As A Reminder If You're Wondering Why Gundam Has So Many Weird Names For People And Things, This Is Why.

i still can't get over the fact that Warframe had a bunch of continuity problems and timeline plotholes and they fixed all of them by just. decanonizing linear time

The other day, I re-jigged a spreadsheet.

It took all I had to not name the 'summary' tab 'black arts', because to most people it may as well be witchcraft.

That should change, hopefully.

Happy ASAW 2024, here's something about community !

Yup, that's me, still named after a warhammer guy who shot down a Falcon gravtank in 1997.

it’s not necessarily that I hate the themes most prevalent in fiction set in the real world and it’s not necessarily that I don’t like stories revolving around real people or relationship drama or interpersonal issues it’s more like im a dog who doesn’t recognize that a pill is still a pill if it has peanut butter on it. I need like the little peanut butter spoonful that is aliens or robots or monsters or time travel or something fantastical and not at all down to earth real life so that you can approach me and be like “this story is about how friendships can deteriorate over time and also how this guy feels bad for being a bad friend and causing his buddy problems with their girlfriend” and then look at me making a face at you and be like “AND! they’re all aliens who are doing all that across spacetime” and I’ll be like OHHHHHH OKAY YAY (shlop shlap shlup the sound of a dog horking down peanut butter pills) wow what a poignant story

I'm going to interrupt my normal posting schedule briefly to discuss naming airplanes. Don't worry, I'll post the regularly scheduled Friday review after this, but first I'm going to talk about naming airplanes.

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

(Although if you can read that, you're probably too close. Incidentally, 'If You Can Read This, You're Blue Close' is an A320-200 with the registration N729JB.)

Legion

This post contains spoilers for Legion, by Dan Abnett, first published as a novel in (as nearly as I can tell) March, 2008. Isn't it interesting how books are published "in" a month but "on" a specific date within that month? Also isn't it weird how I can find specific publication dates for some of these books but not others, so some of them just get the month and some get the day in these opening paragraphs?

Mixed feelings about this one. Or, rather, two sets of contradictory feelings about this one. Probably appropriate, given the subject matter.

So, for context, the Alpha Legion has been the Mysterious Traitor Legion What We Don't Know What They're Up To for a while and this book, when it launched, was sort of an unprecedented reveal about them. It has informed their portrayal ever since; it seems to be commonly regarded as one of the better books in the series. It's about espionage and counter-espionage and the viewpoint characters are all either spies, spymasters, or people dealing with spies. So, I guess as usual let's start with a summary.

The book is divided into, roughly, two halves, the first half taking place on a planet called Nurth and the second half taking place on a planet called 42 Hydra Tertius. Collectively it takes place about... I dunno a year, two years? Before the Istvaan III Atrocity. The actors within the plot are as follows:

A group of soldiers belonging to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, a regiment of the Imperial Army and part of the 670th Expeditionary fleet, basically innocent bystandars to all the espionage going on who are drawn into it as a group. There are a bunch of them and they all have names and at least roughly sketched out personalities and are essentially the secondary protagonists of the novel but for the purpose of this summary I'm going to refer to them as a group for reasons I will get to later.

The Lucifer Blacks, another regiment within the 670th Expeditionary Fleet, and Teng Namatjira, the Lord Commander of the fleet who for narrative purposes functions as a unit with the Lucifer Blacks. Basically one of the Lucifer Blacks functions as the Lord Commander's counterespionage guy, so narratively these are a bloc.

John Grammaticus, closest thing the book has to a protagonist, immortal human psyker and spy for an alien alliance called the Cabal. They've tasked him with making contact with the Alpha Legion.

The Cabal, an alien alliance who are trying to brace for the Horus Heresy, a civil war they've forseen farseen (see, space elf future-predictors are called Farseers, so when they talk about foreseeing the future in this book they say farseeing it instead).

The Nurthese, human natives of Nurth, who the 670th Expeditionary Fleet are trying to bring to Compliance.

The Alpha Legion, tricksiest of Legions, not yet traitor at this point but definitely sus.

