Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 91

Here's a sci-fi movie you can watch online that you may not have seen! It's H.G. Wells' 1936 film Things to Come (Wikipedia link), and you can watch it for free on YouTube right here.

Coming out pre-WWII, Things to Come starts off with a dramatic presentation of the London Blitz--four years before it happened! Wells' prophetic and quite impressively destructive version doesn't take place in London, actually, but an English town, which we then follow through the war--which lasts for decades!

That's when things get pretty weird (and this is only maybe fifteen minutes into the film :P). Devastated by decades of war, disease, and privation, the town's surviving pocket society reverts to a kind of primitive, anti-technology state. The same actors who began the film in near-contemporary England play their own generations of descendents, who play out Wells' ideas of what challenges the presence of technology will pose for us--will we find technology in opposition to our own needs and inclinations? What will happen when technology becomes incredibly destructive?

It's a far-ranging film, and pretty far out--make that VERY far out--by the end. It's quite a good looking film, and some of the effects are even quite good looking by modern standards--there are some really massive super-science bombers ("peace bombs" =p), for instance, that look pretty darn awesome, and later some huge, floating, partially transparent tele-screen things that are quite convincing. Not all of the effects are that successful, and a few of the actors are a bit clunky, but this is indubitably classic sci-fi, and raises some big questions in the bold, straightforward way that sci-fi movies don't really attempt anymore.

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An in-progress snapshot of today's page, right after I'd repainted the face:



This was one of those ones where I thought I had a perfectly good face drawn, but it was in fact two faces--or more specifically, the face from two different angles: the eye and upper part was one way, the mouth and lower part was just enough of a different way to make a difference, and the nose couldn't quite hold them together--so there was nothing to do except repaint it--except the nose. :P

The redraw got a little wild--and I left some of the pencil line around the eye 'cause it seemed to kind of work; now I can call myself a "multimedia" artist, woo!

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Oh, yeah--bet you thought Selenis' helmet was a solid dome, eh? The old version she had in previous episodes, with that big collar thingy, was, but this ultralite travel version is inflatable! Maybe I'll regret this move, I dunno, but I've debated it with myself for so long that I wasn't getting any further with it one way or the other and finally just figured I might as well throw it out there. Aside from solving the story/layout technical issue of what she does with her darn helmet when the takes it off (now it can just fold up into her suit's neck or something! ie disappear so I don't have to worry about it :)), there had been the long-troubling question in my head of how exactly does she get it on/off if it closes under her chin? It was either make it flexible, or have it be like folding sections that lock together--but that seemed a little clunky. I suppose a flexible helmet, even made of eh you know super-advanced whatever it is, probably can't be as resistant to piercing damage as a solid helmet--but man, the convenience! Heck, you could take along a second--third, forth? however many you need!--as a spare just in case!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 92

Saturn's moon Hyperion (the Titan of "watchfulness and observation" in Greek mythology) was the first known non-round moon when it was discovered in 1848--which was some feat, considering that this irregularly shaped, dark, and highly pockmarked moon only averages about 270 km in diameter (it's about 360 km from tip to tip along its longest axis). It kinda looks like a potato in photos taken by the Cassini probe (this one's from 2005):


image by NASA (source)

It is the largest irregular moon of which we have good pictures--Neptune's faceted Proteus is larger, but hasn't been seen clearly yet. Hyperion has a very low density: calculations based on its size, orbit, and so forth estimate it to be composed mostly of water ice rather than rock--the dark color is thought to come from a thin coating of dust--and to be as much as 46% empty space, what with all those honeycombs of craters and so on, which have caused the moon to be likened in appearance to a giant sponge.

This strange potato sponge moon is also the only moon in our solar system known to rotate chaotically: likely because of its irregular shape, eccentric orbit, and proximity to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, Hyperion's axis of rotation wobbles so much that its orientation at any particular time is hard to predict.

