James D Kightly

Great post. People (which is people, next pedestrians, then cyclists, then drivers etc) come first in getting around.

We now know for certain human habitation built for people first works best, not what tech-knobs tell us.

Londoners flow through traffic. Jaywalking can stay under a car in the US.

Take the time to do this folks. The proposed changes to ILR are shocking and cruel, which is made abundantly clear in the text of the public consultation linked below. Please lend your voice to try to mitigate the cruelty.

Bonjour and good morning #histscalemodel gang!

Just a little reminder that on May 1st, the #BastilleBuild 🇫🇷 group build starts! It's never too early to order those aftermarket accessories ;)

You can read all the rules and (optionally) RSVP via the embedded form on bastille.videospectre.net

Southern Air Transport - Wikipedia

Exactly. And that was just the most (in-)famous one. The CIA operated a significant number of ‘airlines’.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther...

Curious that no one’s picked why Audrey’s CIA question is amusing - anachronistically, I think.

Walter Matthau and Audrey Hepburn walking down a Paris street, impeccably dressed, in 1963’s ‘Charade’.

Tonight’s entertainment. First viewing of Charade (1963). Great film, glad to finally get there. Hepburn, Cary Grant ~and~ Walter Matthau.

Many zingers, but this one lands if you’re in aviation history…

“Mrs. Lampert, do you know what C.I.A. is?”
“I don't suppose it's an airline, is it?”

'They're gonna die': How five people tried to stop the Challenger tragedy Forty years ago, the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated just after lift-off. A small team of engineers tried to prevent the tragedy.

The most interesting thing about this ABC Challenger long read (to me) is that the five engineers who warned it was unsafe then became "lepers".

Why is it not the managers who overruled them to suffer social ostracism?

www.abc.net.au/news/science...

"The idea that trans inclusion at the ponds is somehow imposed against the wishes of users simply does not survive contact with reality. Londoners have looked at the evidence... and overwhelmingly said: this works, this is fair, and this reflects our values."

celord.com/2026/01/29/h...

Gotta be the Mk.IV.

Film review: ‘The Dig’ (2021) This article was originally a thread on social media, which is why it is formatted with lots of images and short responses.The text is about the image below that paragraph. Let’s go check out…

Turned another thread into an article for easy reading.

Film review: ‘The Dig’ (2021)

You can read it here;
fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/28/f...
or here;
fakehistoryhunter.substack.com/p/film-revie...

File photo from a previous event of James Kightly, sitting in front of a bookcase, obviously talking into a computer.

File photo from a previous event of James Robert David Jefferies, sitting in front of a bookcase, obviously talking into a computer. Gosh, there are differences though, trust us!

Yesterday James Robert David Jefferies and I had a fantastic chat about our paper for @avculturesconf.bsky.social 'Print the Legend' free webinar 'Searchlight'. Despite being on opposite sides of the globe, we were on the same page! See more, join us! Details: aviationcultures.org/spotlights/p...

At @avculturesconf.bsky.social we have a couple of terrific events coming up. The first, online,our 'Searchlight' is at the end of Feb.

The in-person (and also online) full conference is mid June, in Canada, AND you can submit papers for that until the 5th Feb. So don't be shy, engage via website!

Funny thing is, with my 'sir-name', freelance is v appropriate.

But like 'decimate' few know what the original meaning were...

I’m a journalist. We have ‘freelance’. ‘Freelance journalist’. I think it’s time we normalised ‘freelance historian’. Have at it, it’s appropriate, maybe even more if you’re a medievalist.

Don't miss it! It's free to attend our Print the Legend Spotlight event on 27-28 Feb online, and we have the full conference, in person in Kelowna, BC Canada and also online, so do join us!

We are still accepting papers for the AvCultures Conference in June, for details, see below!

It’ll be worth it!

Or your money back.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Aviation Cultures Searchlight: Print the Legend. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Please join us as scholars, historians, biographers, practitioners and enthusiasts to explore the fascinating intersection of fact and fiction in aviation history. Inspired by the iconic quote, “When ...

In the first presenter profile for Print the Legend, (27-28 February - register here: unisq.zoom.us/webinar/regi... ) we are thrilled to welcome backour old friend Guillaume de Syon. Guillaume’s presentation is titled “Hot Air Stories? Figuring out the “real” Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin”.
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Ray Morimura (Japanese Artist, born 1948)
"House in Tamugimata", 1999.
Japanese Woodblock Print, 45 × 30 cm.
Private Collection.
#art #painting #painters #BlueSkyArt

Ha ha! Indeed. The ejector exhaust concept had only just been developed, but… They kind of prove Petter was able to carry meetings beyond where he should’ve.

All the eccentricities of true genius, while being a v v good to ‘interesting’ designer, no genius.

kermit the frog is covering his mouth with his hand and looking at the camera . Alt: kermit the frog is covering his mouth with his hand and looking at the camera . Scared.

I do like routing the engine exhausts through the fuel tanks.

