"god damn it, you've got to be kind"

This quote is rather enlightening on the meaning behind Old Ben's "He is more machine now than man" line in ROTJ to explain that Vader is "twisted and evil", something I always found a bit out of the blue. While the OT is rife with themes of nature over technology, and technology being used to control and harm the people, the ultimate evil of the trilogy (Palpatine) is entirely organic. Now, I read Ben's quote more as a commentary that being so removed from the Force has only worsened Vader's evil.

I do understand what Lucas is going for with his construction of "more machine than man" Vader being weakened and twisted by his state. Vader is on life-support in the OT and general understanding is that the Force lightning killed him by disabling said life support. He is 'the walking wounded' or perhaps more accurately 'the walking dead' -- his life ended on Mustafar and it's just misery and evil that keeps him going. We understand that he's barely human anymore.

The problem comes from the fact that there are real people out there who are missing limbs and surviving thanks to medical intervention, and to say there's something inherently "twisted and evil" about this state is ableist. It also raises questions about how much of your flesh you can lose before your experience a power loss, which is a very dry way of looking at things. (Come on. One arm = 10% power loss? What do you think?) And, obviously, it can contradict "luminous being we are, not this crude matter" and the whole existence of Force ghosts, which prove that the body is hardly necessary to be powerful and present in the Force.

What I would say is that, as with so much of the Force, this is entirely a matter of the spirit, and perception of self. When Anakin lost an arm, it didn't slow him down. So what if that's it? The prosthetic is a part of him that he accepts. He still considers himself whole, so he is still able to access the Force fully. Then Mustafar, and the spiritual death of Anakin Skywalker. He's lost everything. He's a monster. He's left in a permanent state of chronic, debilitating pain. He has no choice about being put in the suit, and the only thing that he was holding onto -- Padmé -- is revealed to be lost to him. From this point on he is in a state of spiritual unbalance, and he never has a chance to feel whole again. His body is no longer a vessel, but a prison, an unwilling, perpetual walk forward when he's lost what makes him Anakin Skywalker.

He defeats Palpatine because Luke leads by example, showing him what peace and acceptance in face of great suffering looks like. He's empowered by his son, and able to reject his own apathy, pain, and imprisonment to act. He's not interested in being the walking dead any longer, and so he chooses to finally die. This is a narrative that doesn't rely on him being in the suit, but rather the suit becomes a metaphor for.

I see these points, and now I’m going to list out all the ways I can think of that it was a bad political decision too:

1. Alienated his long-standing allies (was there anyone who trained with Alanna when they were all kids that wasn’t pissed about this choice?).

2. Undermined the other progressive policies; he made the decree that girls could openly try for their shields ten years before First Test begins, the training master at the time agreed to it, and Wyldon accepted the decision when he took the job. Stepping backward as soon as it’s put to the test invites other such decrees and programs to be attacked as well.

3. Insulted the Mindelans, who are valuable diplomats, quite badly.

4. Potentially undermined Alanna in her job as King’s Champion; yes, she acknowledges that people often credit her success to her Gift and being god-touched, but she did go through the same official training as all her peers. To make the next woman knight leap more official hurdles is to throw Alanna’s qualifications into question.

5. Nearly lost them Keladry as a knight. She almost makes the decision to wait a few years and apply to the Queen’s Riders instead, because a probationary year for only her was blatantly unfair.

6. Potentially lost them other knights as well. We don’t hear of any other girls starting page training during the rest of Protector of the Small, which spans over eight years. How many other girls, or their parents, looked at that probationary year, and refused to let themselves be so insulted? How many wondered, if the year was lifted for future applicants, if some other humiliation would be sprung on them instead?

Jonathan could have mitigated some of these problems by having Wyldon place all incoming pages under a probationary year, by officially declaring that this was simply yet another change to the training program they were making. Even if rumor went that this change was because of Kel, without it being officially so, it would be less insulting to her & her politically important family, leave less room for open attacks on the other progressive policies, and not raise the stakes so high for future girl applicants.

This decision also highlights one of the main themes of the series—systemic vs. individual bigotry and how individuals can uphold or work against the status quo.

Wyldon takes Jonathan’s compromise as permission to continue his bigotry. In turn, Joren and the other pages take Wyldon’s treatment of Kel as endorsement of their own bullying.

Wyldon barely allows Kel to stay, despite her exemplary performance, and openly treats her poorly— pages take their cues from him. Many are openly misogynistic and sexually harass Kel. Vinson takes it to the point of committing serial rape and assault of other women in the castle and city. Joren holds onto his own bigotry so tightly that he can’t survive his Ordeal. They make their own choices, but they were certainly influenced by Wyldon.

