WHOA WHAT JUST HAPPENED... nutso. so nutso.

Well Vero used his glove controls to launch most of his remaining missiles, and then a bit of crazy perspective tight space suit happened, not directly related--yet!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 121
• A* Episode 10, Page 122

Lots of links happened today!

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I came across a super-cool Frazetta space drawing from 1954 and posted it on the forum; the ship even has A*-like shading on it! (Mmmaybe a bit better =p)

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I got a nice bunch of hits from a post on "The Official Elite Forums; "Elite" was a computer space trading game that came out 25+ years ago--I actually played it on C64 (and its sequel, "Frontier" on Amiga) but it was really my brother who played it all the way to "Elite" rank, which took forever, and in fact he and another friend of mine, who was just revisiting it this past week, were talking about it in my presence this weekend! And now a link to A* pops up on the Elite forum! :o Anyway the post is by "DraQ," calling A* a "Minimalistic, Frontier-like SF webcomic." Yay! Thanks for the link, DraQ!

(I always wanted Elite to get a sequel or add-on or something that would let you spend the piles of money you can't really do much with past a certain point on building up your own trading empire that would then do the dirty work across multiple worlds for you: hiring traders and bodyguards, buying space stations and planets, investing in industry to mine valuable resources for lucrative trade, etc; and maybe you could buy like a super space battlecruiser and fly around in that with all your bodyguards and go conquer rival planets and... Well that never happened. But Elite's author, David Braben, is still in the game biz, so hey, maybe he'll become an A* fan and listen to my silly game ideas now. :D >_>

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After reading how Frazetta (darn him) kicked off his own anatomy study by sitting down with an anatomy book someone gave him and copying it all out in one night, I thought hm it wouldn't hurt if I had some sort of anatomy reference diagrams--aside from all the actual photos of people I'm always pulling off Google image search to remind me what people look like, I mean--so about ten seconds of searching later and I found a couple potentially handy things.

First of all, the Henry Gray's (hm he died of smallpox at age 34, gosh!) famous "Gray's Anatomy" medical reference book of hundreds and hundreds of illustrations of dissected human body parts is online--the 1918 edition, anyway. You can even see where veins and arteries and lymph nodes go. :P

Gray's kind of breaks things down into really small chunks, though, so the second thing I found might be handier for quick reference, and that's these muscular reference "photos" (they look more like drawings or 3D renders to me but hey). Although they really ought to have a side view in there.

