Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 66

I'm doing this thing called "camping" with some crazy friends this coming weekend--it mainly involves staying outdoors for a prolonged period of time, apparently--so I'll have to draw my weekend comic, "The Princess and the Giant," during the week, which will knock into my A* drawing time, which more or less means that I probably won't get more than one A* page to you per day this week. Bleh! Maybe I'll be able to squeeze in a few more, but it isn't all that likely.

I'm also annoyed with myself because I accidentally saved the next page's original, high-res art as the tiny, scaled-down version. Dar. Been quite a few episodes since I made that kind of mistake. So when that one comes along, it won't have a "buy as hand-signed print" link below it. Annoying, because it came out pretty well, too! Hm... Ahh, I know, I'll add a "Save as Copy" step at the start of my flattening/resizing macros, so it'll make a backup before squishing things down. Yay! ... Wish I'd thought of that like a year ago. =P

Gosh, now I've actually kind of cheered myself up after that debacle. So anyway if you need more comics in your day aside from the one meager A* page per day that I can feed you this week, why, you could take a gander at that perpetrator Princess' strip that appeared this past weekend, by clicking on this preview banner shortcut thing:



EDIT: Thanks to the author of the fine Rusty and Co. webcomic for pointing out that the better way to save myself from saving original art in a squished state would be to use the "Image > Duplicate..." command on it, then do the squishy stuff to the duplicate. And that works just dandy in macros even, so yay!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 67

I guess one upside to this working ahead and only uploading one page per day this week business is that you at least get the update during the day on which it is meant to occur, rather than the wee hours of the next morning. ;)

I've got a bunch of interesting links on A*-related stuff that I came across this weekend!

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A reader mentioned to me that actual aerospace engineers they work with seem to enjoy a magazine called Aviation Week. I was poking around their site, and they do have a lot of space-related articles--mostly NASA and such news you can also find elsewhere, but still, they do a good job of collecting it. They've got a gallery where people can upload space-related pictures, and I thought this picture of India's first satellite being transported to its launch site on an oxcart was pretty nifty. They also had a link to this video with a CGI reconstruction of the 1987A Supernova, showing how the remnant we see today might have come about; the blast is thought to have expelled material outward primarily in two opposite ring shapes:



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I came upon the US Department of Energy's International Nuclear Safety: Ukraine, Chornobyl Photos gallery; "Chornobyl" is how you spell it when transliterating from Ukrainian, whereas the more familiar "Chernobyl" is transliterated from Russian--the reactor accident took place in '86, when the area was under Soviet control, so at the time we got the Russian spelling.

I found the gallery because I was looking for information on an interesting corium formation I had heard of being there, called the "Elephant's Foot" due to its shape: it's a 2-metric-ton clump of "corium," which is basically the "melt" part from a nuclear meltdown, consisting in Chernobyl's case of a good amount of uranium fuel, zirconium (from the melted control rods, I think), metals and things from the bottom of the reactor, which melted through, and concrete; during a meltdown this all forms a blazing hot molten "lava" that flows downward from the reactor. Here are some of the more interesting shots, with my summaries from the somewhat inconvenient separate captions page:


image from DOE (source)

^ Solidified corium flow in the steam distribution corridor below the reactor--well, this *is* the reactor, melted.


image from DOE (source)

^ The "Elephant's Foot" 2-metric-ton blob of corium below the reactor site--uranium is heavy stuff!


image from DOE (source)

^ Checkin' rads outside Chernobyl after the accident. Dig those suits.


image from DOE (source)

^ The shelter site's deputy director checking out the "Elephant's Foot" in '96. This is all still pretty radioactive, so I was surprised to see the guys here not wearing full protective gear; I guess it must be all right for whatever duration they were down there, but I think if it was me, I'd want to wear the full suit, if only for the crazy headgear.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then I came across footage of various nuclear tests.



^ This is the 23 kt ("kiloton," ie having an explosive force equal to 23,000 tons of TNT; according to Wikipedia, a kiloton of TNT is about a 10-meter-per-side cube; 23 kilotons is absolutely puny by modern thermonuclear weapon standards: for instance, a Trident II submarine missile can contain 8 W88 warheads, and each one of those warheads has a yield of 475 kt, ie the whole missile would be 160 times more powerful than what you see exploding here; another comparison is the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, whose 13-18 kt blast killed 140,000 people) "Baker" test from 1946's "Operation Crossroads" series, which I talked about before here.




^ 1955's 22 kt "MET" test from Operation Teapot in Nevada. Check out that eerie violet glow bathing the cheerful test viewers. None of them even put their hands over their groins, which as everyone knows is standard defense procedure during a nuclear attack.




^ Official film glamorizing the 1962 test of the portable, artillery-fired Davy Crockett nuclear shells; Attorney General Robert Kennedy attended the test, and can be seen wearing "high-density goggles" in the viewing stands at about 8:42. The idea was to drop the nuclear shell on the enemy, killing most of them by direct radiation intensity, then send in ground troops, in theory able to move around the worst of the fallout cloud, and mop up remaining resistance. Fun times indeed. ("Only two vehicles required a wash-down!")




