Before we get started, I just wanted to remind everyone that Scott and I will be attending Emerald City Comicon next weekend. Scott has a limited number of sketches available so reserve yours today!

After the show we’ll start updating with an all-new Sparrow adventure with art by Wook Jin Clark.

Okay, now that we got all the business out of the way, let’s get to it!

Magnetic Spikes. Geomagnetics. How do they work? You want my opinion, unexplained spikes in localized geomagnetic activity in the Earth’s past obviously point to time travelling teenagers doing pranks to mess with historical records.

The (Legally) Blind Can See. Gonna be a weird time if we can keep this civilization going long enough for features like these to become standard issue in glasses and contact lenses.

I think we all heard about TRAPPIST-1. Or 2MASS J23062928-0502285 if you’re nasty. I’m particularly fond of the infographic and tourism posters. The universe is a weird place. Seven planets, all rocky, all roughly Earth-ish sized, and all of them orbiting their star closer than Mercury orbits our own. And yet three of them are potentially habitable since TRAPPIST-1 is pretty dang small and cool relative to the Sun. Fun fact: the Sun has about five billion* years of fuel left, but TRAPPIST is burning so low it’ll last for another four trillion years.

*The Sun will still be around, but that’s when it will have become a Red Giant and expand to engulf the Earth’s** orbit which will, uh, obliterate our planet.

**Oh, don’t worry, that’s still five billion years from now and it won’t matter anyway since all life on Earth will have died long before then because the Sun is slowly getting hotter and the surface of the Earth will be too hot to support liquid water in only about one billion*** years.

***It’s not that bad. It’s unlikely civilization even has another 40 years*^ in it.

*^Assuming a soft collapse where pockets of humanity are able to survive the post-apocalypse at subsistence levels, it’s pretty much impossible for us to ever get “back” to where we are now. The Industrial Revolution only worked because England happened to have a lot of coal/oil near the surface thanks to glaciers carving up the countryside thousands of years earlier. We’ve long since used up all the “easy” energy worldwide and now the only way to get more is by relying on an uninterrupted extraction infrastructure. Should that system suffer a global collapse, that’s it, there’s no starting it back up. The best we can hope for is getting back to about the Renaissance^ and then just hanging out there forever.

You've been asking us for years to bring you more of The Sparrow, so we partnered up with Wook Jin Clark to do just that in the all-new tale, Project Millipede! It'll debut right here on March 6th. Stay tuned!

How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder. Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics.

Hackers help NASA save climate data. Because we now live in a world where basic scientific inquiry is a radical act.

Zealandia, the eighth continent. All we got to do is jump start another ice age to get it to come out again.

NASA revives “weird life forms” trapped in crystals for 60,000 years. Cool. That’s cool. We’re fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine and good.

DARPA “Biology is technology.” I don’t know if this counts as a strange science link for the blog here or a research link for the Patreon!

New Boston Dynamic Nightmare Bot. This is cool, but also: what is wrong with these people? I guess they’ve chosen their side. It’s not too surprising, really. If you are even half awake on the topic of what software and hardware automation is poised to do to our civilization, you’d make friends of the robots too.

Discovered a new continent. Gravity tipped ‘em off. It’s a cool find but not exactly unexpected. It’s an exciting part of the world from a geological perspective. Just take a look at just how much area is taken up by the Himalayas. Now realize they’re the crumple zone created by the impact of India’s crash into Asia. And that we’re, like, maybe a third of the way into that crash.

If WEG still had the license. This will be an important link to, like, three of you. But for those three it will be the most important link they see all year.

Musical accompaniment brought to you by Lazerhawk. Get ‘em.

This week's process post on the Patreon is a full script for a Big Two project I was hired to do, but it never quite got off the ground. 

Printing with light instead of ink. Pretty sure this qualifies as pure sorcery.

Time Crystals! Because I've been getting tons of links to articles about them this week from folks for some reason. Which is nice, really, because it's good to know we are in your thoughts. Where we can remake you. Control you. Ahem, but I've had my eyes on these things for a while, again, for some reason.

We'll be eating bugs by 2050. Sorry, I just can't get on board. I mean, honestly, who actually believes we'll still have a civilization by 2050? Hahaha, c'mon get real.

On the bright side, Makeup and Vanity Set released a new album. Check it out. 88:88 remains my favorite overall, but everything they do is wonderful.

My process post over on the Patreon this week will take a look at my pitch and outlines for the Firestorm series DC commissioned me to do the week before they made it obsolete by deciding to do New 52 instead.

Here's the plan.

