Zodiac stuff

I'm an Aquisces!

For those of you that don't know this, the Zodiac in magazines can be quite annoying when it comes to the date. Its something I have noticed through my 27 years of experience on this planet. My birthday is February 19. This is by wikipedian standards the last day of the Aquarius sign. In some magazines however I noticed that my birthday was in fact the first day of Pisces!

Now you should also know there is this thing called "Cusp" which is a name they have given to the people who are born on the borderlines of the zodiac signs. For my cusp moment you have the period of February 16 to February 26. If I am to belief wikipedia I would be called a Pisarius. Now don't get me wrong, its nice that they gave us a name but really, PISarius?

Luckily for me I didn't know about the existence of these cusps before I created the list below, hell I only discovered about those cusp names because I was doing research for this blogpost. Yes I can be daft sometimes. Belief me or not but when I started making the names like "Aquisces" or "Gemancer" I felt like shakespear, a noobish one at that, but still, I was happy about the names I had created.

All completly original names...


..

1. Aries -> Taurus = Arus 
2. Taurus -> Gemini = Taumini
3. Gemini ->  Cancer = Gemancer
4. Cancer -> Leo = Caleo
5. Leo -> Virgo = Lergo
6. Virgo -> Libra = Vira
7. Libra -> Scorpio = Librio
8. Scorpio -> Sagittarius = Scorius
9. Sagittarius -> Capricorn = Sagicorn
10. Capricorn -> Aquarius = Caprius
11. Aquarius -> Pisces = Aquisces
12. Pisces -> Aries = Piries

With Virgo and Libra I had come to the same conclusion as the original name for it "Vibra", but if you are old enough you may know why I didn't want to use it like that. Vira sounds more feminine and independed. Lergo is exactly the same as the original cusp name, just like Arus. Gemini and Cancer is called a Gemincer by cusp standards, so I only had one letter different on that one.

The mayor trend hower is this. I worked from left to right, but most of the cusp signs work from right to left. I used the first part of the first sign, and the second part of the second sign.  They however used it visa versa, the second part of the first sign, and the first part of the second sign.

(Sagittarius, Capricorn)=Sagicorn
(Sagittarius, Capricorn)=Caprittarius

I'm not really sure why its like that, their technique isn't chronological or in the right reading direction. Unless of course it was made by somebody who read from right to left. I guess they just wanted to be creative.
 
In the end however I like Aquisces way better then Pisarius, first of all because Aquisces sounds more sophiticated, like the word "eloquent". Secondly, because it doesn't start with pis.

Webcomic translations

Why don't we have a wikipedia for webcomic translations?

Last night I was reading some of the webcomics I follow and for some odd reason I also jumped to wikipedia to check something. In some cross reference minded twist I connected these two sites and a hybred was born.

"Wikipedia for webcomics translations"

As of this moment I'm wondering why we don't have that type of site on the net. There are of course the logical reasons about intellectual property, copyrights and some other paperwork stuff like that. But those rules also apply to any of the encyclopedia articles that have been written in the past centuries. Yet we have wikipedia.

So why would it be impossible for an artist to say: "Hey, I don't mind posting my art on this webcomic-wiki. As long as people translate it I'm cool with it." Though some professional artist might dissagree with freely sharing their comic pages, I guess a lot of the lesser known (or cooler professional) artist might enjoy this type of site alot.

One of the other big issues is of course the practical application of such an undertaking. Making a site isn't the problem, but providing the endusers with the right tools to blank out comic pages, or put text in the bubbles in propper and easy way, that is the hard part.

In most cases you'll need extra software like photoshop to blank out the bubbles on the original webcomic. Putting in the text is also a bit tricky with the limited space of the bubbles. Although this slow proces is not impossible it would stop a lot of users because its not as fast and easy as making a new article in wikipedia.