Part 1: Reptile Summer. The book opens with members of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad, who are part of a force besieging the Nurthese city of Mon Lo, dealing with some bullshit. Again I will get into why I don't have clear detail on this later but for now suffice to say they witness a patrol being not where it's supposed to be, there's a fight with some Nurthese, and a giant of a man who it later turns out is a Space Marine of the Alpha Legion intercedes. Weeks later, some of this cast are called to investigate a mysterious body dressed as a member of the Genos; they can't identify it and set out to deliver it to a superior for further investigation but the Alpha Legion attack them, kill one, and the camera cuts away as they draw a gun on another.

We then cut to John Grammaticus, a spy who has infiltrated the Genos and is having an affair with one of their commanders. He leaves to infiltrate Mon Lo, where he has an established identity as a merchant, and the city wigs him out because he constantly feels like he's being followed and also Chaos-worship is deeply embedded into the Nurthese culture, to the point where prayers to Chaos are worked into their basic grammar and vocabulary. He's found by an Alpha Legion psyker assistant (not a space marine; the Alpha Legion make heavy use of non-Space-Marine assets) and is brought to a safe house where he tries to make contact with them and explains that he and the Cabal have been seeing the Nurthese conflict with elements that are designed to attract the Alpha Legion's attention, but it turns out his feeling of being followed wasn't the Alpha Legion agents but was instead a third, Nurthese party, who were using him to find them; they attack the safehouse with a swarm of lizards and crocodiles and things and everyone flees; he's separated from the Alpha Legion in the chaos and makes his way back to the Genos outside the city.

Three days later, the 670th Expeditionary Fleet have received news that the Alpha Legion are en route and will support their attempt to bring Nurth to Compliance. As far as Teng Namatjira is aware, this is their first arrival on the planet, but we know they've been here for months doing Spy Shit. Speaking of Spy Shit, Lucifer Blacks are concerned that a commander of the Genos have been compromised because of some weird shit that went down involving a body that disappeared, and believe that Geno commander Grammaticus is having an affair with has been compromised. Some more spy shit happens, the Lucifer Blacks come to believe Grammaticus's cover identity within the Geno is a false identity for what may be a Nurthese spy, Grammaticus eavesdrops on a meeting between a figure he believes to be the Primarch Alpharius and Lord Commander Manatjira but is sussed out and has to kill a Lucifer Black to escape, this sets the Blacks on alert and Grammaticus has to run off into the desert to a safehouse. Simultaneous to this, a bunch of the Genos also have to run off into the desert because the Blacks are chasing after that commander; they are captured by Alpha Legion agents and surrender the commander to them for interrogation. Grammaticus considers the whole situation blown and tries to abort the mission so he can tell his bosses they'll need to find someone else to contact the Alpha Legion, but then his bosses arrive in person to tell him a) no, it's now or never, and b) the Nurthese have a weapon called a Black Cube and the entire Imperial force has to evacuate the planet or else they're all going to die.

Then the Nurthese pour out of Mon Lo and charge the Imperial positions and are largely slaughtered. There's a big battle and in the middle of it, Grammaticus meets up with one of the Genos who's been recruited as an Alpha Legion agent, who takes him to "Alpharius." He explains that a Black Cube is a Chaos artifact, an ancient weapon powered by human sacrifice, and that the Nurthese attack on the Imperial positions is fueling the Black Cube, which, when it activates, will make life on the planet impossible. "Alpharius" tells Grammaticus that if he's lying he'll kill him, and Grammaticus is like "Look man that's fine with me, we're all gonna die if you don't get us out of here."

It should be noted that at this point we've seen two named Alpha Legion agents, "Petch" and "Herzog," who look nearly identical (as all Alpha Legionnaires do), as well as the "Primarch" "Alpharius" who is notably larger than them and a second Space Marine who is equally large and who is introduced as a just a normal trooper named Omegon. It's pretty weird for a normal Space Marine to be the same size as a Primarch but Alpharius was always the shortest Primarch and space marines can get pretty tall so don't worry about it! This will be important later for Lore Reasons. Also, there is a bit of third-person omniscient narration in which "Omegon" is described as actually being a normal, unusually tall marine and not a Primarch.