Unique as it is, Hyperion is just one of 61 confirmed moons of Saturn! About half of them are distant, tiny things under 10 km across, but still!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 93

August 16th, 1960: USAF pilot Joseph Kittinger steps off his gondola at an altitude of over 100,000 feet (19 miles / 31 km) to begin what is still the longest, fastest skydive in human history:


image by US Air Force (source)

This was Kittinger's third, final, and highest extreme altitude jump as part of the Air Force's Project Excelsior. He made the first two jumps--after floating up in a helium balloon gondola--from about 75,000 feet; in the first, the stabilizer parachute deployed prematurely, leaving Kittinger helpless to stop himself from going into a 120 rpm spin; he experienced forces up to 22 G at his extremities, and blacked out--he was saved by the automatic deployment device on his main parachute, which kicked in when he'd fallen to an altitude of 10,000 feet.

In his record-setting third jump, in temperatures as low as -94 F (-70 C), the thin atmosphere at that higher altitude allowed him to accelerate to 614 mph (988 km/h) in free fall--about 9/10ths the speed of sound in those conditions. The pressurization in his right glove had failed as he ascended, and his hand swelled up to twice its normal size. Fortunately, his speedy fall got him safely back to the ground in just four minutes and 36 seconds.

To put the 19 mile / 31 km altitude in perspective, the next year, cosmonaut Gagarin reached an altitude of 327 km during his orbit of the Earth in Vostok 1, which is considered the first human spaceflight.

Kittinger, who is still living, would go on to three tours of duty as a combat pilot in Vietnam; after being shot down near the end of his third tour, he survived torture and 11 months of captivity in the "Hanoi Hilton" prison, taking command among the prisoners, as he was the senior ranking officer of those captured in the past three years; he was promoted to colonel upon his release. Retiring from the Air Force in '78, he went into civilian ballooning, setting distance records in two balloon class sizes--one still stands, and it also happens to have been the first solo crossing of the Atlantic by balloon. Now living in the Orlando area, he is still active as an aviation consultant "and touring barnstormer"!

In the Tumblr post where I first found out about his skydiving exploits, there's a link to a Discovery channel segment showing actual footage from his 100,000 foot leap.

And although Kittinger's 1960 dive still holds the records for highest, longest, and fastest skydive, it isn't as though nobody's been trying to beat it: these guys have been trying in recent years, for instance.

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Two other interesting items that drifted across my screen today:

- A computer glitch delayed the departure of an unmanned cargo ship from the International Space Station; the thing I thought was interesting here was that the computer controlling the deployment was a laptop (the glitch was that it was apparently not properly connected to the station's jack or whatever, so the commands didn't go through)--I guess in just about every space station interior photo you see there are laptops everywhere, but it hadn't quite connected in my head that they'd even use them for stuff like controlling space vessels.

- Net Index by Ookla shows the accumulated results of "millions" of internet speed tests from around the globe, and compiles them into a bunch of charts showing which countries have the best internet speeds, prices, and so forth. The US has been dropping like a rock in these categories; we're 34th in download speed, for instance, right behind Mongolia, Estonia, and Liechtenstein; the (warning: auto-playing video with sound) article where I first found out about this goes into how instead of competing and improving out national internet structure, the major service providers in the States have basically conspired to keep raising prices, without significantly improving performance. ... Maybe we'll be saved by a predatory provider from France or Hong Kong or something.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 94

Today's first news item comes from Twitter, where I was linked to a slashdotted article describing the findings of a new research paper, which says that a protoplanetary disk has been discovered around a red dwarf star that is being sucked rapidly toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*. While even the ESO's Very Large Telescope can't directly image the star's disk, its presence has been inferred from "a telltale 100 billion-mile diameter cloud of glowing gas created by the disintegration of the disk" as it is torn apart by A*'s gravitational pull.