All legal issues, artists restraints and technological issues put aside, I think it would be a splendid idea to have this type of wiki. I checked the internet and only found one or two sites that are involved in this type of practise. One of the sites "comic influx" has translations available but not on the comic pages themselves. Only as text next to a cover image of the comic.

There are some webcomics who have translations available of their own. In most cases however its only in one or two languages and the number of translated pages is about 10% of the total number of comic pages.

I'm sure there is a way to create either a wiki or an app for easily translating webcomics by the thousands. My only hope is that some webdeveloper is going to either read this blog or think of this idea and create a site for it. Where artists can submit their webcomics and users gladly translate any comic page that is presented to them.

A collaboration between endusers, webcomics and webdevelopers to make a better translated webcomic world. Ah, good old utopian feelings.

Cloud Earth

There's a rouge planet in collision course with Earth! ... bummer.

The line above is sort of the main idea with which I started a week long sketching project. It seemed like a cool idea to take the idea of Earth being destroyed by a rouge planet from outer space and make a series of sketches or drawings based on that. A week or seven sketches seemed like a nice amount of drawings to give me time enough to flesh out the story behind it and also just not to long to bore me in the long run.

So every day I made a sketch. I started out with some simple ideas and global ideas of what happend and who would survive and where stuff would go to. But the more I thought about it in the passing days the more it intriged me. Did the physics work out? Does water boil in space? What about the problems that could arise?

I think it was on the fifth day that I realised that if the Earth was destroyed we would lose the magnetic field and so we would also lose our protective shield for the suns radiation. This revelation popped a serious hole in my imagination, cause the science didn't fit the story anymore. For as far as I knew. So I had to fix that with adding "Artificial magnetic field generators" in the story somehow. Which in turn brought me towards "Artificial gravity field generators". During the week I posted a sketch on facebook with a little bit of storyline.

Monday:
"Somewhere in the future another planet pops up in our solar system and crashes head first into the Earth! Where there used to be Earth there is now only a cloud of meteorites, dust particals, lost ozon and frozen water. the few survivers who saved themselves by hiding on the dark side of the moon will have to try their best to survive in this new and harsh world. Will they ever get back in contact with the mars collony's that were created only two years earlier? Are they even alive? That and many other questions float around in the minds of the Lunians, Survivers of old Earth. "

Tuesday:
"Survivors of old earth united themselves on Moonrock base. At first it was a moonbase for scientific research. When news came of planet x crashing into earth they transformed it into a bunker for survival. The inital strike destroyed the entire earth and the moon got hit pretty bad as well. Luckily being on the dark side of the moon was a smart move to avoid collision with any schrapnel coming from earths direction. These days, Moonrock base has grown into a small city with a lot of outposts and mining camps on satelite meteors nearby. Soon they'll be able to gather enough resources from the surrounding area to start one of the first explorations towards "Old Earths Remnants". What will they find on these barren rocks? Death, ruins, or just nothing at all? "

Wednesday:
"The survivers of Old Earth have to look, on a regular basis, for new sources of minerals and materials. Once in a while they encounter something that reminds them of the Old Earth and the beauty that it used to be. Whenever they find the ruins of human civilisation from Old Earth they try their very best to bring them back to Moonrock base. There they hope to either investigate the ruins, reverse engeneer them if possible, or just make an exibition out of them for a while. In a worst case they can still just recycle the material they get from it. The very first ruïn that they found was put on the central square of Moonrock base. As a reminder of where they came from and what used to be. "

Thursday:
"Moonrock base is the only human city that exits in Cloud Earth today. There are a few extra camps and mines created by these humans, but besides them there are none left. Of course there are urban legends about humans that did survive the big crash, which suposidly now live in small spacecrafts floating around throught the meteors of Cloud Earth. But no one has ever seen such spacecrafts and all the radios on Moonrock base that are activly searching for any sign of life are only hearing noise. Some say that this is normal. Its almost impossible to get a good signal out to one of the mining camps because there are constantly rocks and meteors floating through the path of the radio waves. So they say it would be almost impossible to catch the radio signal of a lost spacecraft somewhere on the other side of Cloud Earth. Though technicaly correct the leaders of Moonrock Base don't encourage the search for lost Spacecrafts. They'd rather like their people to be zealous about survival instead of looking for past ghosts of Old Earth. Dum vivimus vivamus, as long as we are alive, we should be living. "

