Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 12, Page 39
• A* Episode 12, Page 40

Jeez I gotta watch how many of these tricky perspective shots I make myself do. Back when I was a little more loosey-goosey about the artwork, they were pretty fun, but now that I'm trying to be a bit more accurate, they're darn tough to pull off as precisely as I'd like! Well, I think I got reasonably close on this one on eh I think that was my fourth try. :P

I still gotta recap my first-ever visit to the Emerald City Comic Con this past weekend, but that's gonna take a while and it's already late, so I'll save that for tomorrow and show you this costume study I did for Selenis over the weekend; it started as a sort of art challenge by WendyW of Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit, and I was just gonna do a "quick sketch," which I did, only "quick" turned out to mean "about eight hours-ish." :P Anyway I think this was handy...for the future! And in a way I guess this is the most outlandish outfit you've seen Selenis in--outlandish for her, at least, since her norm is everyone else's outlandish, rather than business casual.



Does that say "Get me those TPS reports," or what? You can always come visit it here among the other stuff in the episode 12 gallery (galleries being accessible via the "episodes" link in this site's top menu).

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 12, Page 41
• A* Episode 12, Page 42

So I visited Emerald City Comic Con this past Saturday for the first time ever. There are a whole lot of comic people and comics (actually there were way more comic shops there than I'd thought there would be, that was cool) and people in comic-related costumes. My dad was in the little posse I went down with, and he had a whole lot of fun taking photos of all the people in costumes; here are a few photos he passed along:



Cutest couple ever! Man that long-haired Chewie could almost load her on his crossbow (whoa I typoed that as "crowboss" :p). There was also a diminutive powder-blue Batboy riding on a Bat-dad's shoulders--the masked avenger looked to be in need of a nap back at the ol' cave.

And then a pretty fierce Catwoman:



Powerful shoulders, dark eyes, good glare: she'd probably make a pretty decent Selenis, you know. And she'd be much more comfortable in any of Selenis' costumes than in that trashy "Derelicte"-style modern Catwoman monstrosity, poor thing.

But there was more than just oodles of people-watching! Or...well there was specific-people-watching! For instance I saw Sergio Aragones (my brother used to collect his "Groo the Wanderer" comic), Geof Darrow (I think we had a nifty graphic novel or two by him back in the day), Phil and Kaja Foglio of Girl Genius (and many other fine comics), Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots, Jeph Jacques of that famous webcomic everyone knows about already, the Halfpixel guys who were stuck facing the second block of Jeph's line all day, W.P. Morse of Rhapsodies, who I went to say "hi" to since he came to my art show opening back in November, yay!, the affable Larry Lewis of Blender who was at the same booth as Morse, and charming Disney artist Brittney Lee, from whom I got a sweet Wild Things postcard.

I also got to have a lengthy brain-picking chat with the rather famous and quite personable man with an extra capital letter, Doug TenNapel, currently of Ratfist. I got to ask him all about the cheap Japanese brushes with which he inks so thickly, the tantalizing possibility of getting sued by Disney if he snuck a Mickey Mouse costume into Ratfist, and many other important topics, including which of his books I should get, since EggEmbry told me on my forum a while back that my style has similarities to TenNapel's work, and I should get one of his books. TenNapel promptly pointed out which ones he felt had the best art, writing, story, and so forth, which worked well because the "best art" one was the Western-themed one I'd been fingering most avidly anyway; it is called Iron West, and I promptly purchased it in cash from the proud (and did I mention personable?) papa (of the comic-producing persuasion) who penned it.

So, good show! The one slight complaint I am going to go ahead and make is that their freebie table scene--by which I mean the tables on which people can plunk down fliers, business cards, brochures, free mini-comics, and other things they might want visitors to snag for free, a fairly standard feature at cons--was nearly non-existent, consisting of just one table hiding off in a corner; the much smaller Jet City Comic Show the same people behind Emerald City ran this past summer had at least twice the freebie table space, and in a prime position right inside the entrances to the main room. So Emerald City could use a boost in that respect! Otherwise it was pretty neat.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 12, Page 43
• A* Episode 12, Page 44

I have to thank Richard Bush for adding A* to his site's Comics Page. Thanks, Richard! :) He's got a bunch of other comics there, too, so if you wanna see what other comics an A* reader reads, check 'em out.

