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| The Big A* Original Art Sale ends today! | Jul 31, 2015 10:37 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The Big A* Original Art Sale ends today! (Friday!) So if you want to get any of the pieces of original A* art for sale through this site for just $10 each—that's 80% off, in most cases!—today is the day to get 'em! Look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner as you browse through the comic (and there are also non-gold "buy the original art" links in the episode galleries); if it's there, that piece is still available for immediate purchase!
I'm gonna sneak in a few last examples, since these are recent paintings that just became available to the sale in the past week—click these thumbnails to go to their "original art" pages:
 
After today I won't be able to pester you about the sale anymore, heehee! ^_^
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| The Big A* Original Art Sale ends Friday! | Jul 30, 2015 9:50 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Don't forget, the Big A* Original Art Sale ends Friday night! If you want to cash in on the 80%-off sale price for any piece of original A* art (watercolor paintings, ink illustrations, etc) available through this site, get those orders in now! : D
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| Obsessive Twitching | Jul 29, 2015 8:32 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Oh boy, hours obsessively tweaking the webcam and broadcast titles for my Twitch channel isn't really keeping me on time. Hope I can actually fit five pages in this week! :P Did get to Post-it chat back to some folks who dropped into the live stream to see me watercoloring, though, so that was fun. Checking a chat window while you're working *can* be a bit distracting...but it can also be a nice pick-me-up when you're feeling not-so-fresh about the page you're working on for whatever reason. Anyway I'd better stop jabbering and get to work on some zzzs so I can get back up and at this!
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| A* live art streaming is go! | Jul 28, 2015 5:25 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Well, this inaugural day of broadcasting streaming internet video of myself working live at the drawing board was pretty fun! I got to meet a few folks and even do a bit of chatting back via Post-its on my drawing board ('cause talking into a mic is so 1920s). I did get a later start than usual for me on a Monday, but if you missed the live streams on my Twitch channel, you can still catch them for I think 30 days in my past broadcasts section: here is the drawing of today's page (a bit twitchy since I hadn't learned to disable my webcam's autofocus yet : p), and then there's the watercoloring of it; there's also watercoloring a painting for a Patreon supporter that I did earlier in the day. And I'll be exporting most of them to my YouTube channel for more permanent storage, so for instance the drawing and watercoloring of today's page are already on there.
Whew! And if you do want to catch 'em live and maybe even get my attention for a Post-it note chat (although I'm not always paying attention to chat 'cause I gotta draw and paint furiously to get this stuff done you know; also my eyes don't like looking at a screen all day x_x), if you happen to load up this site while I'm streaming, there'll be (if I remember to activate/deactivate it correctly...still working on making this a habit!) a notification link to the stream below the comic images, in the gap between the little A* logo and the main site menu:
I'm going to add a little note about it being a (mostly) silent stream at the bottom of future videos, since that seems to be confusing people, and not many folk look at the info section below the live stream video on the Twitch channel page (which I still need to flesh out, besides).
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| The Big A* Original Art Sale ends next Friday | Jul 25, 2015 10:34 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The Big A* Original Art Sale ENDS NEXT FRIDAY! Yes, the sale whereby all the A* art available for sale through this site—mostly normally $50 per piece—is going for just $10 apiece will be ending at the end of the day on Friday, July 31st (and that's Pacific Time, for you sticklers ; ). So that leaves you with slightly less than one week from now to snap up whatever pieces of A* artwork there are lying around here that you might have had your eye on—at their hugely discounted sale price, anyway.
With the original drawings and paintings behind the daily comic, for instance, you can just look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic page images as you read through the comic; if the gold link is there, that means the piece is still available, and clicking the link will take you to its product page with more info about the piece itself, a big photo, and for course the big "BUY" button. Remember though, there's only one of each of these things, and they're first-come, first-served. A heck of a lot of pages have been sold during the course of this sale, but there are still a fair amount left that you may be interested in. To get you started, for my final highlight post of this sale, I'll point out a quartet still surviving from this very latest episode, 26:
 
 
All still available—at the time of this writing, anyway! Thanks for looking, and remember, you've just got through next Friday to get these or any other piece of A* art that's left here at the $10 sale price!
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The streaming equipment I ordered is "out for delivery" and should be showing up at my doorstep any minute now; I may manage to get in some test streams late Saturday / early Sunday here, and *hopefully* I'll be able to figure out this internet broadcasting thing sufficiently over this weekend to make Monday the first ever live stream of an A* page as it is being drawn and painted. I'll try to have a link to the stream—probably in bright light blue or something—appear just below the comic, in the space between the A* logo and the main site menu—where the "Big A* Original Art Sale" link is right now—when the stream is officially live, as a tip-off; the stream will be at my Twitch page, www.twitch.tv/smbhax, and in theory Twitch will auto-post a notification on my Twitter when the stream goes live, also.
