#dovetail joint

[power-chords]

Someone once told me, when looking for answers / don't look in corners, just in the spaces

[guitarbomb]

Unveiling the Ed Sheeran Stadium Edition Guitar: A Masterpiece for the Stage

For Ed Sheeran fans and acoustic guitar aficionados alike, Sheeran By Lowden presents the ultimate musical instrument: the Stadium Edition acoustic guitar. This exceptional guitar isn’t just any instrument; it’s a forensic replica of Ed Sheeran’s personal stage guitar, which accompanied him throughout his monumental Mathematics Tour. Handcrafted Excellence and Limited Availability Sheeran By…

[dijidweeeb]

The Dovetail Joint, Log Cabin Construction, Home Building

[sjw-themes]

Traditional Kitchen Open concept kitchen - huge traditional galley dark wood floor and brown floor open concept kitchen idea with a farmhouse sink, shaker cabinets, white cabinets, granite countertops, gray backsplash, stone tile backsplash, stainless steel appliances, an island and black countertops

[geocyclist]

Band saw dovetail jig, 1:8 slope

[makswoodworking]

Woodworking Joinery Techniques: A Comprehensive Guide for All Skill Levels

Woodworking joinery techniques are an essential part of any woodworker’s skillset, as they help create sturdy and visually appealing connections between wooden parts. In this article, we will delve into some popular woodworking joinery techniques, discuss their applications, and provide step-by-step instructions for mastering them. Whether you’re a seasoned woodworker or just starting, this guide…

[get-back-homeward]

PAUL: Do you want to start it again then?

JOHN: No, you do it then. I’ll just…play—

PAUL: Nooo, no!

JOHN: —‘cause you’ll never hear it with two of us. Anyway just sing—

PAUL: Anyway, you know how to sing it. You know how to do it.

JOHN: Okay, well, I can’t quite sing it.

PAUL: Oh, yeah, okay. Just a critical…mic (?). Can you read that?

JOHN: Yeah, I can read it okay, Paul. Right! You play on your track, and I’ll play on mine.

[payasita]

dovetail-jointed

[power-chords]

Charles Gladfelter, you get me!

[adubsar]

Dovetail joints in Achaemenid Palaces

Dovetail joints have been used in woodworking for thousands of years. About 2,500 years ago in ancient Iran (Persia) they were also used in the construction of Achaemenid palaces (such as Persepolis, Susa or Bardak Siah Palace in Bushehr province in the south of Iran). (550 to 330 BC). They were used to connect different stone parts of the structures.

Photo Source

Joining two pieces of stone with a dovetail joint at Persepolis.

This method has also been used in Urartu, Median, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations.

[bsaka7]

Amy Lawrence: When Arsenal faced new challengers, Arteta and his players found new solutions (full text below)

The Tottenham Hotspur DJ cranked up the volume at full time as Arsenal’s players made their way towards their supporters. It seemed like an attempt to drown out the provocative noise of celebration, but Mikel Arteta didn’t need words to express himself as he went to embrace his players. All week, they pushed themselves when Arsenal dearly needed it and the manager’s compliments after the 1-0 win were heartfelt.

Preparations for this match had thrown up complication after complication. “I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t sleep much,” Arteta said. “I looked ahead to Spurs for four or five days and I had a clear plan how to do it. I prepared all the meetings, the training sessions and everything. Then I get the news that we’ve lost a player, and then another player and then another player, and I had to completely change it and adapt the plan to the players that we had available. It was a great challenge.”

Rising to that challenge was something he and his players addressed with seriousness and sacrifice. It required adaptability, mental and physical willingness, and, for some of the personnel out on the pitch, the determination to stretch their body to the limits.

Jorginho, who pressed and harassed and was a general nuisance to the opposition with the leadership necessary for the occasion, was cramped up in stoppage time. It was only his third full 90 minutes for Arsenal this calendar year. Jurrien Timber, who has been feeling his way back carefully from his anterior cruciate ligament injury, played with combative relish to start and finish a Premier League match for the first time.

