Squireren-blog - Squire Of The Knights Of Ren

Quick doodle of Kylo mean face from the trailer because I LOVED IT. ♥

My latest Star Wars hopes and lamentations now on Diary of a Sith Chick

Forgive Me Vader for I Have Dimmed

Photo of my delicious cupcake, whom I have neglected, borrowed from StarWars.com

http://nerdist.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-collectors-vinyl/

This STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Collector's Vinyl is Gorgeous (Exclusive) If you are a Star Wars completist, then you will also want to check out the other three entries in the series. The other scenes depicted include Poe Dameron surveying a battle scene from his X-wing, Captain Phasma causing mayhem (something we wished ...

New designs in the shop!  Includes TORonNetflix merch!

Diluting Your Other Half

“Vltava, also known as Die Moldau (German name), was composed between 20 November and 8 December 1874 and was premiered on 4 April 1875. It is about 12 minutes long, and is in the key of E minor. In this piece, Smetana uses tone painting to evoke the sounds of one of Bohemia’s great rivers. The composition follows the river Vltava (German: Moldau), from where it starts as two small springs — one cold water and one warm water spring — which then merge together.”

Marriage of many things attempts this kind of merge and marriages often fail, although failure is met with denial. Or maybe it succeeds or is called success when the two souls dilute each other into something plain, paled, warm.

Archives of the Last Jedi Academy (continued, pt. 5)

RARE DOCUMENTS, RARE TRUTHS

Her chin rested on the force field and her shoulders dropped as she sighed; she turned the pages of the ancient manuscript protected beneath. Her touch separated by millimeters of field -- so close to feeling the delicate pages that held so much power -- a power granted by its rarity, ability to survive a purge to hide the positive accomplishments of a man many planets urged its people to see as a demon, to be feared not revered. She pressed more for her face into the field to get closer, her fingers pressing hard onto the page an incomplete, interrupted caress of the page. She rested her head on her arm on the field, an exhaustion from the late hour and from the realization that what had been constantly challenged and denied to her in this place but shared with her as a child back home, ideas and points of view vehemently rejected lay in truth, millimeters from her touch. Jedi were willingly following lies about the Sith, perpetuated by the galaxy. A myth glorifying, denying, hiding the other points of view, pushing an incomplete picture of the truth.

6 Ways You Are Safer Thanks to NASA Technology

By now everyone knows that we are to thank for the memory foam in your mattress and the camera in your cell phone. (Right? Right.)

But our technology is often also involved behind the scenes—in ways that make the products we use daily safer and stronger, and in some cases, that can even save lives.

Here are some examples from this year’s edition of Spinoff, our yearly roundup of “space in your life”:

Impact Testing

What happens to your car bumper in an accident? When does it crumple and when does it crack? And are all bumpers coming off the assembly line created equal?

These types of questions are incredibly important when designing a safe car, and one technology that helps almost every U.S. automobile manufacturer find answers is something we helped develop when we had similar questions about the Space Shuttle.

Before flying again after the Columbia disaster in 2003, we had to be sure we understood what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again. We worked with Trilion, Inc. to develop a system using high-speed cameras and software to analyze every impact—from the one that actually happened on the Shuttle to any others we could imagine—and design fixes.

Finding Survivors

We’re pretty good at finding things you can’t see with the naked eye—from distant exoplanets to water on Mars.

But there are also plenty of uses for that know-how on Earth.

One example that has already saved lives: locating heartbeats under debris.

Engineers at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory adapted technology first devised to look for gravity fluctuations to create FINDER, which stands for Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response and can detect survivors through dense rubble.

We have licensed the technology to two companies, including R4, and it has already been used in natural disaster responses, including after earthquakes in Nepal, Mexico City, Ecuador, and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

Fighting Forest Fires

As we have seen this year with devastating wildfires in California, forest fires can spread incredibly quickly.

Knowing when to order an evacuation, where to send firefighters, and how to make every other decision—all amid a raging inferno—depends on having the most up-to-date information as quickly as possible.

Using our expertise in remote sensing and communicating from space, we helped the U.S. Forest Service make its process faster and more reliable, so the data from airborne sensors gets to decision makers on the front line and at the command center in the blink of an eye.

Safer, Germ-Free Ambulances 

When paramedics come racing into a home, the last thing anybody is worrying about is where the ambulance was earlier that morning. A device we helped create ensures you won’t have to.

AMBUstat creates a fog that sterilizes every surface in an ambulance in minutes, so any bacteria, viruses or other contaminants won’t linger on to infect the next patient.

