#posting publicly in case anyone else is wondering

[feather-bone]

Can I steal borrow your “make a creature with me” idea?

Hi, yes, please feel free! It was fun :-) ✨

[trollbriidge]

Hey, if I were to maybe... Buy the terraria inspired fantroll, would I be allowed to make a pngtuber rig with it? Or use it in a fancomic, at least? I RLY love the design and someone might buy it first but I would ADORE doing smth w it

oh absolutely! my designs are completely free use for anything :3

[boomtubes]

hi! can I ask where your pfp is from? I saw panels of a comic but it was years ago and I've been trying to find it again.

Hi! It’s from the Secrets of Sinister House Vol.2 it’s a Halloween special from 2019 <3

[serafimo]

Which phantom performance does your header image come from? I have a desperate thirst

hello my friend!! it's from a west end trailer <3 you can watch it right here!! happens at the 2:40 mark <3

[the-eternal-child]

Just noticed something...

This part of Iron Flame noting how Riders are usually discouraged from politics and are discouraged from keeping their family seats.

Xaden's grandfather who was Sgaeyl's former rider was said to have died without making it out the quadrant. We know assassination attempts on students with powerful parents happens. So maybe this was an assassination carried out because of the power dynamics mentioned above. The future Duke of Aretia being a rider? Bonded to one of the strongest dragons out there?! It's what I'm thinking because why else mention the fact that he died while in the school? Info drops like these are purposeful.

My first question is timeline wise... WHEN did he have Fen 🤣🤣?!! I'm assuming he wasn't married since you can't get married until you leave... Unless he was married before entering the quadrant. Maybe marriages don't play that much of a part in the legitimacy of heirs for the Tyrrish 🤷🏾‍♀️.

Next question is, was this a case like Aaric? He found out what was going on and decided having a dragon would help the effort to fight the venin?

It brings me back to my questions in a previous post wondering about how much the Tyrrish know.

They're described through out the series as having been the last to join the unification, seen as troublesome or prone to unrest by Navarrian leadership, the Tyrs describe themselves as being 'loyal to their own' which makes me think of the kind of cultural identity people have when they're discriminated against...

It seems like the Tyrrish have been aware of the fate of the continent for a long time - or maybe only their leadership? They maybe have always had issues with Navarrian rulership decisions and being last to the party of unification and objecting to things would give them the reputation of being 'too proud' or 'thinking they're too good to submit to the king'.

Maybe Fen grew up being aware why his father died and decided to try another route to change. Let us become our own country so we can deal with this problem ourselves.

And the Navarrian top brass like Markham were just waiting to finally have a reason to drop the hammer on the Tyrrish people. Crushing a rebellion is one thing... But to raize a capital city to the ground?! A city described as having been beautiful?

Seems like a purposeful psychological blow to the people. Very publicly defame your beloved leader, take out almost everyone affiliated even loosely with the rebellion planning - Liam's father's execution even though he wasn't involved, and I bet he wasn't the only family member to get that treatment - they'd even wanted to execute the damn children! Cripple their financial centre by burning the capital, which would give them something else to focus on in the years to come, trying to rebuild their lives!

They humbled them, invalidated the claim they fought for, crippled them financially and painted a target on their back for the disdain of the rest of the kingdom. Amber Mavis was literally described as 'one of the good ones' because her family didn't take part in the rebellion!

Jesus fking christ!! Someone stop me! Cue 'make it stooooopp!!' screams like Jeremiah 😅😅

The more I think about this damn series the more insidious things start to look, the more glaring Navarre's crimes. The Tyrrish are entitled to freaking reparations man 😭😭!!!

[lucky-clover-gazette]

captive prince book 1 highlights & annotations

chapter 4

indented text is from the book. some quotes have commentary, some do not. some comments are serious, and some are definitely not. most of them will only make sense to people who have read the series. and, like, there are spoilers. so please read the books first if you're interested!

also: part of the reason i'm doing such a close reading is to study cs pacat's style, especially in terms of how she does romance and erotica. there are "craft notes" that might seem weird, like i'm being redundant or restating something rather than analyzing, but those are more things that i want to remember/take away from the writing!

i'm going to tag these longer posts with "sam reads capri" in case anyone wants to read them all at once.

this is a google doc i wrote with overall content warnings for the captive prince series. it's not perfect, but i do think it's important to include.

‘The Prince really . . . did this.’ ‘Who else?’ Damen said. Radel had stepped forward, and slapped Damen across the face; it was a hard slap, and the man wore three rings on each finger. ‘What did you do to him?’ Radel demanded.

context: laurent’s plan worked 🎉 they’re cancelling damen instead of him! for now, at least

A bed replaced the floor cushions, so that he could lie comfortably on his stomach (to protect his back). He was also given blankets and various coloured silk wraps, though he must use them to cover the lower half of his body only (to protect his back). The chain remained, but instead of attaching to his collar it was locked to one golden wrist-cuff (to protect his back).

craft note: i like this repetition

Inspecting Damen’s back, Orlant had—not without some pride—proclaimed the Prince a cast-iron bitch, and clapped Damen cheerfully on the shoulder, turning him momentarily ashen.

“cast iron bitch.” iconic.

craft note: the subtle joke of a recently flogged damen getting a congratulatory pat on the back is great

It surprised Damen how loyal they were to their Prince, and how diligent in his service, airing none of the grudges and complaints that he might have expected, considering Laurent’s noxious personality.

this is a funny dig, and another hint that laurent mayyyyy not be quite as horrible as he seems from damen's limited perspective...

‘They say he’s frigid.’ Damen stared at him.  ‘What? Why?’ ‘Well,’ said Jord, ‘because he doesn’t—’ ‘I meant why is he so,’ said Damen, cutting off Jord’s prosaic explanation firmly. ‘Why is snow cold?’ said Jord with a shrug.

“a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort” (sharp objects, gillian flynn)

‘The paint’s smudged,’ said Radel to one of the servants, after assessing Damen’s body and face. ‘There. And there. Reapply it.’ ‘I thought the Prince didn’t like paint,’ said Damen. ‘He doesn’t,’ said Radel.

context: this wasn’t laurent’s call, but the regent’s. interesting how this could be a relief to a first-time reader.

The Regent wanted to discipline his nephew, and, with the Council behind him, had chosen to do it in public. A public flogging, Damen had said.

context: regent wants to publicly shame laurent for literally flogging damen, using his own flavor of metaphorical flogging. god this place sucks

‘I didn’t think you’d mind. I know you are not so subservient towards Akielos that you would want the slave’s actions to go unpunished just because he is a gift from Kastor.’ The blue-eyed composure was faultless. Laurent, Damen thought with contempt, was good at talking. He wondered if the Regent was regretting doing this in public. But the Regent did not look perturbed, or even surprised. Well, he would be used to dealing with Laurent.

laurent will not take a public flogging without a fight. he tries to turn the court against the regent: “is it not more shameful to make excuses for the akielion, especially considering the alleged assault against me? kastor must be more powerful than you, for you to have such concerns for one of his own” :-)

‘You claim to have administered a just punishment. But the truth is different.’ The Regent gestured, and a man stepped forward. ‘The Prince offered me a gold coin if I could flog the slave to death.’ It was the moment when sympathy palpably swung away from Laurent. Laurent, realising it, opened his mouth to speak, but the Regent cut him off.

regent dismantles laurent’s argument that the flogging was deserved by revealing that laurent bribed the person doing it to actually kill damen. everybody disliked that >:(

‘Be grateful I retain Acquitart,’ said Laurent, ‘which by law you cannot take away and which besides has no accompanying troops and little strategic importance?’ ‘Do you think it pleases me to discipline my own nephew? No uncle acts with a heavier heart. Shoulder your responsibilities—ride to Delfeur—show me you have even a drop of your brother’s blood and I will joyfully restore it all.’ ‘I think there is an old caretaker at Acquitart. Shall I ride to the border with him? We could share armour.’ ‘Don’t be facile. If you agreed to fulfil your duty you would not lack for men.’ ‘Why would I waste my time on the border when, at Kastor’s whim, you roll over?’

laurent: there aren’t people or supplies 

regent: earn back your honor by making it work anyway 

laurent: great, i’ll find the one person willing to help me and we’ll share the single set of armor 

regent: if people actually liked you, you could have more assistance 

laurent: why bother fighting, then, if i could just kiss ass like you?