And now I probably won't look at these much because I'm lazy and it's more fun to look at pictures of actual people. =p

~~~~~~~~

Sixxth posted a link on the A* forum to the Twitter feed of NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, which is where the space-faring Colonel posts really rather gorgeous photos of his space adventures, including his current gig on the International Space Station. Actual space photos by an actual astronaut are happening on Twitter, nifty!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 123
• A* Episode 10, Page 124

I'll be at Jet City Comic Show--at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall!--this Saturday, probably in the late afternoonish, trying to unload free A* postcards on people, so come take one off my hands! I'm not an exhibitor or anything, so I'll just be wandering around looking silly and hopefully saying hi to a few comic people whose stuff I like, like Jonathon Dalton and Chris Samnee.

I have never tried this before so hopefully it will work. >_>

The cards will look something like this, except on papery bits:



Pretty good for free, right? Yessss.

Oh yeah, and if you're going to be there and want to know what I look like so you can hunt me down and take my cards, I look kind of like the guy on this site's "about" page, only lower contrast, and in color. You could also Google image search me, I guess... Hey I'm the first hit for my name now! Rad. And I'm not any of the dudes with the buzz cuts that seem to be so popular among my fellow Ben Chamberlains. Eesh.

And anyway hopefully they'll have a "freebie" table like I hear is often the case at these things, where I can just dump a stack of cards and then go goof off and hopefully find them all gone when I finally remember to check back.

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Vero's "wasn't" in page 124 there was bugging me; it didn't sound exactly right, and part of me kept wanting it to be "weren't," but the other part of me thought that sounded silly. So I finally looked it up right before uploading the page! Turns out that because it's an "if" conditional type of thing, technically he should be using the "subjunctive" tense, which would be "weren't." But the subjunctive is kind of high-nosed and sissy, so he didn't. I guess. Guh.

I find this a bit funny because when you're in school learning another language, like say French, the teachers love dumping all these crazy-sounding verb tenses on you; mine didn't really get encouraged enough to work themselves up to trying the French subjunctive tense on us in a big way--sigh--but if they had, I'm sure my first reaction would have been something like "'Subjunctive?!' What the heck kind of made up foreign junk is this??" Well so it turns out we have one in my own native language, and I even kind of know it, except not by name. And not by rule. Huh!

Oh well, at least now I know why that line was bugging me. =p

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 125

I was really thinkin' I'd get two pages done for once in a blue Friday since the next page (omg spoiler) will share the same background and complete this darn weekend-long dangling sentence, but then I spent too much time detailing this pose. I even wasted time taking screenshots of me at work on it in Photoshop and then adding highlights and things in GIMP. (By the way you will notice I am listening to the new-to-me Goldfrapp album there. It is short but neat.)

Also I gotta get some Z's so I can be bushy-eyed and bright-tailed (actually wait I don't think there will be cosplayers there) for hitting the Jet City Comic Show here in Seattle tomorrow and trying to give away free A* postcards, among other activities. You can see a picture of what they'll have on them in the previous news post!

Hey I seem to have had a record high (or near record high?--there's that trick memory of mine) number of visitors today. Keen beans. Must be the postcards. Although wait, I only got 200 printed up, so you'll all have to share...uh...one per every 58 people. That's about a third of a square inch per person, almost postage-stamp size! Of paper. Hm... That could be messy.

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Remember how at the beginning of this week I was going on about the extremely boring advantages of bilinear vs bicubic interpolation for webcomic graphics, and then how resizing an image in most image editing programs, such as Photoshop, results in edges being darker (lower gamma) than they should be?

I know, I know, you were trying to forget. Well, you might even remember that the author of the article that came from, Eric Brasseur, came up with a workaround for scaling images with correct gamma, and I pointed out (well after he came up with it, mind) a few errors in the proposed process, including a loss of color 1,1,1 when working with 256-color grayscale images, and an incorrect command line parameter being used. I mailed those points to Eric and he updated his article accordingly! I even got a little credit at the bottom along with a lot of other people. Thanks, Eric! Man now I am really famous on the internets.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 126
• A* Episode 10, Page 127

I went to the Jet City Comic Show this weekend to scatter A* postcards around. That might actually have worked pretty well, as I had an unusually high number of pages read per visitor on the site the next day! And I met some comic/webcomic people I'd wanted to meet, so that was cool. And I'd seen on the show's site that "Studio Foglio" was listed as an exhibitor, but neither Phil Foglio nor his equally comic-making wife Kaja were listed as guests--so I figured the attendees would be their colorist or other representatives or something, what do I know.

I headed over to their booth and behold and lo, Phil himself was there! (I guess you're only a "guest" if they invite you to come show your stuff for free, and for some reason he didn't get invited, even though he's local and really well known.) Somehow I got a conversation going on the topic of science fiction webcomics, and Phil began rattling off the science fiction webcomics he could think of, and I immediately forgot what the first two he mentioned were, because the third was A*! :o

