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From Metal Hurlant By Jean Giraud - Moebius

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[ID: a mockup of Miles O'Brien from Star Trek as a saint. He has candles around him and a halo, and the caption "Miles O'Brien, patron saint of uneventful workplace shifts." Around him are other various orange and yellow gifs of job related things. /End ID]

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RIP Richard Serra. You made so many people so so so mad

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The great struggle of education, I think, is that the best way to teach something is the way the student learns it. For some people that's gonna mean a lot of concrete models and exploring the abstract concept as it emerges, and other people it'll mean being introduced to the abstract concept first and being shown an example or two later, as an exercise.

That said, I've always been an advocate for exploring bigger, more abstract concepts through the lens of motivation. Like, all abstract mathematical nonsense™ exists because someone, somewhere was trying to solve a specific problem.

Sometimes that problem was as narrow as "gotta solve this cubic polynomial so that other asshole doesn't take my job as court mathematician," and sometimes it's as broad as "so what really counts as an axiom?" but either way, the solution involved climbing (or building!) up the rungs of the ladder of abstraction in order to look down at things to make sense of them. Something like the definition of a normal group didn't spring forth from Galois' head fully formed; he had to recognize and name it as part of making sense of this strange business with discriminants of polynomials.

As students (and teachers) I think there's a lot of value in seeking abstract definitions by following a problem-solving process (even if it's a more sanitized and streamlined version than what the original mathematician had to grapple with). In doing so, we're not only allowing ourselves some concrete ground to start climbing from, and modeling what it's like to invent/discover new math, but also providing a bit of historical and personal context beyond just "Cayley published this theorem in eighteen-whatever"

this professor really loves introducing everything he can (quotient spaces, direct sums, direct products, tensor products, outer products, ...) via their universal properties and I feel like not being fed a model beforehand makes everything way harder to understand than it needs to be

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Battlestar Valkyrie Decommissioned by Pierre Drolet

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print of my tank destroyer 😍

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sometimes you really do gotta be like "shit fuck" and hold up one of the lights or a bounce card with your hand while you reach over to the camera to take a picture

Fun fact: Behind all those high quality looking photo shoots you see (including all this ones product photos :3 ) Its something incredibly low budget like this :3

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Making a Legion table, and my idea is to make a landing pad/airfield. This model Jedi fighter is my first ship to sit on the table

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I bought a whole can of color-match paint to repaint a Matchbox car the same color as my real car.

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Burn The Maps, The Land Is Poison, Digital Collage, 2025.

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I love this

Don't Touch Me, Digital Collage, 2025.

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Andor Appreciation Day 2 - Everyone Has Their Own Rebellion

@andorappreciation

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I have never wanted a miniature more than the fucking Squeedle from quar look at this goofy thing

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Acid Death Fantasy (2019) is a setting book for Troika by Luke Gearing and illustrated entirely by the aggravatingly talented David Hoskins.

The Troika rulebook strongly implies its chaotic core setting through its myriad character backgrounds, which nest nicely in the dream/nightmare of Fronds of Benevolence. Together, they demonstrate a specific sort of play. But what if you don’t want to play Troika that way? How do you do the same basic thing, but with a different flavor? Gearing shows you.

ADF consists of a brief introduction that lays out the barest frame for the setting — desert, a plastic sea, a thousand petty sultanates, a fallen high-tech civilization. At the end of the book are three tables for sketching out a sultanate and some adventure seeds. The rest of the book is split between character backgrounds and enemies. Reading through them, a handful of Gearing’s inspirations quickly becomes clear: Dune, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Fallout, Gorilla City, Arik Roper’s Dopesmoker cover, a smattering of real-world cultures and historical eras. There’s also plenty of original weird stuff too, though it is a bit more regimented by the setting themes.

By peppering the setting with stuff I recognize, even if those things are subverted or otherwise tinkered with, it provides hand holds I can work with to run a game here, perhaps with greater ease than core Troika (sometimes there is something to be said for having constraints!). Not only that, but seeing the familiar interact with the new and weird also teaches me how to make my own setting, should I desire.

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Star Wars Rebellion and Galactic Empire fighter ship squadrons Art Collection illustrated by me from May 2024 - December 2024

Y-Wing Gold Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

B-Wing Blade Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

A-Wing Green Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

TIE Bomber Gamma Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

TIE Interceptor Saber Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

Assault Gunboat Tau Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

TIE Fighter Alpha Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

X-Wing Red Squadron, Digital artwork, 2024

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Finished 1/25 scale 1962 Buick Electra 225 in Regal Black over Fawn interior. Very happy with the build and finished product.

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Seeing a lot of weird takes on Bix and I think what people need to realise is that not all people are cut out to be soldiers. You can be a part of the Rebellion but not actively participate on missions.

Bix is a mechanic. A mechanic living a somewhat normal life - apart from selling illegal parts to Luthen - on Ferrix. Then everything changes. She’s beaten and sees her boyfriend shot and killed right in front of her eyes - because of her, because he tried to save her. Then she’s left to sit and stare at his dead body until Paak and Wil helps her get away. After that, there’s the capture, interrogation, torture. She is brave, she is strong, she doesn’t tell them what they want at first. But eventually she breaks.

