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| Easy peasy | Apr 30, 2021 9:49 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Got five pages done! Now I just gotta do it every week for the rest of my life. = D
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| So it's a regular week | Apr 29, 2021 9:13 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Back on track for a five page week!
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Just be a little happy here y'know | Apr 28, 2021 7:12 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:
^ Pencil sketch for a reader supporting the comic through my Patreon campaign. Many thanks to everyone supporting the comic, you are the true power behind A*! : D
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| 12 years and I draw slower than ever | Apr 27, 2021 11:08 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Ugh, I'm falling behind again. : P
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| NASA's space tires | Apr 26, 2021 9:50 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Over the weekend I came across a pretty cool NASA article about space tires—wheels for rovers exploring other planets, made for ultra-low pressure and temperatures, and punishing terrain.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Another four page week : P | Apr 23, 2021 4:32 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I fussed too much over the art this week and let myself get behind, so this fourth page is as far as I'm going to manage to get before the weekend.
My brain has decided that there's some kind of stylish look I need to get to; it doesn't know what it is exactly, or how to get there, but it knows that if the drawing or painting comes out looking too shapeless or...something, it will fret about it until I redo it.
I'll try to do better next week!
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| NASA converts a little Martian CO2 to O2 & CO | Apr 22, 2021 1:05 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:NASA just used their MOXIE instrument on the Perseverance rover on Mars to convert Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen; the 300 watt instrument took an hour to generate 5.4 grams of oxygen, "enough to keep an astronaut healthy for about 10 minutes of normal activity."
NASA provided some other interesting numbers for future planetary explorers:
"To get four astronauts off the Martian surface on a future mission would require approximately 15,000 pounds (7 metric tons) of rocket fuel and 55,000 pounds (25 metric tons) of oxygen. In contrast, astronauts living and working on Mars would require far less oxygen to breathe. 'The astronauts who spend a year on the surface will maybe use one metric ton between them,' Hecht said.
Hauling 25 metric tons of oxygen from Earth to Mars would be an arduous task. Transporting a one-ton oxygen converter – a larger, more powerful descendant of MOXIE that could produce those 25 tons – would be far more economical and practical.
Mars' atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide. MOXIE works by separating oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules, which are made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. A waste product, carbon monoxide, is emitted into the Martian atmosphere."
So yeah we're already producing greenhouse gases on Mars. : P
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| How to be silly all by yourself | Apr 21, 2021 2:03 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Spent way too long drawing these last two pages, now my schedule's all upside down. p:
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| NASA helicopter flies on Mars | Apr 19, 2021 11:01 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:'NASA's Mars helicopter takes flight, 1st for another planet' (AP News)
NASA's "Ingenuity" robot weights 4 lbs, and flies on two 4-foot-long blades spinning five times faster than they'd have to on Earth in order to achieve lift in the thin Martian atmosphere, just 1% the density of Earth's.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| A shot in the arm | Apr 16, 2021 11:30 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Got my first of two COVID-19 vaccine shots today, hurrah! Bit of a sore deltoid here but it didn't interfere with drawing and painting, so that's all right. But let's get vaccination to the rest of the world, too!
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| G-love | Apr 15, 2021 9:02 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Didn't expect to have that much fun painting the glove.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Workaround YouTube breaking embedded playlist | Apr 14, 2021 8:39 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:YouTube broke their playlist embedding functionality today, for instance the compilation of the A* episode 1-7 videos I embedded in the A* 10th anniversary blog post two years ago was showing up as a broken grey blank video panel.
Fortunately, smart people found a workaround, which is that you can alter or just delete the term "videoseries" from the embedding code YouTube gives you, and that magically gets the embedded playlist working again.
YouTube knows about the issue; I guess we'll see if they break the workaround whenever they fix the original problem.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Once in a while it sort of works! | Apr 13, 2021 8:27 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:My general technique for eyes is drawing a vague cloud or two of scratchy lines and hoping I'll be able to paint them somehow.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| A cuttingly bitter wind | Apr 12, 2021 8:10 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Traipsed through a weird kind of quasi-suburbia on the far side of town today.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Look up, look down | Apr 09, 2021 11:43 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I saw a hawk dive on its prey today. It's life or death out there beside the road across the street from the city's main post office! But they're the only PO in town that ships internationally so sometimes you just gotta make the journey. No hawk got me, though! So that was all right.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Y'know | Apr 08, 2021 11:13 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Just working on this.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Umph page post | Apr 07, 2021 10:36 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Page got done, phewwww.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Double double quasar! | Apr 07, 2021 12:52 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:NASA posted a new article about two merging quasar pairs—active supermassive black holes at the centers of colliding distant galaxies; they also mention A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of *our* galaxy:
"The Hubble images show that quasars within each pair are only about 10,000 light-years apart. By comparison, our Sun is 26,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy."
These quasars are about 10 billion light years away, which means we're seeing them 10 billion years ago—which is when quasars were most abundant, according to the article—so mergers were more frequent:
"We estimate that in the distant universe, for every 1,000 quasars, there is one double quasar."
Gotta watch out for the big glossy illustration at the top of the article, though, showing a galactic merger with two quasars: that's simply an artist's concept of what such an event *might* look like. Hubble's actual photos of the quasar pairs are lower down in the article, with the quasars simply looking like bright blobs close to each other.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Well heck, I'm taking Monday off | Apr 03, 2021 12:26 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:My Google calendar says this coming Monday is Easter Monday and uh... Oh. Not actually a federal holiday. Well that's too bad, because I'm taking it off so I can use it to get my taxes done, because otherwise, they ain't gettin' done.
Oh I know our tax day has been pushed back here in the States due to the pandemic, but eh I'm tired of them hovering over my head. I'm takin' Monday off and they're gettin' done, durn it!
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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| Just add water | Apr 01, 2021 9:11 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Gotta remember to do faded lines sometimes.
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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