And while I'm speaking of other people and their comics, I came across a webcomic called Newton's Law today, with mighty fine grayscale artwork in a sort of watercolor style. It looks nice! Even if it is a bit tough to go through thanks to Webcomics Nation's wack navigation scheme. :P

Oh yeah, I also saw Frank Cho at ECCC, a pretty famous comic dude--as far as webcomics go, mostly for his Liberty Meadows.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 12, Page 45

Gosh, I guess it took me a long time to draw this one. Hmph. I got to be my own forearm model! *Possibly* exaggerating the size of the muscles and veins just a *little*. *cough*

Well since I've only got one page to show for my work today, I'd better roll in some science. Ah! Okay, remember how last week I was talking about the Glory satellite and its rocket falling back to Earth? Well, conveniently enough, just about a week ago, NASA posted a video showing footage of a Shuttle rocket booster falling back to Earth, from Discovery's February 24th launch; you can go along from multiple cameras, from launch to splashdown--it's quite a ride: the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters help take it up to about 46 km in about two minutes (you can see them blow off here 126 seconds into launch), and are then jettisoned, still firing, and take about three and a half minutes to fall that 46 km back down into the ocean. I suppose you might not want to watch this if you're afraid of heights--or if you get dizzy easily, because they're spinning around until they deploy their parachute: looks to me like that happens with the first one after about 336 seconds or so (110 seconds of falling), since that's when it suddenly stabilizes and falls straight down for the remaining minute or so (394 seconds after launch). You can see part of the parachute in the water with the rocket at 420 seconds.

There's puff of smoke at 380 seconds, and a splash at 386 seconds, right before the booster itself lands. This is something being ejected from the booster--not sure what.

The middle, "Intertank" camera has sound--lots of whooshing the crackling! At about 15:16, it gets a great view of one of the boosters flying off after ejection. At about 16:11 (180 seconds after launch) it goes into a great spinning view of Earth, eerily quiet except for some slight rhythmic hissing of gas. You can see what I think is the other booster falling, too: at around 17:00 on the video (230 seconds after launch), at 17:46 (275 seconds after launch), and again at 18:43, 333 seconds after launch. Hm actually you see something with a distinctly different trail--straight, not curled--at 18:01 (290), so...heck, I wonder what one of those is; maybe some connecting piece that blew off separately. The intertank camera also gets a great view of the Sun over the ocean at 19:00 (350 seconds after launch), right before it blacks out, and--oh! You can see its chutes deploying at 364 seconds (19:15 into the video), and they seem to unfurl completely about twenty seconds later, just a bit before splashdown.

The videos from the right booster start at 20:33, with another great separation shot at 22:58, and a nice sweep across Earth's horizon starting at about 23:10 (just 12 seconds after separation, so that's still probably above 40 km up), including what must be a trailing view of the Shuttle still jetting upward at 23:11, a flashing bright star. And then that long long fall again, this time with smoke from the sputtering booster jet puffing across the view. The right tank lands a bit later than the left did, 402 seconds after launch (25:17 in the video), and again right before landing you can see smoke from something ejecting from the bottom (25:00), falling as a ring-shaped object (~25:05), and then splashing down (25:09) right before the booster itself; I wonder if that's the thruster skirt, ejected because it would probably break off anyway and possibly damage the booster if it was still attached on splashdown?

The next camera view has separation at about 28:06 (no launch timer on this one), before which you can see some really neat flickering of the thrusters playing over the bottom of the Shuttle's wing; and this separation has a great angle showing the Shuttle soaring up above the separated boosters, engines blazing at full throttle, with the main fuel tank still attached. Man that's cool! And there's lens flare from the engine glare--the director of that last Star Trek movie would be proud (although the glare is yellow rather than blue). Sound kicks in from the last camera a little while later.

The right booster's "Intertank" camera starts at 28:38, cutting right to the view of the booster's just-deployed parachutes. It's got a nice view of the chutes falling into the water, and you can hear all these echoey clanks from the hollow booster. These boosters are rescued and re-used, but I guess with the shuttle program shutting down soon (and Discovery making its final landing yesterday, after a 26-year flying career that saw it clock 365 days in space total, the most of any ship (that's from Wikipedia, and they specify "spaceship" because obviously they aren't counting space stations and so forth)).

