the number one surefire way to make people remember something is to annoy them so here’s an annoying announcement that some of the douchebags i keep seeing are gonna get mad at and then remember because it made them mad
[sidenote: gay/bi/pan/etc, trans, and ace are not mutually exclusive identities and this comic does not imply that. just in case anyone tries to get picky. you can be het-ace-trans and acephobic/biphobic, aro-gay-trans and homophobic, etc etc. endless possibilities exist for being a shitty person.]
A light on my baine Marie literally exploded, sending glass everywhere.
Here’s a (lewd) idea. A paladin with a succubus/incubus lover. Partially because sex demons are literally supernaturally good at sex, but also out of ‘a paladin’s duty to protect the local populace from the rapacious demon’s vile clutches’. The second one only really comes up when they’re justifying it after the fact, though. The rest of the time, they’re too enamored with the demon’s ass.
The demon, on the other hand, may actually care for the paladin to some extent, but officially, they’re just ‘trying to corrupt a paragon of virtue’.
so like, demon and paladin trying to bone each other while also telling themselves they have ulterior motives.
Today on fics I didn’t know I needed to write….
The turning point comes when the paladin returns home, wounded but alive. The wounds refuse to seal, inflicted by a cursed weapon that are resistant even the divine magics granted to the paladin by their faith. The succubus turns in time to witness her lover fall to the ground, blood pooling around them.
Their relationship had until that point had been something of a game driven by want and willful ignorance, both denying their growing feelings with increasingly flimsy justifications. The sight of her lover broken on the ground was like a hammer shattering all her restraint, the demon bolting forth as she went to her lover’s side.
She can feel the taint present on the wounds before she sees them, sensing the presence of malice that has long been present in all demonkind. Prior to this moment, its familiarity would have been almost comforting. Now, with the paladin’s lifeblood slowly draining into her hands, it can only feel abhorrent.
“No, no, no, your soul belongs to me. You… I won’t let you leave,”
She whispered, blinking away the alien sensation of hot water streaming from her eyes. Removing the taint is easy enough, like calls to like after all, and the succubus wills the corruption into herself, purifying the paladin. Wounds are another matter, as she was taught only how to inflict them. Healing others is anathema amongst her people, and for a moment she still, frightened and uncertain how to proceed.
The Paladin shifts, the presence of a favored scent and the removal of the taint enough to prompt them awake. The succubus flinches back as bands of holy light begin to knit the wounds sealed. The damage is not totally absent but the danger is past. The Succubus, reeling from the golden feeling in her once black heart that assures her that her lover will not die, quietly helps them to their bed.
The shift in their relationship is silent, strange, but not uncomfortable for either of them. Seeing each other at their most vulnerable strips away the deceptions and justifications, and when they make love again for the first time after the incident, a silent promise is made with their eyes and from then on there is no going back.
They travel together in public now, openly affectionate and safeguarding each other from all that ails them. The paladin even convinces the succubus to even wear armor, though even as she eventually becomes a paladin herself, (that’s another story) she never quite ceases wear outfits that emphasize her more enticing attributes, to the Paladin’s mixed feelings. She even decorates herself with murals of different stories, drawing eyes in different ways. But no matter what, a lone sigil with meaning known only to the couple is left untouched, a silent declaration of a love that grew beyond all expectation.
Like your backyard telescope, just MUCH more powerful
In 2018, we’re launching the world’s biggest space telescope ever – the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb will look back in time, studying the very first galaxies ever formed. While Webb doesn’t have a tube like your typical backyard telescope, because it’s also a reflector telescope it has many of the same parts! Webb has mirrors (including a primary and a secondary) just like a small reflector telescope, only its mirrors are massive (6.5 meters across) and coated in gold (which helps us reflect infrared light).
How does a reflector telescope work? Light is bounced from the primary to the smaller secondary mirror, and then directed to your eye:
Webb works pretty much the same way!
Taking the place of your eye to the eyepiece is a package of science instruments, including cameras and spectrographs, which will capture the light directed into them by the telescope’s mirrors.
In order to install these instruments, we had to move the telescope structure upside down… an impressive sight!
Once Webb was in place on the assembly stand in the cleanroom, the team at Goddard Space Flight Center installed the instrument module (which we call the ISIM, or Integrated Science Instrument Module), with surgical precision. ISIM has four instruments, three of which were contributed by our partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
All four will detect infrared light from stars and galaxies as far away as 13.6 billion light years. In addition to seeing these first sources of light in the early Universe, Webb will look at stars and planetary systems being formed in clouds of dust and gas. It will also examine the atmospheres of planets around other stars – perhaps we will find an atmosphere similar to Earth’s!
Here is an image with the science instruments being lowered into their spot behind the primary mirror. You can see the golden mirror is face-down.
Here’s another perspective of the instruments being fit into the telescope.
What you’ve seen come together above is just the telescope part of the James Webb Space Telescope mission – next comes putting together the rest of the observatory. This includes our massive tennis court-sized sunshield (which acts like the tube-part of your backyard telescope, protecting the mirrors from stray light and heat), as well as the parts that do things like power the telescope and let us communicate with it.
It actually takes several weeks for Webb to completely unfold into its full deployment!