There was a perception that this was a good time to play Arsenal, with the first-choice midfield decimated. At one point, there were four Hale End teenagers watching on and warming up from the sidelines.

The team meetings building up to this north London derby were intense and full of heart. Can you play 90 minutes? Yes. Can you play a different position? Yes. Whatever the question, they endeavoured to give a positive answer. Every player selected stood tall, listened, adjusted and bristled with positive attitude. This was a match about finding solutions to problems.

Strategically, Arsenal turned to a good, old-fashioned 4-4-2. It was a practical way of best using the limited resources available, to pair Jorginho and Thomas Partey in central midfield so they could share the load, while Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli were positioned to scrap when necessary and zip forward when possible.

Kai Havertz, with Leandro Trossard in support, dovetailed efficiently enough. But it was the defence, the rock upon which this team is built, that enabled Arsenal to tackle this game with confidence, despite the deficiencies they would have preferred to do without.

Let’s talk about Arsenal’s back line for a moment. They have a culture, a shared love of defending, an inbuilt understanding between them, which has created a collective fearlessness. That is about to get its biggest test next weekend at Manchester City.

But in general, the way they help each other out and defend as a group, rather than individuals, makes them bigger than the sum of their already impressive parts. It must be wearing for attackers trying to break them down.

The partnership of William Saliba and the matchwinner Gabriel is well established, but it was notable that David Raya and Timber, two newer members of the rearguard, played with character and authority.

Raya’s calmness and confidence have kicked on enormously since last season. As for Timber, this felt like a breakout performance. He played so assertively that it felt as if he had been part of this for years. Winning this match with his own contribution felt like a moment when he was officially inducted into the back four. Welcome, Jurrien, to this very exclusive joint.

Arsenal needed a moment, a hero, to seize all the points and it came when Saka delivered a perfect invitation for Gabriel to turn his head into a human cannon ready to fire the ball into the happy oblivion of the Tottenham net.

Arteta was delighted with the collective response from his squad. “Loving the game means that you can do things regardless of the context,” he says. “Jorginho loves the game. When he’s not playing, he’s training like an animal every day even though he’s won everything. When you ask him to play 90 minutes, which he hasn’t played for months, he can do it.

“The same with Jurrien. It’s been a year out and he hasn’t played 90 minutes at all. He was struggling but he managed to do it for the team. Kai, without a pre-season, I don’t know how many minutes he’s played, but he was unbelievable. All of them — that’s the spirit and the characters we have that I love.

“It’s a tough week coming and, instead of finding excuses, we did the opposite. The team got hungrier and hungrier to play the game. We have people that are hard and have thick skin. They love the game and we love winning. To love the game and win, you have to do things that people call ugly. ”

The fixture list hardly threw up a gentle set of away games to open the season, with Aston Villa, Tottenham and Manchester City in early succession. Even though the performances have not been perfect enough for Arteta, finding ways to win the first two, without conceding a goal, augurs well.

The week ahead remains hugely demanding, with a Champions League trip to Bergamo to play Atalanta, before the Etihad and all the vibrations that brings.

There will be more problems, more questions and the need for more solutions. One thing Arteta can be sure of is that his players will do their absolute best to find them.

[fallingtowers]

so i'm watching dollhouse currently, and watching a non-buffyverse whedon joint has got me thinking about the phenomenon of whedonspeak. it's fascinating to me, because there have been plenty of moments in dollhouse where a character has said something patently whedonesque and i've been like :/ ahh yeah i see why people can't stand this style of writing. but on btvs, where the dialogue is generally a lot more heightened than on dollhouse, it really doesn't bother me at all (outside of a handful of really egregious examples).

the big reason for this, i think, and the one i always bring up when i'm defending the dialogue on btvs, is that on btvs it always felt like a tool of characterization. at first blush it may seem like e.g. buffy and willow have very similar voices, but the truth is it's all stylized, but in different ways. and btvs is so good at characterization (a lot better, i would argue, than dollhouse) that by the end of the show you know the characters' voices so well that you can clock it instantly when a line isn't 100% in character. it helps, i think, that btvs is patient zero for this kind of dialogue -- it became an established style of the show, but it wasn't yet an established style of writing in general (note that before it was known as whedonspeak, it used to be called "buffyspeak"). it works well because it's tailored to the tonal sensibilities of btvs, whereas if you just slap it onto any old story it's bound to feel incongruous and grating.

