LAS TE-TAZAS: 05/08/12

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The beginning of a five page mini-series

Just a little story about A Boy and His Blob.

Inspired by something my friend Brandon pointed out today, which I thought was pretty funny when I noticed that I was doing the exact same thing.

This is the first page in a three page mini-comic that I’ll be releasing over the next three days. When it’s done, I think I’m going to create a process post showing how I make comics, since people have been wondering.

Escape from Snow Wood. It’s hard to say goodbye to your besties.

Dodongo Dislikes Smoke

“Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia” Review (with SPOILERS)

by Kyle Anderson on MAY 7, 2012

When last we saw Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, all the way back in 2010, they were just about to get shot by snipers or blow up themselves and supervillain Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) at the end of “The Great Game.” Well here it is, 2012, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are back, mercifully, for another round of daring mystery-solving in series two of Sherlock, which had its North American premiere last night on PBS.

This season, writers Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and Steve Thompson are offering up three new adventures, this time adapting arguably the most well-known of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories. Episode one gave us Moffat’s take on “A Scandal in Bohemia” with “A Scandal in Belgravia,” a story that introduces the television show to The Woman, Irene Adler, played by Lara Pulver. This may be the archetypal Steven Moffat story; it’s clever, it’s full of sexual innuendo, it has a brassy woman, and, in the end, everything is connected.

But first, there’s that pesky cliffhanger to deal with. Fans have been waiting as patiently as possible for the resolution to the stalemate/checkmate ending of series one’s “The Great Game.” What happens is probably the most Moffatty diffusion of a perilous situation you could dream of: Moriarty gets a phone call. Yep, it appears that today is NOT a good day for Jim to bite the dust and, so, he lets the sleuths live. Moffat understands television better than anyone, and having worked on Doctor Who pays off here; you end an episode with the most “how will they get out of that?!” cliffhanger, and you forget it almost as quickly. What’s great, though, is that it’s entirely in keeping with the character of Moriarty and plays into the plot of the episode at hand as well. We’ll get more Moriarty later in the series, but here he simply walks away.

From here, we get a series of Sherlock and Watson interviewing prospective clients. Watson’s blog has picked up a great deal of steam and Sherlock is garnering a degree of fame. He makes mention of not wanting to have a public face and there’s a very funny in-joke which I won’t spoil here for those not in the know… but it’s a good one. They soon get on the case of a man who died of blunt force trauma while standing in an open field and the only witness, a man whose car had broken down, didn’t see anyone. This intrigues Holmes, but not enough to actually go there himself; he sends Watson and a webcam to investigate whilst he himself sits at home wrapped in a sheet.

They are interrupted mid-investigation (we do eventually get a resolution to this mystery) by government employees and helicopters. Seems they’re being hired by someone very, very high up, as they find themselves in Buckingham Palace. They are greeted, with his usual clipped pomposity, by Mycroft Holmes, still played brilliantly by series co-creator Mark Gatiss. It seems that a high-priced dominatrix named Irene Adler has a camera phone containing a series of compromising photographs featuring herself and a female member of the royal family. These would, of course, spell nothing but trouble for the most powerful family in Britain were they to be released; however, Ms. Adler is not asking for anything. She merely wants them to know that she has them. This power play sparks Sherlock into taking the case, to retrieve the camera phone, and prevent the eponymous scandal.

This is, of course, not the end of the story by a long shot. In fact, one of the things I like best about this episode is that it’s not afraid to span a great deal of time. The very beginning of the episode shows on Watson’s blog that it’s near the end of May, yet by the end of the 90 minute story, we’ve just had Christmas and New Year’s. When all’s said and done, it’s probably close to a year all told from the top to tail. There’s no point in having feature-length episodes if you aren’t going to play with it. We’re seeing the entirety of the Irene Adler saga, which would surely take longer than a couple of days. We see that they’re working on other cases along the way, but we certainly don’t need to know the details of each of them.

