on the actual Treasure Planet, but what will come after it: Will Silver abandon his crew after he finally finds it? Will he continue his piracy? And most importantly, how will this affect his “need” for his crew? After all, they spent the past 20+ years finding this place and this place only.

Turnbuckle wants to stay with Silver, the Ursid was the first being that Turnbuckle had become attached to aside from his mother. Being isolated his entire life hadn’t done a good deal to him at all, and now, if the man he’s spent what is practically most of his adulthood with leaves him for some riches, what then?

It was something he’d approached Silver about multiple times, but he never got a defined answer. Silver’s greed was slowly growing over him as he aged, he wanted Treasure Planet at all costs, which had caused his relationship with Turnbuckle gradually lose some of his closeness. In fact, Turnbuckle was even neglected by him at some points. Despite Silver’s worsening behavior, Turnbuckle still remained heavily loyal to him.

-

Film (and some Battle at Procyon):

Turnbuckle willingly agreed to Silver’s plan to pose as a crew, relieved at the thought of their search finally being over after all these years (note, they were roughly in their mid to late 20s when they met. Canonically in film time, they’re both in their mid 50s).

However, as the events of the film progress, it doesn’t take long to realize that Silver is softening up to Jim. Understandably, Turnbuckle is upset by this. He’d been with Silver since the beginning, never had Silver ever softened up to him in such a way, but now he’s softening up to some random boy he’d just met? Turnbuckle never acts on his disdain for Jim (unlike the other pirates, especially Scroop), if they were to finally reach their goal, why would he want to possibly risk his relationship with Silver becoming more distant? And after all, maybe this was just a temporary relationship his Captain and Jim built.

As the voyage progressed though, more tension did arise. Turnbuckle never liked Jim- he was jealous of his relationship with Silver. Silver could recall more touching moments he’s had with Jim in the past few months than he did with Turnbuckle in the past 25 years. And this became surprisingly obvious during the mutiny- Silver refusing to shoot Jim after he got the (fake) map, and Silver trying to stop the canon that was aiming to shoot down the longboat Jim, Amelia, and Delbert were all escaping in.

Come the actual Treasure Planet, when Silver tried to push away his care for Jim, it was right back to the original thing that he neglected Turnbuckle for- his greed. Essentially, he was too infatuated with the actual physical treasure that when the planet started falling apart, he was more concerned for all the Treasure being destroyed rather than half of his crew literally dying.

Now, I know Turnbuckle technically died, however, I accept all events of Battle at Procyon canon. So, he survived Treasure Planet (also this because I’m biased and he is my fav character lol), but in my canon he has many injuries that are not depicted in BaP.

I imagine he originally visited Silver in the Procyon prison to break him out. Treasure Planet was finally over, he could be with Silver again- just like they started out. But no, Silver’s only concern now is Jim, and he gives Turnbuckle the Dark Matter clump to warn Jim of the ironclads.

Turnbuckle reluctantly agrees to this, maybe after THIS then they’d finally be back together. Of course, Turnbuckle risked his freedom to deliver the Dark Matter to Jim, and was arrested. At this point, I imagine Turnbuckle escaped prison, but guess what? Silver is dead. He died SAVING JIM. So what now? Turnbuckle is back to the beginning, most of the crew is dead or has unknown whereabouts, now he’s back to being lonely.

-

There is so much more I could say about Turnbuckle as I have so much ideas and headcanons for him (as well as the Zirrelian species), but I believe this bit should answer your questions!!

[chromaherder]

Besties that trash talk together, stay together.

Happy new year! I’ve been expanding on the design of these two a little bit, thinking about potential dynamics and such based off a couple older poster like illustrations I’ve done of them (the last two images).

Caravel (robo) and Julian (human) are live and breathe solar wind racing partly because that’s what their whole life has been and partly out of spite, each bringing their own personal struggles to their duo and to the rest of the racing cohort, as you do.

[tsbs-shipfessions]

*steeples fingers*

The Creator having been so fixated on the withershards that he decides to isolate how and why Sun is so closely connected to them. He winds up catching on to the partial biomechanical alterations and goes "oh. Hm. Perhaps it stems similarly to a genetic anomaly". So he develops a program that he uploads to Sun, intending to simulate a heat cycle. Either it's a genetic abnormality that can be passed on to an easier target OR the change of state will cause severe alterations to existing dynamics, leaving him an opening to acquire Sun himself.