For the first time, the Regent looked angry. ‘You claim this is a matter of national pride, but you are unwilling to lift a finger to serve your own country. The truth is that you acted out of petty malice, and now you’re smarting at discipline. This is on your own head. Embrace the slave in apology, and we are done.’

regent: L + ratio + hug the guy who killed your brother in front of the entire court

Expecting Laurent to baulk at his uncle’s order, Damen was startled when, after a lingering look at his uncle, Laurent approached, with soft, obedient grace. He hooked a finger in the chain that stretched across Damen’s chest, and drew him forward by it. Damen, feeling the sustained pull at twin points, came as he was bid. With cool detachment, Laurent’s fingers gathered rubies, inclining Damen’s head down far enough to kiss him on the cheek. The kiss was insubstantial: not a single mote of gold paint transferred itself to Laurent’s lips in the process. ‘You look like a whore.’ The soft words barely stirred the air by Damen’s ear, inaudible to anyone else.

this is a strategic move first and foremost, but also… 🫢

Damen recoiled violently, and gold paint smeared. He was staring at Laurent from two paces away, revolted. Laurent lifted the back of his hand to his cheek, now streaked with gold, then turned back to the Regent with a wide-eyed expression of injured innocence.  ‘Witness the slave’s behaviour for yourself. Uncle, you wrong me cruelly. The slave’s punishment on the cross was deserved: you can see for yourself how arrogant and rebellious he is. Why do you punish your own blood when the fault lies with Akielos?’

laurent: he literally just misbehaved. he totally deserved to be flogged. why are you punishing a poor little meow meow like me when this guy is clearly the problem?? (a sentiment which he knows will be intensified by the court’s latent xenophobia)

‘You claim the slave was at fault, and deserved punishment. Very well. He has received it. Now you receive yours. Even you are subject to the rule of Regent and Council. Accept it gracefully.’ Laurent lowered his blue eyes, martyring himself. ‘Yes, uncle.’

regent: deal with it 

laurent: okay :( i accept your unfair punishment :( everyone else seeing this? :(

On the dais, the elderly Councillor Herode was frowning a little, and looking at Laurent for the first time with troubled sympathy.

outcome: laurent loses his nepo baby privileges but makes the regent’s toxic friend group doubt his authority

‘You may hand me the leash,’ said a pleasant voice, very close. Damen looked up into a pair of pellucid blue eyes. Beside him, the handler hesitated. ‘Why do you delay?’ Laurent held out his hand and smiled. ‘The slave and I have embraced and are joyously reconciled.’

improv comedy continues to be laurent’s main coping mechanism

[savagewildnerness]

I understand that this comes from a place of love, but using ChatGPT, the technology which the writers of the show were on strike against, and threatens the livelihoods of people across the film and book industry is something I’d think twice about in the future. Also AI uses an insane amount of water and is horrific for the environment. Just wanting to gently call in as the chatgpt bits came up on my for you page.

I’m so sorry about this and to anyone else who might have been bothered by it! 

I can only be honest and say ChatGPT isn’t something I’d ever used, beyond seeing it on an increasing number of instagram template story posts, requesting people join in.  Personally, I used it for this only as I’d missed Armand’s birthday and in wondering what to play for him, as he’s such a curious character, I wondered what it’d say about him and in full honesty I was using it exactly as I might use Siri (now I wonder if Siri is equally bad?  Because I have definitely had nights where I’ve sat for hours asking Siri to tell me poems and if he loves me and… eek…?)

In any case, for full clarity, let me please state I am anti AI in terms of creativity. I don’t want to read or watch any thing created by AI & feel it is utterly against the essence of art. I am anti AI replacing people’s jobs (beyond that I will definitely need AI to care for me one day, so I hope that might exist if I make it to be old enough to need it. I mean... use it to replace mundane things that can give us all more creative freedom and time and leisure and life! Not for art.)

In any case, I found what ChatGPT had said about Armand funny (as opposed to artistically poignant) and because it made me laugh I asked it about Gabrielle and Nicolas.  It was only intended as silliness, and I was thoughtless & flippant about it, but I obviously won’t do it for the other vampires now! The are more than enough words from the actual books & TV show and indeed my own brain and all of yours too!

But thanks, as you’ve also saved me from potential addiction, asking ChatGPT stupid questions. Which I hadn’t tried, but I foresee that I could perhaps have ended up doing that.  I won’t use it again anyway.

Regarding the environmental impact, I had no idea about that either.  May we all do what we can for the environment (even though I fear we’re beyond hope. Not to be a fatalist, but…)

I’m far from perfect, but do what I can.  I haven’t been on a plane since 2014 (but that’s not to say I would never!  So call be a hypocrite.  But in any case, I haven’t in a decade) & don’t eat meat (I haven’t eaten meat since I was 10, but I’m only pescatarian so that’s also far from great… but you know… every small thing is some thing?) But in any case, in my own little vampire-esque moral quandary I’ll just have to hope that can assuage those couple of searches by telling myself those things, ooops! 😭

Anyway, thanks for letting me know @definitetrashlord! 💓

And once again, sorry if those few posts upset anyone. At least it was nipped in the bud before I became addicted, for shame!  And I thought I’d reply publicly in case anyone else was as ignorant about this as me!

And to offset for everyone, let me share a great place I bought my phone case from:

Oh my word, I am guilt-phone-case-sharing now. I may have to readdress my assertion that I'd LOVE to be a vampire and would have no moral quandary with regards to murder in order to survive in the context of being inhuman.

Anyway, sorry, let's keep it serious. I do feel really bad! I'm so sorry!

[weemssapphic]

Hi author! How are you? I hope you are doing well!

I will reread our last message (I would have liked to put the link to your post but impossible, yet I was already able to share links with you on Tumblr.. I wonder how I managed 😅) anyway, I I've been thinking about it for a few days and I thought it might amuse you, you see when you post something, people are really motivating for you,( Like cheering you on like fans, yeah actually that's what we are😅)And I said to myself that suddenly if one day you need motivation and encouragement you no longer need to do like the rest of the population, we, ordinary people must motivate ourselves in front of the mirror, and talk alone😑 hoping that no one will see us do it 😅But you, you just have to open the discussion thread and you have a giant mirror to motivate you! Like a magic mirror!!Well a mirror that has a lot to say and that will not agree with everything it has to say, and it will have a lot to say😅 but at least it answers you!😂Mine doesn't talk much 😅😅 his revenge for my abuse of steam and condensation on him?😅All this to notice that you benefit from the only portable and digital motivating mirror!Nice invention, huh? 😁 In any case, it's a beautiful reflection of the beautiful community that you have created here on Tumblr, the mirror metaphor definitely fits well here!Good luck author! It'll work!😎 It's your digital mirror that tells you!!( On the other hand I don't know if you have good makeup or if you don't have salad between your teeth,For that, the good old camera will take over 😅)See you later author! Take care!

hi 🥰 i’m doing well, how are you?

i really appreciate any and all messages and comments i receive whenever i publicly post about my feelings or thoughts 😅 it’s really lovely, even though i mostly post about things like that not to get sympathy but maybe to see that i’m not crazy and see if anyone else also feels that way? because none of our experiences are really unique at all but sometimes it can still feel like we really are the only person we know who just doesn’t have xyz figured out.

that being said, i’m really grateful for the beautiful little community we have here. the internet and some parts of the fandom (of any fandom really) can be absolutely vile but it’s really nice to see that there are so many kind people here who are willing to support each other and lift each other up (and i’m grateful when i’m the recipient of that).

and hey, if you ever need motivation for anything, you know where to find it 😁 doesn’t mean you have to talk alone to your mirror 🥰

take care 🫶🏼

[roseychains]

Shut the fuck up omg

You as a child do not know better. Just because you /THINK/ its safe does not mean it is.

Adult content is called that for a reason. Its for fucking adults. Do children read it? Yeah. I even did. Yeah i lurked. But what i did not fucking do was have the audacity to think i had any right to openly participate in adult spaces.

It does not matter that you put warnings. It does not matter if you dont talk to any adults. We shouldnt have to worry about people like you in spaces meant for us at all.

You want to write smut? Share it in private. You are on a public platform.

Would you set up a stall at a convention for your smut? Do you think it is reasonable that you should have a place for yourself at a public events for adults? What fucking entitlement do you have to have to think you should be allowed her just because you want to be or think its fun. Should you be allowed to go to strip clubs or bars?

Why are adults not fucking allowed to have spaces for themselves. You can make your blog private btw. You can make your blog have a password to be able to view. But instead you post your shit publicly. You force yourself into our space because you think you have the right to.

Even it it was legal for you to do (which it isnt) what the fuck makes you think you have the right to make yourself at home in a space you are repeatedly told you are not yet welcome in. Do you think its just " oh adults are just being selfish and i should get what i want just because i want it regardless of how anyone else feels about it? Regardless of the consequences?"

You arent special. You arent mature. And you most certainly do not know better if you cant have the common decency to stay out of a community that isnt meant for you.