(also, as a sidenote, by and large, btvs knew exactly when to drop the banter. that's another thing -- these days whedonspeak as a concept is so bound up in people's minds [and with good reason!] with that particular brand of annoying mcu-ass ironic storytelling that has to mock itself at every turn for fear of coming across as self-serious. but btvs is a very heartfelt work of art! it [not always, but often] takes the emotions of its characters seriously! when buffy comes home and finds her mom dead on the couch, she doesn't go "well that just happened." you hit a certain threshold of dramatic weight and the whedonspeak falls away.)

there's another reason it's become so pervasive, though, i think, and it's one i kind of sympathize with. it's got to do with the demands of television as a medium. i think modern tv and film is the form of storytelling that has the biggest gulf between Showing and Telling. like, in a novel or a comic or whatever, you can just use narration to shed light on a character's thoughts or plans or whatever, but on screen you don't have that luxury, and these days voiceovers and flashbacks and stuff are generally regarded as being kind of graceless. so you've got Showing, which always runs the risk of being too vague and confusing, and you've got Telling -- and dialogue is really your only method of Telling -- which comes with a whole host of potential pitfalls. it might feel too on-the-nose, or too stiff and contrived. or it might commit the cardinal sin of 21st century entertainment: being Boring.

that's the thing, right. screenwriters are always trying to figure out how to do good exposition. one instance of dialogue i found grating on dollhouse is a scene where echo is dreaming, and the audience needs to be told she understands she's dreaming. so what do you do? in writing, you'd just describe her moment of realization, but on tv you can't do that. so instead, they have echo go, "oookay... i think we can all agree this isn't real." which like, if we view it as an attempt to content with the limitations of the medium, it makes sense! she's alone, so she has no reason to say "this is a dream," so we solve that problem by having her make a little joke to herself. but in practice, it just kind of falls flat.

in conclusion, the art of writing dialogue is one thing and the art of writing exposition is another, and neither is at all easy, and in screenwriting specifically they often dovetail in a particularly torturous way. we're still gonna be trying to figure this out when the sun burns out probably. i certainly don't have an answer. i do have a piece of advice though: watch buffy the vampire slayer. it's really good, and the dialogue is only a little annoying

[even-in-arcadia]

Hey your tags on lighthouse design are so, so cool! The first eddystone light seems a contender for “most haunted lamp around” hehe

Ah I'm so glad you found it interesting! It is definitely very haunted - aside from the men who were swept away there was another keeper who died at 94 when the light caught on fire and he ingested molten lead while trying to douse the flames. (He lived for 12 days afterward somehow!) And that's not even mentioning all the ships the rocks claimed before the lights were built!

The Royal Greenwich Museum has a gorgeous wooden architectural model which gives an even better idea of what a feat of engineering the Smeaton design was:

and here's an illustration of how the dovetail joints were cut into the rock! (!!!)

and finally since I'm already here proving WAY more information than you asked for, dear anon, here is a jaunty little tune that is ostensibly about the keeper (and his mermaid wife) but has nothing to do with lighthouse construction:

[cadere-art]

The Abimaat are an offshoot of the basin region Apinaat people: when the southern invasion of the Apinaat Hordes was broken by the allied Gican and Cianjian, they remained trapped in the South and settled there. They live off their caviþ herds in a climate much colder and arid than the one their ancestors were born to. The Abimaat are pygmies: the caviþ (pronounced cha-vith) they raise and ride would be too small for adult antioles of any other nation. They frequently enter in violent conflict with the Cianjian, but have reached fragile accords with the Gichan among which their services as mounted warriors or messengers are highly valued.