Only he didn't anticipate anyone - let alone ALL of the family - pooling together, finding the code and accommodating the irrevocable changes.

Sun's more sensitive to smells? Oh bet, they'll work on it!

He's a bit more cuddly? Okay, alright. Moon and Solar aren't necessarily snuggly types, but if it helps, it helps. Earth and the kids are SO DOWN. Also he's a little more apt to seek out what he needs bc of the instinctive aspect of it, so that's an improvement!

Sun's nesting? Eh, that's fine. It also doubles as a comfy place where everyone can cuddle up, win-win! Also it seems to genuiney be relaxing for him, which is some serious brownie points in their books.

Sun's already got two pups to dote on, maybe even a third if you include Molten, so that meets that need/desire!

And even his heats are effectively more akin to PMS - mild case of baby fever, but it isn't some biological imperative to make babies RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY OR DIE. He's just looking at cute baby videos or opting to handle the younger kids in the Daycare. Occasionally he's getting emotional about it, but no biggie

The only REAL changes are a sensitivity to smell, a bit more willingness to ask for things he wants, the occasional purr/growl, and becoming a clothes thief.

The Creator is just watching it go down like "wait what, no, what the FUCK-"

((Any ship is viable for this bc it's so dynamic))

[miracleofdatabase]

Code Lyoko Ship Names cuz i am bored

Jeremie x Aelita: Electric Angel/Jerlita

Jeremie x Ulrich: Thunder Punch/UlJer

Jeremie x William: Cyber Punk/WillJer

Jeremie and XANA Dynamic/Rivalry: Error Code

Jeremie x Laura: Sour Lemon

Ulrich x Yumi: Fighting Struggles/Ulumi/Yulrich

Yumi x Aelita: Cherry Blossom/Yumlita

Yumi x Sissi: Gothic Fashion

Yumi x Laura: Reality Check

Odd x William: Black Cat/Vampire Cat/WillOdd

Aelita x William: Choco Berry/Willita

Aelita x Laura: Pink Lemonade

Aelita x Eva: Amber Orchid

William x Laura: Solar Wind/Willaura

Eva x Sissi: Cherry Rose

Theo x Odd: Kitty Slay

Sam x Sissi: Punk Princess

Sam x Odd: Odyssey Score

Feel free to suggest some names for ships registered and not registered yet

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

"Magic of the North"

Fires glow above and below in this award-winning image from photographer Josh Beames. In the foreground, lava from an Icelandic eruption spurts into the air and seeps across the landscape as it slowly cools.  (Image credit: J. Beames/NLPOTY; via Colossal) Read the full article

[yokowan]

re: the orbital mechanics post

orbital mechanics isn't really "simple". the amount of complexity and diversity of the problems you can solve is huge. there's a lot of very complicated math to be done for spacecraft dynamics. but the complexity is all emergent!

so often in engineering you have to bundle all the stuff that's impossible to determine with just pure math into a dimensionless constant or polynomial approximation and then figure it out experimentally. so many things affect pressure losses in an engine or the spanwise efficiency of a wing that you basically don't have an option besides just sticking that shit in a wind tunnel and taking measurements. but not orbital mechanics! that's just gravity!

when you see those animations of super complicated n body simulations, all of that chaos comes entirely from gravitational attraction and the conservation of momentum+energy. you could write down all the fundamental laws of orbital mechanics on a half size sticky note, all the other stuff is just derived from those. you won't always get closed form solutions, but the controlling forces are so simple that numerically integrating them can be very efficient and very accurate.

now, of course, it's not always just gravity. there's atmospheric drag and solar wind and the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect or whatever. additional forces are always there, and these get complicated enough that you do end up needing to put in empirically determined adjustments. but on short timescales, the simpler model holds true! in my experience you tend to treat these as perturbations to the pure gravity model. you take your existing solution and just add the additional stuff on top. when you're doing orbit determination and rendezvous and the like, you're assuming your object is acting only under the influence of gravity and engines. you're probably even assuming its orbit is perfectly elliptical and ignoring gravity from other bodies.

none of this is to say that spacecraft dynamics is like. objectively better than other disciplines within engineering. (it is though.) it just feels nicer to me. there's something very clean about it. there's no jank, it's like solving puzzles. i am literally out here playing touys with my little spaceships. writing out the lagrangian of the circular restricted 3 body problems and seeing the stable points just fall out of it is so neat! and those are real!!!!!!! they're not artifacts of the math that just happen to show up, lagrange points are real and spacecraft use them all the time.

anyways me when i fucking get you

[rjzimmerman]

The Clean Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable. (Wall Street Journal)

Surprising essay published by the Wall Street Journal. Actually, two surprises. The first is an assertion that the fossil fuel industry is parading to its death, regardless of the current trump mania, while the renewables industry is marching toward success due to dramatic decreases in cost. The second surprise is that the essay is published in the Wall Street Journal, which we all know can be a biblical equivalent for the right wing. But be careful with that right wing label: today's right wing (e.g., MAGA) or the traditional conservative republican right wing, which is more aligned with saving money and making money and avoiding political headwinds.