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| Hiroshi Yoshida's colors; A* art live Monday? | Jul 24, 2015 7:20 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:While I was on tumblr last weekend I came across the amazing artwork of Japanese woodblock (and watercolor!) artist Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950); the clarity, delicacy, and harmony of his colors—not to mention his faultless illustration and arresting layouts—are really breathtaking. Take a look! Although he worked in the traditional Japanese woodblock style, he also studied western oil painting, and had an exhibition of his work in the States (Detroit!) at the tender age of 23; he would continue to travel extensively throughout his career, and often used the Japanese woodblock techniques to illustrate non-Japanese subjects, which isn't something that had been seen much in the medium—plus he made plenty of gorgeous Japanese scenes as well!
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Looks like my broadcasting equipment will be arriving earlier than expected—this weekend!—so if I can figure out how to get it working, I might even be able to stream the making of Monday's A* page live on the internet—on my Twitch channel, specifically.
There will be a lot of work left to do in terms of setting up my broadcast graphics and filling out the rest of my Twitch page, but I'm hoping to get at least a web widget set up for myself that will alert you with a light blue link to the live stream below the comic, between the "A*" logo and the main site menu—where the "Big A* Original Art Sale" link is at the moment—when the stream is on the air. If you have a Twitch account (they're free), you can follow my channel and set your preferences to have Twitch email you when I start broadcasting; and I've set my own Twitch settings to have a notice auto-posted to my Twitter when I start streaming, so you can keep an eye out over there, too.
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| Nix and Hydra, tiny moons of Pluto! | Jul 23, 2015 6:19 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:NASA has released the best photos seen yet of two tiny moons of Pluto, Nix and Hydra, taken by the New Horizons probe in its recent flyby:
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
A bit blurry, but that's because these moons are hard to see even from close to Pluto, they're so tiny! About "26 miles (42 kilometers) long and 22 miles (36 kilometers) wide" for Nix, and "34 miles (55 kilometers) in length" for Hydra. New Horizons was about twice as far away from them as they are from Pluto when it took the photos—for reference, our Moon orbits Earth about three times farther away from us than they are from Pluto, but the Moon is around 100 times wider!
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| Bionic ears, and now an eye | Jul 22, 2015 3:35 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Bionic eye implant world first (BBC) describes a recent medical procedure in Manchester that's restored some central vision to an 80-year-old patient with macular degeneration: "The bionic eye implant receives its visual information from a miniature camera mounted on glasses worn by the patient. The images are converted into electrical pulses and transmitted wirelessly to an array of electrodes attached to the retina. The electrodes stimulate the remaining retina's remaining cells which send the information to the brain." The impression given is more like a rough pattern on a grid of white dots than an actual real-world view, but it is enough to show, for instance, the outline of a doorway.
Speaking of bionic sensors, I recently met someone with a cochlear implant, which I guess you could call a type of bionic ear—an implanted microphone that can translate sound waves into electrical impulses the brain decodes as sound, which can give hearing to people whose hearing has been significantly impaired due to damage to their cochlea, a part of the inner ear. The implant has some advantages over normal ears, even! If she wants to hear someone clearly in a noisy restaurant, for instance, she can place a tiny remote microphone close to them to boost the implant's reception of just that person's conversation. And it automatically screens out noises that would be painful to flesh-and-blood ears. I first wrote a blog entry about Cochlear implants back in June 2011 (that entry is much more extensive, with multimedia too!), noting at the time that over 150,000 people had them; currently, Wikipedia says that as of December 2012—just 17 months later—about 324,000 people had them; so by now, two and a half years later...well I guess we could very well be up to half a million bionic ears worldwide!
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| Coming soon: A* TV? : o | Jul 21, 2015 1:20 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I had a crazy idea today. I guess I was stumbling around Twitch and I somehow found the area where Twitch (a video streaming platform) lets people stream their Creative activities. And I thought—well gee, I could do that. I mean, I *do* do it, full time, all week long—except for the actual streaming it part. So I might as well be streaming so people can see me drawing and painting the A* pages as I'm actually doing them (never mind that this is often at times highly inconvenient to most of the other people in the Western hemisphere : o), and maybe get some new fans and supporters, or at least entertain some of the current ones!