Life south of the Kantishian mountains is hard for the Abimaat. Their life's blood, the caviþ, are not adapted to the much colder climate, and they frequently suffer frost injuries to their bare legs and necks. The increased care needs has much reduced the number of animals an Abimaat clan can keep, diminishing their wealth and food security. Where the Apinaat loved their livestock, the Abimaat treasure them, putting the same amount of work into saddle blankets and neck warmers as they do for their own clothes. Abimaat produce beautiful tapestry works, woven in a single piece to their final shape. Their work is not fine, producing heavy fabrics of thick yarns, but the colorwork, dovetailed color joints, and striking abstract shapes gives it a high value nonetheless.

[wordsandrobots]

Wishing on Space Hardware: Trivia and the cutting room floor

Having finished the single longest writing project I've ever done, I find myself with a number of bits and pieces left over.

To be fair, I also invite you to contribute to the pile by letting me know if there are any extra scenes you'd like to see based on my truly excessive amount of Iron-Blooded Orphans fanfic. The ask box is open for that and anything else you'd like to prompt me to write about.

However, there remains a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final story and a lot of little details I feel are worth commenting on. So as I luxuriate in not having to spend the week editing chapters any more, I thought I'd share a couple of quick lists regarding the process and what got cut out of it. For posterity, at least.

Spoilers for the fics, obviously, and since they're post-canon, spoilers for IBO as well (go watch it if you have not, it is very, very good, hence the 656,000 words I wrote as a direct consequence [not counting the essays. Jeepers, I'll have to tot it all up some day and get the grand total).

Ahem. Anyway. Trivia!

First up, I must publicly credit penitence_road (on Tumblr as @stillness-in-green)’s excellent IBO fics for inspiring one of the major threads in WoSH (I've mentioned this in author notes but the debt cannot be overstated). The phrase 'Almiria's Adolescent Apocalypse' lodged in my brain and became a mission statement. I did try to steer in a completely different direction regarding the specifics (hence why Todo is very much not a part of the core gang), but the main thrust was all about taking that description and seeing how I could flesh it out. (Go read these fics, my goodness.)

Second, there are, of course, mythology gags referencing the wider Gundam franchise sprinkled liberally throughout. Some I've already called out in author notes, but I believe managed to reference Gundam 79, Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, Char's Counterattack, Gundam Wing, Turn A Gundam, Gundam SEED, Gundam 00, and Reconguista in G in more or less explicit ways. See if you can spot them all!

I named Skoll and Hati with specific reference to their roles in the Poetic Eda. That is, I thought of them as 'the moon-hunter Gundam' and 'the sun-killed Schwalbe', respectively, in reference to their rolls harassing the Arianrhod Fleet (formally the Outer Lunar Orbit Joint Fleet) and destroying the Ahab reactor factory. But also they reflect their pilots' temperaments, with Skoll 'the mocker' being flown by Embi and Hati 'the hater' by Lin.

Spaceships Baldr and the Váli were named in a similar fashion, for their connections to Ragnarök (Váli is Vidar's brother, another of the gods who survive the final battle), and I chose to describe the finale as 'Ragnarök' in the first place because in the sagas, it represents a renewal of the world, rather than a complete end. Quite apart from the Norse influence on Gjallarhorn's whole deal, the cyclical nature dovetailed nicely with what I was trying to do with the story.

I had a very near miss with Skoll in that I wrote it as being based on ASW-G-15 Eligos, named after a demon that took the form of a handsome knight who can see the future. Some months later, the IBO-G app would reveal ASW-G-16 Zepar, the very next Gundam in the sequence, whose namesake's appearance as a red-garbed soldier seems to have been muddled with Eligos in some of the sources I checked. I am really quite relieved I didn't have to rework anything there, but it was close!

Visually, the deconstructed Char-clone that is Almiria's gang channel aspects of other iterations of the trope, with Asher obviously replicating Montag, Embi settling vaguely in the region of Quattro (that is, a more civilian-mode masked man), and Almira assaying McGillis in a way that probably lands not a millions miles from Rau. But I was primarily thinking of Relena's Sanc Kingdom outfit for her, so the 'general's' coat is a lot fancier.