Here's the entire essay. I rarely post a complete essay, but this one made me happy and feel good, and right now I/we damn well need to learn something to make us happy and feel good.

Since Donald Trump’s election, clean energy stocks have plummeted, major banks have pulled out of a U.N.-sponsored “net zero” climate alliance, and BP announced it is spinning off its offshore wind business to refocus on oil and gas. Markets and companies seem to be betting that Trump’s promises to stop or reverse the clean energy transition and “drill, baby, drill” will be successful.

But this bet is wrong. The clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop. Trump’s policies can marginally slow progress in the U.S. and harm the competitiveness of American companies, but they cannot halt the fundamental dynamics of technological change or save a fossil fuel industry that will inevitably shrink dramatically in the next two decades.

Our research shows that once new technologies become established their patterns in terms of cost are surprisingly predictable. They generally follow one of three patterns.

The first is a pattern where costs are volatile over days, months and years but relatively flat over longer time frames. It applies to resources extracted from the earth, like minerals and fossil fuels. The price of oil, for instance, fluctuates in response to economic and political events such as recessions, OPEC actions or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But coal, oil and natural gas cost roughly the same today as they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation. One reason is that even though the technology for extracting fossil fuels improves over time, the resources get harder and harder to extract as the quality of deposits declines.

There is a second group of technologies whose costs are also largely flat over time. For example, hydropower, whose technology can’t be mass produced because each dam is different, now costs about the same as it did 50 years ago. Nuclear power costs have also been relatively flat globally since its first commercial use in 1956, although in the U.S. nuclear costs have increased by about a factor of three. The reasons for U.S. cost increases include a lack of standardized designs, growing construction costs, increased regulatory burdens, supply-chain constraints and worker shortages.

A third group of technologies experience predictable long-term declines in cost and increases in performance. Computer processors are the classic example. In 1965, Gordon Moore, then the head of Intel, noticed that the density of electrical components in integrated circuits was growing at a rate of about 40% a year. He predicted this trend would continue, and Moore’s Law has held true for 60 years, enabling companies and investors to accurately forecast the cost and speed of computers many decades ahead.

Clean energy technologies such as solar, wind and batteries all follow this pattern but at different rates. Since 1990, the cost of wind power has dropped by about 4% a year, solar energy by 12% a year and lithium-ion batteries by about 12% a year. Like semiconductors, each of these technologies can be mass produced. They also benefit from advances and economies of scale in related sectors: solar photovoltaic systems from semiconductor manufacturing, wind from aerospace and batteries from consumer electronics.

Solar energy is 10,000 times cheaper today than when it was first used in the U.S.’s Vanguard satellite in 1958. Using a measure of cost that accounts for reliability and flexibility on the grid, the International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates that electricity from solar power with battery storage is less expensive today than electricity from new coal-fired plants in India and new gas-fired plants in the U.S. We project that by 2050 solar energy will cost a tenth of what it does today, making it far cheaper than any other source of energy. 

At the same time, barriers to large-scale clean energy use keep tumbling, thanks to advances in energy storage and better grid and demand management. And innovations are enabling the electrification of industrial processes with enormous efficiency gains.

The falling price of clean energy has accelerated its adoption. The growth of new technologies, from railroads to mobile phones, follows what is called an S-curve. When a technology is new, it grows exponentially, but its share is tiny, so in absolute terms its growth looks almost flat. As exponential growth continues, however, its share suddenly becomes large, making its absolute growth large too, until the market eventually becomes saturated and growth starts to flatten. The result is an S-shaped adoption curve.

The energy provided by solar has been growing by about 30% a year for several decades. In theory, if this rate continues for just one more decade, solar power with battery storage could supply all the world’s energy needs by about 2035. In reality, growth will probably slow down as the technology reaches the saturation phase in its S-curve. Still, based on historical growth and its likely S-curve pattern, we can predict that renewables, along with pre-existing hydropower and nuclear power, will largely displace fossil fuels by about 2050.

