I Made A Game!  It’s A Text-based Adventure About Living With Mental Illness.  I Pulled A Marathon

I like airplane names that play on the call sign as well. My personal favourite is the beloved Deli Mike, TC-JDM. In the phonetic alphabet, the last two letters are "Delta Mike", which is easily shifted to Deli Mike, meaning "Crazy Mike" in Turkish. Her technicians use she/her pronouns for this plane.

Why is she called crazy? According to Wikipedia:

"Shortly after delivery, the aircraft started to have "random" technical issues and failures. Sometimes, the aircraft would turn its external lights on by itself and then back off when someone tried to intervene.[4] Occasionally, the lights of the emergency exits would turn on one by one from front to back "like a Mexican wave", not all at the same time, which according to the cabin crew meant that Deli Mike "was in a good mood". The aircraft also made "small jokes" to passengers and crew. On one occasion, the aircraft started sounding the master caution alarm in the cockpit, causing one of the inexperienced cabin crew members to panic. Frequent problems with the aircraft included the reading light of a completely different passenger turning on when the button is pressed, and the same issue also exists with the button used to call a crew member. One popular story among technical staff states that an employee fixed the faulty flight instruments of the aircraft simply by talking to it.[5]"

"According to technicians of Turkish Technic, the aircraft maintenance subsidiary of Turkish Airlines, "Deli Mike can fly to the other side of the world without any problems if she wants to. If she doesn't feel like it, she won't move even one metre on the ground." The technicians also removed and reinstalled all systems on-board and reset the software of the aircraft in an attempt to solve the issues, without any success.[15]"

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.)

This article does make an assumption that I would like to push back on. My area of passion are manuscripts of the British isles from before the Norman Conquest ("Insular" is the term for this style). I am also not a scholar - I am just a calligrapher.

We have no idea who wrote almost all the manuscripts from this period. We can tell roughly how many people worked on something by comparing stylistic differences, but we know almost nothing about those people. Often we don't even know where they were.

In this case we know a delightful amount about the provenance of the manuscript! The monastic gender roles being discussed are extremely over simplified though. Please make sure you do not assume that any other monastary in any other place or time functions like this. The diversity of monastic traditions is staggering and the time period we're talking about spans more than a millenium.

There is no support for the assumption that all calligraphy and manuscript decoration was done by men. In insular calligraphy I'm not even sure you can assume that that was the norm. It is a painfully common assumption, but it comes from the same kind of science and hisotry that identified the sex of archeological remains in northern Europe by whether or not they had a sword, and then claimed that only men have swords.

medieval parchment repairs

in a psalter, south-western germany, late 12th/early 13th c.

source: Hermetschwil, Benediktinerinnenkloster, Cod. membr. 37, fol. 19r, 53r, and 110r

Heh, I love this take on this, it’s far more hilarious than my game was.  If anyone is interested in actually playing it, you can download a windows installer from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7bqhY0xzEu3ckxadVA1d2ZleU0/view?usp=sharing.  If you’re worried about downloading strange files from the internet, that’s very wise of you!  The source code is here: https://github.com/isaach/sdabto.  This will also let you run it on a mac or linux machine.  Click the ‘download ZIP’ button and then run it with python 3 (which you may have to install) from the command line for some text-based good times!  Well, not really good times, as @ave-puella mentioned.  

If anyone actually wants to play this game and is having trouble getting it going hit me up and I’ll help you run it.  I really love hearing people’s reactions to it.

first person computer game: mental illness

> ‘command: walk out front door’ is not allowed. the future is terrifying. staying at your start point inside the house is your best bet.

> good job! lying on the couch and staring at the opposite wall for two hours has boosted your energy. you can now throw away the jar of peanut butter you had for dinner last night. 

> the quest you are following no longer exists. a full day has passed and your priorities have changed. go to the menu to read your new quest. 

> minus one mind point. your last save was two months ago. click ‘ok’ to repeat the ‘get a diagnosis’ quest while under the influence of an unmemory potion. 

> oops! the villager doesn’t understand your explanation of ‘weird brain fog.’ now they treat you with suspicion. looks like you have to go to the next village for your errands from now on. 

> you have collected five good days! check your menu for your new treasure, ‘memory of when i could function’. it might come in handy in the future! 

> cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘cry’. all quests will be put on hold until ‘cry’ is complete. 

> cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘spontaneous desolation’. all quests > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘negativit > cube unlocked! you have > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘only taylor swift songs make me feel anything’. all quests will be put on hold until > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘scream’. all quests will be put on hold until ‘scream’ is complete. 

> this is your new companion, GARGOYLE. he will accompany you on the quest ‘pass as functioning’. keep an eye out for his secondary weapon: whispering ugly truths only you can hear.

A present I made for my dear friend @ave-puella.  You may recognize it as a short Temeraire fic she posted a little while back.  It’s done entirely by hand, and was my first time attempting borders and illumination.  I’m still figuring out gold leaf, but it was super fun to work with (there’s also some gold work on the border of the third page).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Temeraire universe, there are dragons, hence the second page border.

It was a heck of a lot of work, but was entirely worth it for her face and incredulous ‘what did you do?!’

Did you run into the human one or the cartoon one? I feel that both would be very intereting to do coke with, but in very different ways

i just saw the grink lol haha

@upennmanuscripts (the greatest blog in all the land <3) was talking about manuscript-influenced fanart and it made me nostalgic for when I made this

A present I made for my dear friend @ave-puella.  You may recognize it as a short Temeraire fic she posted a little while back.  It’s done entirely by hand, and was my first time attempting borders and illumination.  I’m still figuring out gold leaf, but it was super fun to work with (there’s also some gold work on the border of the third page).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Temeraire universe, there are dragons, hence the second page border.

It was a heck of a lot of work, but was entirely worth it for her face and incredulous ‘what did you do?!’

The ice we skate

Is getting pretty thin

It signifies our youth

And pleasures chucked into the bin

Mercedes and James Hutchinson

HOOKED RUG

1920-1940

Fabric

Fenimore Art Museum

This joke also plays on the fact that in soccer removing your shirt is explicitly banned in the FIFA rules and is penalized with a yellow card =D

English added by me :)

I am of the opinion that if Pierre Trudeau were running Canada in the Smartphone era, he would be social media’s favourite world leader.