The media-savvy ally to Victor Handa in Revolution for Beginners... is the same cameraman who filmed Kudelia's pivotal broadcast at the conclusion of Season 1's Dort arc. Those events seemed like they would have consequences for the journalists involved and in Hajime's case, that involved being swayed fully over to the workers' movement.

I invented Alessio as a character to counter-balance Iverson and ensure I had some non-villainous non-binary rep. That I picked the stoutest background character model I could find was not unrelated to this, though it's also an *interesting* model, especially coupled to the ones around him/them in the big group shot.

Doc Chaifin, meanwhile, just sort of happened. Sometimes characters do that.

I wrote a significant chunk of the sex scene (well, post-sex scene) in To Catch a Falling Star while sitting in a car park, waiting for my partner to come back from an appointment. This was mainly because the fic was absolutely consuming my brain and I'd discovered the joys of using a mobile phone to write notes (I put off getting a smart phone for a long, long time).

With respect to the Calamity War recording segments of Eugene Sevenstark and the Hesperus Treasure, my working head-canon is that Agnika Kaieru had a science/engineering background. Or, well, I think he moved in a social circle full of scientists and engineers before getting started on the war effort. I also have this notion that his parents at least were part of the corporate class, distinct from the aristocratic class from which people like the Bauduins and Fareeds emerged. But I never sat down to work it all out in full, as that wasn't required for the story.

Regarding Hesperus, I kind of fudged a lot to get the story to work. I'd sort of assumed Radonitsa Colony was a post-War construct rather than something pre-existing, which isn't really supported by the Urdr Hunt game. So the idea of it being a composite of different space platforms bolted around a space elevator terminal is perhaps a bit of a stretch. I still like it though, the basic concept of doing archaeology on space stations.

There's a lot of stuff I did in the moment, to get an individual fic to work, that I was later able to basically repurpose as long-term plot-points. I didn't actually intend for the 'There are three things you need to know to understand what comes next' bit to set up the salvager ship in the finale, or the pluma in Let Sleeping Angels Lie to set-up for what the McGillis faction would do with the leftovers of Season 2's events. But having those things set up gave me some wonderful 'ah ha' moments as I marshalled the overall plot. If nothing else, I got quite a rush out of realising both Gaelio's weaponised wheelchair and the beach house's lethal defences were there to use.

...try not to think too hard about how excited I got figuring out a convoluted assassination method. I'm certainly going to try not to.

The plot really kicked into gear for me with The Ares Affair. Up to then, I'd been coasting on character interactions and fix-its. But then all the consequences suddenly coalesced in my brain and I went, 'oh, this is what we're doing, is it?'

In addition to the playlists I've already put up, grown-up!Almiria's theme is Bach's Polonaise in G Minor on the harpsichord because it is *precisely* what you'd get if you pitched Rustal Elion's theme higher and more playful.

I still have no proper explanation for why A New England stuck in my head so hard when I was writing th first few fics. But I'm glad it did because it gave me a killer series title, if I do say so myself.

I tried extremely hard to make sure everyone in the anime cast got some kind of moment in the spotlight or at least a mention. Think I did a pretty good job on that front, overall.

And to wrap up on that point, yes, the narrator who occasionally addresses you directly is a character from the show. I'd be terribly interested to hear if any of you've worked out who. (It might not be strictly guessable, since there isn't anything gesturing at it per se; I just imagined it being their voice and it kind of fits, thematically.)

Now let's open the door to the cutting room!

The big one is that when I originally planned out the plot of Revolution for Beginners and Polyamory for Dumbasses, a key part of the uprising in the Dort Colonies was going to be the hackers allied with Ride knocking out the nearby Ariadne beacons in order to blind Earth to what was happening. Gjallarhorn would then have analysed the computer virus they used, and that would have been the basis for them messing about with the Network in the final stretch of fics. In the end, there simply wasn't enough room to fit any more threads into that fic and the more I thought it over, the more I decided this would be weighting the balance of power wrong. It'd be too much of a flat-out win for the colonists. Joshua's appearance on Ariadne One -- which had been intended to set things up for the beacon-hacking -- remained, just recontextualised as a clue to who was responsible for the attack in Frozen Sunlight, and a small bit of character development for this OC. I repurposed the remainder of this plot as a way to tie Ride's arc into Almiria's (she taps him for the hacking resources as a result of them messing with Ariadne One's sensors instead) and made 'Höðr' an entirely Gjallarhorn project.