Over on the Patreon I'll make posts talking about process for whatever the hell I'm writing and researching for that week. Over here I'll collect the links that bubbled up in my travels. These will usually lean toward weird news or neat tech.

Like what? Like this!

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism. Afropunk is rad, get into it. My Phantom mini-series gave me an excuse to look more closely at it, oddly enough. Some of the most interesting sci-fi created today fits under this umbrella.

Tips to avoid skimmers. Never a bad idea to remind yourself how much of our cyberpunk future is already here.

Plastic bottles recycled into blankets. Reminds me of the ocean plastic Adidas shoe.

If you like to work to music, might I suggest The Beautiful New Age Relaxation Tapes? Check out an album or two, they have ~30 to choose from. If you like what you hear, there's over 24 hours worth of music to be had for less than $1 which is a deal so good it'd still be a steal at $10.

Christmas is coming up and we’ve got things to buy. Here's the deal(s):

First up the full set of Atomic Robo postcard prints are on sale.

Do you like Atomic Robo? Doctor Dinosaur? Stickers? Booya.

Anything in this batch of Real Science Adventures products is 25% off with the code SCIENCESALE.

You want this stuff to arrive before Christmas probably. Here’s how that works: order from our online store sooner rather than later!

Carriers do not guarantee non-air delivery times between Dec. 11 and Dec. 24, but your best bet for delivery by Saturday, December 24 is to order in-stock items before 6am, Thursday, 12/15. Our Standard Shipping takes between 3 to 5 days for transit, so that should give you plenty of time.

The end!

You’ve got a Christmas to shop for and we’ve got Christmas gifts. Lets put these facts together!

FIRST

Go to our online store and buy things.

SECOND

You want them to arrive before Christmas probably. Here’s how that works: order from our online store sooner rather than later.

Carriers do not guarantee non-air delivery times between Dec. 11 and Dec. 24, but your best bet for delivery by Saturday, December 24 is to order in-stock items before 6am, Thursday, 12/15. Our Standard Shipping takes between 3 to 5 days for transit, so that should give you plenty of time.

The end!

I just wanted to thank everyone who dropped by our table over the wild NYCC weekend.

Anyone in this business spends a part of every day wondering if they've made a huge mistake. But then you do a show where you can hardly get one and a half sentences into your sales pitch before you hear, "I'll take three," and you come out of it realizing that, yes, comics was a huge mistake, but at least you're making some folks happy while you're doing it.

Meanwhile, here on THE INTERZONE, our family of sites kept updating despite my absence. In case you need a rundown of everything that went down, here is a list of links that is as handy as it is dandy.

Tuesday, Oct 4th: Page 11 of Issue 4 of The Flying She-Devils Raid on Marauder Island. This was also the last day for our most recent Kickstarter campaign, so you no longer have to put up with me talking about it nonstop. Joy!

Wednesday, Oct 5th: Page 15 of Issue 4 of Atomic Robo and the Temple of Od.

Thursday, Oct 6th: Page 12 of She-Devils.

Friday, Oct 7th: Page 16 of Temple of Od.

Monday, Oct 10th: Page 17 of Temple of Od.

Tuesday, Oct 11: Page 13 of She-Devils.

Whew!

If you're reading this there are between twenty-four and zero hours left to get your hardcover copy of Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire, a Robo plush, the Task Force ULTRA Field Manual, and a ton of other great stuff like original cover art (grab it before someone else does, you fool!) and Atomic Robo RPG goodies.

If you missed out on our previous hardcovers, then head on over to the online shop and fix your life.

Or, if you happen to live in the NYC area, then you should head to the graveyard of civilizations, a.k.a. the Javits Center, for NYCC this weekend and come by Artists Alley table G-6 to watch me dance for nickels. Look for the enormous Atomic Robo banner with the ghoulish fellow who looks like he could use a little more coffee.

Scott will not be able to make it to the show due to a knee injury. Comics is rough business, kids. But he is pre-drawing some sketches that you can pick up!

I am starting with 20 slots open. Time permitting and if there is a demand, I will open up more.

To get on the list email us at tesladynellc@gmail.com and put "NYCC 2016 SKETCH" in the subject line.

Sketch Commissions cost $50. You'll pay at the show when you pick up the sketch. Cash or card.

You can request a single figure and I will draw it in pencil, on a 9”x6” acid-free two-ply bristol board and it'll look something like this:

To pre-answer the question I get at every show: no, I cannot squeeze in a second character if you pay for more. The single figure limit isn't due to miserliness, it's due to time. If you want more than one figure, you can purchase multiple sketches if slots are still available!