I hadn't introduced myself at all, so I blurted out "O that's mine do you want a free postcard?!?!" or something, and inflicted one on him without waiting to see what he said. The next I could manage was to ask how he'd found it or knew about it or something, and he harumphed (which he can do quite impressively), cocked an eyebrow, and growled "I read it!"

:oooooooooOOOoooo

So I threw another postcard at him and dribbled something about could he please put that in writing. I think he took a little pity on the clearly brain-dead individual in front of him, but still managed to rescue the situation comically by writing this:



:))))) So... Keep in mind I had never met someone out of the blue who turned out to have read my comic, and when I finally do, and that person turns out to be Phil Foglio, co-author and artist of one of the most well-known and respected webcomics going, Girl Genius--the first webcomic I ever read regularly--and a writer and artist whose work I've enjoyed for at least the past two decades, well... Gosh! My head was pretty much up in the clouds at that point. And he was still indulgent enough to keep talking with my friend and I for a good long while about all sorts of science-fiction and comic-related topics! At one point I tried telling him that he was a hero to webcomic people, but he pretended not to believe me. =P Well Phil, Mr. Foglio, sir, you are definitely a hero to me. <3<3<3

As we were leaving he was also sending his bowler-hatted assistant off with the most ornate latte order I've ever seen--and I live in Seattle, so that's saying something! But three or so hand-written lines across the top of a sheet of paper tops any coffee combination I've ever witnessed.

Visiting him was also neat because I got to see--although it didn't really penetrate my starstruck brain at the time--an actual Hugo award: his gleaming new one that he just got this month with his wife for Girl Genius--for the second year in a row. He had it strategically placed directly in front of him on the table, so that even brain-dead jellyfish like me couldn't miss it; I think in a pinch it would also have done pretty well as a self-defense measure, what with being thirteen inches of pointy silver mounted on a heavy base:


(source)

This (I had to go look him up when I got home) was his fourth Hugo: the third was last year for Girl Genius, and the first two were for "Best Fan Artist" in the late 70's; I hadn't known it, since most of the comic work of his that I'd seen was fantasy, but apparently he's a tremendous science fiction fan, and got a couple Hugos when he was running a weekly sci-fi club in college, and drawing illustrations for hundreds of fanzines.

So I guess that explains why he reads a ton of sci-fi webcomics, mine included! Man I am not gonna get over this for a while. :D :) :o

(By the way, if you're wondering what Phil Foglio looks like, here's a pretty good picture--him and his wife all dudded up for the Hugo award show a couple years ago (notice the Hugo lapel pin ;). I was dumb enough to have to ask if any of the three people at the booth were actual Foglios--although I suspected the cherubic fellow leaning back dangerously in his chair was the man himself--because I'd never--or had and forgotten--looked up a real picture of him, and so only had his cartoon self-portraits in mind, in which he always draws himself as a big guy with white (okay see I'd only seen black and white self-portraits by him :P... Gah okay see back when I first read the first page of Girl Genius, it was in black and white... Hmm and if I'd bothered to have paid attention to his What's New with Phil and Dixie comic from 1980's Dragon magazines, I'd have known better) hair, suspenders (I asked: they were hidden under his vest!), and a comically tiny bowler hat perched on the top of his head (a youthful assistant nearby was wearing one, but couldn't have been old enough to have done Phil's earlier comics!).)

The convention itself was a blast from the past for me, because it took place in the exact same big room--the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Center--where I had gone to my last comic convention--15 or 20 years before! And I had never paid any attention to the guests and activities at conventions as a kid, so I can't really compare how those...compared, but I do suspect the emphasis is more on guests and such these days than comic shop people selling their stuff. But if that's the case, this small, first year show--run by the same people who do the massive Emerald City Comic Con--was nice, because it wasn't very crowded or noisy, didn't have *too* many cosplayers, and still had a bunch of local comic shops there with tons of back issues available at bargain prices. It's been ages since I collected any comics, but a certain one strategically taped to the front of a collection box caught my eye


(source)

because, while I was never into Conan comics, I *have* enjoyed Robert E. Howard's Conan books, and this particular cover didn't look like it was drawn by the Marvel series' usual artist, John Buscema, of whose work I was not particularly a fan. And it was just $2.

Turns out it's the only comic from the series to have been entirely written and inked by Neal Adams, an artist whose work I do rather enjoy. Roy Thomas' writing is way too over the top, he throws in a character by the loathed hack writers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter ("Juma the Black" who is--get this--a black man! And thus very strong, and, like pretty much any non-white character in badly written fantasy, well-versed in mysticism and native lore. Great characterization there, guys ;P), the coloring by Glynis Wein is remarkably sloppy (my favorite bloopers: Conan stabbing through a guy with an uncolored sword, Conan's left arm having a gold stripe on it in one panel in the same spot where he wears a gold band on his right arm, and, on the cover, the colorist probably just reading the title and thus coloring only the baddy's skull gold, even though his whole body is supposed to be gold), the story is sort of carried off by a giant slug, and the art isn't Adams' best work by any means (you'll notice there on the cover for instance that the torso of the princess behind Conan is--if you count the part of it that must be blocked by Conan's calf--far too long; I think I noticed that only because I have that kind of problem all the time in my Princess and the Giant comic), but I think I can still count it as money well spent for the amusement I got out of it.

