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| A* to 2015 and beyond! | Dec 31, 2014 2:38 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hey we're back! Monday's day off *should* be the last holiday-related break, so if all goes according to plan we're back on the usual five-days-a-week schedule for the foreseeable future—yep right on through New Year's and all. : ) Some time before next Monday afternoon I *will* have to go collect the A* art on display at the current show here in Seattle, at Julia's of Wallingford, in order to take it—and a bunch of pieces that Julia's entertainingly opinionated curator deemed too "babelicious" for their diners ; )—over to the next venue, the 14 Carrot Cafe in the Eastlake neighborhood, for setting up that afternoon, *but* I should be able to fit that stuff in around getting new pages done. Hopefully. It'll help that the 14 Carrot is fine with hanging artwork simply from nails in the wall—that's so much easier than places that want it suspended from fishing line or whatever. : P Yay nails!
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| This isn't your dad's tractor beam | Dec 27, 2014 9:25 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Good news! You won't have to keep an eye out for a new page from me on Monday! Because I'll be taking the day off to catch a holiday party with friends. >_> Durn these holidays, anyway! Well I hope you're getting through them more or less intact if you're having them. I will be back to work on a new page on *Tuesday.*
Speaking of bringing stuff back, did you know that a few months ago, scientists at the Australian National University broke the distance record for a tractor beam (BBC)? This is a little less impressive than it may sound if you're thinking of classic sci-fi tractor beams—in this case, the new record is 20 centimeters. That was 100 times further than the previous record, though! And actually the scientists said it could have worked over "meters," but their lab wasn't large enough. So there! I'm just gonna quote the middle section of the article since it does a great job of explaining what this real-life "tractor beam" stuff is all about:
Previous tractor beam experiments used the momentum of light particles (or photons) to impart motion. But this latest device relies on the energy of the laser heating up the particles and the air around them.
The researchers used a so-called hollow laser beam in a laboratory at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The laser is bright around the edges and dark at its centre.
They then used it to manipulate hollow glass spheres about a fifth of a millimetre across.
The particles are trapped in the dark centre of the beam. Energy from the laser hits the particle and travels across its surface, where it is absorbed creating hotspots on the surface.
Air particles colliding with the hotspots heat up and shoot away from the surface, which causes the particle to recoil in the opposite direction.
By changing the laser beam's polarisation (the direction in which the light waves vibrate) they were able to move the position of the hotspot to manipulate the glass spheres. |
Sounds a little like cheating, but technically it is a beam and it is tractoring (that's a technical term, right?) things around, uh or at least causing them to move around. And I think we can trust science to come up with some really useful applications of this sort of thing, probably more useful—if perhaps less dramatic—than holding spaceships in place. Oh actually the article lists a few potential uses, you should go read it!
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| Now smoother than a lump of coal | Dec 25, 2014 9:17 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Merry Christmas! Or just have a nice day if you prefer. : )
You probably can't tell but the comic browsing experience here should be imperceptibly smoother today! After three days of poking at it while working on the new top-of-the-screen, click-on-the-sides-of-the-comic-to-go-forward/back navigation, I finally figured out a non-super-kludgy workaround for the problems the mobile version of the Chrome browser has in centering tables (ie this blog when it's beneath the "large" 1080p version of the comic), so I was able to de-kludgify the page layout script at last, which made me happier than it had a right to. And while I was on that long slow roll I went ahead and added pre-caching for the page before the current page, so if you're flipping backward through the comic, you shouldn't see a whole lot of loading time for the comic images, because (hopefully) they've already loaded before you even turn the page (pre-caching for reading in the forward direction has been in for a while now).
I'm taking today off for family festivities and frolic—back to work on another new page on Friday! It'll be the perfect thing for your eggnog hangover!
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| Click the comic to navigate yep | Dec 24, 2014 8:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay, I think I'm done with my little comic reading interface overhaul. In case you missed it yesterday, you can now click on the left or right side of the comic image to navigate backward or forward through the pages—should be easier to click than the little text navigation links. Those (and the main menu) are still around, just moved down beneath the comic so the comic itself will fit better on wide screens.
