Added 3 new A* pages:Hey I was wasting time reading more interesting stuff about the Rooskie space program, particularly the few deadly mishaps they've had; I didn't bother to note the addresses of these so I'm just kind of paraphrasing from what I can remember of the Wikipedia articles and probably have most of it wrong, but here goes:
- One Russian dude, coming down for landing in his space ship, had the main parachute fail to deploy correctly. He then deployed the backup chute, but it got tangled with the main, screwed-up chute, putting them both out of action, and his ship hit the ground at 90 mph or so, killing him. When they checked the chutes on another craft that had been due to launch earlier but had been delayed, they found those chutes would have had the same problem--so fortunately they were able to fix those, at least. This would have been ehh in the late '50s or sometime in the '60s I guess, as would the next one as far as I can recall.
- The only people to die in space (as opposed to in the upper atmosphere or further down) were three Russian cosmonauts who suffocated when a hatch got pulled off their ship after it fired its thrusters to put them on a re-entry course: it was supposed to separate from some other module, I think, but this hatch thing pulled away with it, leaving a hole that let their ship's atmosphere leak out very rapidly. The ship went through its landing procedure, and although ground control had not heard from the cosmonauts since shortly after the re-entry firing, they didn't really find out what had happened until the recovery team opened the landed ship and found the three dead in their seats.
- (This one was a bit later.) There was a lot of pressure to get a heavy rocket launch vehicle working that could compete with the huge American rocket at the time--one that could launch a crew directly to the Moon, for instance--and during a hurried round of testing, with the managing General or whatever he was of the Russian rocketry program at the launch platform directing efforts, a technician triggered one stage of the huge rocket's thrusters, which had mistakenly been left charged, and they fired into the rocket's other fuel tanks, igniting a massive fireball and explosion that destroyed the platform and killed over 100 people, including the bigwig in charge. American surveillance photos showed the destroyed platform, and hints acquired by European news agencies strongly suggested that a cataclysmic accident had occurred, but the Soviets staunchly denied a rocket accident--they gave out that the main guy and anybody else had died in a plane crash--right up until Glasnost allowed them to disclose it finally, in '89 or '90.
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I draw A* using the lasso tool, which is a little unusual, so I like to keep track of other people who draw with it:
deviantART user squazilla has been doing some cool lasso drawings lately, like this one: check out that pose, the clothing and facial detail, and those shades of gray! Nice.
Also, on her page I noticed another artist commenting about using the lasso; that was maxprodanov, who did this piece with the polygonal lasso tool.
Nedroid does the coloring for the popular webcomic "The Adventures of Dr. McNinja" these days, and a while back put up a coloring tutorial where he gives a detailed description of his coloring technique, which involves using the lasso tool to isolate areas to be colored. That's more of a traditional use of the lasso tool and not exactly lasso drawing per se, but hey I'll take what I can get.
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