Russian space pioneer Valery Bykovsky dies aged 84 said the BBC today: Bykovsky, a member of the inaugural 1961 class of Soviet cosmonauts, still holds the record for the longest solo space flight—5 days—that he set back in summer of 1963 aboard a Vostok spacecraft, the predecessor to the Soyuz capsules that are still in use today (the Vostok's spherical crew compartment puts it ahead on style in my book : P).
"Bykovsky's mission overlapped with that of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. At one point, the two Vostok spacecraft were said to have come within 5km (3 mi) of one other.
Tereshkova is now the last person alive to have flown in a Vostok ('east' in Russian), the first generation of Soviet-crewed spacecraft."
Finally got through my backlog of blogging topics that piled up during the mad blogging run-up to last week's big A* 10th anniversary post, so, whew! Now I can just go to bed at something a little closer to my theoretical responsible adult bedtime for once. _^^
A sketch I got to send to a reader for supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign : ) :
Thanks everyone for your support, you make this comic possible! = D
(I've set the default, menu-hidden front page view to show just text links to images, rather than displaying the images directly in the blog article—I didn't want them to be a distraction while reading the comic. You can view the images by clicking their text link in the article. And they will still display normally, in the body of the blog entry, when the site menu is un-hidden; in that mode, the blog entry is farther down the front page, under all the menu and social media stuff.)
So, you know, nothing worrying there at all, nope, not a bit. : P
And the articles, if you think about them, and watch certain science fiction movies, may be slightly alarming. The first tells how the US Army went looking for commercial partners to develop AI weapon platforms that could engage targets "three times faster" than "the current manual process," which apparently got people worried they were about to start creating an army of killer robots. Which...they very well may be. But they pointed to Directive 3000.09, a Department of Defense guideline saying that our AI weapons are only to engage human targets with lethal force under direct human supervision, more or less; and they promised they would definitely, certainly, always always always follow that rule and what, you know, could possibly go wrong? Obviously nothing, the rule is very exhaustively written. Whew! Good thing that rule is there. They probably didn't have good rule-writers on Planet Terminator. Praise Directive 3000.09! It keeps us safe.
The second article is a little more light-hearted, depending, I suppose, on your point of view; self-aware robots looking back on this may consider the brutal disassembly by unknown assailants of the harmless and cute "Hitchbot" hitchhiker robot in Philadelphia in 2015 the clear indicator that humans will ultimately commit robo-genocide if our existence is allowed to continue. In any case, for now things are hunky-dory because the Ryerson University team in Toronto have rebuilt poor Hitchbot—and hopefully Hitchbot 2.0 won't be mugged as it harmlessly hitch-hikes its way across the country, to the entertainment of fans following its GPS signal.
The article also talks about research at MIT that found people presented with the opportunity to conk robots with mallets and so forth mostly didn't want to hit the robots: "The reaction of most people was to protect and care for the robots."
If you missed my last, brief, late blog entry: no, your web browser is not broken, I made a radically minimalistic change to the comic's initial front page. Hopefully it declutters the experience while leaving the comic browseable for normal day-to-day reading, and the site's full features just a single, intuitive click away...but please let me know if this is *not* intuitive to you, because my intent is definitely not to confuse people! Email smbhax@gmail.com or tweet @smbhax. Thanks to those who've given me feedback already! : )
(I did go in this morning and add a little explanatory blurb about menu-free comic navigation to the menu page, and removed a tiny bit of the redundant clutter here and there.)
Tried something a bit drastic with the front page layout. Let me know if you figure it out! : ) (If you can't find the "about" page now, my email is smbhax@gmail.com, and my Twitter is @smbhax.)
About 2/3rds of the world's collected meteorites have been picked up in Antarctica, where the dark, scorched rocks stand out in sharp relief against the snow, and are naturally brought to the surface in areas where the glaciers in which they land move over ridges.
But iron meteorites, about 5% of the meteorites found elsewhere in the world, make up only 0.5% of the meteorites found in Antarctica—and the expedition's science team theorizes that this is simply because, being metal and thus more readily conductive of heat from any sunlight that strikes them, any iron meteorites that come to the surface are much more likely than rocky meteorites to melt their way back beneath the surface, where they may remain hidden within a mere 30cm of the surface (the team is devising a metal-detecting sweep to find them).
So anyway, while that dead old leaf probably isn't metal and thus not as efficient a conductor as an iron meteorite, it does seem to have heated up a bit in the sunlight—darker stuff being dark because it absorbs incoming photons rather than reflecting them, heating up in the process—and begun the process of melting downward through the snow...probably somewhat slower than an iron meteorite would. : P
...So I can only assume that all the iron meteorites in my yard were already hidden.