The delay to the release of the Urdr Hunt mobile game drastically changed the opening to arc 4 and had knock-on effects for how the grand finale worked. Because I thought I'd have more to work with in terms of plot and characters of the game when it came time to do the writing, I'd assumed I'd be able to work in appearances from Urdr Hunt's cast. I'd planned a much bigger pay off to the idea of Radonitsa Colony's tourist board trying to get the Martain Chairperson to visit, which was that Atra and Akatsuki would have gone alone with Eugene and Sri. The whole 'let's pretend we're here to assess the facilities on behalf of the Martian government' would have been more than a passing joke and instead been a full-on cover story, with Wistario and the his friends scrambling to put on a good show. This would, I admit, mainly have existed to set up a rather dumb gag whereby Sri and Akatsuki would have been the only ones not distracted by Nanao Narolina's everything in a room full of straight male or bisexual adults. But with the delayed release of the game, I needed a drastic rethink, hence bringing in Zaza and having the whole adventure take place with the Urdr Hunt characters off-screen (I even made it vague as to whether they were the ones running the colony, just in case I needed to swing it as someone else taking over following a tragic or failed ending). Ultimately I am very happy this happened, since I didn't especially gel with the protagonists of the game and it gave me greater opportunity to play with my beloved manga cast. But it did mean my idea of having both spin-off heroes come to the rescue at a dramatic juncture never materialised.

This proved to be single biggest alteration to my plotting for the final arc, too. Initially, the escape from Earth was going to be a lot more dramatic. For one thing, I was planning for the whole 'Yamagi gets left behind' element to happen in orbit, with Shino and Eugene actually present. Some sort of ship to ship transfer going wrong, people going adrift in space, that kind of thing. For another, I had the idea of bringing both Gundams Astaroth and Hajiroboshi into play, for a proper 'fight our way through the blockade' moment. Wistario was going to swoop to the rescue as the shuttle broke atmosphere, there'd be pursuit, and I'd wreck as many cop cars Grazes as I could get away with in some protracted chase sequence before we got to the big NOOOO moment. Yeah. But obviously without knowing Wistario's real personality or situation post-game, I didn't have enough material to work with and plans changed. For the better, I think, given the characters moments it allowed me to have and given that Wiz's character is one of my least favourite parts of IBO's extended media. But yeah. I was aiming for a proper team-up, the kind where you could have different people's theme music kicking in as they swooped into view, and it was not to be.

History of a Catastrophe. Oh boy. As I noted at the time, this one got away from me a lot in terms of length. I ended up cutting three complete scenes in an effort to contain the sprawl. The first to go was one focused on Ville Klaassen, (main?) villain of the Moon Steel manga, who I'd already had cameo in Of Obsessions and Erotemes. I wanted to gesture more towards a conclusion for the manga's story, extending from what I'd laid down previously, but ultimately that was too low a priority to justify adding to the word count, so out it went. Given the alternating structure of this fic (it switches between what is broadly 'Julieta's strand' and 'Almiria's strand), that meant cutting a later scene as well and I opted to ditch a brief cutaway to Embi, mainly because it just repeated stuff I'd already establish in A Handful of Rusted Petals. And possibly because of this cut, or because I'd just mucked up the ordering at some point, I also had to get rid of a scene between two of Gjallarhorn's high command that, while cute from an office politics point of view, didn't really contribute much else.

Actually, since these are all quite short, I might as well put them in here so you can see what you weren't missing!

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P.D. 327 – In the middle of entirely unrelated events; Gjallarhorn branch office, Prague

“I'm sorry, is this a bad time?”

Ville Klaassen pushes his briefcase and hat across the desk, out of sight of the terminal screen. “Not at all. I'm just in the middle of preparing for a business trip.”

The Police Bureau officer's eyebrow twitches. “Hopefully this shouldn't take up much of your time. I'm calling regarding two cases you worked on in the aftermath of the McGillis Fareed Incident.”