Anyway, as you can tell I had fun watching the video again. :) And speaking of space stations, check out the first comment someone left on the video: "please can u tell me how to contact the ISS can anyone help" (no final punctuation). :o

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 12, Page 46

Boy, I think I'm getting slower and slower at drawing here in my dotage. Well, hopefully next week I can get a good chunk of this promising little encounter drawn up for you.

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Once again I've neglected to nudge my lovely A* readers into checking out the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant. I don't have a fancy link banner for you to click this week (you'll see why when you see the comic, if you've been paying attention to what's usually in the banners... :o), but clicking that link right there in the previous sentence will do the trick. A new page of that will go up Sunday...if I can survive the cursed annual "Fall Back" part of that obsolete, wasteful ritual known as Daylight Savings that shorts this poor Sunday by an hour. ;P

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I have to thank the proprietor of Jeff's Online Comics for adding A* to his link list--thanks, Jeff! He's got an interesting thing going on there that I haven't seen done for link lists before, where two layers of framed menus at the top let you browse his categorized comic listings, then load the comic you select in the window below the menus, so the menus are still available for checking the other comics. I'm not the world's hugest fan of frames, but that seems like a pretty good way to put them to work.

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Lots of awful stuff happened in the past day in Japan, including a huge 8.9 offshore quake, followed by a 7-meter tsunami--the tsunami causing most of the ensuing death and destruction there, since Japan's one of the most earthquake-prepared countries in terms of having buildings able to withstand them. EXCEPT, as it turns out, for one very vital type of aging building: nuclear power plants. Japan has a lot of them (Japan has 53 nuclear reactors, which makes it the third-largest nuclear power-using nation in the world: 34.5% of Japan's electricity comes from nuclear power (compare that with the largest nuclear power user, the United States, whose nuclear power still only accounts for about 20% of electricity use)), and apparently they aren't all great at withstanding earthquakes, because five reactors at two plants declared states of emergency after the quake after their ability to cool their nuclear cores was impaired due to earthquake damage. At one reactor, radiation levels inside increased 1,000-fold, and 8-fold outside--although that's still well within what's considered safe levels.

Still, residents for miles around the plants were evacuated, which turned out to be a very good idea, because a building housing a nuclear reactor at one of those Japanese plants just exploded--the one that was on an emergency backup cooling system (hm I see that article says Japan has 55 reactors producing 24 percent of the nation's electricity--hopefully the Associated Press and Wikipedia will sort this numerical discrepancy out :P). Apparently the explosion hasn't led to an increased release of radiation into the environment, which is a very good thing--although the article also mentions that at one point before the explosion, radiation outside had been so high that you'd absorb a year's worth of normal radiation (from the Sun mostly) in just an hour, which is not so good.

I think I got these stats from this Wikipedia article, but anyway according to some of my old A* research notes, a year's worth of radiation for your average person in the States is supposed to be 0.36 cSv ("centisieverts"). 200 cSv is the point at which nausea, hair loss, and chance of death are supposed to start kicking in, and at the 500 cSv range, human fatality rate is about 50%. Fortunately the radiation levels mentioned in the article are well below that, but still, 365 times the normal Earthly radiation level is not something you want to have going on on a regular basis, so hopefully they get that patched up--and hopefully this is a wakeup call to any other nuclear facilities in the world that might have similar critical structural failures in a large earthquake...but I'm sure humanity hasn't seen the last of this type of problem by a long shot.

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Oh yeah, before I scurry off for the weekend, I have some art related to today's sole page, so it won't be so lonely by itself. First, here's the original storyboard sketch for it:



If you compare that with the finished page, you'll notice that I stuck very closely to the position of the door and the lunging knifey fellow, which came out pretty well by my standards in the storyboard sketch, but I felt that the demure Selenis way down at the bottom on the right side wasn't cutting it, so I decided to change what I was doing with her. And naturally that meant I had to waste some time trying to get a working pose; I drew a rather nice one right off the bat, but then decided it wasn't right for the page. Still it came out okay so I might as well post it for you; I've added placed it at double normal size in the episode 12 gallery; you can also get to it by clicking this small preview version:



