#magic square

Source details and larger version.

Serving as their second take on the Decepticon mad scientist, MS-B32A “Spock” serves as a lovely little Legends scale take on Shockwave. This is specifically their second version of the character, now presented in more cartoon accurate colors.

He’s mostly cast in a very pretty purple. It’s nice and rich without being too dark. All of the silver on him is painted, and it’s a very nice finish. Quite shiny. The two tones work together as nicely as ever. He doesn’t have too much additional color on him, with the only other major point of paint being on his face. The yellow for his eye is especially striking, eerily sticking out from that well of black it’s sunk in. He’s a pretty figure all around, with good sculpting and proportions.

He’s rather expressive, as well. Can hit an Are All Dead like a champ. Going top down, his head’s on a ball joint which lets him look up and to the side simultaneously, though the hinge right behind his head limits how well it can use that movement. He’s got a dual pair of hinges for his shoulders, with a swivel attached to the one in the body. He’s got a bicep swivel, double jointed elbows, and. Well, a wrist swivel. There’s a waist swivel and a robust ab crunch, and all his hip skirts can move out of the way for his legs. The front and back ones are each one piece, but the front skirt is on a double hinge which makes it easy to get it out of the way. His hips are on ball joints, which were a bit loose out of the box on my copy, but it wasn’t unbearable and easy enough to fix. His thigh swivel is rather high up, almost right below the hips, but that doesn’t end up presenting much of a problem unlike on a lot of other figures. Magic Square in particular seems to like utilizing a little wall that covers where the hip and thigh meet (it’s a feature I generally dislike due to the way it gets in the way of using the figure’s thigh swivel), but on Shockwave it’s so short that it doesn’t create an issue. His hips also swing down for transformation, so it’s really, really easy to bring his legs down juuust a touch to entirely circumvent them running into his crotch.

Accessories include a back cover for an even more cartoon accurate look, if you don’t like the gun barrel just sitting there, a miniature version of himself in gun mode, a flexible tube to complete his look alongside a spare, and alternate hands. I’m always indecisive on whether or not the default Magic Square hands actually look any good, but I don’t mind them here on Shockwave (it might possibly depend on a figure to figure basis). If you don’t care for it however, you get both a flat hand and a completely closed fist. Ok. Two of them. All his hands attach via small peg, but then that plugs into larger insert. The gun on his left arm is its own entire piece, which can be replaced with a second insert to give him two hands, as opposed to removing just the gun and putting a hand in the peg hole. It’s maybe a bit odd but the notion of losing the gun or having it break seems far more likely were it on a smaller peg like the hands, so the system works just fine for me.

The transformation is, somewhat unsurprisingly, mostly in the legs. His arms spin around and come up, his back comes out and his head tucks inside his chest, and then you can bring the backpack up on a. VERY small armature. Like gosh that things thin. The gun barrel unfolds a bit before wrapping around his hands, and I have to say it feels a bit odd. Getting the side panels untabbed is a bit weird, as the tabs themselves are somewhat tight and the motion is odd. They’re supposed to hinge down but it feels like it lacks the necessary room. Similarly, bringing the whole assembly over the hands isn’t the smoothest experience. After that, the legs split open, fold up, spin around, and then collapse over the thighs before pegging together, with one half forming the stock of the gun and the other becoming the handle. This part is an overall hassle free experience, though pegging and unpegging the legs from the body can be a touch particular.

The resultant gun mode looks great, though the barrel maybe feels a bit small compared to the rest. There’s no good way to stand it up on its own, either. It’s, obviously, a bit front heavy, so it wants to tip forward. The back cover can kind of be used as a stand but also not really. It’s not a dedicated thing and it can’t get as far up as it should to have the grip sitting flat on the ground. He is the perfect size for bigger bots, though, including Masterpiece combiners. Bruticus, as a totally random example.

Proud owner of issues #1 through #24 and half of #25.

Created in Blender 4.something by meticulously measuring the Magic Square Light of Peace figure’s bits and pieces with broken calipers and then making eyeball adjustments to better fit the proportions of DWJ’s rendition.

MS-B29 Video Team (Toy(s?))

If you visit the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona (Catalonia), you might be intrigued by these squares with numbers. Like every detail in the building, it has a symbolic meaning.

These are a very particular kind of magic squares. A "magic square" is a series of numbers on a square grid, placed so that any row, column, or diagonal line always adds up to the same number. Well, to be fair, there is one more rule for the normal magic squares which this one doesn't follow: the squares cannot repeat numbers and must use all numbers from 1 to the number of squares possible (for example, a square of 3x3 would have numbers from 1 to 9, a square of 4x4 would have them from 1 to 16, etc). When this rule is followed, the number that results from the addition will always be the same (in a square of 3x3, the sum of 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9 = 45, and each row, column and diagonal line sums 45/3 = 15; in a 4 x 4 magic square, where the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 16 is 136, the magic constant is 136/4 = 34). For mathematical reasons, the resulting number cannot be chosen, it will always be the same one if we follow those rules.

And here is why this one doesn't follow that rule, and it's on purpose. It doesn’t have all the numbers from 1 to 16 (it is missing the 12 and 16) and some numbers are repeated. And why did they do that? Here's the important bit: the result of the sum isn’t 34 (as would always be in a 4x4 magic square), but 33.

The sculptor who created the Sagrada Família's Passion façade (the artist Josep Maria Subirachs, following architect Antoni Gaudí's vision) took a different spin for these squares. Magic squares have been used as talismans in many cultures for millennia, since ancient cultures including 3rd millennium BC China, Ancient India, Ancient Egypt, Arab, and Greek cultures, among others. For the Sagrada Família (a Christian temple), Subirachs used to hide a number of great significance in Christian symbolism.

Painting Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer (1514) and a detail from it.

Subirachs adapted a magic square from this engraving by Dürer and changed it so that it would add up to 33: the age that Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been when he was executed. A number based on the repetition of another of the most important numbers in Christianity: 3, symbolizing the holy trinity.

The square in the Sagrada Família manages to add 33 by repeating some numbers and skipping others. But it also goes further than adding up 33 in every row, column, and diagonal line. The same number can also be obtained with many other combinations. Here are some of them:

Plus, in the magic square at the Sagrada Família, there is also a sort of hidden subliminal signature: adding up the numbers that repeat and looking at their correspondence in the Roman alphabet, we get the initials INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum = "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews" in Latin), which was written on the sign at the top of the cross where Jesus was crucified.

This way, mathematics, art history and religious symbolism all come together in this little symbol.

if you have a pendulum or can feel energy I would be interested in your vibe, experience, impression, insights, and scrying of this square: