bakamitai

Text from the framing manuscript - Act I

Translation:

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

In 1990, a British Airways BAC One-Eleven, captained by Tim Lancaster and co-piloted by Alastair Atchison, was cruising at 17,000 feet.

Around 15 minutes after take-off, flight attendant Nigel Ogden entered the cockpit to bring the pilots something to drink. One second everything was fine. The next second, the pilot's side window blew out from the force of the pressurized cockpit. Even though he was strapped in, the force of the explosive decompression ripped the captain out of his chair and pulled him though the window.

The flight attendant immediately leapt forward and grasped the captain's belt. The force was so strong - due to the plane's speed - the captain slipped and was pulled almost entirely out of the plane, but the flight attendant caught his leg. The captain laid on the roof, then the side of the fuselage (the above image is an inaccurate recreation - the side window was smashed) and the flight attendant's entire arm was soon outside of the plane, gripping him.

(Recreation from the show Mayday at the point of decompression)

At the same time, the event caused the autopilot to disengage, and the captain's body hitting the flight controls caused the plane to enter into a deep dive. The throttle was set to full power and could not be accessed due to debris, meaning the plane was descending rapidly. The co-pilot, experiencing hypoxia, fought to control the plane's dive while allowing it to continue descending to a level the passengers/crew could breathe at. He attempted to contact air traffic control, but the wind made communication impossible, so he broadcast a mayday signal. Finally, he was able to re-engage the autopilot and level the plane out at a breathable altitude.

Soon, the flight attendant's entire arm was burned from wind shear and frostbite, and his grip began to slip. The other attendants entered the cabin to see what was wrong and took over holding the captain's body. Seeing the blood covering the windows from the captain's severe wind sheer burns and frostbite, the attendants and co-pilot knew he was dead. However, they could not let his body go because it could smash into the wing, horz stabilizer, or engine, and bring the plane down.

For 30+ minutes the co-pilot flew a jet plane with an OPEN WINDOW and his co-worker's body hanging along the side of the plane. Finally, clearance to land from ATC came across over the sound of the wind and the flight attendants were able to dislodge the captain's ankles from the flight controls without letting him go. The co-pilot successfully landed the plane.

(tw below for blood)

(Taken same day as the incident)

BUT HERE'S THE KICKER: when they reached the ground and evacuated, they realized THE CAPTAIN WAS NOT DEAD.

He SURVIVED being outside the fuselage of a jet airplane traveling 550mph at 17,000 feet. His only injuries were extensive - but mostly superficial - frostbite and windshear burns, bruising, fractures in his hand, and shock. He has since stated that he remembers the event and was conscious for much of the time he was outside of the fuselage. The only other injury was the flight attendant's frostbitten/windshorn arm. Captain Tim Lancaster returned to flying five months later.

(Captain Tim Lancaster in bed several weeks after the incident, with flight attendant Ogden (+ Ogden's wife) above him and co-pilot Alastair Atchison to the far left, along with the two other flight attendants)

Why did this occur? Because the plane had received maintenance the day before, and the maintenance supervisor did not check he was using the correct screws in re-installing the windscreen.

(Recreation)

Just a note that I was wrong - it was the front pilot's windscreen, not the side-window! I'm used to looking at Boeing windows with different positions :)

The ‘maintenance supervisor did not check the bolts’ is technically correct but ignores the amount of stuff that had to go wrong for that to happen.

1: the supervisor was the one doing the bolts (I think there was a staffing issue) and so did not have to check the work that he did

2: the window was not on the list of vital components that need to be checked by someone else even if the supervisor does it.

3: the parts store where he had to go to get the bolts was badly lit and had bolts in the wrong drawers.

4: the wrong bolts and the right bolts are almost indistinguishable by sight.

5: the correct tool to put the screws in was not available so they had to do some lite bodging to get the screws in. By this I mean it was still a torque wrench and they checked it released at the right point but the correct socket did not stay in place or something like that.

6: any slight differences between the right bolts and the wrong bolts were hidden because of the tool they were using (which would have worked perfectly if they were using the right bolts).

From Wikipedia:

“The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur. In this diagram, three hazard vectors are stopped by the defenses, but one passes through where the "holes" are lined up.”

This is my favorite screenshot of all time. The time stamps on it are ridiculously out of date because, as of writing, I have been holding on to this screenshot for almost 10 years.

To explain how we got here, I need to explain transformation porn. It's very a very simple concept: porn of one thing transforming into another thing. Got it? Got it.

A very popular sub-genre of transformation porn is bimbofication: A normal person (sometimes male, sometimes female) is transformed into a hypersexualized, sex-crazed caricature of a woman known as the bimbo, who has no thoughts in her head except dick and where she will next get it.

These are both niche interests with small fetish communities around them. Until one fateful day.

One day, an artist who regularly makes bimbofication art receives a commission: Instead of drawing a normal person transforming into a sex-crazed bimbo, what if you instead drew a bimbo transforming into a normal person?

"How novel!" thinks the artist, "this will be fun and cool, getting to work on a variation of what I normally do. I will get straight to work on this right away."

The following piece of artwork is created:

There is a very good chance you recognize this image. If you do, you already know the second half of the story. For those of you who do not, I will continue.

Somehow, and I am not aware exactly when, where, or how, this image becomes divorced from its fetish context. And from there, it spreads over the internet like wildfire.

People are not interpreting it as fetish art. Most people, by definition, are normies, and are oblivious to even the possibility that this is actually porn.

No no no.

They are interpreting it as a political cartoon.

And everyone has an opinion.

People are scrambling either to dunk on the obvious misogynistic and racist themes of the piece, or to defend it, saying that it's only about valuing knowledge over superficiality.

And one of the funnier (if not funniest) parts of this controversy is that the original artist agrees that the meaning being read into it is misogynistic and offensive.

So EVERYBODY on the internet is either scrambling to defend an artist who does not agree with them and does not want to be defended, or else to attack somebody who agrees with them.

Chaos ensues.

To go back briefly to the screenshot at the top of the post, I need you to be aware that this interaction was only ONE in a FLOOD of interactions like this.

And the internet being what it is, several variations spring up. As well as people shipping the women in it, obviously.

etc etc