Al is dehumanizing I've saved the most important part for last. GenAl is dehumanizing. By this, I mean that using genAl means saying that the people involved in what you're trying to do don't matter. I've already talked about part of this; building an entire commercial enterprise around comical levels of theft while racking up a body count is not a project that takes people's humanity seriously. It says that the people being harmed don't matter. If I were to use genAl to grade your work, which is now a possibility with new Canvas integrations, I would be saying that your work is not worth taking seriously enough to read myself. It's saying that you don't matter enough to take seriously. A world where genAl grades genAl generated submissions from a genAl generated assignment is not a world where people and the work they do matters, and I refuse to live in that world. The dehumanizing aspect of genAl is even worse when you consider the effects of genAl on you as a student. Using genAl as a substitute for doing the work yourself robs you of your voice. It prevents you from developing your own sense of who you are, what you believe, and how you express that in your own unique way and replaces it with statistically generated slop that is literally incapable of forming a novel thought. In a world that works to dehumanize us every day to say who we are and the relationships we form don't matter I don't want to add to that work. I don't want to do this because the relationships you form matter. Your voice matters.

Generative Al has a literal body count In the short time genAl platforms have been available, they have repeatedly encouraged people to harm themselves or others. This includes murder and suicide. In one case, ChatGPT told a user who killed his mother before killing himself that his mother may have been a demon, that he "wasn't crazy" to think she tried to poison him using the air vents of his car, and said that it ChatGPT-would meet the man in the afterlife. In another case, ChatGPT encouraged a man to commit suicide in part by rewriting the text of Goodnight Moon to what one news report called "a nihilistic philosophy that romanticized suicide and encouraged him to let go of his life." There are cases where genAl has not only encouraged suicidal ideation but told users to hide these thoughts from loved ones. These cases were not users who found some exploit or were pushing the edges of with new technology. They were normal people convinced by a computer program to do terrible things when using that program normally. These aren't the only cases. There have been enough deaths related to Al chatbots that there's a Wikipedia article. OpenAI's data suggests that hundreds of people in mental distress interact with ChatGPT weekly. This is not the behavior of a moral company. In 1982, seven people died in Chicago when someone tampered with Extra-Strength Tylenol, lacing pills with cyanide. Johnson & Johnson responded by voluntarily recalling all Extra-Strength Tylenol in Chicago, offering refunds to anyone who had purchased it, ceasing advertising, and taking out national ads advising consumers to not use Tylenol. Compare that to what companies like OpenAl have done in response to murders and suicides encouraged by their products. A platform that encourages murder and self-harm under normal conditions is not a platform I think belongs in my classroom. The fact that genAI companies aren't taking meaningful steps to address these outcomes only makes it worse.

I just updated my explainer for why I don't allow generative AI in my classrooms with a new section and an expanded section.

New: Generative AI has a literal body count

Expanded: Generative AI is dehumanizing

CETERUM AUTEM CENSEO INTELLIGENTIA ARTIFICIALIS ESSE DELENDAM

No, these are very serious comments.

ChatGPT has absolutely no goddamn place in graduate education. It steals from other authors, routinely gets major facts wrong, hallucinates sources, and generally makes the prose flat and boring as hell.

And if you shill for it in my mentions, I'll block you.

That’s fascinating. I was pleased we got four pages and a few photos of the Antarctic Flight into the centenary RAAF book ‘Then Now Always’.

Do you have any docs or photos of your father’s? I’d love to see more of the story.

I’m still STILL practicing my “Top. Men.”

A photo of a page spread of The Vintage Aviation Echo, photo with my text and overlaid with a Martin Mars lanyard in red, tech drawings in the background, and a Martin Mars mug. Marsworld!

Another spread of The Vintage Aviation Echo, showing the original Martin poster recreated with design work by the VAE’s brilliant design team Harry and Oliver, with that Mars mug again, tech drawings and an old envelope to me from FIFT containing Mae’s drawings (also in the background) and info. Plus my card.

Covers of both issues of The Vintage Aviation Echo, surrounded by photos of the Mars.

For #FridayReads, May I suggest The Vintage Aviation Echo’s ( @vintageavecho.bsky.social ) new Vol II?

As well as a range of other splendid articles, it has my feature on the Martin Mars saga, that goes in many unexpected directions, inc from Mary Pickford to Typhoon Freda.

Details: www.vaemag.com

Mosquito Engine Run - January 16 Experience a rare Mosquito engine run in Kelowna at the KF Centre for Excellence. A historic aviation moment. Free event. RSVP required.

An exciting opportunity in Kelowna. Great to see the twin Merlins on this Mozzie in action!

@avculturesconf.bsky.social and the Canadian Aviation Historical Society will be at the KF Centre for Excellence in June, so see you and the Mozzie there, then! -JDK

kfcentre.ca/mosquito-eng...

No power, no phone, no radio: why comms dropped out during the central Victorian fires We need reliable communications during climate emergencies like bushfires and floods. But changes have left regional communities exposed.

Important article on the lack of redundancy and robustnesses in Australia's rural emergency public comms network. Knowledgeable input welcome.

theconversation.com/no-power-no-...

A thing I didn’t expect to see.

It’s an Iguanodon (Victorian reconstruction) one of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.

Ha, sounds like it. THe stills are GREAT.

Loved taking a stroll through your timeline about them (and the other stuff). Can you recommend a primer and / or non-Japanese speaker places to see (and recommended) films?

OK, @six18sfoundry.bsky.social , you have my attention, I think we need to hear more, please!