So without giving myself a chance to come to my senses, I've ordered what I hope is the requisite hardware to support a hefty video stream, and once that gets here next week, I'll see if I can actually get it running. : o If you want to think positive and get the jump on things, you can preemptively follow my Twitch stream; also, Twitch has a setting that says it will notify those following my Twitter when I start streaming, so you could keep an eye on that. And I'm going to set up a little widget here on smbhax.com itself—probably to appear in that announcement space between the little "A*" logo and the main site menu, underneath the comic—that will show a maybe bright blue text link to the stream while it is live. If I can actually get it working! Anyway I'll let you know.
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| About two weeks left in the Big A* Art Sale! | Jul 18, 2015 11:40 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay the Big A* Original Art Sale has let's see...about two weeks left! People have been buying up the A* artwork on this site during the sale at a pretty good pace—the sale price is just $10 per piece, after all!—but there are still some nice ones left; just look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic images as you read through the comic—if it's there, that piece is still available, and clicking the link will take you to its product page with more info and a big photo and so forth. Here are a few to get you started—these are from back in episodes 17 and 18:
 
Prices will go back to their usual $50 or so rate in a couple weeks, so don't delay too long if there's some piece of A* art here that you've had your eye on!
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Today's page—or actually yesterday's page—was a bit late in being posted because I had to draw it twice (the first time ended up not working out : p), then after I painted it I was so tired I just had to go straight to bed! Sheesh!
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| Good morning! | Jul 17, 2015 1:16 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:In between penciling today's page and throwing an excessive amount of watercolors all over it, I felt the need to stretch my legs a bit, strolled around the block, and happened to catch the rays of the still-unrisen sun just grazing the peak of Mount Rainier beyond the still-shadowed Seattle:
Heading down to the end of the street, I found the Olympic Mountains already fully illuminated, off in the hazy distance across Puget Sound:
By the way, if you tried registering an A* forum account earlier this week and never received your activation email, give it another shot: I'd inadvertently allowed the forum's email settings to get a little out of date, but it should all be working now.
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| Up close with Pluto and Charon! | Jul 16, 2015 1:30 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The first detailed photos from New Horizons' historic fly-by of Pluto are in! And they went real close-up on Pluto:
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
The big surprise: mountains! "As high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters)," they are almost certainly composed of water ice, which is rock-hard at Pluto's frigid temperatures (average 44 K (−229 °C)). But what caused them? It was most likely something fairly recent, as the smooth, crater-free landscape beside them could only have survived that way if it formed within the last 100 million years, hardly an eyeblink in geologic time; could Pluto be geologically active? If so, scientists will have to come up with a new mechanism to explain how this frozen little rocky ball, outside the squeezing grip of any gas giant, can move its surface around!
And we have a wide view of Pluto's largest moon, Charon (this is the compressed, slightly blurred version the probe could upload quickly; the full version will come later):
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
The gouge on the right side, which could be "4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep," and the 1000 km (600 mile)-long scar running across the lower section, coupled with the smooth, surprisingly little-cratered landscape around them, again suggest recent geologic activity! The dark area at the north polar region appears to be "a thin deposit of dark material"—another mystery!
At about 1207 kilometers across, Charon is (just) over half the diameter of Pluto itself! So large relative to its planet is it that as it orbits, Charon pulls Pluto off its axis, so Pluto in effect orbits empty space in a small circle (although in physical reality the two orbit each other); this has lead some to call Pluto/Charon a binary system! A week before the fly-by, New Horizons captured the two in a nice side view:
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
(And here they are in a handy diagram showing their size relative to Earth.)
But with the relatively slow release of the final fly-by photos, the really indelible image we have so far is the one that came out a day *before* the fly-by, as New Horizons approached Pluto, and revealed the large, light "Heart" surface structure (the mountains in the top image come from the lower left tip of the "Heart"):
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
<3 Pluto!
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| First high-definition Pluto photos due today! | Jul 15, 2015 6:01 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I'm not sure why I keep making organically shaped spacecraft. Like, I'd been envisioning drawing this ship with all sort of angles and jutting spurs, but then I realized that didn't really make sense in terms of practical space ship design. : P Hum!
Speaking of angular spacecraft, the BBC says New Horizons: Spacecraft survives Pluto encounter, so hopefully we'll start seeing the first-ever high definition photos of Pluto from its flyby later today!
