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(Jon sez:) 
You were probably wondering what narrative purpose had Benjamin speeding along in an open boat. Well, some method of mussing up his hair was necessary so that he could smooth it down into a somewhat familiar coiffure. You may also notice that Benjamin has a habit of pointing out his gun to people, which surely is only because he doesn't want to have to use it.
In science news, there's a theory out there that the large planets may have caused each other to tilt through gravitational interaction. Note that in the article a comment is made in passing that the smaller planets like Mars and Earth can change their axial tilt over time. I was as surprised as heck when I first learned this, years ago. Earth is stabilized by the angular momentum of its large moon, but Mars isn't. Given long periods of time, Mars' angle of axial tilt could change radically. Something to think about, if you're intending to terraform the planet and stay there for a hundred million years or so. And if you're intending to maintain a physical form as opposed to, say, moving entirely into computers or computational foofaraw or whatever crazy sciencey gizmos we might try out in a Kurzweil-style posthuman world. |
(Mark sez:) 
Chaucer's non-sentient act cracks me up every time I read it. Cracks... me... up.
Now that MoS is rumbling towards its conclusion I'm in a contemplative mood. Specifically I'm contemplating all the annoying little bits of design I'm stuck with because I really made very little effort to plan out my designs before drawing them. A good example of that is Chaucer's spotlight thingies. It doesn't take very long to CG them in, but still, it's a huge pain to circle the area and then feather the selection and then choose the gradient and then fill it in and then manually clip out anything the light is supposed to go behind... ugh. I'm going to try to plan ahead a lot more on our next (top secret!) project and hopefully make less work for myself in the long run -- something that is devoutly to be wished. |
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