For decades the IEA and others have consistently overestimated the future costs of renewable energy and underestimated future rates of deployment, often by orders of magnitude. The underlying problem is a lack of awareness that technological change is not linear but exponential: A new technology is small for a long time, and then it suddenly takes over. In 2000, about 95% of American households had a landline telephone. Few would have forecast that by 2023, 75% of U.S. adults would have no landline, only a mobile phone. In just two decades, a massive, century-old industry virtually disappeared.

If all of this is true, is there any need for government support for clean energy? Many believe that we should just let the free market alone sort out which energy sources are best. But that would be a mistake. 

History shows that technology transitions often need a kick-start from government. This can take the form of support for basic and high-risk research, purchases that help new technologies reach scale, investment in infrastructure and policies that create stability for private capital. Such government actions have played a critical role in virtually every technological transition, from railroads to automobiles to the internet.

In 2021-22, Congress passed the bipartisan CHIPS Act and Infrastructure Act, plus the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all of which provided significant funding to accelerate the development of the America’s clean energy industry. Trump has pledged to end that support. The new administration has halted disbursements of $50 billion in already approved clean energy loans and put $280 billion in loan requests under review.

The legality of halting a congressionally mandated program will be challenged in court, but in any case, the IRA horse is well on its way out of the barn. About $61 billion of direct IRA funding has already been spent. IRA tax credits have already attracted $215 billion in new clean energy investment and could be worth $350 billion over the next three years.

Ending the tax credits would be politically difficult, since the top 10 states for clean energy jobs include Texas, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—all critical states for Republicans. Trump may find himself fighting Republican governors and members of Congress to make those cuts.

It is more likely that Trump and Congress will take actions that are politically easier, such as ending consumer subsidies for electric vehicles or refusing to issue permits for offshore wind projects. The impact of these policy changes would be mainly to harm U.S. competitiveness. By reducing support for private investment and public infrastructure, raising hurdles for permits and slapping on tariffs, the U.S. will simply drive clean-energy investment to competitors in Europe and China.

Meanwhile, Trump’s promises of a fossil fuel renaissance ring hollow. U.S. oil and gas production is already at record levels, and with softening global prices, producers and investors are increasingly cautious about committing capital to expand U.S. production.

The energy transition is a one-way ticket. As the asset base shifts to clean energy technologies, large segments of fossil fuel demand will permanently disappear. Very few consumers who buy an electric vehicle will go back to fossil-fuel cars. Once utilities build cheap renewables and storage, they won’t go back to expensive coal plants. If the S-curves of clean energy continue on their paths, the fossil fuel sector will likely shrink to a niche industry supplying petrochemicals for plastics by around 2050.

For U.S. policymakers, supporting clean energy isn’t about climate change. It is about maintaining American economic leadership. The U.S. invented most clean-energy technologies and has world-beating capabilities in them. Thanks to smart policies and a risk-taking private sector, it has led every major technological transition of the 20th century. It should lead this one too.

[accio-victuuri]

i am due for some cpn so let’s over analyze gg’s recent post like we always do. lol. i thought this was him updating his weibo dynamic header/cover but turns out it’s really a video. it’s pretty and v atmospheric. i swear, xz’s camera roll must be something to look at. so the focus of his post is the 6th solar term Guyu. not sure why he is suddenly so focused on these but we know one other person who is, to the point that he included it on his ximalaya show. in episode 52 (tomorrow is guyu day), wyb mentioned this:

Hello all ximalaya friends, I’m Wang YiBo, it’s time to air the 24 seasons of China. Once again, this is the last solar term in the spring. Guyu means rainwater that creates valleys and streams. in the meantime If the weather is still good, the peonies in Luoyang, my hometown, must have bloomed soon. You can go to Luoyang to see the flowers. You can get a ticket if have free time.

and was part of LTS lyrics, literally the first line: blown by the clear wind and waiting for the rain to sow the seeds. in this case the english translations mention it as rain but the original text uses 谷雨. yes he is not the songwriter but to think that he picked that song, with that lyric is telling. it may not be romantic per se, but that his drawn to it. to the rain and what it means.

what a coincidence. 👀

source.