In addition to reinforcing misogyny, Wyldon mistreats other pages who don’t fit his ideals of knighthood—Neal in particular. Once again, Joren and his crew respond to this, bullying young pages as they please. Had Kel not stepped in and rallied her friends against it, how many other young pages would have been bullied out of knighthood or turned into bullies themselves?

There’s a great moment at Joren’s trial, where Joren basically says he was dojng Wyldon a favor in trying to get rid of Kel. Wyldon objects—he didn’t want that. But it’s too late. It doesn’t matter what he says. His mistreatment of Kel set the tone, and Joren and many other pages followed.

The same holds true for King Jonathan. His treatment of Kel—and his own daughter, for that matter—sets the tone for how women are treated in general. He is in the wrong.

And Pierce doesn’t really give Jon and Wyldon of them a chance at redemption, or any credit for Kel’s success.

Wyldon retires in shame. He is—quite explicitly—a failure at his post. Though he learns and grows, his failure remains.

Jon doesn’t win Kel’s sincere loyalty, which Raoul rightly points out as a major loss. In fact, when choosing between allegiance between King Jonathan and Kel, Alanna, Raoul, the King’s Own, almost an entire generation of knights, Wyldon’s squire, and Jon’s own son all choose Kel, some to the point of treason.

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!

up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."

however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.

also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.

neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.

let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?

...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:

the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)

so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.

pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.

all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.

but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.

the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.

this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.

this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.

enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.

they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.

the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.

as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN

here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.

another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.

by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.

all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.

meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.

the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.

and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.

all 69 of them 😎

This is "The Most Tumblr Punchline" in action, only I didn't realize there was something to look up.

Now that I do?

Let me just open up that bad boy to my birthday and see my cool space vis---

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

SAY NO MORE. everyone sit down, grab a drink, and listen to what i like to refer to as "hey what the fuck are we even doing." i will preface this with 4 statements:

I am a terminal hater. I view every claim made in an academic publication with a suspicious squint, which probably influenced my dissertation significantly and definitely influenced my outlook on Attic Late Geometric (henceforth called LG) pottery.

I am specifically a terminal hater of periodization. I love continuity. I love observing the integration of old and new as things gradually change over time. I do not like cutting time up into ‘neat little boxes’ which end up simplifying gradual processes into sharp breaks. I am also already a bit of a hater of Early Iron Age Greek chronology. I would kill Submycenaean in a heartbeat, I think it’s stupid as hell (shoutout Papadopoulos et al 2013 btw). So I am even more predisposed to be skeptical here.

I especially hate the idea of definitive statements being applied to a protohistoric period & region like, say, Early Iron Age Attica. like man i think it depends

Either everyone else has been using a totally separate mindset here which I am incapable of having towards pottery analysis or perhaps they've been smoking crack in a corner for almost a hundred years, its really uncertain. Either way this is literally just me. I have tried to find someone else with this specific critique. Nope. Its Just Me. so take that for what you will.

Anyways, here is my beef with the Standard Approach To Late Geometric Attic Pottery Chronology & Development (Abridged) (This was an 8000 word undergraduate dissertation):

(with apologies to @doloneia for chiming in here)

See, the problem with that approach is that knowing where the clay comes from doesn´t give you a date of when the vase was made - at best it would give you a date of the formation of the claybed (hope that´s the right word in English). We can approximately tell when a vase was fired via a method called Thermoluminescence dating, but that is VERY approxomate and as far as I know mostly done to fnd modern fakes.

Normally - or at least unless you are a classical archaeologist with a certain training, grumble, grumble - we´d prefer to date by stratigraphy and correlations with historic cultures with calendar systems we can translate into ours. Radiocarbon, if need be, but that is also somewhat imprecise and can´t be done on clay directly (on accont of not being an organic material). Dendrodating - dating by yearrings in trees in wood closely associated with the pottery in question - would be really nice, too.

And for various reasons, almost none of that is an option. Like, we can manage stratigraphic sequences at least for some sites and regions, but thanks to the prolonged fallout from the Bronze Age collapse, we lack secure associations with historic cultures, and wood does really, really not survive well in the Greek climate. On top of that, chronology in the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt is also somewhat shaky during that time.

So we are in a situation, where we can fairly reliably date the last pottery from before the BA collapse (aka the Late Helladic B/C transition) and then nothing, really, until the Middle Geometric period at the earliest. Mostly, if I recall correctly, trading relationships with the Near East start up again at the end of this period around 750 BC and apply therefore mostly to (Attic) Late Geometric. The lengths of style phases before that are estimations.