I added little upwardly bending arrows next to the next/prev page text links to try to illustrate that navigating by clicking on the nice big comic image itself is now an option, uh...hopefully that'll be somewhat clear. There's probably a much better and more elegant way to do that but I couldn't figure one out! : P
And then I tidied the script up from all the cutting and pasting I'd done in moving things around, and broke everything because I forgot that I need a bunch of redundant stuff in there to keep the mobile version of the Chrome browser from forgetting how to center things correctly after a while. I mean, when a browser from the world's biggest web company doesn't know how to obey a div center tag correctly, just what is this world coming to?
So my daylight schedule is kind of off thanks to staying up late about three nights in a row working on that stuff, but I'll be taking what will be more or less Christmas Day off, which in effect means I'll have one more page (page 12) out before I take a one-day holiday, then another page (13) before a two-day weekend. Whee!
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| Click the sides of the comic to turn the page | Dec 23, 2014 5:11 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:You may be noticing that things appear to be a little topsy-turvy around here all of a sudden; no, you do not need to adjust your browser: the site menu bar and the navigation bar have indeed peregrinated down to positions underneath the comic, rather than lording over it from above as they had been doing since time immemorial. I still have to redesign the navigation bar a bit, adjust the vertical spacing on everything, and clean the script up, but what you've got here is the meat of a change that came to me in one of those unasked-for up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-can't-sleep brainstorming sessions last night. Oh yeah, the other main thing that goes along with this is that whereas before you could click anywhere on the comic image to jump to the next page, now you can click on the left side of the comic image to go back to the previous page (clicking on the right still advances a page).
The idea is to declutter the area around the comic image—it had ended up sandwiched between lots of little text link rows—and to make the comic navigation easier and to maximize screen space for those reading the comic on mobile devices, which, according to my demographics, is now fully a quarter of you! (Well, in the US; globally, it's 21% of you.) That number includes myself, during the day, because I prefer to keep my computer off and just have my phone and tablet on hand for flipping through recent pages, checking reference images, and so forth as I work on drawing the latest page. And I think my sleepy brain swiped the the clicking-on-the-sides-to-turn-the-page scheme from the Marvel Unlimited comic reader app, which does just that as you read a comic on it—and so do most mobile app "print" comic readers I've tried.
One of the main things I have to do still with the relocated nav bar is to add little explanatory text and arrows pointing out the click-the-image navigation scheme; it's a fairly intuitive scheme, I think, but only if you actually know it's there. ; ) I'll be working on getting the remaining bits and pieces of this sudden switcheroo in place over the next few evenings, I think, and hopefully it'll all be squared away by X-Mas, when I'm taking a day off. If you are having trouble with this rejumbled comic navigation scheme in any way, please do let me know!
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| A* goes old-timey | Dec 20, 2014 5:53 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a reader some weeks back as the reward for their support of the comic through my Patreon campaign in the month of October <333
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| What's in a name | Dec 19, 2014 1:29 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:An astute reader on the A* forum pointed out that "Dox," the name applied yesterday to the male member of the comic's current conversation, is also the surname of the Brainiac family from DC Comics; "Vril Dox" (aka Brainiac 2) was the name I should have recollected but did not as I was attempting to name my character late last night; I take some solace in finding that "Vril" was a literary name going back to 1871—although the writers who applied it to a comic character in 1964 could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that, not having the internet and all; then again, maybe they did know it, since it was a pretty far-out sci-fi concept that had been back in literary discussion as recently as 1960, and was almost certainly in the public domain by then. Hm! Anyway, my "Dox" is a first name, or an only name like a rock star...so I'm probably close enough to being in the clear. I wouldn't have had this little fuss in the first place if Warner Brothers had been doing their SEO job properly and had gotten any of the Brainiac Doxes to show up in the first five pages of a Google "Dox" search, or even in Wikipedia. Sheesh. : P
I'd had some name starting with "C" that I kind of liked for my "Dox" ("Cade"? Hm not sure, at any rate I don't like that today ; P), but then I thought that was probably one "C" too many to throw out right after "Caldwell." That space station name, incidentally, does not come from the Caldwell Station neighborhood in North Carolina (but bonus points to you if you live there!), or from any of the many other Caldwells you may find, except for the Caldwell Catalogue, "an astronomical catalog of 109 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies for observation by amateur astronomers." I'm not sure how I got to that—my browser history isn't causing any bells to ring; either it was through some astronomical feature that linked to it on Wikipedia, or, which seems more likely now, it was just a name-sound that popped into my head somehow that seemed to fit.
