This Was Such A Fun Read - Blog Posts

Finally finished reading 50 Tea Recipes from the Duchess. I loved every minute of it. It made me laugh and smile from the sweetness between Chloe and Alphonse.

—— Spoiler alert ——

Not going to lie, I kind of cried for Prince Arthur when he was shipped off. Don’t be me wrong, he was a dumba$$ with how he handled his feelings for Chloe, but a small part - really small part- of myself felt bad for the guy. Like the moment between him and his dad before setting sail was brought me to tears. The fact that the Prince admits and owns up to his mistakes shows that he is starting to show some development.

I kind of wish for an epilogue with Chloe and Alphonse with a child. Or seeing how Prince Arthur comes back a changed man from his exile.

——Spoiler ends——

I went to see if I could find fanfic for this comic, but I only found one on AO3.

As I was reading the comic I had an idea for a fanfic as well. The problem is flushing it out. Typical idea of where Chloe meets a different transmigrator who is interested in crocheting and embroidery and baking yet she can kick a$$ with a dagger and her archery skills. Can’t use a sword worth crap, but a dagger or bow is fine. The character can’t be short or dainty either. More tall and not so curvy. It helps add depth as she is self conscious about it when going to parties hosted by nobles. It makes it harder to find a husband as well because I feel like men in that comic would want a more dainty wife. Her other flaw would be that she doesn’t know when someone is flirting with her as it rarely ever happens.

Honestly, I’m up in the air about writing the fanfic. I feel like it would change the story too much... Especially since I kind of want my character to end up with Prince Arthur. Is he toxic yes, but the way he would get all flustered and confused over Chloe made it him so adorable I couldn’t help but like him a little. Like I can’t fault him for falling in love, it’s something you can’t really control completely. The way he went about dealing for his feelings for her though was self destructive to himself and problematic for those around him. He was a dumb-a in love who didn’t know how to handle being rejected by a woman who said to have loved him before all this happened.

My idea is for the romance between Arthur and my OC is that he finds her interesting at first because she doesn’t fit in with how most noble ladies look being as dainty and ladylike. OC stands in the corner just watching everyone dance. Content to be a wallflower. He goes over to flirt with her, but she doesn’t think anything of it as he is known as a womanizer. She thanks him and excuses herself. She’s more confused on why he flirted with her. From two to want it to be a mix of meetings between them, at parties, or tea times with Chloe. I’ll have to flesh everything else out.

Telescope Instruments Part One: 

What they are (humor me)

Astronomy is an old field. For ages astronomers have had to be satisfied looking at the sky and interpreting what they saw as somehow connected to their Earthly lives. Zeus carried Ganymede off into the heavens and similarly the sky was a place of supernatural awe, somewhere that held your fortunes, a place the dead go, somewhere a child could be carried off to by a god.

Remarkable natural events like storms and lightning blistering over our us long seemed to confirm any and all suspicion and belief. For what could be responsible for something like lightning but a god? What else could the Sun be, but some divine light? Though the atoms in our bodies don’t remember where they come from, the answers have always been there, elusive.

When people finally started looking from the Sun to the stars in skeptical comparison, it was symbolically the beginning of a new age for astronomy. The stars weren’t pinholes in the sky, nor were they jewels (well some are “diamonds” but that was just a remarkably good guess!). Stars, people gradually realized, were kin to our own Sun. Could there be other Earths?

This truth is so grand, and it implies a universe so vast that it was more unbelievable to people than to simply go on assuming the lightning came from the likes of a “Zeus”. Human creativity, intellect and curiosity grew, however. We kept exploring and questioning until at last the technology we created harnessed the very electricity we used to fear.

In a sublime twist of irony Polyphemus, fire in hand, took to the heavens.

We have learned, in our exploration of nature, that we are not helpless. The divinity we saw in the heavens is literally same stuff that makes our blood red. We were of the sky all along and all it took was the most human part of us to figure this out: our curiosity.

Embracing our knack for exploration, however wasn’t exactly an easy truth. Our stories of gods in chariots dragging the Sun across the sky weren’t simply backwards: they were entirely simplistic. The universe astounded us for so long because our imaginations failed in grandiosity. The universe was the better magician and we simply didn’t know the tricks.

The technology which has resulted from our scientific exploration has similarly become more sophisticated. Out of necessity, we constantly invent new tools to solve old problems, which traditionally reveal another problem hitherto unknown.

The progression looks like this:

Astronomers stare up and wonder if the bright dot is a god or another planet.

Galileo invents the telescope and realizes that yes, there are other planets, but only a couple of the dots were visible - for most of them distance was too great to discern anything.

As math and science progressed, we became able to calculate the brightness, accounted for distance and it was obvious that all the bright dots unobservable with telescopes were roughly as bright as our Sun. Not all the dots fit this description though as some were very hazy and smoky looking.

Hubble then figures out that some of those hazy things are other galaxies, not just stars, but this extraordinary realization meant the universe was larger than the Milky Way! How could it be that another galaxy was all the way across space like that? Why did they seem to be moving farther from us faster, the farther they were?

I’ll stop there. You get the point. The progression of science has been met a proportional progression of mystery. This is as true today as it’s been since the dawn of science. The question then becomes this:

What is it that allows us to repeatedly push the darkness of ignorance away, to repeatedly domesticate the mysterious and turn the mystical forces of the universe to our personal use?

Our technology. Again, using our creativity and intellect as hammer and anvil, we forge miraculous solutions to unsolvable problems.

In astronomy, our resources are especially limited given the incredible distances that separate us from our targets. How can we possibly know anything about a planet orbiting a star hundreds of light years away?

In a way mother nature almost commit the perfect crime. It left one prolific clue behind though: light. Because of things like light’s dual wave-particle nature, techniques like spectroscopy and our growing ability to respond to and control our optics’ environments, astronomers are hot on multiple trails.

I want to explore and introduce you to some basic principles of the special mechanical eyes astronomers build which turn an otherwise invisible universe, into a bright, transparent scroll to our curiosity.

(Will be continued in part two)

(Image credit: NASA and Chris Gunn)