Friday:
"With the loss of the Earth the human survivers also lost the gravity of the planet and the magnetic field that surrounded the Earth. This brought new challenges to the survivors. They were able to invent artificial magnetic fields which could protect the smallest human and even the largest base from the radiation from the sun. The biggest challenge however was gravity. It took them a while to discover ways to harness its power. While they were researching this, a lot of different inventions were made. One of them was the anti-gravity pulse generator, or in laymens terms, the poke gun. It sort of creates an anti gravity field around a certain area. Instead of being attracted by the gravity source anything will be repelled by it. It turned out to be very usefull to get rid of those annoying little meteorites floating around Moonrock base. It was even better to protect fragile equipment that had to stand outside on the rocks, like satelites or solar power generators. Some bold scientist once claimed that the destruction of the Earth wasn't so bad, because of all the awesome new discoveries that had been made. He soon discovered that people weren't that apprehensive of his statement."

Saturday:
"Growing crops on earth wasn't always easy with the little annoying bugs. In space however, after everything on Earth died, there were very little to no bugs left. Which helped the farmers on Moonrock base a lot. They only had to worry about gravity, radiation, water supply, roots growing through the soil into the meteorite, sunlight that has irregular hours of light, going from 3 hours sun, and 12 shadow, to the opposite and some more strange problems you get from getting your planet blown into smithereens. Because it is very hard for anything to grow the lunians concider it a miracle if anything grows, even if its a fungus. When they first created Moonrock base a wide variaty of plants was brought to the base. Sadly enough a lot of accidents, fires, meteorite crashes have destroyed a lot of the original stockpile. The natural diversity has been diminished to a mere 1024. The strange part however is that, from the 1024 different spiecies, there is one of them which doesn't match any of the spiecies from Old Earth. Some say it might have been a random plant hitching a ride on another plant and nobody noticed. Other people hower say that it is a plant from the other Planet. They believe it must have infiltrated Moonrock base during one of the accidents and that it may be proof that there was alien life on the other planet. Though no scientific proof has been found to back up that urban legend."

Sunday:
"A lot of things changed with the destruction of the Earth. But a few things stayed the same. Hollidays stuck around and eventhough there weren't any more christmass trees, that didn't stop them from decorating something that looked like it. One of the strange things that got the Lunians by suprice was snow. Thought in the end it was to be expected but nobody actually thought about snow in space. Having a planet that had about 71% of its surface covered by water was a good source for snow and ice in space. Thought this time it isn't seasonal anymore, now it all depended on the flow of the material in Earth cloud. If they were lucky they'd hit a snow cloud. If such an event would appear they'd go out and make some snowmen. Once in a while though one of those snowmen gets hit and destroyed and the remains float in space again. A sad reminder of what happened to earth, but also a happy thought about that smily face floating around in the cold space, never to stop smiling or being happy while its still alive. Dum vivimus vivamus. "

Now that the week is over I'm glad that I was able to take an idea and work it out way further then I expected when I started. Now there are many ideas floating in my mind about this imaginary world. In a way I'd love to work more on it, draw more of the ideas and storylines that still linger in my mind.

There are still the colonies on Mars that I didn't flesh out or the aliens that might have lived on the other planet. Heck, I havn't even begun on working out the layout of the other planet, was it alien, earthlike, or was it baren like mars or venus. So much ideas and questions that I still have in my mind. Not sure thought if they'll ever see the daylight. Being a procrastinator I fear for the worst. But luckily I already have these seven drawings and a storyidea that could actually work if I ever were to finish it.