But back to poor "Dox": deciding I couldn't do a name starting with "C," or numerous other consonants I've already used for names, like "M" or "S," I wracked my brain for some other letters to start off with appropriate-sounding sounds for this guy; I wanted it short and hard-consonanty. Well I also had "Quin" in the running at some point but that didn't work out. I got stuck on Pax, then Fax (hah), Dax...which became Dox. And then I found that's modern slang of some sort for electronic "documents," which I thought was amusingly appropriate for this would-be administrator! And I'm keeping it, so there. : P
Considering all these difficulties, panic nearly ensued when it was time to come up with a woman's name for today's page, but somehow "typhus" relatively quickly sprang into my head—certainly a good unpleasant association, fitting for a pirate, but now I wonder if maybe it also came along from the Marvel comics character "Typhoid Mary," whom I've looked up in recent months. (EDIT: Uh and whose name they swiped from the infamous historical figure. Jeepers, is nothing sacred?) (I've been reading tons of old Marvel Comics through their Marvel Unlimited subscription service—if DC had an equivalent, we probably could have avoided that "Dox" debacle! And actually I just recently received, from a wonderful A* reader going through my Amazon wish list, a gorgeous compendium of early Legion of Super Heroes comics, which very likely contains a Brainiac "Dox" reference—if only I wasn't behind on reading and blogging about the great comic books readers have got me! Gotta get on that.) Feminizing it in my head turned "Typhus" into "Typhae," which turns out to be Latin, which I for some reason feel tends to be kind of a good, relatively safe place to find names—at any rate, there are tons of sci-fi-ish-sounding Latin scientific names, many of which are still obscure enough to be relatively unclaimed by commerce; Nonagria typhae, I found, is a moth—coincidentally, a nice parallel of meaning to Selenis' name, which I got from the Greek for "Moon." (And this reminds me that Selenis' cover name in episode 17, Mellifera, also came from an insect—a bee; although, that episode featured a robot bee... I don't think we'll have any moths in this episode. : P Statistically speaking though I suppose the gigantic Insecta class has a bit more than the usual Animalia share of Latin names to plunder!)
Fortunately, I don't think I'll have to try to come up with any other names for a while now. : P
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| Space...gardening? | Dec 18, 2014 2:06 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's yet another sketch I mailed off to a reader a little while back as a reward for their support of the comic through my Patreon campaign in the month of October ^_^:
... I am in a weird mood sometimes when I do sketches. >_>
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| You are not able to touch this? | Dec 16, 2014 11:31 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I mailed off a little while back to a reader as a reward for their support of the comic through my Patreon campaign in umm October, I think it was! <33
I guess it was hammer time! : o
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| Episode 23 e-book now available! | Dec 15, 2014 11:36 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:
The episode 23 e-book is now available from the episodes & e-books page! Get the episode in high-res pdf format for reading offline or wherever.
Those folks supporting my Patreon campaign at e-book reward levels will be getting this one mailed to them at the beginning of next month. : )
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| Black comets, and a sketch! | Dec 13, 2014 10:22 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:If you like end-of-the-year lists, the BBC has a pretty interesting one of the top 10 "physics breakthroughs" of 2014 (does this mean physicists are all already on winter break? : p) (I think I'd missed that "quasar as a cosmic flashlight" thing : o). And their article Even in Colour, Comet 67P is Grey tells us just that—or to be more precise, the recently explored comet's surface is "black as coal"—the photos you've seen of it were artificially lightened to show detail.
Here's a sketch I recent-ish-ly mailed off to a reader as their reward for supporting my comic-making efforts with a much-appreciated monthly contribution of funds to my Patreon campaign:
Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuu! And thanks everyone for reading along with this silly ol' comic. ^_^
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| Go, go Patreon sketches! | Dec 12, 2014 5:22 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I mailed off to a reader not-so-recently (I'm a little behind on showing these to you!) as the reward for their support of A* through Patreon:
Patreon is a service that makes it easy to help your favorite creators keep creating by automatically sending them a little money each month. It's a huge help to me—thanks to everyone who's pitching in!!
