By the time you read this it'll probably be New Year's somewhere in the world, so...Happy New Year! And as Mar suggests, have fun (I'm sure he meant that) and don't do anything too stupid...or you could say burn your house down like my neighbors did this morning:
[embed]kmJz34zbnT4[/embed] (Or watch it on YouTube)
Yikes! Fortunately all eight people in the house made it out, although seven had to be rescued from the roof, and one old granny got banged up pretty bad. Here's a local news article on it. I'd woken up at 5:30 am to find a fire truck right outside my window lighting my apartment up in festive flashing red light, and the entire block covered with emergency vehicles, but couldn't see the fire since it was on my side of the street, a ways down, and also my window was frozen shut, but here's what it looked like when I went out at 9:30 and found it still smoking.
So hm well that was exciting, but yes have fun but maybe stop short of burning the house down!
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A couple top lists of space! 11 Things Americans Will Be Doing in Space in 2011 includes things like sending a larger rover to Mars, getting a(nother) probe to a comet, retiring the shuttle fleet, and sending probes to an asteroid, Jupiter, and the Moon. Lots of stuff!
The Top 10 Fantasy Spaceships Headed for Reality shows a bunch of commercial space vehicles being prepped for the near future, including one by a company founded by game programming legend John Carmack, and one being made just south of me here in Seattle, in the oft-maligned little town of Kent, WA. Kind of interesting to see the designs, although only the Carmack-company one is really out there.
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The next page of my weekend fantasy comic will hit on Sunday--next year! You can catch up with last week's page by clicking this handy little tidbit of it:
Thank my time management skills for just one measly page today! :P Eh and tomorrow *might* be just one because I gotta go take down my art show. It actually went better than I thought it would, and I got to meet some people who found out about my web site as a result of seeing prints up on the walls of this fine coffee shop, so that was nice. If you're interested in which pieces (about half of them were from A*) were framed and hanging for the show, you'll find them collected here on my deviantArt.
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In my other daily comic, "Sketchy," I just finished up a little stand-alone story called "The Tale of Death Boy," which started last July--click this banner thingy to start at the eh start:
and ended here yesterday. Starting today we're doing some catching-up with Sketchy himself in his silly adventures (click this thingy if you wanna see):
but not for long, because I have another story, which will be an action adventure comedy thing south of the border! I think. Well it should be fun whatever it is, so keep an eye out for that--or maybe I'll just post about it once it's started, anyway. ;D
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Here's what the shading on today's A* page looks like, if you make the black and white part mostly transparent:
That's why we generally keep the black part fully opaque, yep! :D
You may recall me talking a little while back about the ALPHA experiment at CERN having trapped antihydrogen (simple antimatter) molecules. Now thanks to advances in the Internet you can watch a video instead of having to read me making a hash of it; here's ALPHA's spokesman Jeffrey Hangst describing the antihydrogen trap:
He mentions that ALPHA is staffed by 40 scientists--probably not all full-time, I guess?--and has an annual budget of "a few hundred thousand" Swiss Francs; Swiss Francs are running about 1:1 with the Dollar, so...that's a tiny budget! For some of the most cutting-edge science on the planet! Gosh.
This Sixty Symbols video has various University of Nottingham professors talking about the antihydrogen trapping; among other things, they point out that antimatter is used in PET (positron emission tomography) scanners: the neat rainbow-colored images produced of things inside people's bodies
are actually showing positrons (antimatter versions of electrons), produced by radioactive decay of an ingested/injected/whatever radionuclide, annihilating with matter in the body. That sounds bad/painful, but I guess it's in such small amounts that you don't even notice. So, hurrah for antimatter!
