Some More Artwork

Finally went back to the studio for day to use the scanner. It's very weird being here with storage stacked up everywhere and no tables or chairs. Also, really major de-ja-vu of the first day of Uni.

Surprise, surprise, I been drawin' Astronauts again. Of course, traditional fabric rope freezes and shatters in space but whose counting.

Couldn't figure out how to rotate this, and Photoshop is being a big gay. Speaking of gay...

I'm on the planning committee for the next Plymouth Pride Event (me helping to plan a whole cities pride!? wow!) I volunteered myself for logo duty. I did like five different logos and they choose this one to keep working on. Apparently it's a competition, if I don't win then, well, screw em' and their drag queen contest!!!

Caturday

Well, moving out day is rapidly approaching. In seven days I will move all my earthly possesions to my new home (a tiny prison cell in a shared house of 10) and five days after that I will move myself there, to live for two years. What will I do for those five days I dont have my xbox, playstation, TV, dvds, musical instruments and telescope? *sob* I JUST DONT KNOW!

Anyway, leaving the family home for the first time, not sure if I'll ever return (Mum wants to sell the house) is causing me all sorts of stress and deeply damaging worry. Also, I'll be leaving my cats. Will I ever see them again either? If mum sells the house she has to find a new home for the cats. Having just lost one of them to old age I feel even more upset about the prospect of them going to live with strangers. Anybody in Devon or Cornwall with a nice big garden, no children or other pets!? Anyways, commence caturday, Rae-style:

Holly. The skittsh, gentle soul. Like's tummy rubs.

 Sally, the fat cat, although since Stripy died she's lost a considerable amount of weight. She was second in command and Stripy's foster sister, they were the closest so I think she's taking it hard.

Toby, the man-cat, spawn of Holly and mystery neighborhood sperm donor. For 10 years we though Tiby was a black cat but suddenly this year he started turning burgendy, It seems as he ages his mother's colours are coming out in him. He's running along the neighbor's wall to climb onto our balcony to roll at my feet. The late Stripy did the same thing: (for some reason Holly and Sally refuse to leave the house)

Finally, The BBC Does Something Awesome

So this BBC website www.howbigreally.com shows the size of natural disasters, war zones and man's forray into the heavens in comparison to things we can relate to. For example, the size of the moon when compared to main land Australia:

 How about the runway of the Space Shuttle centered over Central Park, New York?

Or, the same runway when centered over my house:

Now I live in Plymouth, England, and I wont pretend it's a big city. But just look at that! The Space Shuttle runway stretches pretty much across the ENTIRE CITY! Its HUH-YAWGE!! Now something thats comparitvly miniscule, the distance walked by the Apollo 11 crew, the first moon landing. This is how much was explored on the first moonlanding 40 years ago when centered over Old Trafford football stadium:

I think you can tell thats no real distance at all. Ofcourse by later missions they explored greater distances with the help of the luna rover. But still. I think thats pretty startling. As my hero Phil Plait would say, we need to go back!

I invite you to place the Space Shuttle runway over your house, or indeed you can plot the Apollo 11 distance over your town, print out the map and walk it yourself: http://howbigreally.com/

Perseids Meteor Shower

Heads up to the (two) people who read my blog, tomorow night, August 12th, will be the peak of the Perseids meteor shower which comes around every year, caused by Swift-Tuttle (what an awesome name for a comet.) I've spent the last two nights out observing Jupiter and I've counted eight shooting stars so far, and I wasn't even looking for them. So grab a blanket and look east, because it'll be beautiful.

Good Work, Astronauts (Even though you smell of wee)

Last week I read news that an emergency had developed on the Internation Space Station. What had happened was a faliure in the pumps that cycled ammonia through the massive coolent and radiators. It could have been catastrophic, but thanks to the fast work of Expedition 24 astronauts (Expeditions are long duration missions, STS missions are Space Shuttle Missions that last 2 weeks at the most) they Macgyvered the problems into a non-dangerous but urgent situation. If they're backup system broke down they could be in serious trouble. So, they shoved some spacewalks together, which is  HUGE thing since astronauts usually train for months to do a a particualar spacewalk these guys had about 2 days to prepare and no time to practise. The second spacewalk interested me particularly as I watched part of it live, and also, because it broke the record for being the longest ever spacealk at 8 hours 3 minutes and it was also Tracy Cadwell-Dyson's first ever spacewalk. Imagine being told you've got 2 days to (mentally) prepare for that sort of thing, but also that if they mess up they could be in serious trouble having one side of the station 200's and the other side -200'c. Just goes to show how smart and together these folks are. There was some ammonia leakage during the spacewalk that came in contact with the astronauts, that could have been bad, but they did a "bake-off" where they literally just float around in space for a while to late the ammonia disapate.

Well done guys, I'd be up there risking my life too if I had 3 PHD's and was born in texas.

First Year in Two Minutes

Something I've been working on for a couple of days. The frustration in it's creation took about a decade off my life, seeing as I was using Windows Movie Maker and its infamous for being the most unstable program out there. I'm happy with the end result even though I had to save it at a lousy low quality because even though it's only 2 minutes long it took way more RAM than my computer to handle to save, so I had to save it lower. Its almost completly in chronological order of my whole first year of uni. If anybody asks what my first year was like I'll direct them to this video. Tis about 70% of all the photos I've taken over the year and is in pretty much chronological order. I think it's interesting how visually you can see how I've grown my comfortable with the camera, at first I'm hesitant and but then I start getting closer to closer to people and they get used to me taking pictures all the time until now I can get some really beauitufl candid shots of really humans up close.