And of course I have to mention that the galleries are always available from the "episodes" page accessible from the site's top menu, since that isn't really obvious. Okay bye! :D

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 12, Page 47
• A* Episode 12, Page 48

I suppose pretty much everyone is following the situation with the overheating nuclear power plant in Japan, damaged in Friday's earthquake. Since I mentioned it early Saturday, they've had two more explosions, and now a fire, which has apparently led to higher radiation levels and even radioactivity "being released directly into the atmosphere." After the fire, radioactivity in the area was measured "up to 100 times the normal levels," which might be about .1 cSv per day: not a situation you want to have for very long. You'd have to get about 2000 times worse than that before it started making people seriously physically ill in the short term, but (still according to that Wikipedia article I linked on Friday) just 19 days of that, for instance, might increase your chance of getting cancer over your lifetime by 2%.

These are a couple days old now but still good, I think: this article has some solid information about the situation in a reactor of the type in question, mentioning for instance that this reactor's are old (they were near retirement), which means they take longer to cool down, prolonging high temperatures and thus meltdown risk; and this article mentioned that the earthquake (which has since been upgraded from 8.9 to a full 9.0 on the Richter scale, meaning it was about 1.4 times as powerful as initial measurements had indicated) sped up the Earth's rotation by 1.6 microseconds (millionths of a second)--that tends to happen with big earthquakes: the 2004 Sumatra quake, for instance, advanced the planet's rotation a comparatively whopping 8.6 microseconds.

UPDATE: Ah, that first article has been updated with more specific information: the radiation spiked at "a radioactive dose in one hour at the site 400 times the amount a person normally receives in a year" for six hours. If they're basing that on 0.36 cSv per year, then that would have been 864 cSv (144/hour), which would have been a fatal amount (500 cSv is considered the point at which a 50% fatality rate is incurred)...but then they quote a guy as saying "a person would have to be exposed to that dose for 10 hours for it to be fatal," so maybe they were using something more like the low end estimate for yearly gamma ray exposure, 0.1 cSv, which would come out to 240 cSv (40/hour). Even that's quite a bit, and hopefully nobody took that much (presumably you would have had to have been at the plant itself to get that exposure), or they'll be very, very sick right now.

UPDATE again: The article above was an Associated Press article; now I see there's a Reuters article that says the high point of the radiation leak was "400 millisieverts per hour"; a millisievert is 0.001 Sv, or .1 cSv, so 400 of those would come to the 40 cSv/hour exposure I'd guessed above, which means they were using 0.1 cSv as the normal annual exposure figure. Radiation levels ten times normal were measured in Tokyo (which is a little under 250 km, or about 150 miles, from Fukushima--where the plant is said to be located--if my eyeball of Google maps is correct). Both articles have quoted people in Japan as mentioning that what really makes the radiation threat worrying is that you can't see it. On the positive side, the AP article says that a Chernobyl-like scenario where gas from the reactor core explodes directly into the environment is very unlikely, since the reactors at this plant are inside radiation containment structures that did not exist at Chernobyl. Back on the freaking-us-out side, the Reuters article quotes someone as saying the water in the reactor would take 7-10 days (starting from early Saturday, presumably) to boil away, exposing the fuel rods and making a leak possible.

Had a friend's poetry reading to attend today, so this is gonna be one of those post-midnight single-page update days. =P

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 12, Page 49

Went to a friend's poetry reading today, so I've only managed the one page. :P

Well if you're like me you're still obsessed with the situation at the tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, so I'm going to keep rattling on about it and related issues! Things are not looking particularly good there: there was another fire today, and radiation levels got so bad that emergency workers had to be sent away, although apparently they're getting ready to go back--and hopefully it isn't a case of them sacrificing themselves to terminal radiation poisoning, as it was with hundreds of workers and emergency personnel in the Chernobyl disaster.

The Wikipedia page on the Fukushima plant is a good place for a concise summary of known facts. Reactors 1-3 of the plant's six reactors were online at the time of the earthquake, and there's been an explosion of superheated hydrogen gas at each of them; today's fire was at reactor 4. Reactors 1 and 2 have probably suffered damage to their fuel rods. Since the cooling systems were put out of commission by the tsunami, they've been trying to cool the overheated reactors with sea water; it's hard to tell how it's going, but it doesn't sound like it's going well (if you listen to news reports :p). And temperatures have even been rising in reactors 5 and 6.