If you cant even respect the fact that adults dont want children in an adult space talking about adult topics then what makes you think you have any right to be here. Since you think you know so much do you also think you should be allowed to go to a sex dungeon and just exist and watch even though no one wants you there cuz you're a kid? Should you be allowed to set up a table there with your smut "just in case someone is interested"

The fucking audacity you have. I have to wonder how badly your parents must have raised you. And dont you dare accuse me of bullying you or "im a minor uwu". You wanna act like an adult then you can take confrontation like one too. You want to think you're mature enough to talk about sex but you cant even respect the wishes of the people in the PUBLIC community that said community was made for.

Fuck off. I am so sick and tired of entitled children like you who think they know better. If you did you wouldn't be here acting like an idiot.

Someone’s mad 🥺

Since when do you make the rules on who can and can’t write? Writing is for everyone, fuck off lmao. If it bothered you sm then block me and move on. How entitled are YOU to think that no one else is allowed to write things?? Minors read “young adult” type smut all the time? If it bothers you so much, if I’m “invading” your space, then block me. Christ.

[transpersian]

Did you really go on Poppy’s stream to harass her? Christ, it looks like your friends from Kiwi Farms are rubbing off on you. Did you really think that move would convince people you aren’t a vindictive and malicious ex?

So let me get this straight: you think that I went on their directly controlled gg site to "harass" them, where they would easily and quickly be able to ban me, and for the first and only message guaranteed to go through, I picked "oh hey am I somehow unblocked? lol" as the best way to hurt them in that moment?

Please, I am begging you to think about how absurd of an accusation that is. While I'm sure that they've made a convincing case in isolation for why I'm insane, I would hope that I haven't come across as completely fucking stupid.

Here, you can look at the whole clip yourself. See what I said. Does that seem like someone who's locked and loaded for some prime harassin' time?

lol

No, what happened was that I went to their GG site for the stream because I like being able to scroll through chat if I miss something. I noticed my old account was still accessible, so, being the silly little dipshit ball of chaos that I am most of the time, I typed what I typed and hit "send," fully expecting it to reject the message.

It did not, and I immediately regretted my actions to the level of shouting, "Oh no, oh NO! OH SHIT."

It was very funny, but not nearly as funny as watching Poppy try to navigate the moment live. "You don't get to be in my chat" was particularly good; I literally don't care. I have no use for their chat. What am I going to do, argue live with their fans who have absolutely no context or reason to listen to me? No.

There are a lot of people getting involved here who have no window into who I am or what my personality is beyond the text on this blog, so a lot of you don't know what a derpy little ball of chaos I can be. This was a chaos ball derp moment.

And honestly, aside from my posts on my own accounts, I’m confused as to what you’re calling “harassment.” Them calling this a harassment/hate campaign doesn’t make it one; it means they’re trying to stop anyone from looking at what I have to say.

I’ve actively, publicly pushed back against people using the g-word to describe her. I pushed back against the pedojacketing. I’ve corrected misinformation on other posts. I unpinned the “SFW Spaces” tweet as soon as I saw that they’d fixed their pre-roll.

As wild as it may sound from where you’re sitting, I’m actually a very reasonable person. I mean, do y'all still think this is fueled by breakup spite? Seriously?

Please hear me when I say this: my life as it stands now is better than it was when I was dating Poppy in literally every respect. Better environments, more empathetic and emotionally intelligent community leaders, better support, more intelligent conversations, no constant battles to defend something you like because Poppy wants to be act snobby and condescending about it, etc.

My darling partner and fellow "evil ex" @helavitrum and I strongly agree that we've both scored massive upgrades, and I can't tell you how wonderful it's been to reunite with other people looking for refuge after they see the rotten core of The Foundation for what it is. They’re people as good as PZ pretend to be and they’re looking for like-minded individuals, just like we are.

See, I recognize that the reason they're telling you that I'm just some crazy, obsessive, “psychotic” ex isn’t because they deliberately want to hide the truth; they see what I say as manipulation and lies because they literally do not recognize the harm they've done. What I'm doing doesn't make sense to them in any other way, so that's the translation they share with everyone else.

They have no idea what motivates me.

I mean, yes, I still get upset about the things they said and did, but not because it's still eating away at me or something; it's because they were incredibly shitty things that go against everything that PZ supposedly stand for, and they're continuing to perpetuate this harm against others who come to them for safety.

I get upset because I know so much more about the larger picture and how the behaviors you see in my account are only scratching the surface.

It’s okay, though. Genuinely, I mean this: I understand how you feel about me and I don’t begrudge you your feelings. I don’t think you’re a bad person for thinking these things. If I were in your shoes with just the information that you have available to you, I’d look at me like I was crazy, too.

But the thing is that you think you're protecting a "Lindsay Ellis.” You're not. You're protecting people more akin to iilluminaughtii. Or Lily Orchard.

If you genuinely care about the truth, you should read what I have to offer as far as evidence because, at the very least, I am providing evidence. Practically everything they've said about me (and others) has been their word with nothing else to back it up, uncontested by anyone else involved because their goal is not resolution or honesty; it's control.

And I don't just mean that you should read what I've already provided. I understand if that's not enough for you to understand what I'm doing.

I mean what's coming.

I can only present it, though. It's up to you to decide whether you want to form your own opinion or have it fed to you exclusively by the alleged abusers (and their inner circle).

Until then, I wish I could share more, but I can't because I don't want it spinning off into wild, out-of-control conjecture.

Unlike PZ, I respect the weight of what I've been entrusted with too much to mishandle it for the sake of saving face.

[runwayrunway]

No. 7 - A jetBlue FaMintly ReBluenion - The Quest for the Bluest Plane

And now, for something completely different.

We're done with jetBlue. I said that and I meant it. But we're not done with this train of thought. This post might not be what you expect. This is a very long post (and I do mean very long), a journey through the history of the US low-cost airline, the cognitive dissonance of the everyman millionaire, the thinly-veiled cynicism of the start-up airline, human kindness squeezed through cracks of a soulless machine which can never stop churning, and above all one man's quest to make the bluest planes he can, and my quest to tell you all if they look bad or not.

Let's begin here: have you ever wondered how new airlines are started? Well, when a wealthy individual or group of individuals love making money very much, they get together and incorporate a publicly traded company, lease a few airplanes, buy some airport slots...

I'll get to the point. Readers, there's somebody I'd like you to meet.

"Never speak to me or my daughter ever again." image: Rick Maiman

This is David G. Neeleman. He's jetBlue's dad. And jetBlue...has siblings.

David Neeleman is a Brazilian-American-Cypriot businessman I would best describe as a serial airline founder. Normally the description 'serial entrepreneur', to me at least, implies flakiness and perpetual failure to get anything properly off the ground, but that's not the case for Neeleman. He's very successful. He's probably some sort of pioneer. I've seen him compared to Howard Hughes. There's really only one stain on his record, one failure to speak of, and it's been over ten years. He has a net worth of 400 million dollars.

image: bloomberg

He's an...interesting person. Very interesting. He was born in Brazil and raised in Utah by a wealthy Mormon family. There are many very funny images of him available through Google. He has ten children, an ADHD diagnosis, no university degree, a whole lot of money, and a weird, weird, weird personal philosophy.

This interview is hard to sum up, but there's clearly a lot going on here. This is a guy who wants so desperately to be down to earth and kind and generous, who thinks he is down to earth and kind and generous, but who just can't take the extra step to realize the implications of the truly obscene wealth involved in venture capital and the inherent contradiction of that with his own ostensible charity and drive towards a fair and comfortable experience for passengers. In a way he seems like he's just too wealthy to really understand what being wealthy means. (It's also an older interview, and I imagine any scrap of genuine convictions he held through cognitive dissonance are now long-gone, given the CoViD thing.) He's also clearly got a chip on his shoulder about being fired from jetBlue. To be fair, having seen what they've done with their livery...I get it.

What else...he's also been CEO of airline booking program Open Skies, was involved with bizjet charter airline Superior Air Charter (then known as JetSuite), is founder and chairman of security company Vizgul for some reason, and is a minority owner of TAP Air Portugal. His nephew Zach Wilson is quarterback for the New York Jets. Oh, and he funded a study to underestimate the prevalence of CoViD. Classy, David. Real classy.

This isn't about David Neeleman. Not really. Not yet, at least. At some point it becomes about him, about his journey, but even then it isn't. When you have 400 million dollars you cease to become a meaningful subject as a person and become a meaningful subject as a distilled effigy of the things which the money came from. I dislike the Tony-Starkification of real people and I refuse to approach him in a way that supports that view of him. His life only matters to me in the context of the airlines he makes, and in what the way he changed over time represents. There's at least one biography out there for anyone particularly interested in the lives of Mormon multimillionaires who take issue with making people die less because they want the line to go up more. He is worth 400 million dollars, which is roughly a million dollars times what I make in one paycheck, delivered every two weeks. He's a creature in a suit who owns an absurd amount of wristwatches, each of which could pay for some sort of surgery for someone out there. There's a bunch of those in the world and this one happens to have made something which eclipses him, and that something is what's been occupying me since Wednesday.