That explains the highly-secured channel, which demanded Ville confirm he was alone before it would establish an encrypted link. “Oh yes?”

“I'm specifically referring to events at Research Station AD-5, and the investigation into the Fareed Charitable School.”

“The Alaya-Vijnana research? Of course.” The murdered scientists, the destroyed data – evidence of a zealot's self-mutilation turned to so much ash and broken glass. “What of it?”

“This is your official notification that information on these cases has been deemed deleterious to the public good and will henceforth be restricted to category five clearance.”

Interesting. The research Ville can understand, but a school –? Oh, that's right. Those rumours concerning Lord Iznario's predilections. “I was only peripheral to the second investigation. I wouldn't even have been on the ground for the first, had internal affairs not been so short-handed.”

Clearly the exact details of the involvement are irrelevant. “Please sign the forms now being sent to your inbox to confirm you have received this notification. Since you only hold level four clearance, you are not permitted to discuss the indicated cases unless ordered to do so by a superior with level five clearance or above. I am additionally required to run a remote-access search on your Gjallarhorn-issue devices to purge any data pertaining to these cases.”

“Remote access?” Ville asks, a drop of sweat forming at the top of his spine and seeming to fall right the way down it. “Now?”

“The scan must be run as soon as is viable.” There is an overly-deliberate pause. “Do you object?”

Such a rookie error. Ville curses himself inwardly. “Naturally not.” He casts a glance at the pad on the other side of his desk, still displaying the surveillance feed from this morning. “Will you need to scan my personal devices as well?”

“I am not authorised to do so, since under level four clearance, you will not have been permitted to take personal copies of relevant information.”

“Forgive me, I merely wished to be certain.” Opening the security menu on the terminal, he checks his settings. Shouldn't be too much of a risk since he isn't amateur enough to conduct his outside dealings using work equipment. “Please go ahead.”

“Thank you,” says the officer once the progress bar has run its course. “No excisions required.”

“I try to keep things tidy.”

“Please sign the forms promptly. Good day.”

Doing as instructed, Ville wonders what will become of the staff and 'students' of the school. They must surely know plenty of juicy details that would be deleterious to Gjallarhorn's good name… on any other day, he'd consider stretching feelers in that direction, just to see what he might find…

The pad twitters. Fresh footage of two people on a street corner, a skinny blonde with a crutch beside a big, white-haired man, both huddled in cheap anoraks.

Ville snarls, grabbing his hat and dialling furiously. “Nanao,” he snaps as soon as the comm connects, “the Warren boy and his employer's pet thug are right outside the building! I cannot have them causing a scene here. Where the hell are you?”

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P.D. 327 – More than two years after Tekkadan's last battle; Chryse, Mars

First time Embi takes Fly-Away, he doesn't stop giggling for four hours.

He floats on a cloud of painlessness, the ghosts and memories lost somewhere way below him as the vapour swirls happily inside his head. His brother is dead. He's constantly surrounded by the people Elgar died for. And right now, he doesn't care. About any of it! It feels so good!

Crashing afterwards sucks. Not getting the shakes bad. It just stinks to be stuck with all the usual feelings. He has fucked-up nightmares about carrying Elgar through the desert, a dead weight clinging tight to his back. Barely gets through the day without starting a fight. Tries to punch Hirume for asking what's wrong.

The solution is obvious. Embi gets some more Fly-Away and the second time is even better.

So it becomes a pattern. Get the money to buy what he needs to make things a little less shit for a while. Burn through that. Rinse. Repeat.

Everyone keeps telling him he needs to find something to live for, right? He guesses this is it.

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P.D. 329 – Some time later; a private dining room at The Blue Horn, Vingolf

The Director General of the Inspection Bureau sniffs, as he is wont to do whenever he wishes to delay speaking. “Lord Iznario's death is being ruled misadventure. As… anticipated.”

The Regulatory Chief of Staff eyes him from across the table, fingernails digging ever so slightly into the white cloth laid between them. “Indeed it is.”