A couple new BBC articles on findings from space probes visiting giant rocky things in space!
New Horizons: Ultima Thule 'a time machine' to early Solar System - Scientists now think that this "giant snowman" probably formed from a gentle collapse of a particle cloud, with the final two lobes bumping together at no more than 2-3 m/s, "about the speed you might run into a wall." They're still working on figuring out why one of the lobes, Ultima, is really flat, but they've got some theories.
Hayabusa2: Asteroid mission exploring a 'rubble pile' - The Japanese probe has found asteroid Ryugu is about 50% empty space, and likely "formed when rocks were blasted off a bigger asteroid and came back together again." And as a bonus, there are also some findings mentioned about asteroid Bennu, being explored by NASA's OSIRIS-REx ("Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer" : P) probe.
It's A*'s 10th anniversary. : ) On March 18th, 2009, the first episode of A* appeared online as a silent video. A*'s first seven episodes debuted as movies, in fact (episodes 1 & 2 were quickly redone with sound : ); if it's been a while since you watched them, or if you never saw 'em, heck, check 'em out (I don't usually put embedded videos in the blog since it can slow down some browsers ever so slightly, but it's 10*, let's go crazy : D):
In July 2009, I started converting my daily animation work to static webcomic pages, so viewers would have something to follow in the gaps between the animated episodes appearing. It turned out to be so much easier to get people to follow the static, page-by-page version that in February 2010, with episode 8, I switched A* to 100% static pages, graduating up to a larger page size and making the art—which was done digitally and in black and white at that point—more detailed.
I tried A* in a lot of different media since then: pencil, ink, digital color, even a tiny bit of gouache; we've been in the current magenta and ultramarine watercolor mode since episode 21, page 23 (January 2014), and I feel like I still have a long way to go with that. = o
So, that was 10 years! Well, we've also had 3,400+ pages and 35+ episodes of space adventures—not to mention the high times in the blog, social media, and I've even met a reader or two in person. : ) I thought maybe I could summarize the A* action with a not-so-little retrospective gallery of some favorite pages from the past 10 years; thanks to the readers who helped flesh the gallery out by sending me their picks! I tried to include at least a few from everyone—and my own, of course. : D Okay (you can click these to jump to that point in the story):
Aaand we're back to just about today already. : ) But we wouldn't be here without the many, many people who've contributed to A* over the years! So thank you all for writing, commenting, emailing, sharing, tweeting, joking, buying, framing, exhibiting, Patreon-ing, and just plain reading. If you can keep that stuff up, I think just maybe we can be back here in another 10 years for another little party, and another 10 years worth of comics, space adventures, and good times. *\o/* Let's go for that. : DD
It's been a long winter, but we're finally starting to defrost a little here: patches of grass are beginning to peep out from beneath their crusty blankets of snow.
And the day after the grass reappeared, so did...its hunters.
This morning, in fact, the widening patches of grass in my yard had not one, not two,
but three hungry admirers of the ruminant variety.
I think it was a mother and two fawns. (Can you see the smallest? Only its head is showing from behind a tree there. Hint: follow mama's gaze.) The larger fawn sat down on a grassy patch right beneath my kitchen window for about ten minutes while mama grazed and listened.
My yard is the high ground at one end of a long, lightly forested hillside that runs down to the left, eventually ending in a large park. Earlier in the week, the first day the grass emerged, two deer (the second appeared and followed just after the first left) had already found it.
Coming back from my walk today, I took a path along the small river running along the park, and saw separate groups of deer on both sides, midway up the hillsides—as well as their well-trod paths through the snow, thoroughly criss-crossing both areas. They aren't wasting any time!
Before the deer, though—before the real thaw had quite started, but was in the air—I had a smaller, lunch time visitor:
Lord of the snowy domain—at least for a day or so.
A*'s 10th anniversary is Monday and I figured it was a long shot, but it couldn't hurt to see if my local newspaper thought this was worth a mention of some sort.
They put me on the front page. = o
Yep that is me there, holding A* art up while my face tries to figure out what to do when a large camera lens is pointed at it in the morning. 8}
The interview (and I've got it backed up in crude photo form - 1, 2 - just in case) covers what A* is, where the idea for it came from, what I was doing before that that led up to it, and, well, a lot more stuff than I figured they'd ask me about! So, a big thanks to writer Josh Babcock, photographer Geoff Crimmins, and the Daily News for taking an interest, and for the generous coverage. Front page! JEepers!