If you're a book-reader - and I recommend being one - I think you're probably better off reading Barbara S. Peterson's "Blue Streak: Inside jetBlue, the Upstart That Rocked an Industry", which talks specifically about jetBlue and the way it pioneered what we now consider normal for aviation in the US. Reading it brought back memories for me of seeing adverts for jetBlue's planes on television, guaranteed to have a TV screen on every seat, and having my little mind which was still scarred by hours upon hours of complete boredom flying all the way from Tokyo to the American Northeast completely blown. Air travel really is unrecognizable from what it was when I was a child, although 20 years feels a lot shorter than it really is when you've lived it. There was no one factor that changed aviation so much in my lifetime, but there were a lot that contributed. ETOPS, 9/11, the recession, geopolitics, gas prices, the internet, legacy airline mega-mergers, privatization...and the jetBlue way of doing things.

It's easy to forget from our current vantage point but low-cost air travel wasn't always like this. Southwest did a lot to pioneer the modern low-cost model but jetBlue is probably the second-biggest player in the airline industry's shift to a culture which tries less to be glamorous and tries more to be fun and approachable (they by no means invented the Fun Airline, but PSA had been gone for 20 years at that point and the market had a gaping hole). They were a huge player in the rise of in-flight entertainment as standard even on low-cost flights. They helped keep aviation going after 9/11, when it was one of the few airlines to actually make money. And jetBlue's story isn't Neeleman's story, even though he founded it. I literally just listed four other major involvements of his, and he hasn't been involved in the business side of jetBlue since 2008. His story involves the founding of four - count em! - other airlines. Let's take a look through them and see if we can spot any patterns.

Morris Air (1992-1994)

sources and further reading: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]

Never heard of Morris Air? Can't blame you. jetBlue's oldest sibling existed for two years in the 90s. Two years. That's pretty miserable. ValuJet was around for twice that. That said, you're actually probably more familiar with them under a different name: Southwest.

No, Morris Air did not become Southwest. Southwest existed at the time, and it was in fact Southwest which gave birth to Morris Air.

Morris Air was named for its founder, June Morris, who operated one of Utah's largest travel agencies. In 1984 she partnered with a then 25-year-old David Neeleman to launch Morris Air Service. The two had realized something that was about to shake the airline industry: plane tickets were really expensive, and you could charge even less than major budget carriers like Southwest by just buying all the seats on a charter flight and selling them on to customers at an attractively low price. If you did this, even regular working-class people trying to book a trip to Hawai'i or Disneyland could actually afford a plane ticket. This worked successfully, enough that Morris sold off her travel agency, until they incurred a large fine from the DoT for pushing too far and fraudulently passing themselves off as a scheduled airline (which mattered because commercial charters are operated under Part 135 regulations while scheduled services are governed by the much more restrictive Part 121). In response, girlboss queen June Morris and her investie David Neeleman went and started up Morris Air as an actual, genuine, fully certified part 121 carrier, making June Morris the only female jet airline CEO in the US. They operated a fleet of 21 737-300s around the west coast on both scheduled and charter flights, pioneering such cost-cutting measures as e-tickets (wrongly attributed to Southwest, they were actually first used by Morris). This fleet included N75356/N764MA/N697SW, the airframe involved in the TACA 110 incident, which was successfully landed on a levee after losing power in both engines.

image: Richard Silagi

Now, I don't know about you, but these planes don't scream 'vacation' to me. In fact, they don't scream anything. They barely whisper. They breathe lightly on my ear. There are a couple planes in their fleet with weird features, like multicolor painted noses or cheatlines, but these seem to be one-offs and I wouldn't even be surprised if they were just leftovers from previous paintjobs (the one with the cheatline does look suspiciously like the one used on Sierra Pacific planes, one of the operators Morris chartered from). So they don't count. What counts is this.

Maybe if Morris Air didn't want to be instantly forgotten they shouldn't have made their planes completely generic. I'm not sure they cared, though. They wanted to make money and they made money.

A D- for Morris Air.

In 1992, less than two years after gaining its air operator's certificate, Morris Air merged with Southwest and the brand was retired. Despite having posed a legitimate threat to the titan that was Southwest at the peak of its relevance, it's since largely been forgotten. June Morris and David Neeleman both worked in Southwest's upper management for some time, but it was only five months before Neeleman left Southwest for other ventures. Soon, something more familiar would spring up, fed by the dying rays of Morris Air's gargantuan profits.

WestJet (est. 1994, began operation 1996)

Not exactly a deep cut, is it? WestJet is actually the second largest carrier in Canada and the ninth-largest in North America. They carry over 25 million passengers a year. I've never been one of them, but David Neeleman probably has, because he was one of the group of absurdly wealthy individuals who founded this incredibly successful airline in 1994.

WestJet operates a primary fleet of over 100 Boeing 737s of various models and seven Boeing 787s; in the past they also operated the 757 and 767. They operate both scheduled passenger and charter flights, as well as having a cargo division, a fully-owned regional subsidiary, and a Delta Connection/United Express-style brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates.

These all use more or less the same livery, which has only slightly changed since the beginning of operations in 1996. Pictured above is the original livery. I like the colors, I like the angularity on the tail, but I despise the style of livery with just the isolated tail colored in. This said, they introduced a new, updated livery in 2018.

I am a very predictable person. Given a livery mostly seen on 737MAXes and Dreamliners, I will always pick the Dreamliner to use as a visual example. This is not a slight to the MAX. They are nice looking planes, but the Dreamliner's planform is just on another level. Look at that wing sweep. Immaculate.

I like this color scheme a lot. I just happen to really like sea-green-adjacent colors, this is not the first time I've mentioned this. The font is nice, big, legible. I like the all-caps, I like the descender on the J. I think removing the logo mark on the wordmark and making it solid color was fine as a choice, makes the whole plane feel more balanced between the turquoise and the dark blue. The 'l'esprit du Canada' feels utterly pointless and is blocked by the wing and too small to be clearly read anyway. Tail design not limited to the tail, but mostly white fuselage regardless. Boring, but there's nothing here I can really call...bad? It's what they don't do that feels like the issue here, not what they do. Like, some sort of design on the nose and directly above or below, maybe? I didn't even realize there's any paint on the engines until I was editing my first draft and from most angles you just can't see it. Come on.

Grade: D+

Before I move on, there is something I have to mention. And that is WestJet's sub-brands. WestJet Encore is a fully-owned subsidiary which operates a respectable fleet of Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, and WestJet Link is a brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates a couple Saab 340s. And that is...fine, normal, even, but...

Is this a joke to you?!

Change your name to WestProp. Now.

...

Hey. Wait a minute.

David! The large blue plane is coming! It has no engine power because it ran out of fuel and is about to hit you on the racetrack during family day! Oh no, he has airpods in! He can't hear us! image: Cean W Orrett

This guy. David Neeleman. Yeah, him. We were talking about him. I mean, it's been a minute since he came up because as far as I can tell after founding WestJet he did nothing of note related to it again, but...what's he been doing? Wait...wait a minute. This is becoming a habit, David. All your airlines are...well...they share a certain trait, in a very specific area.

David knows what I'm talking about. After all, his next move, in 1998, was to found NewAir, which would shortly become jetBlue.

I have not stopped to count how many words I have written about jetBlue this week. It is a lot. I already delivered a verdict. We are moving on.

Because David didn't stop here. Why would he? It's 2008 and he just got fired from his own company because a winter storm went Southwest-holiday-scheduling levels of horrendous for the airline he raised from infancy. He's got time to kill and money to burn and he wants the line to go up, damn it! Well, maybe he can be in the right place at the right time again. Make a second jetBlue, win back what he's lost. After all, he's got something else up his sleeve - dual citizenship.

Just your regular average Mormon, lurking in forests with a model plane. Nothing sinister about that. image: conde nast traveler

I did mention earlier he was born in Brazil, right? That's always been part of his life. When he was in charge, jetBlue was actually the launch customer for the Embraer E190, an incredibly popular mid-sized regional jet made by Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.

Is it just me, or do the men in this picture somehow look like cardboard cutouts holding a real airplane? There is something very strange about this image. I would go so far as to call it unsettling. image: The Gainesville Sun

So, figuring he'd bled the US dry, I suppose, he moseyed on down to his birthplace with his millions of dollars and presumably a couple little blank model planes waiting to be painted and shown off at a press conference. If you've seen a pattern emerging, prepare to see it continue.

Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (est. 2008)

Mmm. Helvetica Neue Heavy. Not impressed.

Okay, sure. Technically there was a 'naming contest' and this name 'was the most popular'. But I think at this point I would believe that David Neeleman botted his own vote years before I would believe that Blue Airlines of Brazil just happened to be the winning name.

Okay, all else aside, I would really love to gently hold a plane like this. There's a certain caressing nature to the way he's holding this plane's snout which I crave to someday replicate with a similarly sized model aircraft. image: Paulo Whitaker

Much like jetBlue, Azul began operating Embraer 190 and Embraer 195 aircraft before expanding its fleet to include Airbus models, a handful of ATR 72 tubroprops, and two Boeing 747s for cargo. They started with just five aircraft but grew rapidly, absorbing a bunch of other airlines and securing large investments from the likes of United and Hainan Airlines. Today they operate a fleet of over 150 planes to 161 destinations and are the third largest airline in Brazil. They have a set of crossover liveries with freaking Disney. (I might review those sometime.) They also have a crossover livery with John Deere for some reason. You know, the tractor company. In 2020 TripAdvisor named them the world's best airline.

In addition to the name of the company, they also name their airplanes. I do not speak Portuguese, but thankfully a close friend, @ametri-e, does. I asked him if the names were silly puns like jetBlue's are, and I got this response:

some of these are puns but not particularly funny, some of them just have the word blue in them, and one was funny

So there you have it!

Unlike Morris, which no longer exists; WestJet, which he seems to have minimally contributed to past its founding; and jetBlue, which tossed him unceremoniously on the tarmac with his bags, he remains the chairman of Azul at time of writing.

I find myself briefly wondering if this is all an attempt to recapture his lost glory. Is jetBlue, larger even than the impressive heights Azul has reached, the one that got away? Is he now forced to go forward modeling his work in the image of that which he was robbed of, that which he can never go back to?

I don't know and I don't care. I care about if the livery looks good or not.

Well, I wasn't just going to leave the John Deere plane out. It's a bit underwhelming, though, isn't it?.

So Azul is pretty different from jetBlue at first glance. Mainly, it uses a much darker blue and has a logo to go with the wordmark - a cute little pixel Brazil that looks a bit like a heart to me because of the specific way it's drawn. Everything is scaled nicely so it looks pleasing on the turboprop and I think the dark underside and the way it curves around the ventral fairing actually looks really good with the ATR's airframe, which has a very pronounced ventral fairing relative to similarly-sized props. But, okay, let's look at a jet.

This...is not terrible. I really like the highlights on the trailing edges of the winglets and the end of the rudder, and bordering the deep blue belly. Not crazy about the Helvetica Neue still. Why doesn't the 'u' being cyan carry over to the actual livery? Also, Detached Tail Syndrome. In fact, although it has features beyond this which make a further discussion worth having, the basic layout is what I call the 'Deltalike' because that's the airline I associate with it despite them certainly not being the first to use it - detached tail, painted engines, painted underside that's large enough to see from the sides. It avoids a lot of pitfalls of the other popular archetype, that of the very tail-heavy (which WestJet fell into), but has its own loathesome features. All said, though, I do think Azul is one of the better takes on the Deltalike.

In the first picture the highlights look green, but in reality they're one line of green and one of yellow, for the Brazilian flag. I think they look really nice with this particular blue color, but I am exhausted of this man naming his airlines blue and then having the planes be majority white. They have such a nice shade of blue here, couldn't they make that the primary color of the body?

That aside, the way that the line curves up towards the middle of the plane combined with the tailing-edge highlights creates a sort of aerodynamic feeling. You even see them in other colors sometimes, like the pink ones on the E190s and blue ones on the E195.

It also comes in pink! Were this not a one-off I would ask them to change their name to Rosa Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras, but it is a promotion.

It seems like reconnecting with his origin has given David Neeleman the creative push he needed to beat jetBlue in at least one way - livery. All said, Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras clocks in at a final grade of...

C+

Aww, not quite a B for Brazil. Better luck next time! Though I'll admit I considered putting it there for a bit. This is a very high C+. Still, no cigar. Next time try putting less white on the plane. If you're all about blue, why are all your planes still so white? Come on, David. You are spreading blue paint on every airline you've ever touched but never letting it get past the tailfin. Who are you kidding? You know you're holding yourself back. There's a desire deep in you. You know it's there. I know you want to. It's just a matter of when. You are going to give in to your most animal urges. This isn't enough for you.

You need a bluer plane.

You can feel the thirst for a plane blue enough that you might as well own a piece of the sky straining against the bonds you've tried so hard to impose on it all these years. When will you finally unleash it?

Breeze Airways (commenced operations 2021)

image: inc. usa

Here we are, David. Time has almost caught up to us. It's just you, me narrating, and a very, very blue plane indeed. We have finally reached jetBlue's youngest baby sibling.

"Together, we created Breeze as a new airline merging technology with kindness," David Neeleman said. ​"If you can just be nice, the people will be nice to you in return and your job will be more fun.”

This is an interesting pitch. When Cape Air, with its fleet of tiny airplanes and its founder who started the airline with himself as pilot just to fly one route that he found himself needing to travel regularly, makes their motto Make Our Customers Happy And Have A Good Time Doing It (Mocha Hagodti), it feels...well, it feels like the person who said that didn't understand yet what a company was. Cape Air is its own story with its own contradictions and the vicious cognitive dissonance of capital on stark display but you can sense the desire in its inception to provide a service before running a company. It is the opposite of cynical - it is naïve. It is hopeful and human and starry-eyed.

When a man on his fifth airline makes a pitch like that it's like trying to cloud-watch looking at the ceiling.

That's not the only pitch for Breeze. I mean, even if you've started four successful airlines already and it seems like everything you touch goes on to revolutionize some part of the industry I think that would be a hard sell to investors in 2021. There's a bit more going on here. I'm going to start with the bit that's boring and makes me roll my eyes.

Ever since JetBlue, Neeleman has, like the kid peering into the circus tent, longed to get back into the U.S. airline industry. 

Bill Saporito writes for Inc. USA. I let out one tepid physical laugh. Yeah, David. You've got something great going in Brazil right now, but you want more. You want jetBlue and you can't have it. So instead...you give us an app.

The Breeze app is designed to eliminate chokepoints between passengers and planes. That means fewer people on the ground and lower cost.

Is this revolutionary? Is this destined to end in a Southwest-tier scheduling catastrophe? I'm not sure. I think David Neeleman's history suggests he could make this work, and I think the history of apps being used for things that didn't have apps before suggests that this could horribly blow up in his face. It seems to have gone fine so far, as I haven't heard anything else about it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly invested in the idea, so I haven't been looking. There's always time for some situation to happen nobody had foreseen and it all to go belly-up. Saying you never cancel flights works fine until a blizzard hits and then you have to start all over again, but he didn't build jetBlue by being afraid to take risks.

More interesting is the service they offer. Breeze has a bit of an identity crisis. Breeze wants to be an ultra low cost carrier with a first class cabin. That sounds contradictory because it is. The ULCC model as used by airlines like Ryanair and Spirit fundamentally relies on charging a low fare upfront with the expectation that customers will not receive a crumb extra without paying for it. Everything from seat reservations to snacks to anything else you can think of, you can pay extra for or you can do without. Breeze also follows other trends common with ULCCs, like a lack of seatback screens (the very thing jetBlue pioneered!) and flying point-to-point to smaller airports located outside of major metropolitan areas rather than routing through hubs. Yet Breeze insists it wants to have a first class cabin!

It does have a first class cabin, apparently. The classes are called Nice, Nicer, and Nicest. I wish airlines wouldn't do this. Air travel is the floorboards of stand-up comedy. Everyone already hates flying except weirdoes like me who spend enough time looking at pictures of airplanes to write reviews of their paint jobs, and even I get pretty tired of it if I go too long sitting there without the plane doing some sort of plane thing. You can be honest. You can call the classes Bearable, Unpleasant, and Painful. We all understand. It's okay. I would rather buy a ticket for Miserable But Cheap class than Nice. It probably won't actually be that bad, since Breeze doesn't do long-haul, which makes the presence of first-class even more bizarre. If you want first-class short-haul and have that sort of money just charter a private jet! And David Neeleman has been involved with at least two private jet charter companies too, so...what is he doing?