Part 2: The Halting Site. Five months later the Alpha Legion have commandeered the entire expeditionary fleet and have spent the last five months traveling towards a system called 42 Hydra, because Grammaticus suggested years ago this ought to be the place where Alpharius and the Cabal meet up. Grammaticus chose this place because a three-headed hydra is the symbol the Alpha Legion uses for itself and he thought having the meeting there would be, I dunno, neat? He explains it to "Alpharius" as a tribute to the Alpha Legion but "Alpharius" basically goes "What is this your idea of a joke?" and isn't impressed.

There is a brief flashback in which it's established that the evacuation of Nurth went badly -- the Black Cube summoned black clouds and sandstorms that made everything chaotic, and Lord Commander Teng Namatjira initially refused to evacuate and in the end only half of the fleet made it off the planet. The Black Cube made the entire star system uninhabitable and the fleet only barely escaped its influence.

Grammaticus is being held prisoner on the Alpha Legion battle-barge Beta alongside a member of the Genos and the commanding officer is being held prisoner elsewhere on the same ship; he hasn't been allowed to see her. He tries to convince "Alpharius" that he has to go down to the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius first to set up the meeting, but the "Primarch" is instead intent on landing the entire expeditionary fleet there and taking the position so he can meet the Cabal on his own terms from a position of strength. The planet is uninhabitable with no human-breathable atmosphere except for a big sphere of air on a spot where the Cabal have set up atmospheric generators for the meeting.

The Lord Commander of the expeditionary fleet demands an explanation, "Alpharius" explains the situation -- he's found a spy who claims to be aligned with a powerful cabal of aliens and wants to judge what they have to say because either they're telling the truth about having intel vital to the survival of the Imperium or they're lying and he can attack them; either way he can take action for the good of the Imperium. The fleet commander is like "Oh, you found that spy the Lucifer Blacks were looking for. Cool, sounds reasonable, I want to be there when you meet with the aliens." The commander is a power-hungry blowhard asshole, by the way, and wants equal access to whatever secrets the Cabal wish to bestown on Alpharius.

In the middle of the deployment to the planet surface, Grammaticus uses his psyker powers to turn his Geno companion away from the Alpha Legion and uses him to escape to the surface to set up the meeting safely, but they stop briefly to rescue the Geno commander Grammaticus thinks he's in love with. She's been driven insane by psychic interrogation, though. They get to the planet, Grammaticus gets to the meeting site, the Cabal leaders are all there and he starts to ask them not to take the mass military deployment as a betrayal on Alpharius's part but surprise, the two Genos who went with him were all still loyal to the Alpha Legion (having been turned earlier in the book); his companion was just faking being subverted by Grammaticus and the commander was just faking being insane. A bunch of Alpha Legion including "Alpharius," teleport in and demand to be told what's what, and the Cabal agree to tell them, but only if the "whole Primarch" is there, at which point "Omegon" steps forward and they describe Alpharius Omegon as one soul in two bodies. This was a major lore drop back when this book was published. The Alpha Legion actually having two Primarchs is a big deal.