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| New Horizons flying by Pluto! | Jul 14, 2015 3:15 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:As I write this, NASA's New Horizons probe is just two hours away from its flyby of what was once known as The Ninth Planet: Pluto! Although as a matter of interesting trivial fact, "Ninth Planet" has meant a lot of different things, at different times, and maybe depending on who you ask! Check out this copypasta from Wikipedia:
Ninth planet may refer to:- Pluto, considered to be the ninth planet from its discovery in 1930 until its reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006; still considered a planet by some scientists
- Neptune, the ninth-closest planet from the Sun from 1979 to 1999 (with Pluto then considered the eighth-closest planet from the Sun)
- The asteroid 2 Pallas, considered to be the ninth planet in chronological discovery order from 1802 until its reclassification as a minor planet in the 1850s
- Jupiter, considered the ninth-closest planet from the Sun from 1807 to 1845 as a result of the discovery of minor planets
- Planet X, various hypothetical planets beyond Neptune
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But back to Pluto, which will always be The Ninth Planet as far as I'm concerned! : P NASA has a video-or-app-based simulation showing what New Horizons will be busy doing during its all-important flyby (it's only taken 9.5 years of flying faster than any other spacecraft to get there!). Those of us who just want to see the pretty pictures will be most interested in those, of course. You can see on NASA's Deep Space Network Now page just what deep space antennae are communicating with which spacecraft; New Horizons has a normal transmission rate maximum of just 1 KB/second, meaning it takes about 42 minutes just to send back a single photo! And that's after the five hours it takes for the signal to get from Pluto to Earth! Then there's probably decoding, processing, and whatnot... But who knows, maybe by some time today (Tuesday) we'll be able to see the first razor-sharp photos of Pluto, ever! !! It might be a day or so more than that though for all I know. And this is assuming that the flyby goes as planned. : )) Go New Horizons!
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| ~3 weeks left in the Big A* Original Art Sale | Jul 11, 2015 10:57 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hey let me tell you about the Big A* Original Art Sale! It's been going on for months now but it *will* be drawing to a close in three weeks-ish, so that's how long you've got to snap up any piece of original A* art available for sale through this site for just $10—as opposed to the usual, non-sale prices of $50 or so! Yes that is a pretty good deal and a lot of pages have already been bought :), but there are still some instances of my best work to be found! Just flip through the comic and look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic pages—that indicates that the page is still available for purchase, and clicking it will take you to its product page with details and a big photo and so forth.
For instance, here are a couple black ink pages from the very noir-ish beginning of episode 18 that I thought came out rather well—and they're still available for instant purchase as I write this! Clicking these thumbnails will take you to their details pages:
 
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| Quintuple--and higher!--star systems | Jul 10, 2015 10:38 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Rare system of five stars discovered is the descriptive headline of a recent BBC article about just such a discovery 250 light years away from us: years of reading little pulsations in the light reaching Earth instruments has told astronomers that the system in all likelihood consists of two binary stars orbiting each other at a distance of 21 billion km (that's just over 4 times Neptune's distance from our Sun)—one of the binaries is a "contact binary," which means the two stars that make it up are so close together that their outer atmospheres are actually touching each other!, and the two stars in the other binary are only separated by a little over two diameters of our Sun—with a *fifth* star orbiting the detached binary. One of the astronomers involved calls systems with this many stars "extremely rare," adding only that NASA's Kepler telescope had discovered another quintuple system.
Speaking of which, Wikipedia lists two known quintuple system (with a third considered a dubious classification, apparently), three or four sextuple systems (including Castor, a star in the constellation Gemini, and one of the brightest in the night sky—the giant star Pollux in Gemini is even brighter though!), and two septuple (seven stars!) systems. No system of more than seven stars has been found...yet!
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| I got a date with a box and tape | Jul 09, 2015 8:34 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Oh boy, it's late/early and I gotta go get another A* page boxed up and ready to ship off to another A* reader. Thanks everyone who's been buying my artwork, by the way! Whether it's the new pages that go for auction daily on eBay, or the older pages for sale directly through this site (the Big A* Original Art Sale has three or so weeks left!), your purchases are much appreciated, and I'm always happy when one of my paintings finds a home. ^_^
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| I should've done a comic about cyclopes | Jul 08, 2015 7:11 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The second eye! The second eyeeeeeeeeee~~~
(Also I got all the monthly e-book rewards emailed off yesterday to those supporting the A* Patreon campaign at the relevant support level, so those should be in your inbox now. Thanks for your support, it's a huge help!)