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| Episode 24 begins! More space pirates! | Dec 11, 2014 5:01 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Here we are on a new episode! Boy I'm gonna have my work cut out for me this weekend. I'm already behind on sending out e-books to Patreon supporters for last month, so I gotta do that, and make the episode 24 e-book, and get the "episodes & e-books" page all up-to-date with the new episode, and archive the episode 23 scans, and uh... Hm well I should be getting sketches enveloped up to send out to Patreon supporters but I'm behind on those—gotta get back to the sketching next week for sure! Oh yeah and I'll probably have some original A* art pages to box up and get ready to take to the post office to send to people. Whew! But for now I'm going to bed. : P (Hopefully to dream of space pirates!)
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| End of ep. 23; Page titles and descriptions! | Dec 10, 2014 2:55 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Last page of episode 23! This ending action scene went quicker than I thought it would—I found myself skipping pauses and combining actions together in this weird urge to keep the tempo really high. This episode only took two months, gosh! : p
By the way, if you're ever stumped by my staccato sequences or funny art, and left wondering what's happening in a given page, especially in these silent segments, you might find it handy to check the title and short description of the subject of the page's painting in its eBay auction listing—I find them handy myself, sometimes. :P The link to a page's auction, while it's going—they last a week—is in blue and gold at the lower left corner of the page's comic image in this site's comic reading view. (If you want an even shorter shortcut to the auction for today's page just to check it out real quick so you can see what I'm talking about, here you go.)
Or you can just ask me. ^_^
Episode 24 will start tomorrow...uh just as soon as I catch up to working out the specific opening and dialogue. Yes, there will be dialogue and a new character or two and more space pirrrrates!
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| Last day for the big painting auction! | Dec 09, 2014 2:56 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:It's the last day I can bug you about getting in on the auction for the largest watercolor painting I've ever done because the auction ends today! Late-ish! You may still have time! The painting looks something like this, only bigger and real-er:
Now I'll have to come up with new stuff to bug you about. : o
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| Big Selenis painting close-up | Dec 06, 2014 9:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:You've still got time to get in on the auction for the biggest watercolor painting I've ever done! Here's a close-up of the central figure in the 18" x 24" composition:
Who *wouldn't* want to bid on such a cute face? ^_^
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| Orion test flight & ESA ExoMars on track | Dec 05, 2014 6:02 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:In case you somehow missed it the past few days, you've still got five days or so to check out the eBay auction of my biggest ever watercolor painting; it is 18" x 24" and looks something like this, only probably bigger unless you have a huge screen : o:
There are more and bigger photos of it in the auction listing!
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I spent a big chunk of blog yesterday talking about the imminent launch of the first (unmanned) test flight of the Orion crew module, which is part of a two-module ship, mounted on a still-in-development rocket, that will, according to NASA's plan, one day fly some people to Mars—and then the launch was delayed due to high winds and "sticky fill/drain valves on the rocket's big boosters" that "had become excessively cold in the presence of the Delta's liquid hydrogen propellant." Which is a good example of why I usually don't take up such impending news stories. : P Oh well, the delay was just one day, and it launched a half hour or so ago as I write this; if you missed it like I did you can catch the launch video, which also has some dramatic events, like the spectacularly fiery jettisoning of the booster rockets starting at about the 4:57 mark, (although all that stuff was just the ol' Delta IV rocket, which is used to carry the module up for this test but won't be part of the Mars missions) and the jettisoning of the crew module panels starting at about the 7:05 mark.
(Hmm NASA is calling them the "service module panels" but the Orion service module is four years away from a flight test, and according to this test's launch configuration schematic there is no other "service" module of any sort...so maybe they're just using "crew" and "service" interchangeably here—or "crew" becomes "service" when there a) is no crew and b) is no other "service" module? I guess that would *sort* of make sense but it would also be pretty confusing to people like me. : P)
The flight is scheduled to go for two orbits of Earth and should take uh I think it was four and some hours; according to NASA's Twitter feed and their Orion Spacecraft Twitter feed, everything is going just dandy; oh and if you're the very patient sort you can see it all for yourself through NASA's streaming live coverage.
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The European Space Agency meanwhile, not to be left behind, has been thrashing out the plan and the budget for their next generation Ariane rocket, the Ariane 6, which needs to be less expensive than their current very successful workhorse, the Ariane 5, in order to stay on top in the increasingly competitive business of boosting satellites, ISS supplies, and other things into Earth orbit.