There is a heavy pause, the kind filled with common understandings that cannot be said aloud.

“You don't think…”

“I wouldn't know.” The Chief of Staff adjusts her forks. “That falls in your purview, not mine.”

“The Police Bureau is… not my bag either. Unless there's evidence of misdemeanour, the investigation is beyond our scope.”

“Is there? Evidence?”

The Director General fiddles with the cuffs of his tunic. “Seems the old man just muddled his tablets and didn't care about watching his diet.”

“The Seven Stars always thought they were above mere mortals.”

“Yes. Yes…”

Another, heavily pause.

“Convenient, at least,” concludes the Chief of Staff. “One less remnant of the old order, hanging around.”

The Director General coughs. “You know I'll be retiring in the new year? Lord – I mean, Commander Elion has some up-and-coming young fellow picked out to replace me.”

“I heard. Is he up to the job?”

“Mm. Probably. Didn't… get much say in the decision.”

“How democratic.”

“Hm.”

A waiter glides into the third silence, bowing obsequiously. “Madam, sir? Your entrées.”

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As I said, nothing especially mind-blowing. I also had a slightly different opening to the segment featuring the pluma, which I again cut for length, but that I rather liked, as a conceit.

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Can a machine remember?

It is possible for a machine to record. Pluma ASW-A-H-011_sub:27 can access data on its previous combat deployments at any time, to support its tactical algorithms. It can return the dimensions of the space freighter it disabled on its last activation, the topography of the desert it traversed during the battle before that, or images of the colossal detonation that led to it becoming buried for ERROR: UNABLE_TO_SYNC years.

But that is not remembering as you would understand it. Memory is imperfect, riddled with loss of clarity and skewed by emotional prejudice. A machine records raw, uncaring facts, free from conscious understanding of why they occur. Even if it performs tasks based on the patterns it detects, even if that performance resembles intelligence, it is most likely nothing more than a cascade of hollow logic, as insensible to wider context as a pebble dropping into the sea.

These, then, are the facts.

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On the subject of aborted starts, here is something I sketched for a putative 'Wistario segment' of the Arc 4 opening story, which as discussed never materialised:

Wisterio Afam is having a bad day. That is to say, he's not having a good day. In the grand scheme of things it probably doesn't count as truly terrible given that nothing is presently on fire and as far as he knows the colony isn't being attacked right this minute. He personally is being assailed from all sides but that largely seems to be on the scale of a cosmic joke whereby all his carefully laid plans are coming apart at the stitching.

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And finally, just because I thought it was clever at the time, a reprise segment from Love, Death and Cannoli that I again cut for length, but that would have repeated the echoing memory trick from To Catch a Falling Star chapter 11, with Yamagi recalling lines of dialogue with Shino that were (mostly) from my fics rather than the anime:

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Suns turn into black holes if they get too big and die. So it is with his feelings. Gravitationally crushing.

I don't want perfect. I want you.

What a dumb thing to say.

(There's something wrong with me.)

But isn't it better to be wrong together than apart?

Do you think if we're both worrying it's our fault, that's a sign of something?

At least there are similarities in how they're screwed up, for whatever comfort that is.

(You're here and you're – you're mine.)

And Yamagi will hold on with hands and teeth and everything he's got.

Jeez, you're so uptight sometimes.

He can be fierce too, if it's necessary.

(Of course I want to be out there with you.)

Right to the very end.

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I've a few more partial scenes in my planning document, but they're mostly things I reworked for the actual posted versions, rather than cutting entirely. Stuff like some of the flashbacks Shino has to his pre-Tekkadan days were originally in different places and the conversation between Yamagi and Ordsley wound up requiring a lot of changes as the story developed. I think that about covers all the major deviations from my original outline.

Oh, except for Gundam Paimon. I swear I meant to figure out what to do with that thing, eventually, but in the end it just remained hanging on the wall. Ah well.

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Something something about Eddie trying to glue wood and plastic together but not having the right glue to make it work.

Two different materials that don’t bond well together and gluing them will never be as strong as proper joints when putting the same material together - not needing glue to hold them in a relationship because they can be dovetailed