The torture is horrifying. You can see how much it changes her, she is so out of it, she is broken, when Cassian rescues her she even tries to stay saying ”No, they’ll get angry.”

A year later we find her on Mina-Rau and we see that she still suffers from nightmares. During the day she looks somewhat content, doing her job as a mechanic on a peaceful planet, the moment with Wil and Bela is sweet and shows us that. But the threat of the Imperial ship brings that fear back immediately.

Then she is brutally attacked, almost raped, and ends up killing her attacker with a hammer and shooting an imperial. This is the first time we ever see Bix kill someone. Then she loses another friend, Brasso.

One year later, things are very different. No longer peacefully hiding out on some planet, she has joined Cassian to go on missions for Luthen. One thing remains the same: She still has nightmares.

What’s interesting about this nightmare compared to the first one is that in the one on Mina-Rau, Dr. Gorst comes after her, standing over her, removing her blanket, the one thing she had for comfort when she was captured on Ferrix.

In the nightmare on Coruscant, there’s Dr. Gorst and a dead soldier who Bix feels guilty over because we learn later that Cassian killed the soldier because he saw Bix’s face.

But in this dream, the way Dr. Gorst is talking to her, it’s not really as if he is an enemy to Bix. It’s almost as if Bix sees herself on the same level as Dr. Gorst.

She’s a killer now and she’s not handling it well.

We see Bix taking drugs in order to sleep. She can’t stop seeing the dead soldier’s face. When Cassian is away on Ghorman, the place becomes a mess. When Luthen visits she says ”I’m not loving Coruscant”, and you can tell she feels boxed in. When Cassian returns and asks how she’s doing, she dodges the question.

Luthen sends them on the mission to kill Dr. Gorst and she gets her revenge. We see her smile when she walks away, the Bix is back.

Jump to arc 7-9, Bix and Cassian are living on Yavin. This is definitely the most healthy that Bix has ever looked since before her captivity on Ferrix. They have a cozy home, they live among people who are fighting for the Rebellion, the one thing she has left except for Cassian. And oh, do we find out how strongly she believes in the Rebellion here. Much more so than Cassian who is struggling and wanting to leave.

Here is where I see people wanting Bix to go to Ghorman and kill Dedra. After all the things listed above, I think it’s quite clear that she’s not a soldier. In the end, Bix is a mechanic, she is brave and she is strong, she’s a fighter and a survivor but she’s not a soldier. I think I can draw a parallell to Mon Mothma’s character here and state for the record that women can be fierce and strong and interesting characters without being ruthless killers.

And while I’m sure I would have enjoyed seeing Bix killing Dedra if that’s the way they went with her character, I do actually like that they went this way with Bix. After everything she has been through and all the dealing with her trauma, I find it more interesting that she doesn’t go down that path but instead went with a more healthy path. Besides, we have other female characters for the ruthless soldier type of roles - such as Vel and Cinta.

Now for the ending. Bix makes the most selfless, difficult, cruel sacrifice. Leaving Cassian - the one who she has leaned on during her recovery, the one she can not even remember not knowing, the love of her life - behind for the sake of the Rebellion.

This is Bix’s choice.

In the chaos that’s been following them, with the danger that’s been surrounding them, it’s quite clear Cassian has taken the lead. This can be shown in the scene at the end of S2x09 where he says he wants to leave and I quote ”We’ll leave before it gets too complicated.”. He didn’t ask what she wanted, it was merely ”I’ll talk to Draven tomorrow.”

I’m not at all looking down at Cassian as a character, I love him as much as I love Bix, I’m merely stating the facts here.

Then Bix makes her own choice. It is a cruel one, very much so, because she makes the choice for them, for him, and leaves him without saying goodbye in person.

It’s not fair to him.

But it is a selfless act, all for the of the sake of the Rebellion. Bix believed that he had an important part to play in the Rebellion (and we know that she was right).

That is a very interesting story arc to me. She made her choice. And along the way, she realised that she was no soldier like Cassian and instead she found her own path. And had we gone down the soldier path, the only way to write her out before Rogue One would have been to kill her off and I am glad we didn’t get that for Bix after everything that she has been through.

Sure, it would have been interesting to see what else Bix did on Yavin but there are a lot of storylines and too little screentime. I’d like to believe she did work as a mechanic for the Rebellion there, doing what she’s best at. Knowing Bix, I’m sure she wouldn’t just sit in the house all day and wait for Cassian, some people seem to believe that if you’re not a fighter for the Rebellion then you’re simply a housewife.

Besides, even if she would have became a housewife, if that’s what she became content with after all her trauma, then good for her.

But I doubt that’s what she became. What I love about this show is that they don’t need to spell it all out for you. Her skills as a mechanic are also very useful to the Rebellion, every single person and their contribution matters.

In conclusion, not everyone are cut out to be soldiers but that does not diminish their character.