Now, let’s talk about Irene Adler. She is an incredibly smart, savvy, industrious, dangerous, and sexy woman, absolutely tailor-made for the Moffat treatment. Ever hear of a person named River Song? Moffat eats up women like this on a silver platter. It’s like he wants all women to be the screwball comedy version of Emma Peel. Within Sherlock Holmes, Adler is the closest thing he could possibly have to a girlfriend. He doesn’t exist in a physical or sexual world; he’s got no time for it. But he has the utmost respect for her intellect, which is the only thing that Sherlock Holmes values. She proves to be a match for him, a worthy mental sparring partner. Her allegiances lie only with herself, or to whoever pays her the most, and often, that isn’t Sherlock. Because Moffat is who he is, he’s made her a dominatrix and she wears very little throughout. Like all of his women, there will undoubtedly be allegations of sexism in the way he’s written the character, but I think he’s just writing women the way he wants them to be. It’s the same thing Howard Hawks did. They like sexy women who talk like men.

Lara Pulver’s portrayal of Adler is very good. She’s graceful and demure but you know she can handle herself, in just about any way possible. Her scenes with Cumberbatch are heated and enthralling. There are lots of layers to the character (not clothing-wise) and Pulver plays them all wonderfully. She makes you believe she’s telling the truth when you know she probably isn’t, which is exactly the predicament Holmes finds himself in. Of the Conan Doyle stories, Adler appears in only “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but I would like to think Moffat & Co could find a way to work the character into further stories, simply because Lara Pulver did such a great job.

The rest of the cast is a joy as well. Cumberbatch and Freeman’s interplay is even stronger this season, and we truly get the sense that they are great, if unusual, friends. This should go without saying, since they’re professional actors, but at no point watching them do you think they’re actors playing parts; they seem like real, live people. The supporting cast has a more prominent role in this episode, specifically Gatiss as Mycroft and Una Stubbs as Mrs. Hudson. Both get the opportunity to explore their characters a bit deeper and flesh them out. Unlike in the recent Robert Downey, Jr. film, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the relationship between Sherlock and Mycroft here is respectfully adversarial and we get a real sense of their childhood through short exchanges. There’s also a fantastic moment when Sherlock, at home with all his friends on Christmas, calls Mycroft who is sitting entirely alone in a giant room next to a fireplace. It’s a rare moment of Mycroft behind the curtain.

The direction for this episode is by Paul McGuigan, who directed episodes one and three last series and also directs episode two of this series. He brings an excellent flashiness to the program, taking various moments to do interesting or surreal things, depending on the situation. As with last series, Sherlock’s mental processes are represented graphically, via onscreen text, slow motion photography, and freeze frames. I’m sure as a nod, or a slam, on the Guy Ritchie films’ fight scenes, we get a quick, Matrix-y punch-up between Sherlock, Adler, and some CIA guys. It’s very well handled and doesn’t detract from the story for the sake of cool cinematography. I’m very much looking forward to next week’s episode to see what McGuigan does with a horror story.

“A Scandal in Belgravia” is an excellent opener to the season and welcome return to our favorite consulting detective and military doctor. By taking on such a well-known story in the Holmes canon, and making it their own, the Sherlock team has solidified their place in the history of televised sleuthing. Until now, nothing could touch the Jeremy Brett series of Holmes adventures and, while those are still fantastic, Sherlock is making something wholly separate yet equally wonderful. Next week’s episode is “The Hounds of Baskerville,” written by Mark Gatiss, of course a take on perhaps the best known of Conan Doyle’s stories, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Who’s excited?

-Kanderson is a consulting nerd. Follow him on TWITTER and listen to his PODCAST.