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| I'm not blogging, I'm emailing! : o | Jul 07, 2015 2:30 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I said I'd get the monthly e-book rewards mailed out over the weekend to those lovely people who have them coming for supporting A* through its Patreon campaign, buuuut I didn't! So I'm off to get a start on that now, hopefully I'll have them all taken care of in a few blog-slacking evenings here. >_>
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| The one eye of quality original A* artwork! | Jul 04, 2015 11:08 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:There may be only three or four weeks or so left in The Big A* Original Art Sale! But for now you can still take advantage of it to pick up any piece of A* art for sale through this site for just $10 (as opposed to the usual $50 for most of them!). Just look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic images as you read through the story: when you see it, that means the original painting, drawing, or whatever behind that A* page is still available for purchase, and clicking that gold "original art" link will take you to its sale page with info, details of the piece, and a big photo.
There are bunches of pages still available! To help you get started, here are a few, still available at the time of this writing! Click the thumbnails of these 17"-wide ink illustrations (well, the first is ink wash, specifically; they're both from episode 17, where Selenis was infiltrating a cult's moon base!) to get to their sale pages:
 
Notice that in today's page, just as I did way back in episode 17, I still bail out of drawing two eyes in the same head in close-ups! I tried, I triiiiiiiiiiied to get that second eye to cooperate , but it just wouldn't. So...visor reflection/obfuscation to the rescue! Yes it's all smoke and mirrors to conceal that darn second eye. . P
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| That e-bookish time again | Jul 03, 2015 7:17 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A fresh month is upon us, so supporters of my Patreon campaign at e-book reward levels can expect a download link for another A* e-book in their mail soon—hopefully I'll get that done this weekend despite 4th festivities. : )
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| Neutron star apes black hole; comet sinkholes | Jul 02, 2015 5:54 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A couple recent bits of space news:
- NASA’s Chandra Captures X-Ray Echoes Pinpointing Distant Neutron Star (NASA): A neutron star is what you get when a star that isn't *quite* massive enough to flaunt the normal rules of matter and collapse into a single point in space—a black hole—collapses: an incredibly dense spinning ball! This particular neutron star, 30,700 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy, is ripping material off of its binary partner and throwing it out into space in rings, which served as an array of mirrors, reflecting X-rays from the neutron star in our direction, and because the travel time differed slightly depending on the displacement of the "mirror," this allowed scientists to calculate the neutron star's distance from us pretty precisely, essentially by triangulation. Anyway the part I thought was particularly interesting about this star was this: "This new distance estimate means that Circinus X-1 is inherently much brighter in X-rays and other types of light than some scientists previously thought, and indicates that the star system has repeatedly passed a key threshold for brightness where the outward pressure from radiation by the system is balanced by the inward pull of gravity. This behavior is something astronomers generally see more often in systems containing black holes than in systems like Circinus X-1 that contain a neutron star. The researchers also determined that the speed of the jet of high-energy particles produced by the system is at least 99.9% of the speed of light. This extreme velocity is usually associated with jets produced by a black hole." So this neutron star is behaving somewhat like a black hole, which is "unusual."
- Rosetta spies cometary sinkholes (BBC): The ESA's spacecraft orbiting comet 67P has spotted sinkholes—a different kind of black hole, if you will : ), although these are actually the source of some of the spectacular jets of gas and particles that have been streaming off the comet with increasing intensity as it nears its closest approach to the Sun: sunlight strikes the newly revealed ices on the walls of the holes, and they boil right off. Just as sinkholes on Earth are due to subterranean erosion, so can the innards of a comet wear away, it appears; probably another part of the boiling off going on as the comet heats up. And conveniently, these holes, up to 200 meters deep by 200 meters wide, allow Rosetta to look into the interior of the comet for the first time! 67P will reach its closest point to the Sun next month, heating up all the while.
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| SpaceX rocket latest to fail resupplying ISS | Jul 01, 2015 2:07 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:An unmanned SpaceX rocket taking supplies, including food and a new docking mechanism, to the International Space Station exploded shortly after launch on Sunday; it joins "the US Cygnus ship and the Russian Progress craft" as recent casualties on supply ferrying missions to the ISS. The Falcon-9 rockets had enjoyed 18 missions without mishap before this, but this accident—due to "an overpressure event in the upper-stage liquid oxygen tank," according to early data—grounds the Falcon-9 line until an investigation is carried out and any required alterations made. This leaves companies wishing to put satellites into space with only one launching option—the European Ariane-5 rocket—since the other two commercial launch systems, the Falcon and International Launch Service's Proton, have both been grounded after mishaps. Good news for Arianespace, maybe, but tough times for the satellite industry!
Even with the string of supply mission failures, astronauts on the ISS have sufficient supplies to last until October. The Russians get another shot at resupplying them this Friday.
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