This technology works its magic through the power of atomic oxygen—the unpaired oxygen atoms that are common in the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. We’ve had to learn about these atoms to devise ways to ensure they won’t destroy our spacecraft or harm astronauts, but here, we were able to use that knowledge to direct that destructive power at germs.

Air Filters 

Did you know the air we breathe inside buildings is often up to 10 times more polluted than the air outdoors?

Put the air under a microscope and it’s not pretty, but a discovery we made in the 1990s can make a big impact.

We were working on a way to clear a harmful chemical that accumulates around plants growing on a spacecraft, and it turned out to also neutralize bacteria, viruses, and mold and eliminate volatile organic compounds.

Now air purifiers using this technology are deployed in hospital operating rooms, restaurant kitchens, and even major baseball stadiums to improve air quality and keep everyone healthier. Oh, and you can buy one for your house, too.

Driverless Cars 

Car companies are moving full-speed ahead to build the driverless cars of the not-so-distant future. Software first created to help self-learning robots navigate on Mars may help keep passengers and pedestrians safer once those cars hit the road. The software creates an artificially intelligent “brain” for a car (or drone, for that matter) that can automatically identify and differentiate between cars, trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, and more, helping ensure the car doesn’t endanger any of them. 

So, now that you know a few of the spinoff technologies that we helped develop, you can look for them throughout your day. Visit our page to learn about more spinoff technologies: https://spinoff.nasa.gov Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Ninja Maul By Aki Rahmat #starwars #darthmaul #lordmaul #maul #thedarkside #sith #sithlord #apprentice #ninja #mashup #fanmade #fanart

Kylo piloting his starfighter, the TIE silencer

Archives of the Last Jedi Academy (continued: pt 2)

She projected the notes that her mother had recently transmitted to her into the space around her, casting a pale blue halo of light, the only light in the darkened room, around her. This one commanded her focus:

Source: Manoussakis

What accounts for this pathology is the false positing of the good alongside with the evil, the fact that one takes the good as simply being the opposite of what is evil and furthermore the fact that one places these two opposites side by side - presenting thus oneself with a dilemma.

But no such dilemma between good and evil can be maintained. To posit the good alongside the evil equates the one with the other, as if the good were no different from the evil except insofar as one is good while the evil is evil. It is precisely this mistake that allows for the danger of ethical relativism, that is, of the undoing of ethics, for it does not take long before one starts asking what makes the good good or by whose standards is it good.

With this idea from Manoussakis was her mother’s note: 

Foolish, deceptive Jedi. Things cannot be seen in extremes. It is not just black and white. And who defines the dark? Who defines the light? Who are they to decide? Questions I think Anakin may have pondered (and may have been urged by master Jedi to repress), but through a lens of despair, fear of loneliness and losing love, and desperation, it led him to choose the dark side, that led him to think that he had to choose one over the other, when maybe there was no need to choose but just to find balance.

As she set out to transpose those thoughts onto the parchment, she sensed Ben enter the darkened archives and stealth his way into the room with her.

Never looking anywhere but down at her work, she smirked, wondering why he moved so quietly when she knew that he knew that she could sense his presence.  Preferring to work in isolation, she wished that she could not sense him, but even if she did not have that ability, soon enough, his clumsy command of his body betrayed his stealth as he knocked into a cart of old data cartridges. His lanky body soon towered over her workspace.

Threads of these thoughts intersected. Woven in ink, onto the parchment, they then wrapped around his curiosity and drew him to the effervescent silvers, reds, violets amongst the sharp, thin black lines. The words whispered and called out to Ben, simultaneously, a then unrealized, siren prose: the Jedi created Vader. With their repression, their ancient, archaic, un-evolved beliefs, their blind belief in a definition of “good” -- just a description but no verifiably authoritative source of its definition -- was imposed on Anakin’s critical thinking. His freedom of thought, restricted. His enlightened thought, of what Jedi could be if they did not blindly follow ancient lore as law but instead developed a more evolved ethic, was dismissed. A refusal to revisit deeply held beliefs was brought to light by Anakin and they refused this call from the one they believed fulfilled their own prophecy. If they weren’t going to listen to who they believed was prophesied to bring balance to the force, then perhaps they did need to be destroyed in hopes that from the ashes a more sensible order could be established. Through this warping of Anakin, they created Vader then worked to demonize him.

He stepped away from the grasp of these words, detaching his gaze from the page. Thoughts that he had wanted to express but hid deep inside were laid out bare in the signifiers drawn on the page, released before him through her hand.

© Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.