In 2011, almost exactly 10 years before Breeze began operation, Neeleman was interviewed for Business Jet Traveler. I linked the interview above. It's a powerful display of the cognitive dissonance of a man who considers himself a regular everyday Mormon dad, who donates his salary to his employees, who insists on calling his employees crewmembers, even as the line goes up, and up, and up. I've heard anecdotes about him sitting in the backs of his own planes at jetBlue, observing what he could change to make the experience better for the cabin crew and passengers, noticing a lot of those things could even save money, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

As the head of a company he is by necessity exploiting those under him, as a businessman he is providing a service not from altruism but because he knows that people need it enough they'll give him money, and the more comfortable the experience for both the less likely he'll lose their labor and their money. Conscious or not, altruism is a means to an end, but it is still startling surrounded by airlines which don't even go that far. 'Nice' as a name for economy class is a pretty good summary of the man David Neeleman was, and the one he still tries to present himself as. But there's a specific question, and a specific answer, which I feel the need to place here.

The airlines have been cutting back on frills and first class, which is driving more people to business aviation. Do they need to find ways to treat their high-end customers better? Well, JetBlue doesn't have first class. We treated everyone the same. Maybe it's funny I'm in the JetSuite market because it's so weird to me that on a plane with 150 seats, you give 12 people a great ride and you stick it to 138-squish them all back there because of 12 people. There's something about that that just feels wrong.

Does it still feel wrong, David? Did something change about you between the first million and the 400th? When did this transformation happen? Was it the Ship of Theseus effect? Or...was this what you inevitably were working towards all along? Was it a fool's errand to pretend that there is a difference between what you do and what you are? Aviation is not immune to the society which it is built to serve - it is shaped by it. It feels wrong for 12 people to have a nice ride while 138 are squished in the back, but if you think about the life that 5 million Americans live and the life the other 326 million have to live, all squished back there so the lucky few can have a nice ride, doesn't it feel a little less wrong? After all, you've got the reclining bed. You can just pull the curtain closed. You've probably known what you were all along.

The airlines are a tough business. Why start another after JetBlue? Well, I've done this three times. It's what I know. I've always made money at it, always been successful. I figured out a formula that works and Brazil really needed it. And I had this idealistic view of trying to make a difference. I've got 3,000 people in Brazil that work for us and love their jobs and we flew four million people this year and a lot of those people had never flown before.

Air travel is life-changing. It's not just for those of us who stand outside airports and take a picture of every airplane we see. It is a faster, safer, easier way of getting people and things from one place to another. There are people who live in the remotest places in the world, who deal with mountains and oceans and even just being so far away from anywhere else. They can travel now, and they can do more than that. They can visit their family. They can get places even if they're somewhere railroads don't run to. Cargo planes bring these remote communities necessities. They take their children to university and its sick to lifesaving treatment. It's a lifeline and a fundamental part of infrastructure. Once we invented it we stopped being able to go back.

It isn't an inherently cynical thing to start an airline - not more cynical than starting any other company, anyway. At least, it shouldn't be. But I think it's an inherently cynical thing to start five. To have your position at Azul, which is both massively successful and your own brainchild, which you think is doing good...and to say to yourself "I need more. I need America. I need what I was robbed of when I lost jetBlue."

Very few people have ever started one airline successfully. David Neeleman started four and sat at the helm of Brazil's third-largest airline and decided it wasn't enough for him. He's always made low-cost airlines. To a not-insignificant degree he made the low-cost airline what it is today. But he needs a first-class cabin.

The Inc. piece on Breeze continues to discuss the airline's planned operations. In 2011 Neeleman's employees were crewmembers.

Breeze is also introducing a program in which it will hire college interns from Utah Valley University and mold them into customer-service machines. In exchange for salary, free tuition, and housing, the students will undergo training and then work 15 or so days a month while taking their college courses online. "The big thing is we are going to provide a great service with kind people on a beautiful airplane with a fun atmosphere," says DePastino.

In 2021 they are customer-service machines. They will spend not just their days but their nights in Breeze's living spaces at one of the most vulnerable times in a person's life, learning how to be cogs in a machine right when they're transitioning from being students to entering the turbulent world of trying to find a job. And all of us want a job that makes us feel like we're still us, doing something that makes the world better and that helps us touch the tip of Maslow's pyramid. Almost none of us get it. Most of us slog through something utterly pointless that is entirely separate from our own self-identity to just keep our heads above water. Breeze turns this into a machine and it starts its cogs young.

Would I take this deal if it was offered to me? I'm a university student with barely enough money to keep myself afloat in a very expensive city while paying for university and for medicine and for anything else that may suddenly come up. I love aviation. I have customer service experience. I work in customer service right now and will probably continue to for a long time. I would hypothetically be an ideal candidate for this sort of program. Would I take this offer knowing that nobody, myself included, says to themself as a child that they want to be an airline customer service representative when they grow up? College is supposed to be the place you lay the groundwork for trying to start a career. Nobody wants their career to be 'customer service representative'. Nobody wants their obituary to say 'beloved son, husband, middle management at an airline's call center'. Sure, lots of people end up there, and plenty of them are happy and fulfilled and they have nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody's 18, going into college, and thinks that's what they want to live and breathe for years. They want to intern in the accounting departments, to shadow engineers, to see the sleek jets and peer in on the lifestyles of the people who built this. They want to be David Neeleman. But that's not an option for most of us.

So what would I do? Live this concession to the inevitability of automation which overtakes much more than the flight deck? I might, because at least it's a guarantee of shelter and stability that I don't have trying to stumble my way through an utterly shambolic job market caught between the price of school and the need to earn that money and the costs inherent to autoimmune disease and the number of hours there are in a week. I want to write, or even just to do something that involves words, because even a data entry job might let me pretend I'm still the person I thought I would grow up to be, and even that seems off the table. But it's one thing to know your dreams are never going to be realistic and another to say it out loud and yet another to commit to it in a place that even refers to you outright as a machine as if they don't understand the weight of that word when you provide someone's lodging and pay and everything else they rely on. This is a few steps short of being a company town populated exclusively by the young and vulnerable who think they're going to be entrepreneurs one day.

"When I started JetBlue, it was a customer service company that just happened to fly airplanes," Neeleman says. "Breeze is a technology company that just happens to fly airplanes."

He was talking about the app when he said this, but I think it comes through in a broader sense. jetBlue was a customer service company. Humans interfaced with humans. The idea was in nature lively, giving names to inanimate flying machines. It was a corporation, it made money, it did not actually care about people and it could not because it was not itself human, but it did not wear this fact proudly. It was a regrettable necessity of running an airline, and the CEO donated his salary to the employees. jetBlue under Neeleman and beyond clung to the human element, and to kindness and to making low-cost flight fun and comfortable even though there was nobody on the plane with a first-class ticket. You might be part of a fundamentally unethical system known for cutting corners and lying and sweetheart deals and never suffering consequences when something as simple as a jackscrew nobody lubricated kills 88 people, but you're going to at least try to dampen that impact. It might kill you just as dead but it can hurt less, maybe so much you never realize jetBlue occupies the same slice of the world as Pan Am and as ValuJet.

Breeze Airways lodges young individuals and molds them into machines. It is an ultra-low-cost carrier with a first class cabin. It presents a scenario where people are optimally herded by an app, served by employees who go home at night to the same place they work, and all of it can be reduced down to numbers so easily. It takes the human and it makes it technology. It makes it profit. The human element is gone. It doesn't matter how much it hurts you because if you aren't a person there's nothing to kill. It says the quiet parts out loud and makes you get on the phone and tell your family you're happy here with a gun to your head. It is a machine built of anonymized mannequins who, irrelevant to their role in it, happen to be alive, and it calmly tells you that this is a good thing, and that is a threat. The lowest category of experience you can have is 'nice'. Breeze Airways does not name their planes.

When I was a child I thought airlines were people and airplanes. I've flown many times in my life. There aren't many other ways to get from Japan to the East Coast these days. The world is huge but we can see it all so easily, assuming taking us there can make someone money. I remember being eight and having the pilot standing by the door to greet passengers, having him hand me a little pair of plastic pilot wings I still have now. I remember the stormy night I flew alone for the first time and the stewardess who let me sit next to her for a little bit and answered all my questions about the noises the plane was making. I remember the first time I flew on a propeller plane and the pilot who explained to me what all the gauges meant, and who insisted there was nothing to be afraid of and pointed out all the landmarks we flew past, who clearly knew this route by heart.

That's not what aviation always is. That's not what it usually is. People don't usually start airlines because they wish they could fly everyone around in their little single-engine plane on a commuter route from Boston to Provincetown, from Hyannis to Nantucket, provide that service to the people who don't have a plane and a license of their own, but they just can't do it all themselves. People who start airlines aren't usually intrepid pilots searching for new heights to push themselves to or flight instructors looking to fly people around in a single rented DC-3. They're businessmen. They want money. Juan Trippe was a businessman. Howard Hughes was a businessman.