The dwarf star has been calculated to hail from a "3 million-year-old ring of young stars" orbiting A*; a close encounter with another star or stars in the ring could have thrown this star into the pull of the supermassive black hole. It is projected to avoid being sucked in, though: calculations show that in 2013 it will make its closest approach to the hole, within 270 billion miles miles--that's about 100 times as far as Pluto is from the Sun--in the middle distance of Pluto's elliptical orbit, anyway. The star may survive that revolution, but it looks likely that its planetary nursery won't.

The article also points out that the Hubble Space Telescope found a ring of stars orbiting the black hole center of our neighboring Andromeda galaxy in the 1990s, and goes on to get excited about the suggestion this troubled red dwarf in our galaxy presents: if it was forming planets, then could life evolve on a star orbiting a supermassive black hole? I guess anything's possible, but I'll take our position in this nice peaceful galactic backwater over that precarious position any day, thanks!

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I also noticed an article saying that NASA is tracking two pieces of space debris that may get into the 30-mile-wide, one-mile-high "safety zone" around the International Space Station Thursday and Friday, which would mean that the station would have to fire its thrusters as a "debris avoidance maneuver" to get back in the clear--they don't actually think the pieces will hit the station anyway, but they like to be on the safe side. The pieces are "the remains of a Russian Cosmos satellite and a leftover chunk of an old Indian rocket."

The Kosmos satellites, as they're spelled in their home country I guess, aren't a single satellite program, but more of a blanket term for all Soviet and Russian government satellites, counting all the way back to Kosmos 1 in 1962--they were up to 2,468 Kosmos-designated craft as of 2010. Hopefully most of them will behave themselves.

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In fighting with today's page--which gradually got darker and darker as I found it just looked too hm bright and plain I guess in the airlock's before-seen super-white state :?P--I came across something that actually worked pretty well. I finally decided I had to make the background of the airlock, behind the spacemen, very dark, but I didn't want to do full black, because I wanted the full black on them to stand out from it a bit, so I filled it with a very dark gray wash. That wasn't quite spooky enough, though, so I took my big brush and drybrushed some pure black ink into the middles of those dark gray areas, and it actually made a pretty nice effect I think: a very dark area that could pass for black, but has dark auras and other magical things that seem to be living in it. An easy and lively alternative to a flat black fill, perhaps!

So its just... kill everyone? I know Selinis really likes to see the 'crimson carpet' flow and paint the walls... but why not just grab some uniform and blend in until she gets to her objective?

Interesting question! There wasn't much choice in the airlock, since she couldn't have been sure of getting past the locks on her own; possibly she could have tried taking one of the men hostage, but that would probably have required killing the other anyway, and would have raised a host of other problems. And she had to figure that some alarm would be raised fairly quickly in either case.

She hadn't planned on gunning anyone down in the corridor--she was surprised by that last soldier as she came out of her hiding place.

As far as blending in goes, it's actually a fairly small facility--and we're talking small squads of soldiers who are up there for a lengthy tour of duty together--so she couldn't count on fooling anyone for a moment just by putting on a uniform or helmet. She also couldn't have known if she'd have time for a costume change after possibly raising an alert in the airlock. All in all she felt invisibility--hiding when possible, I mean--and speed were her best allies in this rather desperate attempt; after all, all she has to do is locate the archive backup, maybe circumvent whatever digital protection schemes might by trying to prevent it from being removed or copied, and transmit it to Mother--or so she hopes.

It's by no means an ideal way to approach this base, but she felt she had to go with what she could cobble together on Nena.

Oh! And it probably wasn't super clear (I didn't want to do the usual scanlines or weird perspective to show it's being viewed on a monitor, so I just stuck that |> "play" indicator in the upper left corner, which admittedly is much less obvious!), but this last page is a video replay of the airlock scene from earlier--the woman in the monitoring room is playing it back.

Also, I've been dying to draw some action. >_> :D

Ah...! All makes good sense in a 'roll-the-dice' and trust to your own skills logic... its very Selinis. LOL!

Yeah! And who wants to live forever, anyway?