Oh, and it was published the same year I was born! And it's got the same silly old ads I always used to see when buying back issues: Grit, Charles Atlas ("Don't Be Half A Man" and "The Insult that Made a Man Out of 'Mac'" right on the inside front cover), "I'll Make You a Master of Karate," and "Too Skinny?" among them.

And I got to meet and talk to the comic guys I'd set out to see, Jonathon Dalton and Chris Samnee, who were both super nice. So, first comic show I've been to in years and years, and it was a small one, and it was pretty darn great as far as I'm concerned.

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I added links on the "about" pages of my comics to their just-made-today listings on Webcomic Tweets, which provides handy ways to find and track Twitter feeds by webcomic artists. Here's A*'s entry, for instance. And by the way you will notice--should you peruse said about page, that A*'s very own Twitter feed is right here, just waiting to bring the latest A* updates right to your Twitter uh page or reading list or outlet or whatever they're called.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 128
• A* Episode 10, Page 129

Reader Robotwin.com (nice marketing there, RW ;) observed on page 10:127's mirror on ComicFury that Selenis was looking distinctly David Bowie-like yesterday, and I think he's probably on to something there, seeing as how I was on a Bowie YouTube blitz back in May. So...hm. Is Bowie a good look for Selenis? Do I have Bowie on the brain? Will our hero survive!?!?!

I'd forgotten to mention that late last week I added an enlarged detail from page 10:105 to the episode 10 gallery:



The galleries can be accessed via the "episode list" link in the site's top menu, by the way (and some day I really should find a way to make that a little more self-explanatory...).

I made that detail because I was finally getting around to putting that page on my deviantART, which is kind of a collection of what seem to me to be the most successful of my comic drawings. I'm still way behind on that and I need to catch up, because it's what my dad and I will use for selecting the pieces to print, matte, and frame for the exhibition of my stuff that's going to be running at the swanky Caffè Fiore in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood from November through December. Yep, you could go have some (really good) coffee or hot chocolate (:)) while checking out nicely framed prints of what I hope will be my best A* and other drawings. So that's super-exciting and I gotta get caught up on my deviantART page so we can get started on that.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 130
• A* Episode 10, Page 131

Hey, even more action today, how about that.

Speaking of action (oh man was that slick or what?), Congress today passed a bill providing funding to NASA through 2013. According to the article, they're supposed to spend that on stuff like an extra-final Space Shuttle flight, supporting the ISS, helping commercial spaceflight development (since that's how they're supposed to get to the ISS after the final Space Shuttle flight, although since none of that exists yet they'll be using the ol' Russian Soyuz capsules), and developing a deep space rocket, in line with the Obama administration's road map of getting astronauts on an asteroid (the Moon has been dropped--too 1960's, I guess) by 2025, and to Mars by the 2030's.

Hm, I thought Mars was George W.'s idea, and we weren't going to do that anymore. I suppose the thought of Japan or Russia or China or Brazil or whoever beating us there was just too much to bear after all. And I wonder what astronauts will do on an asteroid that robots couldn't do? If it isn't drilling inside and making a long-term base--which I just bet it *isn't*--then I'm not sure what the point will be. But we'll be able to say HEY WE DID IT FIRST JUST LIKE THE MOON REMEMBER--unless of course we don't.

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Another thing was that some bunch of scientists or whatnot released their exciting data about finding yet another planet around some other star somewhere that might have life on it. I'm not even going to link it because it's ridiculous. Oh okay fine. Now the excuse for getting excited about this particular chunk of rock is that it's in the dinky dwarf star's tiny habitable zone (since when did those start getting called "Goldilocks planets"? what an awful term), which means the temperature range *could* support liquid water. Which various over-enthusiastic psuedo-scientific hacks want to be the first to proclaim means alien life is there, 100% guaranteed.

Well, call me a pessimist. Our planet had things pretty cushy, and even with everything pretty much just perfect--as far as we understand it--it took like a billion years for single-celled stuff, another billion for multi-celled stuff, and another billion for animals of some kind--all of that long, long time being relatively undisturbed by super-deadly stuff, aside from a major asteroid impact or two. Hm and major meteors for a while at the beginning.

Now single-celled stuff, sure. That stuff is tough, and doesn't really take very long to generate, provided you have some hydrocarbons or whatever and maybe some lightning or something. You probably don't even need the planet to have *that* much water for it to happen.