The corporation is where passion goes to die if it existed to begin with. They build machines to suck the life out of pilots, exhaust them, put them in planes that are falling apart and let them take the blame when they fail to do things they failed to teach them. These people aren't your friends and they don't care about aviation, and if they do it's in the way an American child plays soldiers at the same time a school in Syria is being bombed. They're usually not even pilots. They're people with a lot of money who want even more money. jetBlue isn't unique in that sense and neither is Breeze. One just says it a lot louder.

Sometimes an airline is a technology company that happens to fly airplanes. That's true. Every single positive experience you have is with people, not airlines. I've never once spoken to jetBlue, just a matrix of pilots and flight attendants and customer service representatives who make up its many limbs. Maybe it should come as a relief, a sort of coming clean, that Breeze is tearing back the curtain and reminding you that the time a stewardess calmed you down during turbulence isn't really any different from the time a drugstore cashier let you off even though you were a few cents short of your total and said they'd take care of it. It's not CVS doing that. It's always people.

So many businessmen say they're here to do good, to make the world a better place, to reconcile kindness with venture capital. Any of them could build a tower that reaches all the way to the edge of the solar system and let us all know how many beautiful things there are that we can reach if they can find a profitable way to get us out there, and yet it's still the people who see your transit card is out of money and scan you in using theirs that make me remember that we are capable of kindness despite our surroundings. It is up to all of us whether we wish to be kind or not and it's not something anyone else can build for us.

Companies can't build a kinder, softer, funner, more human place. They can make money. They can provide a service. A service you need, at a cost you can afford, predicated on the fundamental question: whether they think you can make them money. Desperation, need, giving people a non-choice, that's how you make money and kill criticism. That isn't kindness. That's finding a gap in the market. Always has been.

I read that at JetBlue, you also didn't have your own parking spot and you donated your entire salary to a crewmember crisis fund, saying, "It seemed hoggish of me to have all this stuff when others didn't because every time I would get something someone else would have less." Yet then I read about your $14 million mansion in Connecticut. It's my wife's mansion. I never would have built that, ever. I think she's repentant. It was a project for her and it kind of got out of hand. But we all felt funny moving in. That's why we want to sell it.

I'd wondered how you reconciled the mansion with your philosophy. I don't.

image: Bill Bernstein

Okay, Marx or Megatron or whoever you think you are, that's enough of that depressing schlock. You are a tumblr.com airline livery review blog. We're here to answer if the plane looks good or not.

It's not like Neeleman's only goals are money and vapid personal satisfaction. We've been with him from the start. It was just an unacknowledged bit of the tail. He probably didn't notice it at first, but we did, with the gift of hindsight. It germinated. It took root. It grew. It became identity. It became his white whale. Are the planes blue, though?

Well, everyone, meet N206BZ. She's an Airbus A220-300. She's just a year and a half old and was delivered brand-new to Breeze Airways. She doesn't have a name, just a registration, but that's sure one blue plane if I've ever seen one!

The color scheme is visually pleasing. It's all over but it keeps visual interest with the darker tail and rear fuselage, the darker engines, the big white check-mark that serves as an instantly recognizable emblem for the airline. The repetition of it on the winglets is a nice touch.

I hate the wordmark, honestly. The text feels like it's located too low, the lightest blue blends in with the main fuselage until it borders on illegible. As far as I can tell, the typeface is custom. I hate it. It's ugly. The text is bad and it weighs down the rest of the plane.

A lot of how a livery looks depends on the lighting. So let's look at another example. I'd like to introduce you to N140BZ. She's an Embraer E195-200 and she's coming up on 15 but she hasn't slowed down any. She flew for Air Europa for a long time, but from 2016 on she was in limbo, all sorts of holding groups leasing her to each other but nobody putting her into service. Now she's with Breeze. They'll retire their E190s somewhat soon, but for the moment they like to have them. It allows them to operate shorter routes and free up time for charters on other days, just to maximize productivity. She doesn't have a name either. I'd say she still looks pretty blue. A lot of the concept art has a very metallic and reflective feel which I'm glad isn't as present in the actual planes, because it looked a bit sci-fi movie and not in a campy way. It was very blue chalk marker.

I like these colors just as much in this sort of washed-out environment as I do in direct sunlight gleaming at full intensity. Maybe more, even, since the text of the wordmark is so much more legible now and you can even see that the checkmark itself is blue. There's almost nothing on this plane that isn't blue. The only thing not blue about this airplane is that she doesn't have a name to revel in it.

The Breeze livery gets a B-.

It is a competently executed version of the thing it wants to be. There's visual interest. There are choices made. It's more than a logo slapped on a tail and sent off to sit on the tarmac with hundreds of other primarily white airplanes. I like it, I think this is the best Neeleman livery. It's also the bluest.

I find myself thinking the checkmark is an apt logo. Azul wore the shape of Brazil - a country full of people. Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras S/A is a company. It cannot have a soul. But its founder says it does. He wants to make something better for people. Breeze Airways is a checkmark. It satisfies a need. It is 'nice' but there is no pretense that it is people.

The pilots will be kind all the same, and the stewardesses. People will agree to swap seats so families aren't separated. People will compliment strangers' outfits and help the person in line in front of them who's fifty cents short for a bottle of water. We will hold the door for elderly men with canes and exhausted women with strollers. We will take every little chance we can to be kind. We do this because we are people, and not because of where we work, and it's definitely not the people with 400 million dollars to put down on a shiny new airline making that happen. Everything is scheduled through an app, minimizing contact with humans even as the ones we do talk to are 'molded into customer-service machines' over the course of years. N140BZ wears her blue colors well, and not having a name doesn't make her any uglier. So what is it that's changed?

David Neeleman can't make jetBlue a second time. But he doesn't know that. To a man with so much, maybe it makes sense how he could fail to realize that. When you're high enough in the air a thriving uptown and an area of condemned slums look more or less the same, just little blocks of color all the way down there. He doesn't even realize he's given up the ghost. This is only a tragedy if your definition of a happy ending was us believing someone is better than they are instead of being left no room to continue failing to recognize what money is and what money does. The corporation wears two masks - the mask that it wears when it is a corporation wearing a mask, and the mask it wears when it is so close to human that you mistake it for your friend. The businessman wears these masks too. To be sad they've taken them off is to invest more in the virtue of these men than they ever do in the life or death of the 138 people squeezed in the back.

There it is. Two decades, five attempts, the bluest plane. If you've kept reading all the way to the end let me know in the replies what your favorite Neeleman-proximate livery is. I'll see you all tomorrow for our regularly scheduled Runway Runway livery review, and I hope you all have a wonderful night.

[paperstorm]

Do you also notice that the whenever ronen talks about Rafael he’s always very bubbly and smiles even post a birthday post for him and just talks highly about him but Rafael seems too not like ronen AS much like he’s very dry only post natacha and takes pics with natacha and just seems more enthusiastic when he’s talking about or with someone else this isn’t hate I just want to know if anyone has noticed it too. I just feel like ronen deserves the energy back with all his cast members

To be honest this feels in the same category to me as assuming TK and Carlos don't love each other the same amount because they have different personalities and different ways of showing love. And it's a little bit anxiety inducing honestly because I am a very sort of ... level, stoic, quiet person. I love my friends and family very much but yelling about it on instagram isn't how I demonstrate that love, and it's troubling to think someone would assume I don't love them because I haven't hyped them up online. Most people do not live their lives only to perform it on social media.

I think Rafa adores Ronen. He has talked so many times about how safe Ronen makes him feel when they're in a scene together. They spend time together outside of the show all the time and don't post about it, which we know because they've told us. Last year in Paris they stayed together for an extra day, just them, and went sightseeing and for dinner and dancing. Rafa isn't super loud on social media about anyone, including other cast members, friends, family, or whatever past/present romantic partners he may have or have had, because that's not who he is and it's not how he expresses love. We know he has a brother but I don't think we even know his name.

This video, to me, is all you really need if you're wondering how much Rafa loves Ronen. This is from the Paris con last year, when Ronen was talking about how he didn't come out publicly for a long time because he felt physically unsafe to do so because of some members of his family. Look at Rafa's reaction when Ronen talks about how life-saving it can be to have "one friend." Because Rafa was that one friend for him. (In some interviews Ronen has said Rafa was the first person he told about his sexuality and in others he's said Rafa was "one of" the first people he told, so I'm not sure which is the real story but in any case, only about 2 or 3 people knew he was bi for almost two years before he came out, and Rafa was one of those people.) It upsets him so much, remembering that time when Ronen felt so unsafe and this beautiful part of him had to be kept a secret. He loves him. The fact that he doesn't get goofy and silly and loud about it on Instagram is not indicative of anything other than the clear fact that they have different personalities.