Snapshots from Space: A Tour Past Two Moons of Saturn

by Emily Lakdawalla on MAY 7, 2012

Snapshots from Space Post - Cassini Orbiter

More than a billion kilometers from here, a city-bus-sized robot has just rounded the corner on a close looping flight around Saturn. I’m talking about Cassini, a huge autonomous spacecraft that is now on the outbound leg of its 166th elliptical orbit of Saturn. It might seem pointless to count orbits, like counting up the school days in a year; but in fact it’s extremely important to count up Cassini’s orbits, because certain orbits, including the 166th, are special.

Cassini orbits Saturn, but it’s not the only thing circling out there; there are also Saturn’s rings, on their own circular orbits, as well as seven moons that are large enough to be somewhat spherical. Cassini’s orbit crosses the moons’, but most of the time, the moons are nowhere near Cassini when it crosses their orbits. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, a Cassini orbit is planned and timed just exactly so that Cassini and one of the moons wind up in very nearly (but not exactly) the same place at the same time. One of these encounters happened on Wednesday, May 2, 2012, when Cassini’s navigators placed it within 74 kilometers of the little moon Enceladus. That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, when you realize that Enceladus’ orbital speed around Saturn is about 13 kilometers per second, and Cassini’s speed past Enceladus was about 7.5 kilometers per second. Miss the timing by just a few seconds, and you miss the close-encounter data collection, or worse, you crash into a moon.

Anyway, when Cassini flies close by Saturn’s moons, it can get very pretty photos like this one. This was taken after Cassini’s closest approach, when it had receded to a distance of 140,000 kilometers away. This is a color view of a skinny crescent Enceladus that shows why this particular little moon is so cool. It’s a tiny world with enormous geysers erupting from its south pole. These geysers have been erupting continuously, as far as we know, since Cassini first saw them in 2004, and probably for a great deal longer than that.

The Cassini Saturn orbiter captured this view of Saturn's moon Enceladus on May 2, 2012. The image was assembled from three pictures taken from the Cassini raw images website. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute / Emily Lakdawalla

I want to point out how incredibly cool it is, not only that Cassini flies close enough to Saturn’s moons to take pictures like this, but that I, as a member of the unwashed public (and not a member of the Cassini mission team) can get my grubby hands on the images just hours after Cassini is done radioing them across 1,300,000,000 kilometers of empty space to a gigantic dish here on Earth.

You can get to these pictures, too. The Cassini mission is one of two right now that post their pictures directly to the Internet, as soon as they are received on Earth. (The other is the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.) For Cassini’s pictures, go to the Cassini Raw Images Website, and click the arrow to browse the most recent pictures, or select Saturn or one of its moons from the little dropdown menu, and browse data fresh from Saturn to your heart’s content.

Just a decade ago, you would have had to wait for months or years for these data, and even then there’d be a steep learning curve to figuring out how to even open the files, and probably a drive to some NASA library to get your hands on the data in the first place. Now, you can just sit at home and see views of Saturn and its moons that are just hours old. Depending on the time of day that you hit JPL’s website, you could even be among the first people in the world to see these brand-new images.

Cassini followed its stunt-flight past Enceladus with a close encounter with a larger moon, Dione. Here’s one pretty picture from that encounter. To see more, and an explanation of how I make pretty pictures like this from the raw image data, visit my blog at The Planetary Society’s website!

Dione poised in front of the much larger disk of the planet Saturn. Dione is much closer to the photographer (the Cassini spacecraft) than Saturn is, so it appears larger than it should. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute / Emily Lakdawalla.

RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS, 1984/2008

Images by Tetramesh

‘THE TIME-MACHINE’ COMIC

PLANE FLYING INTO A “TIME VORTEX”

“The air flow from the wing of this plane is made using colored smoke rising from the ground. The swirl at the wingtip traces the aircraft’s wake vortex, which exerts a powerful influence on the flow field behind the plane.

“NASA researchers are studying wake vortex to create an automated system that could predict changing wake vortex conditions at airports. Pilots already know, for example, that they have to worry less about wake vortex in rough weather because windy conditions cause them to dissipate more rapidly.”

- NASA Langley Research Center