But multi-celled? We're talking two-billion pretty peaceful years on a perfect planet to cook those up. Even if there are however many hundreds of billions of stars some folks like to think there might be in our galaxy with planets in the "habitable zone" as we understand it, how many have things just so? We know that there are so many factors on our planet where, just nudged a bit out of whack, there'd have been no chance for Earth's current types of complex life to develop. And even if you get all that stuff right, there's still the odd gigantic meteor just waiting to come along and wipe the entire surface of the planet out. Earth has probably had a couple nearly big enough to do that in the past three billion years or whatever, and we're kind of due for another one.

And how many of these planets are bathed in deadly radiation, disturbed by the gravitational pull of other nearby planets, roasted or frozen by fits and starts of their or other nearby stars, etc?

At any rate, the point is, we don't know. We don't have instruments yet that can detect just exactly how swell the climate and history of an extrasolar planet may be. Finding planets outside our solar system is the astronomical fad du jour, but it simply isn't a precise science yet, and the annoying thing about it is that until it gets significantly better, we're going to be bombarded by more and more "OMG look at this planet we probably just found that might have aliens" announcements by whoever's discovered what they hope is the latest Neo Earth. The dude who's all excited about this latest one (which is hardly "Earth-like" given that it's tidally locked, average temp well below freezing, hot side at 160 degrees, 3-4 times Earth's mass, orbits a dwarf star, and no clue if it actually has water or even an atmosphere at all) named it after his wife, for gosh sakes.

I'm sure the aliens will be just tickled.

So I'm putting my foot down: no more links to whatever the latest "Earth-like" utopia planet is. There's no point. There wouldn't be much point even if we had instruments that could detect the presence of liquid water and an atmosphere on them, but at least *then* the silly alien theories about it would have *some* basis in what we understand as biochemical fact, and then sure, start getting your space ship ready to try to land there in 20,000 years or something. I'll be the first to break out the party hats.

No, really, there's no point in getting excited about the prospect of life from other planets until we actually make contact with an alien species, or at least their signals, inadvertent or intentional. In which case, we're *probably* doomed. But maybe if we name them after somebody's wife, they'll be charmed.

Until then, don't bother me about it. =p

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 132
• A* Episode 10, Page 133

Boy, all this silence is getting a little creepy. Hm... Looks like one of them will finally say something about Monday-ish.

A friend sent me a link to this Vimeo today, the result of a dude attaching a movie camera to a weather balloon so it would sit at just the right angle, and letting it go. Pretty neat!

But--since, with yesterday's rant about exoplanets, I seem to be on a YOU AREN'T USING ASTRONOMY WORDS RIGHT trip, which is funny because I'm in no way qualified to go on one, but it's fun...--the title is maybe a bit of deceptive advertising: "Homemade Spacecraft"--the "spacecraft" part, specifically, and it's clarified in the movie where he says stuff like "this thing was in space."

It wasn't, because it--and other weather balloons--only get into the lower stratosphere, about 20 miles up, and the Earth's atmosphere has wayyyy more stuff going on above that before you get clear of it and get into space proper. Heck, even the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are still in the atmosphere, and they're 10 times higher--maybe they should be renamed "Thermosphere Shuttle" and "International Thermosphere Station"?

Well okay, that's a bit silly. Obviously at some point you have to make an arbitrary decision as to where "space" begins; still, calling the stratosphere "space" is a considerable stretch; maybe it does only have 1/1000th the amount of the planet's surface pressure, but that's still considerable in the scheme of things, actually, and heck, there are bacteria up there, and they aren't "space bacteria." The title is so silly, when I read it in the email I received, my first thought was that it was going to be referring to this, which...is also something of a stretch. ;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 134

Still the silent treatment. Just one more page of that, promise!

Speaking of silent comics, I was so excited with posting other stuff this week that I forgot to toot the horn of my weekly and completely silent fairy tale, "The Princess and the Giant." Check out last weekend's update via this preview linky banner:



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On the "about" pages of my various comics, I've added links to their--in some cases new--entries on Piperka. "Piperka" is Bulgarian for "paprika," but the site is not about eastern European spices. No! It's a thingy you can use to keep track of when your favorite comics update, or something along those lines. I saw someone mention it last week, and imagine my joy when I checked through it and found that not only had some nice person already made entries for A* and The Princess and the Giant on it, but they each had nearly two dozen Piperka subscribers. (Here's A*'s Piperka entry, for instance.) Neat! So I got those jazzed up a bit with the help of Piperka's friendly webmaster, added entries for my three other comic series, and yay now they're all on Piperka and stuff!

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Ohh yeah Monday might be similar to today, ie a single very late comic. Yep, it's my nutty Monday party group, at it again. I think. Actually all I know so far is that I'm supposed to go to a "dilapidated death house" somewhere. Hm. Welll anyhow hopefully I'll survive and have a late page for you--the last one in this little silent stand-off in fact!--to start off next week.