[kmp78]

"Nope, from Dec 2019 to March 2020 life was completely normal. VK traveled around the world on shoots, she and JL had cozy vacays on Kauai and in JT... And by May she was fully living at Casa Craphole as we saw in her birthday pics. 🎉🎁"

Shit didn't fully hit the fan and shut the whole world down until March, but it was very much a concern already by winter of '19. I was working in a retail store back then and we were already having trouble keeping in toilet paper, sanitizer, and Clorox wipes around Christmas. Word was out. Cases were popping up. And fear was growing.

Of course, she still went to shoots and on posh vacays. Why would the elite waste any time concerning themselves with anyone or anything else 🙄 Just like JL wandering into the desert without a fucking clue what was already very much happening around him. Literally everywhere.

When quarantine DID hit, I suppose they had a decision to make. Him being a giant germaphobe, it wouldn't surprise me if he told her she couldn't come and go. And her being such a googly eyed bimbo obviously chose to stay than to have to stay away for an unknown amount of time.

I still don't understand the her posting backgrounds and similar style pics vs his panic when she walked by, though. If they were finally a "solid couple" supposedly for months already and had been cozying up places, why the back and forth games still?

And wtf went down while they were stuuuck under the same roof that things ended so abruptly afterward?

Him finally agreeing to be a "proper boyfriend" to VK versus him being man enough to admit that publicly and especially to his Walking Wallets? 🤔

Yeah gee wonder why there were still theatrics... 🤷🏼‍♀️

Not to even mention the fact that he STILL keeps yapping about how he "SPENT LOCKDOWN AAAAAALL ALOOOOONE..." 🙃😂

Is his house haunted?

I mean... we all saw that eerie white figure floating across his garage right...? 😵👻

Very Ghostbustery! 🫣

[ramonathinks]

Last postttt honestly and seriously but i feel like this needs to be said because this is just pure mean girl behavior! Only posting this because of the unnecessary comment that she posted and the shady posts from her mutual as well. As stated in this post, i never accused her of stealing anything… read the post: “i don’t want to be accused of copying… i should’ve wrote it in 2022” now explain how that sound like any implications. even in the screenshot that i showed on my account, it was in a draft and not posted. the day before i posted this i literally asked a mutual about writing something if someone else was doing it and while they said yeah, EYE just didn’t want anyone to accuse me of copying, since i have to keep repeating that fact, which was why i made the post just expressing how i felt.

But regardless of the situation I mainly felt like I need to clear my name because while i never said anything bad about dej this is what im being met with…

Not to mention the goon squad of several people who aren’t in the conversation yet inserting themselves and wondering why im not replying or getting annoyed by the dms they’re sending me or just overall annoyed by the conversation. everyone wants me to hear her out and everyone wanna take her side rather than when i said that wasn’t the case? and trying to force an apology out of me or whatever in an attempt to make me ‘admit’ where i was wrong when the post wasn’t worded in any way that gave malicious intentions.

Then I messaged her like everyone begging me to do because now instead of talking about the situation she’s talking about me and now im blocked (even though i admit i was rude but i don’t like it when people try to come for my character), messaged her mutual as well and got no response even though since i sent the message it has shown she was active lol. But either way if it was a problem just as she said i could’ve dm’ed her about it (which i never felt the need to because it wasn’t shady or messy, or anything against her so it wasn’t no reason for that.), but the same applies to me if not more so because i didn’t have no intentions on her getting hate but it seems as that’s what she wanted to do to me lmao like if she told me in private about how she felt about the post or the hate she was getting then that would’ve been one thing because i never said i was feeling some type of way about the concept just that i wanted to do it a while ago and didn’t want to be accused of copying HER never once was what i said “shady” “messy” or “tacky” but her responses are ! if anyone is victimizing themselves in this conversation it’s her because if you are feeling some type of way about someone it’s your choice to confront that person but making a public statement when all i said was i didn’t want to be accused of copying you is messy in what sense?? like how do you read that as shady at all?? & how am i victimizing myself for defending myself against you and several people? and even when i said that wasn’t my intention, it was crickets! no deletion of the post, no anything because it’s not like im asking for an apology. i said it wasn’t my intention and that was it after that the conversation should’ve been over yet you and your mutual are posting shady stuff or bashing me like girl??

Plus I don’t have anyone publicly defending me besides the two mutuals who reblogged my post and im basically getting jumped like hello! I had to turn my mailbox completely off, when at first it was turned off just for anons. I had to turn my DMs off so that only people i follow can message me because your weirdo supporters are harassing me. If you’re against someone being harassed why would you in turn allow this to happen to me like make it make sense!

[chdarling]

I’m the terrible anon who dared to call Sirius despicable because he behaved like a supremacist and a sexist (normal thing for wizard of the 70’s, as said by another anon, so I don't understand what's wrong in my comment).

And always for the anon "it was kind of annoying to read that comment because I often feel like readers only want to read the best of a character and not their personal struggles" I don’t see the correlation with my comment. I never said "sirius is always perfect, how dare you to write him as a fallible human?".

I specified that Sirius must grow, so I want to see this process, not to see a perfect Sirius in the end (since I know very well that he will never be for so many reasons) but to see his improvements.

And this is one of the chapters where he gave the worst of himself, considering he treated lily like a b**** for a futile reason like every single sexist always do since the beginning of time and think about MB and HB as w**** as a supematist does and in fact even sirius "felt properly disgusted with himself". He realizes that he still has a lot to do to be a decent person. He knows that and that’s why I never wrote that he's a hopeless case but needs to grow up.

Can I get an opinion without the groupies feeling offended by listing some of the flaws in a fictional character or not? I must say that he's wonderful and perfect ? He's not and never will be and I'd like to be able to say it. But he can be improved! I never said he's a lost cause.

P.S. I mentioned graham simply because he's already on the warpath with sirius and is the only character who despises him enough not to go easy with him. Lily is a too obvious conclusion. The boys love him too much and they don't realize how wrong and obnoxious they have been towards some classmates (you yourself wrote an answer to an anon comment where you listed all the moments that could justify the distrust and dislike of the muggle born towards James and Sirius).

And to become better, Sirius will have to learn to listen and care for others, even if they're out of his little circle of friends. He will fight a war that he could avoid because he's privileged by birth, he will have to learn to be empathetic and selfless towards those he doesn't know and with whom he has not developed strong emotional ties.

I hope I have clarified my positions to the other anons if and when they'll read this.

Have a good day.

“Groupies”? Come on. This is rude and weirdly aggressive.

You shared an opinion to my inbox, presumably wanting me to reply. I replied — mildly and lightheartedly. A few people had opinions on your opinion, which is what happens when they’re shared publicly. I went back to reread the post in question in case I or anyone else was rude and I missed it, but no one attacked you or called you a terrible anon. They just disagreed. Not even that many or that vehemently. 🤷🏻‍♀️

For the record, my blog isn’t a public forum where I am obligated to mediate anon debates or air anon opinions while also making sure no one reacts to said opinions in any manner an anon deems incorrect. How exhausting. This is my personal blog where I engage with people in good faith and for fun about a hobby. When it stops being fun or people stop acting in good faith, I stop engaging.

None of this is that serious. (Or Sirius. Ha. Get it. Badum tss, etc.)

[ao3-anonymous]

Hi! Let me start by saying I LOVE your AO3 trends dashboard and the regular updates on this blog. It's amazing to have all this data at our fingertips!! Thank you!

I've been working on a fandom-specific dashboard inspired by yours. Initially this was just for my own purposes, so I made a copy of the looker studio dashboard you made and plugged my own data source into it. However... I've been tweaking things on and off for a month now, and I think it's safe to say I've gotten a bit over-invested. Fan data is neat and fun! So many possibilities!

If you're comfortable with it, I'd eventually like to share this dashboard out on my blog — with credit to your dashboard, of course. If you'd rather I didn't share it out publicly and kept it for personal use, I understand and will respect that.

If you'd like to see the dashboard-in-progress before deciding what you're comfortable with, I'm happy to send you a link. 🙂

Let me know what you think - no pressure and no rush ❤️

Hey! Thanks for reaching out and checking, but please feel free to share your dashboard with the world. I would appreciate a little callout and link to the OG dashboard, but we love transformative works here :).

My dashboard has to stay pretty surface level since it covers ALL the fandoms, but I'm sure there is a ton of cool data that could be pulled at the fandom level!

Feel free to share a link to your dashboard once it's published. Would love to check it out and share for any fans that are interested in the same fandom.

Hope it's okay that I'm posting, but wanted to spread the word in case anyone else is wondering as well!