^ 1971's "Cannikin" test at Amchitka, on the tip of the Aleutian Island chain in Alaska. At 5 Mt ("megatons"; a megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT), this is the largest underground nuclear test held by the US; the force of the blast caused seismic shock equivalent to an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale, making the ground about a half-mile around (I forget where I read that distance, so take with grain of salt) jump up about 5 meters, leaving a crater that is now a mile-wide lake, and producing a concussion that killed 700-2,000 nearby, and presumably non-Communist, sea otters. The group that formed to protest these tests became Greenpeace.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 68

So far this working ahead thing is going all right; just need to get two A* pages done today and I'll have enough to cover me (at this meager one-per-day rate ;|) through my return next Monday, leaving me with the next two days to complete this coming weekend's Princess and the Giant page.

I think I mentioned recently how I was roped (haha oh so funny am I!) into being co-founder of the new #Lasso-tool group on deviantART. Well now it is group madness! Last week I had two other groups ask to show some of my Princess artwork: #MonochromedVision ("one color art" although it's actually two colors, 'cause one color is eh blank you know) and #ShadedInBlack (interesting and large niche covering any art with shadows done in black). #MonochromedVision is more in line with my own interests, so I became a member of that group, but I also ended up making the icon for #ShadedInBlack, because they didn't have one and when I teased their founder about it, he challenged me to put my money where my mouth is. ;) So I took the easy way out, and you may recognize their icon as being a crop of Princess and the Giant page 53.

So that was all very exciting! Oh yeah, my deviantART page is here in case you were wondering---okay so you weren't but just go visit, yar! Hm I need to get some of the recent A* stuff up there.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 69

Man, Vero's really gotta work on those landings! This one was pretty fun to draw, and yes, I *have* been looking at a lot of Frazetta lately, fancy you should ask!

Okay, now I gotta start ahead on this weekend's Princess comic. Never drawn one of those during the week, this is going to be weird. Gotta get in the right frame of mind... Maybe if I sing some songs to myself, or something...

Rubber ducky
you're the one.
You always make
bath time fun!
Rubber ducky
I love you!

Ah, better. (Apparently my brain paraphrased that from Jim Henson.)

Oh yeah, but back to the sci-fabulous for a second, if you want a pretty significant spoiler for tomorrow's lone page, you can check out this super-secret screenshot of me at work on it yesterday.

Always cool to see screenies of peoples desktop!

And - Mel Torme FTW!!

Yeah man! Up until this past year or so the only thing I really knew about him was that he was this weird dude who sang with funny noises on "Night Court" once in a while. Now I know he's "The Velvet Fog" or Frog or whatever--I always forget that last bit. And he sang better than any current popular jazz vocalists do--unless Nancy Wilson is still performing. ;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 70

Yes that is a weird pose for the weekend! Things are all in all getting pretty weird with this whole working ahead business, trying to cram my weekend comic work in during the week and so forth; like, in the Princess comic I've been working on over the past two days, first she came out as a streaking female Ghost Rider, flaming head and all--no, really--and now I've realized that I subconsciously stretched the primary sections of her body by *exactly*--I measured this in pixels--33% along the horizontal--AS I DREW IT--in order to convey an increased sensation of fast motion across the page.

It's sort of neat but I wish my subconscious would clue me in as to what it's doing a little sooner sometimes. My conscious mind has been trying to "correct" this subconscious skew for the last hour or so but is now realizing that the subconscious was actually very clever about it, and stretched small sections of detail--like the head, hands, chest, etc--by slightly smaller amounts, as the eye slows down to rest on them, and did other things like increasing the width of the legs to make her look like a really fast runner just in terms of muscles. Man. My subconscious is apparently crazy smart. Now if only it was more of a team player.

Anyway probably the more subconscious version will be going up tomorrow, and I'll probably put the naked Ghost Rider super-subconscious version (Freud is sorry he is missing this) up in my deviantART gallery, behind a "Mature Content" warning, at about the same time.

Then I'm driving a bunch of people on what they call a "camping" trip, and I'll be back late Monday, hopefully, to post the last page of A* weirdness. So hopefully Tuesday will allow me to get back to doing multiple pages per day, and, eh, maybe not quite so weirdly--at least, not just subconsciously weirdly.

Not to hijack this thread but 1) Didnt know he was on night court! lol 2)He really does have an amazing voice and 3)his rendition of The Christmas Song pwns all.

Back to the thread....

Yeah he like co-wrote The Christmas Song, or something, when he was really young. On "Night Court" he was the favorite musician of the judge, so the judge was always talking about him, and then they'd have him on as a guest star once in a while, since the judge's character was supposed to be a huge fan of his.

Last hijack post, promise. I have this favorite Night Court bit, goes something like this:

Bull: Its only through adversity that we grow stronger

Judge Harry (looks impressed): Who said that?

Bull (leans in towards the judges face): Its me sir! Bull!

:D