The article mentions Paul Chadwick (@PaulHChadwick, paulchadwick.net), who I worked with on the MMORPG "The Matrix Online," my gig before A*. He's probably best known for his long-running (started in '86, so he's got me beat on anniversaries by a good long way : ), Eisner-winning independent comic book series Concrete (you can read some stories for free there on his site)—and he's also done loads of other comics. Working on his story for the Matrix was my first professional creative writing experience. : )
Get me your picks for any pages you want to see included in the little retrospective gallery I'm assembling for A*'s 10th Anniversary! Oh and get 'em to me by Friday. : ) (Email smbhax@gmail.com, tweet @smbhax.)
As I'm into assembling retrospective galleries at the moment—practicing, I suppose, for the A* 10TH gallery I'll be assembling the the big anniversary just one week from now, with your help (send me—email smbhax@gmail.com, tweet @smbhax—by this Friday the 15th your picks for favorite A* pages, max 1 per episode!), and a reader recently asked me about this "Oswalt" character who seems to be looming in this episode—and as the last time I did anything like this was way back in 2013 during episode 20, and without pictures, I figured I'd put together a little gallery of all of the mentions of Oswalt prior to this episode. They started in episode 10, then there was one in episode 11, 17, 20, and a big gap until last episode, 35 (you can click on 'em to jump to their points in the story):
There you are, all caught up on your Oswalts! Well, also we've caught actual glimpses of Oswalt twice up to this point—once in flashback—but I'll leave those unspoiled for enterprising readers to hunt up. ^_^
A*'s 10 year anniversary (!!) is March 18th! Help me pick A* pages to include in a retrospective anniversary gallery! Send your picks (no more than one page per episode!) to me one way or another (email smbhax@gmail.com, tweet @smbhax, etc) by *next* Friday, the 15th, so I have time to put together a final selection. Thank you! : D
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I sort of got to do a mini gallery selection process last night, because I was meeting someone here in town today who was interested in seeing my artwork, so I figured I'd take along a selection of the A* pages I have sitting around here. I wanted them to be a) somewhat recent, b) reasonably proficient, and c) showing a variety of scenes—and they also had to be pages that aren't currently on sale on eBay (ie the latest week's worth), or haven't already been sold; so here's the little selection I came up with for that purpose (these are in order of appearance, you can click 'em to go to that point in the story):
They pointed out that the second one, Selenis up in her tower, looks kind of like one of the observation decks on the local college campus. Darned if they aren't right!
Gee, the images are big all together here in the blog. Hm. I wonder if I should do thumbnails for the anniversary gallery. I guess I'll have to see how it shapes up. : o
Here's an ink sketch I got to send to a reader for supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign : ) :
Thank you! : D And thanks to everyone who's supporting the comic—which includes those of you reading it, which is of course the most important thing. ^)^
Just a reminder! : D :: A*'s 10th anniversary is in just under 2 weeks! Help me assemble a 10th anniversary gallery by letting me know your favorite A* pages. : ) No more than one page per episode! Get me your choices by Friday, March 15th—so I have time to pick which nominated pages to cram into the anniversary gallery the following Monday. : D Email your choices to smbhax@gmail.com, or tweet @smbhax, etc. Thank youuu! : )
It was -5 F when I got up this morning, but look who showed up for breakfast!
^_^
Apparently, this town I just moved to just had the most snow it's had in a February in 78 years. :P High temperatures have been about 20 degrees below normal for over a month. =ppp But my neighborhood bunny seems okay with it so that's something, anyway.
One of the younger sheep at the farm next to the big city park had a jacket taped around him today. As I was leaving, I looked back across the park and saw that one of the llamas had got through a gate to a neighboring yard, and the sheep were following (along with some of the more curious ducks, who I think are hanging out around the sheep while their pond is frozen over because the sheep can clear snow off patches of grass)—maybe hoping to find some area with less snow. I hope they didn't end up wandering too far off and getting into difficulties!
I kind of snuck this up on you but A*'s 10th anniversary (Ten years of A*! Can ya believe it?? = ooo) is in just over two weeks: March 18th! : D So I thought we'd have a little contest to pick out our favorite A* pages, which I'll assemble into a 10th anniversary gallery as a sort of retrospective. ^_^
The contest starts now! Just let me know (you can email me at smbhax@gmail.com, tweet me @smbhax, etc!) what your favorite A* pages are—but *no more than one per episode!*
There are only 36 episodes and 3,400+ A* pages to choose from so uh how's two weeks sound? Get your fave page picks to me by Friday, March 15th; I'll need them by then so I can total them all up and figure out which ones have thus been selected to be in the 10th anniversary gallery I'll be posting on the following Monday, the 18th—which, again, is the anniversary. : )
I guess I'll probably have to whittle things down a bit from all the pages people may nominate, so just because a page is nominated may not mean I can fit it in, but the nominations *will* be my guide, so let me know which pages you think should be representing A*'s first 10 years!
