I like to imagine Kylo has a bunch of useless scoundrel-y type skills that he pretends he doesn’t have, like he’s actually a really good shot and great at picking locks and occasionally when the First Order raids smuggling vessels for supplies he’ll do a personal sweep of the vehicle, sigh heavily and bang on a certain interior panel so the *really* good stuff will fall out.
so i was wondering where rey learned to understand binary (the language of astromech droids) because she’s a lone scavenger living on a desert planet and i was thinking that mabe sometime in the course of her star destroyer spelunking adventures, let’s say she’s 14 years old; she finds part of an astromech droid that’s still functioning just enough to talk. so she decide not to trade it to untar platt for portions and takes it home instead, cleans it up. hooks it up to an old comm screen so she can see what it’s saying while she’s still learning all its beeps and whistles. and then at the end of a long day, when she gets home, she scrubs the sand off her face, pours the sand out of her boots, and just sits and talks to her barely-functioning astromech droid, whose knowledge is thirty years old: coruscant, the seat of the empire (what empire?) updates on the construction of the death star. bounty notices for han solo, smuggler. the imperial senate, disbanded (but what about the new senate?)
the hot, dry air of jakku, making mirages of old memories just outside the shell of her AT-AT. the desert so quiet that you can hear sand sliding down the dunes, in soft silky layers. rey, scraping crumbs off her plate with her fingertips, pressing her droid with more questions. what’s naboo? what’s a forest? how big is a forest? what’s a tree? how many trees are there? (no one else tells her about these things. no one else talks to her.) the droids go everywhere, she realizes. they see everything and keep everything, scavengers of memory and information, of events and people and ideas. she learns binary until she gets good enough to detach the comm screen and just listen; during the day she quietly practices binary to herself, whistling each beep and tone as she hikes the dunes to the star destroyers, her calves aching. when she gets home, the droid greets her with a happy beep. for a few months, it feels nice, strange, hopeful. it feels odd to have someone waiting for her. refreshing, almost.
and then one day rey comes home and the astromech droid doesn’t beep, no whistle of greeting. the light in its glassy round eye is dark. the fuel cells are dead. her heart sinks. she searches the star destroyer endlessly for another working fuel cell, tries to trade for them at nima outpost, but to no avail: the model is too old, any fuel cells that could work are all being used for other things. that night she wears her x-wing helmet and sniffs, watching the stars, wrestling with hope and despair in equal measure; in the morning she drags the droid to untar platt and trades its parts for twelve portions. the first portion is bitter and tasteless, more so than usual, but it’s alright, rey thinks. her friend even fed her.
and now she talks to all the astromech droids that pass through nima outpost. they don’t mind talking to her. they’re happy to tell her how hyperdrives work, what a compressor does, how to fix an acceleration compensator. and every time she hopes that maybe, the droid will end up on a distant planet somewhere else, and it’ll mention a girl on jakku, a girl who polished its casing and oiled its hinges, a girl who’s been waiting for a long time, and someone will look up with a twinge of recognition and realizeit’s time to go back. it’s time for her to come home… it never happens. but rey tries anyway, because the droids go everywhere, see everything, meet everyone… she stays, and waits.
so hamilton is doing their opening number at the grammys. but here’s an idea. they do the opening number. then they segue right into “aaron bur, sir”. then when that’s done, they jump into “my shot” and just keep going right through the whole musical because who the fuck cares about the grammys i’m only watching for hamilton anyway
life things happened so this is SO late, but yay witchsona finally !!
i decided “weather witch” a lonnnng time ago to go with my weird air sprite motif (like cloudbairn) , plus my lantern collection and little familar :’D
Boring answer, did you say? AU CONTRAIRE, MON PETIT BERYLLIUM ATOM.
Of all the charts and tables and organizational tools for keeping information straight that mankind has invented, none is more impressive or more inspired than the Periodic Table of the Elements.
You might think of it as some tool of the devil that you had to memorize or study, and of which you have no fond memories. But the Table? IS AMAZING. The table is genius. The table is a work of inspired predictive power that boggles the mind.
Why is the Table so cool? Well, for a number of reasons.
As you may know, the Table was devised in 1869 by a scientist named Dmitry Mendeleev. At the time, scientists were trying to find ways to order the elements. Mostly they were trying to use atomic mass to put them in order. That didn’t really work. Mendeleev’s amazing insight (and it was amazing…I can’t imagine how he thought of it, it was pretty counterintuitive) was to group the elements in rows and columns based solely on his empirical observations of recurring chemical properties like melting points, bonding affinities, electronegativity, etc. These properties seemed to cluster and group the elements in ways that Mendeleev noticed and used for his table.
Cool as that is, it didn’t stop there. It became clear to Mendeleev that there were holes in the table where he suspected that other elements existed. And he was right. The holes in the table pointed the way for chemists to discover the missing elements. So the Table not only organized the existing elements, it actually predicted and helped discover elements that were not known at the time.
But there’s still more coolness to come. In 1869 no one had the first damned clue about atomic structure. Orbitals, subshells, electrons…it was all unknown. But as our understanding of atomic structure became more sophisticated, it became clear that Mendeleev’s table was actually organized based on atomic structure. Each new row (they’re called periods in the table) represents a new energy level. As you go left to right across the groups (what the columns are called in the table), you’re filling up each subshell with electrons until when you get to the far right, the noble gases, the level is filled and you jump up to the next period and the next energy level.
So Mendeleev, having no knowledge of subatomic structure and using purely observations of the elements’ physical characteristics, designed a table that actually revealed the way atoms are put together.
I find that pretty damned amazing.
Incidentally if you like this answer and want to reblog it, I c&p’d it from a post I wrote about the table ages ago. That one isn’t an Ask so it might be nicer to reblog.