Construction of the Fukushima plant began in 1967, so, like many nuclear plants around the world, the reactors are not of the most modern type available; reactors 1-5 have the earliest, Mark I type of containment system, and reactor 6 has a slightly more up-to-date Mark II. Still, together they can generate about 4.7 gigawatts, which puts Fukushima in the top 25 of world nuclear plants (and could power nearly five A* ship lasers! :P) in terms of power output. The reactors are "boiling water reactors"--generating power by converting water into steam, whose force is captured by turbines and converted into electricity--which are known to have a number of disadvantages; at Fukushima, these have been a) a weakness in the Mark I containment that can allow the escape of some radioactive gas in case of a coolant failure and resulting gas explosion, and b) the relatively slow cooling of water (it can take years to cool fuel rods down completely), plus the danger of boiled-off coolant water separating into hydrogen and oxygen, which are explosive in such a superheated environment.

So that's bad. None of the experts I've seen in articles or on TV appear to know just how likely a total failure and meltdown at any of the reactors is at this point, although I've seen at least some broaching the topic of "the Chernobyl option," ie entombing the damaged reactors in thousands of tons of sand, metal, and concrete...basically forever.

As it happens, we're just one month away from the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where reactor number 4 at that nuclear plant in what is now the Ukraine overheated during a risky systems test, and several more mistakes and miscalculations probably helped lead to a power spike, overheating, and an explosion in the reactor that damaged the control rods, enabling a huge thermal increase estimated at 30 gigawatts (10 times the plant's normal output) that quickly caused a massive steam explosion that lifted the reactor's 2000 ton covering plate, followed just a few seconds later by a much more powerful nuclear explosion of the reactor core itself; those last two explosions blew the roof off the reactor building and sent radioactive fallout over a vast area. That degree of disaster is not expected in the case of Fukushima, since Fukushima's reactors do have containment vessels--albeit old ones--while at Chernobyl there was no containment vessel at all. Still, it doesn't appear that the possibility of a massive explosion that wipes out the containment at one of the Fukushima reactors can be ruled out completely if the reactors continue heating up, and in that case you would have a large-scale release of radiation into the environment, as there was at Chernobyl (also, check out the table of radiation levels in that last Chernobyl Wikipedia link: up to 300 Sv per hour in the vicinity of the reactor, which would transmit a fatal dose within seconds; the area around unit 4 was at 10-15 Sv/hour; by contrast, the worst leak of radiation at Fukushima so far, as I mentioned in yesterday's news article--and apparently it's thanks to the failure of an upgrade to the Mark I containment, that was supposed to prevent just this thing from occurring, as the flaw in that containment type has been known for decades--was about 40 cSv (0.4 Sv) per hour: about 30 times less intense than post-explosion Chernobyl, and of a much shorter duration).

So when reactors start heading toward meltdown, you have to start thinking very seriously about encasing the damaged reactors, as was done at Chernobyl--although there it was only done after massive explosions that destroyed the reactor and reactor building completely, leaving a large pile of radioactive wreckage. I've posted some photos of the radioactive slag present at Chernobyl before; this time, I've got a sequence of the building of the wrecked Chernobyl #4 reactor's "sarcophagus" from the same US government source:


image from DOE (source)


image from DOE (source)


image from DOE (source)


image from DOE (source)


image from DOE (source)

^ That's the completed Chernobyl sarcophagus back in the day, and here it is in 1995:


image from DOE (source)

It was constructed in emergency conditions, and relies on parts of the wrecked reactor building for support--so it is thought to be somewhat unstable. It is due to be covered over in 2013 by the New Safe Containment, a massive arched structure that will be the largest mobile structure in the world, which will encase the existing containment unit, at which point cranes and other equipment mounted on the inside of the NSC will deconstruct the unstable parts of the sarcophagus, to prevent it, hopefully, from collapsing and causing a fresh release of radioactive material from the wrecked plant. The article says the NSC is meant to contain Chernobyl for the next 100 years, at which point...I guess you make a fresh containment system and roll that into place.

Could this type of massive containment structure be the future of Fukushima?

No. http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-16-march-summary/