this evil dork bewitched him body and soul

ryland grace + looking at eva stratt

bonus:

[Strattland Week 2026 - Day 02: Touch Starved]

I would still be surprised I could find you, darlin’, in any life

If I could hold you for a minute, I would do it again

Hosted by strattlandism on Twitter!

At Aegons coronation, they erased Dowager Queen Alicent placing her crown on her daughter's head and calling Helaena her queen.

We know that Helaena was happier before she became queen, but that's after Jaehaerys died. Before that, Helaena doesn't express her opinions and feelings on her ascension or the political scenario.

During Blood and Cheese, Helaena offers her necklace for Jaehaerys' life. Her NECKLACE. In the book, she offers her LIFE. They changed so much of the scene, whole characters aren't where they're supposed to be, but they couldn't leave in a line that shows Helaena is willing to die for her LITTLE CHILDREN, like many mothers would, including neurodivergent ones.

In the book, when forced to choose a son to be murdered under horrible threats made to her daughter, Helaena chooses Maelor to die instead of Jaehaerys. It could be because Maelor was younger and didn't have the awareness that Jaehaerys had, but Helaena's choice ultimately prioritises the life of her firstborn, Aegon's heir. It's a political move. In the show, she's so far removed from politics, the only thing she does that remotely comes close is being forced to parade her son's body around the city.

Then, they refuse to let her call Jaehaerys by his name, instead she calls him "the boy", and people argue that it's because she's in shock, but no other character calls Jaehaerys by his name UNTIL Helaena herself says "I'm sad for Jaehaerys but I ought not to. Children die all the time" in the most dismissive way possible. She doesn't ugly cry. She doesn't sob or scream or express her pain. Her devastating grief is conveniently opted out, and episodes later she is ready to be the cryptical catch-you-in-a-lie targaryen oracle. She doesn't ride her dragon to assist the war efforts, not because she's spiralled into depression and what is crudely called madness, but because she doesn't like to ride, as per Rhaenyra, and if she's ought not to be sad, she can't be enraged or vengeful either, because it would be just as inconvenient and wrong, and she's a pacifist with a sensitive soul that shouldn't be corrupted by her evil brother.

An angry mob of smallfolk throws fish at her and Alicent, when she was notoriously beloved by them in the book.

Her authority as Queen Consort is constantly ignored, bypassed and disrespected by her own mother, when Helaena outranks her.

Why is no one campaigning for Helaena to use the power her position gives her?

They made her a vessel for the prophecy, a plot with so many holes it's become swiss cheese.

Not interested in politics? She's neurodivergent. Doesn't offer her life for her children? She's neurodivergent. Is not consumed by grief? Neurodivergent. Doesn't like to fly on her dragon that she claimed at what, eleven years old?

so, goodbye… my dear, dear world of a father.

so, goodbye… my dear, dear world of a father.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

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