And speaking of Mars missions, the ESA was also discussing the future or their ExoMars rover project, which is intended to get a European rover lifting off to look for evidence of current or past life on Mars in 2018; that project has been plagued by a persistent budget shortfall, but they managed to agree upon enough funding for now "to keep the mission on track."
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| First test flight for the Orion crew module | Dec 04, 2014 3:20 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Just in case you somehow missed me blathering about it yesterday, the biggest watercolor painting I've ever done is fresh up for auction on eBay. Notice how its 18" x 24" bulk sits commandingly in this chair:
Isn't it lovely? Some lucky bidder will be setting aside a place for it once the auction ends next Tuesday.
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This next sunrise, at Cape Canaveral, is the time for Exploration Flight Test 1, the first test flight of NASA's intended-to-go-to-Mars-eventually Orion spacecraft, specifically the aluminum/lithium alloy Crew Module (aka the "Command Module") built by Lockheed Martin, due to be carried up to a short two-orbit unmanned flight by the triple-gold-barreled funky-looking and currently highest capacity rocket in the world, the Delta IV Heavy; the Space Launch System is the rocket intended to do the heavy lifting on full bore Orion missions, but it's still in development.
Hm, the EFT1 Wikipedia page I linked up there says this is also a test of the Orion Service Module, but that can't be right, because the contract for the ESA to build it was only signed in recent months, and it isn't due for its first test flight until 2018's Exploration Mission 1, which will also be the first test flight for the Space Launch System ("SLS").
Update 1/18/15: A reader got me on track of looking into the service module situation a little more closely, and it seems that what EFT1 had was a "mockup" service module—some sort of stand-in for the real deal. Googling hasn't found me an official confirmation of that, but one such mockup is pictured on page 3 of this NASA pdf from 2013.
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Ended up kind of trying to paint a lot darker than I usually have been in watercolors in today's page, to get the foreground to stand out from the background; I guess I haven't done a watercolor painting this saturated since the very early days where I was slathering the stuff on like mustard—but since then I've learned that the way to get colors darker is not to lay it on thick like paste, which takes a heck of a lot of watercolor ($$) and is hard to work with, but to apply the watercolor in layers, which somehow ends up much darker than if you had applied an equal amount of watercolor in a single coating. I guess because with layers the particles of pigment can stack up on top of each other? Anyway, it works. : )
Another thing I did here was adding colored highlights—those blue blips along the horizon in the background. I first thought of this last week when I needed to apply a pink patch over a darker patch of watercolor I'd placed accidentally; not sure why it took me this long to think of it, but basically I just mix some watercolor with the white ink I normally use for stars and corrections, and voila, I have a light-colored paint that can go on top of watercolor and lighten it, whereas watercolor on its own pretty much only darkens. So that's handy.
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Today I absorbed a tasty slice of carrot cake while casing the site of my *next* art show, which will be right after the current one (at Julia's of Wallingford) ends, at the beginning of January. If you're familiar with Seattle's kitschy cafes you might be able to guess where it will be!
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| Get my super-big Selenis painting! | Dec 03, 2014 12:28 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A couple weekends ago I woke up really early and instead of going back to sleep, for some reason I painted a big painting: 18" x 24", which is way bigger than any watercolor piece I've done before. It features you-know-who and is up for auction on eBay right this very minute! Here is a preview (there are more and larger photos in the auction listing):
It was fun to be able to paint Selenis in a more abstract way, outside of an immediate story context and all. I hope people like this one and buy it because the huge sheet of super heavyweight watercolor paper alone cost like $12 or something. : o It is way too big to fit in my scanner so I won't ever have prints of it to sell—the only way to get it is to win that auction! The auction runs for seven days and I will probably be bugging you about it every day in my blog if I don't forget because making art is expensive—man! And I want to be able to do more of these big crazy things. : )
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| A* art at Julia's of Wallingford, Seattle | Dec 02, 2014 12:49 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:For the month of December, framed A* art is on display—and for sale!—at Julia's of Wallingford in Seattle (map), peering down at you from strategic vantages as you dine. : o
Thanks to my dad, and the owner, Charles, for getting this show scheduled and hung up on the walls. This is the second time I've shown A* artwork at Julia's, so I guess they didn't get too many complaints from diners the first time. ^_^
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