Leo :)

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Want to wake up like an astronaut? Now you can! Check out the Artemis II astronauts' wake-up songs on Spotify.

These songs were chosen by the astronauts for each day of the mission. To end each sleep period aboard Orion, the Mission Control Center at our Johnson Space Center in Houston sends out a special song to the crew. This continues a tradition that reaches back decades to the Gemini VI mission in 1965.

"LES MISERABLES" LOCATIONS IN PARIS: AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE

BY KATIE BARNES

AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON

“Among many other things, “Les Misérables” is Victor Hugo's love letter to the Paris of his youth... His descriptions of its streets and buildings, and the routes the characters take, are almost forensically detailed and accurate.”

If you have ever wanted to know more about the locations in Paris where Victor Hugo says that Valjean, Javert and the other characters walked, this will be for you. Using contemporary and modern maps, photographs, engravings and paintings, this book gives detailed written and illustrated histories for 35 locations connected with the novel, the musical and the life of Victor Hugo, including the sites of the Barricade, the Rue Plumet, the quay where Javert commits suicide, the Cafe Musain, the church where Marius and Cosette are married, the street where Valjean dies, the street where Hugo was nearly killed on the night of the barricades, the Pantheon where he is buried, the place on the river bank where Valjean and Marius emerge from the sewers, and many more. And if you visit Paris in person, the book includes information on travel to each location by Metro, bus and bicycle, together with two suggested walking tours on the Right and Left Banks.

All profits are donated to Acting For Others, which provides financial and emotional support to all those working in theatrical professions, through its network of 14 member charities. I will receive no financial benefit whatsoever.

It's available as a Kindle download for £5.99/$7.99; as a paperback with colour illustrations for £21.50/$28.98; and as a paperback with illustrations in black & white for £12.50/$16.79. 

If you like it, please leave a rating and review on Amazon: if I get more than 10 positive reviews and ratings, Amazon will do more to help me publicise it, which would hopefully mean more sales and more funds raised for Acting for Others. 

These are the links to all three editions on Amazon:

Black & white edition:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCQTHM

Colour edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCNZRZ

Kindle edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H4DWJ8LP

so the idea of an all-american golden boy, an almost essentially white male figure embodying western partiarchal values, being black instead isn't unheard of in media and in real life (he's literally not american lol but jackson from the tv show "sex education" is both a good example of and subversion of the trope when appearing in a black character); the golden boy is usually an athlete, handsome, conventionally masculine, talented, comes from a "good" family, experiences favoritism, has strong principles, etc - all of which applies to white jason (the "good family" being jupiter, which awards him the highest possible status among the romans - and thus causes jason's supposed favoritism that he detests). but for a black "golden boy", there can and has been an added connotation of racial exploitation by dominant white power structures (I recall reading some really good papers in college about black football/basketball stars being exploited for their bodies/labor on both the collegiate and professional level, though I can't remember the names of said papers. exploitation of black men in sports is a big and easily researchable topic tho)

I think this connotation of exploitation would matter because although hera seems to be soft for jason in some ways later on in the series, in tlh she uses really specific, unpleasant language about her ownership of him that evokes much more obviously violent imagery if she now becomes a powerful white woman claiming ownership over a black teenager, rather than a white one (I'd like to note that this is also almost exactly what hazel goes through with gaea, which I've posted about before here and here - though to my knowledge gaea lacks a specific race/human skintone whereas we do know that juno appeared explicitly as a white woman to frank's mom when he was a baby). this is even more uncomfortable if this renders beryl grace a black woman who had her son taken away by an omnipotent white power figure (juno/hera). jupiter "gives" him to juno as a "gift" and names jason after juno's favorite mortal, rather than beryl choosing his name - as if to completely strip jason of his black roots and forcibly assimilate him into her own culture (which is just. a thing that did actually happen to enslaved black people, and why most black americans have """white"""-sounding surnames to this day, including myself)

jason rejects these claims of ownership immediately, and a continuous theme of his character is extracting himself from the repressive confines of camp jupiter, a camp that canonically has ties to the american confederacy as well as a history of racist discrimination against frank's ancestor shen lun. camp jupiter highly values collective strength and militarism, and is in general very old conservative-coded (hence why a lot of people read octavian as a somewhat conservative figure). the existence of reyna as one of its leaders unfortunately doesn't negate this conservatism, but it's interesting how, in having his memories wiped, (black) jason can gain the opportunity to view the world through a completely new lens and attempt to rediscover himself, especially while surrounded by other people of color like piper and leo (idk, especially piper? black-indigenous solidarity runs deep in america, and there's a reason why 'bipoc' is its own category)

in this way I like how jason reevaluating his relationship to camp jupiter, how "roman" (= white/conservative) he actually is, and how much he needs to find himself again after everything he's been through could then be read as a black man freeing himself from an exploitative white power structure that doesn't really care about him. it's an imperfect metaphor that gets icky when taking into account how most of hoo's nonwhite cast starts roman and stays roman (reyna, frank, hazel) but I don't think the metaphor necessarily needs to be read in the exact same way for every character (i.e. frank's eventual praetorship over camp jupiter could be interpreted as a triumph over camp jupiter's past sinophobia)