My friend Chris Lintott and I were commenting on cute cartoon versions of spacecraft, and I mentioned I wanted to retroactively anthropomorphize past space missions, and then the ideas just started coming. Chris had the idea of encounters with the Great Galactic Ghoul, a fictional entity supposed to be responsible for the failures of spacecraft headed to Mars. The Ghoul was created by a journalist in 1969, and subsequently adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and even mentioned lightheartedly in some of its official documents.

Mars Polar Lander was launched in January 1999 and was supposed to have landed in December of that year. Instead, communications dropped just before cruise stage separation, and that was the last we ever heard from MPL. The mission failure was probably caused by a software error that caused the onboard computer to mistake the landing legs deploying for actual touchdown. Whoops.

I'm still a little bit sore about MPL because I'd put my name on it:

That said, the concept of sending a lander to the polar regions of Mars was later resurrected for the Phoenix mission (pun intended by the mission team), which was phenomenally successful. So all's well that ends well.

Also, I'm fairly certain this is the first time in 56 years that someone's drawn fan art of the Great Galactic Ghoul. You're welcome.

 There are fans and then there are fans.

Maybe we can all just stop fighting about what constitutes a "true fan" and acknowledge that everybody likes a thing in their own individual way?

 The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs need more love! I just really wanted to draw fan art of them. (I know, I need to get better at photographing my art. I'm trying. Lighting is hard.) (I know my lettering also isn't great. An attempt was made. Ironically, my grandmother is a professional calligrapher. I don't know what happened with me.) I definitely need to go see these guys on my (as-yet-hypothetical) grand tour of nerdy places in the UK (which will of course include Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics).

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs get maligned a lot for being inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs, but considering that no complete (or indeed articulated) skeletal remains of dinosaurs were known at the time of their creation, you have to cut Waterhouse Hawkins a lot of slack. Hawkins was an extremely skilled wildlife illustrator who was probably the best person in England for the job of trying to come up with believable animals based on fragmentary remains. I think his designs, while incorrect, are actually much more biomechanically workable than those ghastly waddling-tripod dinos of the late 19th century to late 20th century. (That one is Louis Dollo's fault, and he tried with those Bernissart Iguanodon, I know, but if you have to straight up break a specimen's tail to get it into the posture you want, that is probably not the right posture for it.) 

If you look closely at the Iguanodon sculptures, you'll notice that they even have beaks. There was no cranial material known for Iguanodon at the time, which makes this all the more remarkable on Hawkins's part, because Iguanodon really did have beaks. A genius inference.

Fun fact: Hawkins's Megalosaurus has that big shoulder hump at Richard Owen's request; he was directing Hawkins's sculptures, and was aware of a set of tall-spined vertebrae that he referred to Megalosaurus (which at the time was basically a wastebasket taxon for all large theropods). Because these vertebrae were found on their own, it was anyone's guess where they went on the animal, so it seemed reasonable at the time to give "Megalosaurus" a tall shoulder hump like bison have. Nowadays the specimen is referred to Altispinax, which may have been related to Concavenator, meaning those tall spines formed a weird mini-hump in the middle of the back. Interesting case of a dinosaur being reconstructed inaccurately because too many unrelated animals were lumped into the same genus.

I'm a big fan of the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and that's why I wrote him into my novel Thunder Girl. If you want a really beautiful treatment of his work with sculpting prehistoric animals, I highly recommend the picture book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick.

 This NPC's dialogue is supposed to tip you off to the fact that in earlier Pokémon games, a poisoned Pokémon's health would steadily decrease outside of battle as you walked, until it fainted. But I just imagined a different story involving a negligent Trainer not noticing his own Pokémon getting poisoned. (I feel really bad for that Clefairy, though.)

In later games, this mechanic was amended so that a Pokémon was cured of poison when it reached 1 HP, thus preventing the player character from potentially blacking out and being sent back to the nearest Pokémon Center at an inconvenient time. More recent games have done away with this mechanic altogether, which is kind of nice because that poison sound effect reminding you that your Pokémon's health was depleting was kind of stressful.

 Theoretically, more Pokémon can only be a good thing, right? I guess I just wanted to play around with someone bypassing the usual party limit.

Game Freak has said that at times they've entertained the idea of altering how many Pokémon you can keep in your party at once, but decided that would mess with the formula too much. Six does feel like a pretty solid balance between a strategically diverse selection and a manageable party, so I doubt it will change anytime soon.

Most forms of Pokémon media don't actually explain why you're only allowed six Pokémon in your party at once. I think the Pokémon Adventures manga is the only canon that actually does bother with an explanation--in that universe, the Pokémon League restricts Trainers to six active Pokémon at a time because they felt that was the maximum number a Trainer could properly give care to at once. Kinda weird how in the games and anime, it's never addressed. But I guess the writers have other things to do than satisfy pedantic geeks trying to work out fictional logistics.

 After yesterday's cartoon, I got to thinking about how Americans do not have a monopoly on the English language. But don't worry, there's a dinosaur for every occasion.

Incidentally, alvarezsaurids (the family Mononykus is in) are still giving paleontologists a headache about what they possibly could have used those tiny, short, one-clawed arms for. Some people think they could have used them to break open termite nests, anteater-style, but their arms are so short, the critters would have had to lay on their stomachs to do any digging.

I'm probably right about this one, guys.

 Sometimes the truth hurts, Bug Catcher.

Don't worry; someday, you'll grow up to be a Bug Maniac, and then... actually I'm not sure that's any better.