Alice Sheppard

😍😍😍😍😍!

(I immediately thought of Ursula LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" and especially "The Dispossessed", but he's probably sick of hearing me talk about them, and as a non-native English speaker I think he finds her style a bit heavy going.)

Ideas please!

My husband wants a book for Christmas that is fiction, set in the future, but not a dystopia: a future where there is at least some hope and a few things being put right. He read Cory Doctorow's "The Lost Cause" lately and liked it.

Can you recommend such a novel, anyone? Thanks!

A graphic featuring a black ink illustration of a falcon with his wings partly open. Title: “Keep Hope Alive: a Gaza giving circle". Text: We are a team of volunteers in the US and UK helping our friends on the ground keep tehir families and neighbors alive with food, water, & shelter. More than ever, they need our sustainable support. Click weekly to join: https://tinyurl.com/HopeGivingCircle.”

Exactly seven months ago, we started this giving circle with seven friends in Gaza—six families, a team helping fifteen more, and the idea of sustained survival support that protects their dignity.

Click "weekly" on a coffee to join two hundred members. Keep hope alive: chuffed.org/project/hope...

*waves*

Ugh, now I’m even gladder I never get around to watching movies 🤢 thank you for warning me!

I hear someone got arrested for throwing a load of custard and pudding at the crown jewels. I recommend they be charged with dessertion.

An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years.Complex dust lanes visible within also indicate that NGC 1316 is itself the result of a merger of galaxies in the distant past. Found on the outskirts of the Fornax galaxy cluster, NGC 1316 is known as Fornax A. One of the visually brightest of the Fornax cluster galaxies it is one of the strongest and largest celestial radio sources with radio emission extending well beyond this one degree wide field-of-view.

🔭 Galaxies in the Furnace

Image Credit & Copyright: Simone Curzi and the ShaRA Team

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25120...

Ah, what a shame 😞

Told my 2-year-old she couldn’t wander into the gents or JKR would come and get her.

😆😂

Hey all,

The Onion is accepting applicants for our writing, video and graphics fellowships.

Fellowships last six months, pay well, and provide full benefits.

You can apply at theonion.com/fellowship.

Ooooffff. Ow. Yeah.

Reminds me of Rose to Jack when he says he'll jump into the water after her early on in the film and she replies "the fall alone would kill you". Yeah. That stuck in my mind, which might not say great things about my mind 😂

I wonder if a black hole has a solid surface ...

A mansion *and* some avocados, definitely.

Yeah, I bet they would. It's so hard to picture it. The only way I can try is to recall jumping off allotment shed roofs as a kid and I was only falling for a second or two doubtless with lots of muscles tensed ready to land!

Got an e-mail from my bank to tell me I've received cashback - the queenly sum of 10 pence. Whatever shall I do with it?

That’s a lot! 😄

Insert a movie into another movie:

The Full Monty Python and the Holy Grail

(Two of my favourites!)

Tim Peake wrote about trying to sleep in microgravity which was pretty interesting. You have to lash your sleeping bag to the wall, and you can’t enjoy the sensation of your head sinking into your pillow. I guess someone falling into a black hole might feel stretching - eek!

But IIRC the person falling wouldn’t experience all that extra time - an observer would see it, but the faller’s time would be slowed down. I love the thought of sleeping for several months though …

I was still going in when I woke up - no impossible physics to report on!

I’m sure it was based on a children’s book called Black Holes and Uncle Albert. An incredible book - adventure and real physics. And yes, the heroine gets too cocky near a black hole and is nearly swallowed up!

Good morning BlueSky, I had a nightmare about falling into a black hole! As nightmares go that has to be one of the coolest ever. There was a distorted universe and a rocket and all. Chilling though 😱

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree. Ate it.

Cats are so obsessed with following their humans into the toilet. Do they feel neglected when we don’t escort them into their litter trays?

Yum! 😋

Ha! My family has never liked turkey either so it’s always been some other kind of roast. The ham and cod sound TASTY.

I just bought a Jehovah’s Witness advent calendar. Every time you open a door someone tells you to go away.

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1

Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

Nothing has ever trickled down.

Night time. A huge (overexposed, because bad camera) moon over a very dark lake. The water is rippling so the moon's reflection is very long, thin and glittery. A few little clouds are visible around the moon. Across the lake is an absolutely black forest which you can barely see. There are no artificial lights anywhere: it's a national park.

Good morning BlueSky, have a picture from 4pm yesterday: moonlight over a Swedish lake. I don't live quite in the land of the midnight sun - merely midnight twilight - in the summer; but November is a very dark month until the snow gets going. We had a lovely dark warm windy walk in the forest.