Say, this reminds me of my own pet theory for the Mona Lisa, aka this famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci (a dude who totally would have been good at webcomics):
You know how they say Mona's eyes "follow you around the room" or something? Well not that I've ever seen it in person, but anyway I think part of it is that while the head is painted as looking off to our left, the face is painted closer to head-on, so it *feels* like it's turning, because the face is actually sort of twisting toward you out of the head. Drawing heads in two different perspectives is something I do accidentally all the time--because I start on one part, then later I'm on another part, and sort of forget which way I'd been drawing the first part pointing, exactly--but we'll give Leonardo credit and say he did it on purpose... At any rate, it worked out for him.
The focus of the eyes is tricky, too. I like to have them appearing to look directly at *you*, the viewer, but if you have the eyeballs too close together, the figure looks cross-eyed, and if they're just a hair too far apart, they appear to be looking past you--and anyway I always just have trouble getting them lined up straight with each other. Myah!
I was reading the Wikipedia Mona Lisa page and noticed some interesting factoids! For one thing, Pablo Picasso was accused of stealing it when it disappeared for a few years. Not fair to Picasso! Actually it was stolen from the Louvre in Paris--this was in 1911--by this Italian dude who believed it--the product of an Italian artist--should be in Italy rather than France. So he took it to Italy and tried to get it into museums, at which point it was confiscated, exhibited all over Italy, then returned to France later, and the guy who stole it was kind of hailed as a patriot and only got six months in jail.
Also, in 1956, the bottom half was doused in acid, and later that year another vandal threw a rock at it, knocking off a chip of paint near the elbow. Those have been fixed up pretty good, I guess.
Fri Jan 07, 2011 3:48 am
BC
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:18 pm Posts: 2859
Dooh I have a page pretty much drawn, still gotta shade it up and stuff. But I gotta go out now, so that won't be until I get back, ie after midnight-ish. :P
Hello, fellow internet user! Do you read A* regularly? If so--and I'm glad of that!--please consider telling some of your friends/fans/followers about A*. Tweet them a link, put it in a status update on Facebook, mention it in your blog, add it to your site's link list--whatever! Word of mouth is vital to the growth of a webcomic, and you can bet that I will really appreciate it!
In fact, if you do happen to link to A* on your site in some way, I will happily thank and link back to you in one of my own news updates. I've done this for every lovely site--as far as I'm aware--that's linked to me in the past, but I wanna do more of it! So, hook a brother up. :) And if you do, I may spot the incoming traffic myself, but you can certainly say send me a PM on the A* forum, tweet me on Twitter, message me on Facebook (A*'s page on Facebook is right here, incidentally), pass me a note on deviantART, or whatever, and my thanks shall be forthcoming.
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In the mean time, I'll just keep linking to my own stuff. ;) If you haven't seen yet, you may enjoy this past week's "Princess and the Giant" page--that's my weekend fairy tale comic, you know--which you can get to in a flash by clicking this link picture thing:
There will be a new one of those on Sunday, and otherwise I'll see you back here on Monday for more A*--we'll even have some character dialogue, egads!
Well I need to thank Gary Green for Tweeting me in response to my news/blog thing asking for links on Friday--thanks! He's got a rather interesting blog here. And two people one of whom may nor may not have been mentioned already <_< actually *donated* apparently in response to that, which was a nice surprise, thanks to both of you. Hm maybe I should ask for links more often... >_>
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It occurred to me that the portrait of Selenis in last week's page 106 sort of resembles this fashion photo of model Heather Stewart-Whyte. Well, a little. So anyway I was looking up more pictures of her, and came across this one where she's dressed in black, with her hair bleached white and spiked up, just like Selenis circa hm episode seven or so. Coincidence? Uh... Well I guess it is. But I always knew Selenis had good fashion sense.
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The bad poetry bug bit me again this morning for whatever reason, so you'll find two new picture poems on my -word- sorta webcomic poetry thing, starting here with a nice little ditty about leprechauns. The one after that is about like life and choices and boring stuff, except that I'm pretty sure the last line is totally a Tolkien rip-off. Ah well--steal from the best, they say.
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