The future the Cabal had foreseen farseen was an Imperial civil war in which Chaos subverts Horus, which tears the Imperium in two, with two outcomes: If the Emperor wins, he'll be crippled and the Imperium will fall into a stagnation which will eventually lead to total victory for Chaos within the next ten to twenty thousand years. If Horus wins, the last spark of nobility and defiance within him will motivate him into an orgy of self-hatred and genocidal slaughter that will wipe out humanity; in the absence of humanity's psychic energy, Chaos will be starved and fade and the galaxy will be saved. The Cabal want Alpharius to side with Horus and help him win, ensuring Chaos's ultimate defeat. "Alpharius" demands to see proof, and so the Cabal expose him to a device called the Acuity, which shows their farseeing prediction to anyone exposed to it in a way that apparently carries some sort of undeniable truth-qualia such that if you see it you can't deny that it's true. He comes out of the exposure convinced, and then exits the meeting and seems to psychically brief "Petch" on how the meeting went. They then all immediately teleport back to the Beta and are challenged by Lord Commander Teng Namatjira, who's jealous that Alpharius met with the Cabal without him. A second battle-barge, the Alpha, de-cloaks, and the Alpha and Beta destroy the 670th Expeditionary Fleet and fly off. Below, on the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius, the atmosphere engines turn off and all the soldiery who'd deployed to the planet are left to suffocate. Some of the survivors of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad go with the Alpha Legion to be used as agents elsewhere, and Grammaticus leaves with the Cabal, but everyone else we've met over the course of the book is left to die.

Grammaticus, on the Cabal ship, is congratulated on a job well done and then goes to jump out an airlock, distraught that he's just caused the doom of his species. The end.

So.

First, I've seen a lot of commentary about this book, and something I've seen a few times is how mysterious and inscrutiable the Alpha Legion are and that it's not clear what they were doing in the first half, but I legitimately do not find it complicated. If the standard Alpha Legion procedure is to do recon and infiltration of any theater of war they plan to operate in, then everything they do up until the point where they make contact with Teng Namatjira just makes sense as standard infiltration tactics. That weird body that kicked off the opening? We don't have to know what that is, that's just, like, a signal to the audience that Spy Shit is happening. The book goes to some lengths to establish that the overall 670th Expeditionary Fleet is quite large and we only see a small part of it, so having elements of Alpha Legion infiltration that are never explained just demonstrates how they're infiltrating the entire force on both sides -- with subversion of assets within the Geno Five-Two and establishment of safehouses within the besiege city of Mon Lo, they're clearly just locking down the whole theater of war before they reveal themselves.

Second, you'll notice that I've been putting "Alpharius" in quotation marks throughout most of this description. I am pretty sure "Alpharius" is not Alpharius. I am, in fact, pretty sure that for the purposes of this book (and as I understand it this would be popularly conceived as contradicting facts established in future books, but I'm reading all of them myself to draw my own fucking conclusions separate from the Lore Explainers so maybe I won't agree with that either), Petch is the real Alpharius, Herzog is the real Omegon, and "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are body-doubles. Here's my reasoning:

We know the Alpha Legion is lead by a physically identical pair of twins named Alpharius and Omegon and other members of the Legion are physically altered to pass as them.

We know Petch and Herzog are identical.

We know "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are identical.

We get a single third-person omniscient paragraph establishing that "Omegon" is not a Primarch.

Following his experiencing the Acuity, "Alpharius" psychically briefs "Petch."

This has significant lore implications inasmuch as it implies that the real Alpharius was never directly exposed to the truth-qualia of the Acuity, which means his motives remain mysterious well into the rest of the series, rather than his motives aligning with the common fan understanding that, yes, he actually was convinced that siding with Horus and working towards the extinction of humanity was the only way to save the galaxy. Since Petch is the first Alpha Legionnaire we meet in the book and he introduces himself with "I am Alpharius," it's also quite funny.

And now the other thing.

This book took me six months to read, and here's why. In characterizing the Nurthese, the book does two things in quick succession: First, it establishes them as stereotypical Indiana Jones / Lawrence of Arabia 1920s Cartoon Muslims, and then in the next breath tells us that their whole culture is Chaos-aligned to the core.

This bothered me deeply enough that I went off and finally read my copy of Edward Said's Orientalism that I'd been meaning to read for years, and then the prospect of somehow making this a summary of both Legion and Orientalism seemed like so much work that I stopped reading the book and completely reorganized my kitchen and got back into Minecraft for half a year. The only reason I came back is because I want to read Mechanicum because I hear it has cool Skitarii in it, and I only need to read this and Battle for the Abyss before I can get to that. And then, in the end, it kind of didn't matter, the Nurthese are basically just a plot device during the first half of the book; in retrospect it looks like he characterized them as 1920s Cartoon Muslims because he had to characterize them as something. I still don't think it was a particularly tasteful choice on the writer's part. Anyway my point is there is a huge break in my reading of this book, and I don't particularly want to go back and read it again to get it all clear in my mind because I have The Worst Book In The Entire Horus Heresy series to get through and I'd rather travel lightly over rough terrain.

