@post-brahminism check it

Darth Maul:

“I have condemned her…”

- Darth Maul 1-4, 2017

This was a great comic and it really made me want to draw something. There was something there between these two…

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Michael Newton’s Monsters, Mysteries and Man was a bit of a mystery for me for many years. I remembered it from my local library (it was at the Main, which I didn’t go to as much as the closer, smaller Branch). I had gotten it out before a trip to my grandparents' house and I distinctly remember reading it in bed there in almost one sitting. I remembered that it had a garish monster head on the cover and that the title reminded me of Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series, but that was all I could remember. Searching, for years, on the internet, turned up zilch.

And then, sometimes, I find that magic combination of words on the right site and boom, there it is, the thing I was looking for all those years. The site in question was Archive.org, so hey, you can read it too. The dust jacket is magnificent, isn’t it?

The text was a bit less noteworthy all these years later. It’s a general survey of crytpids — Yeti, Sasquatch, surviving dinosaurs, sea and lake monsters, Kraken, Nessie, UFOs — and the efforts to find and study them. Two more chapters cover vampires and werewolves, but they are half-hearted because there’s no meaningful chance that they are real. And that’s what Newton wants. He’s the opposite of skeptical Daniel Cohen; the whole book is arranged around finding the small holes of doubt in the skeptic’s argument and filling them to brimming with the hope of the believer. Considering not much has changed on any of these fronts in my lifetime, I don’t expect they ever will. Sorry Mike.

The reason that flight times can be so different is mainly dependent on three things: the specific aircraft, the route, and the wind. I could go on tangents about all of these, but the point is that you can be flying the exact same plane on the exact same route at the exact same airspeed… and still get drastically different travel times due to the wind fucking with your ground speed.

(Ground speed = true air speed + wind component, if you care.)

And if you’re worried about pilots ramping that shit up to the maximum velocity… you would know if we did. Because we would have to point the nose down for the whole flight. The engines are already often operating at their maximum thrust any time you’re departing or ascending— but as my flight instructors have screamed at me since the day I started flying, “pitch for speed, power for altitude”. I’m not even sure you can hit the “never-exceed” velocities in a stable airplane without slamming the stick forward and nosediving that thang.

We also have this handy color coding on the air speed indicator! (And similar coding on the vertical tape versions in those newfangled glass cockpits.)

Lastly, almost every commercial flight is going to have two people up front. Even if the captain does something stupid, the first officer is there to say “hey, don’t do that” and make corrections accordingly. Even if they do agree to do something dumb, someone on the ground is going to tell them to cut it out. Nobody just gets to fuck around up there.