Ooph! Ain’t this a fucking dazzling display of Europa’s surface. NASA space-wizards have done something-such beyond my means of comprehension to achieve this beauty. Assembling a variety of pictures and uh, processing and stuff. They can explain it better than I can.

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Enlarge. | Via.

One of Jupiter’s moons, motherfucking Io, has more than 400 active volcanoes. This picture taken by the Galileo spacecraft has caught some of those bad boys in action.

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[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

Spoilers Ahead. Forreal.

I believe in ideas.

I’m not religious. I don’t belong to a political party. And I’m generally weary of aligning myself with institutions. But what I am unabashedly interested in is the formation, exploration, and discussion of ideas. Anything that has or can or will be done has come about by the processing of thought. Mental exertion. Trying to conjure up something that has yet to be plucked out of the nebulous pool that is the collective unconscious.

Human beings are squishy blots of flesh that exchange fluids with the world and rarely last one hundred years. They are fragile and gross and quite often unhinged mentally. And yet, within the few protective millimeters of skull is the capacity for goddamn anything.

Penicillin. Films. Sexual fetishism. Hospitals. Education. Genetic manipulation. Geoengineering. A hilarious anecdote about a dead relative. Cloned organs. Terraforming. Dinner reservations for two, no wait, three. Interstellar travel.

It’s all in there, in the goddamn ideaspace. The realized and unrealized.   The real and the fictional and the grey area where the two meet for conjugal visits.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is a comic book about these conjugal visits.

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