Also John Grammaticus is a creep and the first half of the book is full of creepy descriptions of female members of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, whose officer corps is entirely made up of young, nubile, promiscuous women who get minor psychic powers from their libido. It's a whole thing, they're called Genos because they're the product of genetic engineering on pre-Unification Earth to create an officer corp with an intelligence-gathering advantage. Anyway my point here is that the first half of the book feels like it's written to make me throw it at a wall so no wonder I dropped it for six months. Fuck this book.

No, my highschool had a haunted tower. I mean, it was a converted Georgian mansion built by a robber-baron to look like a castle, which I'm sure is a very common source of school buildings in the UK.

I could never be a protagonist because I'd just never move the plot along. "You have free reign of this castle, but don't go into this one area" Okie dokie. I mind my own business and hang out in the library. Queen of staying in my own lane. I'll never discover your magic curse.

I've only seen the Christmas Specials, but this series really does poke gently at the heartstrings. Sure, it's a small celebration of craftwork, technique, tools and inspiration as a half dozen experts carefully fix some old stuff, but... it's always about who's old stuff it was. Grandad's chess set, granny's paintings.

what fucks me up is that “the repair shop” is loudly about restoring objects but quietly (or not so quietly) about grief and memory

@achronalart, you often know about paint/media oddities: do you know much about Windsor & Newton Pyrrole orange/azo yellow medium? This blogger's sunset nearly got ruined by some odd-sounding clumping behaviour (though it did turn out fantastic in the end).

My man is complete. Another Knight of the Flame to join the Chamber of Purity.

Look at him. He is all nice and shiny and full of deamon killing vibes.

Look at him next to his bro. His buddy oh pal.

Look at his staff.

Look at the fabric. It took me 4 hours to finish.

Look at them together.

The skull would have said hi but its shy. Maybe next time.

Look at the fabric when it was still a wip.

No this post is not done yet.

I need to vent.

Because the orange and the yellow had been such a pain in my concave posterior I need a separate section on this post to adequetly describe my pain.

What the fuck is going on with w&n pyrrole orange abd azo yellow medium?

Like for the realzies as the kids say. I try to thin them down, they thin fine. And after a minute of them being left untouched and unbothered they begin to clump up.

I had to take this much out of the tube until I found paint that didn't have the consistency of dirt.

And at first things where fine until they began repeating bad old habbits like I didn't sqeeze the orange and yellow life out of those tubes 5 minutes ago.

So I improved.

Mixed in with glazing medium.

The paint told me to eat dirt cause it ain't gonna behave.

Mixed in with fluid medium.

The painy told me to eat [redacted] cause it ain't gonne bend to my demands.

So you know what?

I decided to turn around and tell it to bend over cause I ain't gonne give up that easily.

And the plan was for me to leave a decent glob of paint on the side thin a tiny piece of it on a different section of the palette and then apply the thinned paint immediatly before I guess the ghost of painting past comes and plays a trick on me again.

It worked.

But.

*goes very quickly to check the price of those tubes*

26€ for the pyrrole orange

18€ for the azo yellow medium

I won't even bother doing the math. Personally in my humble trashfire opinion I think that when a paint costs this much I shouldn't have to go through those painting gymnastics.

And you might say.

Wow. You are taking it way too personally bro. Calm your negative posterior and sit down.

And I will say no. Because I had to improvise on the fly and scrape off paint clumps from my mini and the blending was almost ruined four times because the paint gained the consistency of a dehydrated husk.

🧘‍♂️

Imma calm myself now.

My boy came out well. The trials and tribulations were part of the journey.

The patience cultivation is needed because the future projects will be far more intense.