Advent Day 7 - White Dwarf and Toast

Day 7 !

What's behind the doors today ?

In the foreground, we have Chewbacca doing something horrible with a Porg over the fire, plus a S'Mores marshmallow. Tasty, tasty S'Mores marshmallow.

Today's Mass Effect pic is Tali'Zorah vas Neema, as she starts in the second game. Tali is a beloved character in the game series, voiced admirably by Ash Sroka (IMDB link). It's a pretty short list there but I know she's been in more roles (like the Xenophile advisor in Stellaris) and she really brings Tali'Zorah to life. There are many amazing characters in the Mass Effect series and Tali is quite possibly, the most loved of them all.

And it's the voice acting that turns the words into something that makes that happen.

One curious thing is that the Quarian race of which Tali is one of, is a very slightly different race to the norm. Pretty much all of the Mass Effect intelligent races are bipedal humanoid in shape, with variances along that theme. So the Turians (Garrus from yesterday) and the Quarians have exoskeletons and need different food. The Quarians also have an extra joint in their legs, which coincidentally makes them look like they wear high heels all the time.

They are also forced to live in ships, the Migrant Fleet, after being evicted from their homeworld by the artificially intelligent Geth and consequentially, inside environmentally sealed suits as they have minimal immune systems. This also drives their naming convention, so Tali'Zorah vas Neema is Tali of the family Zorah of the ship Neema.

It's all part of making a fantastic universe to dip in to as you play.

Today's Elite theme is "White Dwarf", another where I'm not sure how I would have pulled off a drawing. But ... I do have screenshots ....

Oh wait. Wrong White Dwarf. I can't remember how many of these I bought over the years ! White Dwarf was a gaming magazine owned and run by Games Workshop, who you may recognise from how they've expanded into being a pretty ubiquitous presence. They've done well too, instead of exploding and imploding like so many others who rapidly established a presence, they've survived where so many have disappeared.

Some of that is probably due to being able to exploit their market ... they are pretty much the only wargame miniature figure producers. But it's also because people are highly interested in playing with the stuff. Their games are all over the place and some of that is copying from those who came before (orcs, dwarves, elves ...), some of that is making the rules easy to understand and play.

I started buying White Dwarf at issue 98 and back then, it was a mix of background articles, rules previews, tutorial guides on building models and painting them and it had huge amounts in there of artwork in both the drawn and modelling world.

The sad realisation came though a few years later that it wasn't so much a hobbyist magazine any more, it had turned in to a marketing arm aimed at selling their product. I lost interest and walked away from buying it. Part of that was down to eliminate buying stuff that wasn't food though. Yeah, been there, it's not fun. But then I started working and my finances looked up from there on in.

What is a White Dwarf in the real world ?

The in game graphics may not be representative of the real stars !

Here we have the Searching for Biscuits looking on at a rapidly vibrating White Dwarf star. They are degenerate stars at the end of their life which are in a cooling phase. They've burned up all of their fuel, gone through the expansion in to a red giant like Betelgeuse and started contracting and cooling as their fuel source runs out. They start at a particular size (between 8 and 10 solar masses), outside of which other things will happen to the star, like degeneration in to a neutron star or a nova explosion.

The colour comes from what happens when the hydrogen fuel runs out. Normally stellar fusion will start with Hydrogen with one proton and fuse it into heavier elements like Helium (2 protons), Lithium (3 protons), Beryllium (4 protons) and then into Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. Stellar fusion is how everything in the galaxy becomes more than the base protons, neutrons and electrons. And novae and supernovae are how those elements become spread throughout the galaxy, to form the worlds that orbit younger stars. But before then, the balance of the elements in the star determines their colour (spectroscopy) with the carbon and oxygen in the White Dwarf producing that colour.

There's more about them in the wiki page (link!).

Astronomy is a great science to dip in to occasionally, although it can get mind bending.

Cya tomorrow.