[bomberqueen17]

how the writing is going

Ok so. LOL. About the only thing I am effectively achieving this week *is* writing, and even that is not really..... I don't have a draft. But I have a whole bunch of sample snippets I've written to try and feel my way through the worldbuilding and discover the sorts of things the characters are likely to be preoccupied with, which is often how I figure out what a plot should be.

The next thing I thought about after dolphins was modes of transport besides sailing ships.

So this is a fairly high-tech society, but they do not have fossil fuels, and they don't have a large-scale power grid. I decided that for aesthetics, but as I'm unpicking my plot, I'm realizing that it makes sense. See, the main driver for all my plot devices is that there's a lot of sun activity-- sunspots, coronal mass ejections, magnetic field anomalies, that sort of shit. A power grid could not survive on a large scale. So all power generation is done in small, local installations-- some very local indeed, panels on rooftops, little waterwheels, tiny wind turbines. Industrial-scale power is generated in hydro plants and used right at the site for hydro-powered manufacturing-- much of it direct hydro-power, not converted to electricity. Just direct drive waterwheel shit. Because the sun can throw whatever shit it wants at the planet and your waterwheel won't notice or care.

That said. Communication over long ranges does pose a significant challenge. You're going to need line-of-sight semaphores and shit, which I had not worldbuilt in the earlier versions but absolutely could add in.

There should be trains, and I haven't really pondered those yet because I need to know more about my geography. Please, god, don't make me draw a map, but I'm gonna have to. Oh well.

But the other thing I thought of and got really excited about was

DIRIGIBLES

It's feasible with technology we currently have, and this is a thing that some large companies are pursuing, to make very large, hydrogen-filled, entirely solar-powered dirigibles for long-distance cargo transportation, faster than ships, the same speed as trucks/trains but more direct, slower than airplanes but INFINITELY lower carbon footprint. And hydrogen is outlawed by the FAA as a lifting gas, not because of the Hindenberg (which had many contributing factors) but because of a Congressional hearing which was presented by the helium lobby in the 20s. Hmmmmm.

A fascinating detail is that you could make a solar-powered lighter-than-air craft operate day and night seamlessly by having a power generation process where some of the day's collected solar energy directly powers the thing, and some of it goes toward... I forget the details but it powers a chemical reaction that, come nightfall, is simply set to reverse itself, which will then release most of the energy that it took to power the reaction in the first place, which you can now use to power your aircraft. Which is not a thing I knew about and I now have to research how that would work because, fascinating.

Anyway. In Fantasy World, there are totally dirigibles, and they're also probably operated by the Navy, and the water-ship sailors fucking hate them, LOL. This will be a wildly entertaining dynamic and I am rubbing my little paws together.

Also.

While feeling sort of brain-dead and stupid, I got a sheet of paper, went through a bunch of lists of historic names and lists of like, suggested baby names from various ethnicities, and I just made lists on this sheet of paper of men's names, women's names, arguably gender-neutral names, and then a huge pile of surnames, and then I sat down with a bullet-pointed list cribbed from the website of the museum of the USS Constitution of all the personnel that would be on a 44-gun frigate ca. 1812, and I first pondered each of the jobs, added some, took some away, came up with my own numbers of how many guys I needed, and then I just sat there and combined the first and last names in aesthetically pleasing ways to generate characters, lightly crossing out ones I'd used. (and sometimes googling them to make sure they're not somebody famous or something, which i always recommend with fictional character creation, especially if you're as oblivious as I am.)

I was unable to resist also coming up with some backstories-- siblings, little work histories, criminal pasts, notable traits, that sort of thing-- for many of the characters.

I did not make up names for every individual person on this ship, which I decided should have a crew of about 150-180, but I made up some names for every position, and considered age and gender as well for all of them.

I will not use many of the characters I've created this way, I'm sure, but the ones with interrelationships will totally somehow get used, and this way as I'm writing if I need a character I can find them already made, and if that person has a defined role, I already know which one and won't lose track of them.

This also got me to consider why people wind up in the jobs they do in this society, what drives them to seek out certain things, and that gave me a lot of background as to what's going on onshore.

I should try to find a list of a dirigible's crew and think about them, too, and build out the train people and routes and whatnot.

I also bought a used older edition on Thriftbooks of The Annapolis Book Of Seamanship and have been reading that with... more interest than I expected actually. I have the 1983 edition and it has a really moving little plea to let the women on your ship also learn to sail because it is foolish to relegate them to the kitchen when if only they were taught how it works, they could save you all in an emergency. LOL I wonder if that's worded differently in the updated new version or not.