For once, I wish to channel my musical esthetics and talk about one of the absolute most sought-after albums I have ever pined for. Which is to say, when it was released I was just starting a new job and on a tight budget, but by the time I’d established myself, it was already grossly out of print.
To be sure, as a musician, I don’t know if I could ever play any of Tristram Cary‘s music, but like Delia Derbyshire, I find the kind of organic sound they used in the mid 1960s was unique and something I’d love to try. I would love to have high-fidelity digital tape loops of ordinary, everyday sounds.
Cary’s music was itself bombastic and brutal in a fresh, naturally bassal way. I was reminded of this, but didn’t have a chance to cover it, during my discussion of Doctor Who: The Ark. The Ark is filled with the classic themes and tones from Cary’s earlier work on The Daleks. Cary actually contributed music to a number of Doctor Who stories during the Hartnell era of the show, as well as in the early 1970s with the Pertwee story, The Mutants.
The album is so rare, it often goes for, from $80–$130, which is well beyond my price range. Especially considering it originally retailed for about a quarter of that. It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth it, but it’s not the media I care about, it’s the music and surely if it was just a digital copy of the music, it could be re-released as streaming for little to no cost, and thus all profit to the Cary estate.
Tristram Cary died in 2008, so he was around when the album was released. I can only assume he was happy with it. I hope he would want more people to hear it, but I am hesitant to look into the grey recesses of the Internet to procure his music. I want so badly to buy a legal copy. I just wish I could get it for a fair price.
Well, no new Doctor Who for a while now so I thought it might be fun and topical to review a story from the third series in the classic run as a tie-in with the modern Covidapolis. The Ark was is the modern name for the collection of 4 stories which ran in March 1966, pretty much 54 years ago from today. In a sense, though, it is precinct because in The Steel Sky and The Plague (parts 1 and 2 of The Ark), Dodo Chaplet gives a race of humans and Monoids a coronavirus. Yes, technically that’s exactly what she had since the common cold is a coronavirus. But it’s easy to speculate the variety she has is actually some form of SARS-CoV-2, so let’s just say it’s SARS-CoV-13—we’re skipping 3–12, which is just as well as SARS-CoV-7 was really nasty. But I digress.
The story starts out with the TARDIS landing in a jungle with a mix of animals from Central America, South America, and India. The Doctor, Steven Taylor, and Dodo Chaplet even pet an Indian Elephant’s trunk.
The problem is, Dodo has SARS-CoV-13, or so I assume. The story takes place four billion years, or ten million years, or whatever this story misinterprets the age of the Earth to be at the time the Sun becomes a Red Giant (hint: it’s four to five billion). In that time, the human race has lost all immunities for most illnesses, having long ago eradicate them.
Meanwhile, the rather docile Monoids have also lost their home planet and are friendly companions to the last humans. The do act subserviently but the humans also see the Monoids as friends and defend the Monoids when, Niash, a human, is negligent in the beginning of the story and sentenced to suspension for seven hundred year of miniaturization. Strangely, this red herring is never seen again, even in the later episodes that take place when his sentence would have been served.
Also, why do they all drive hovercrafts on a spaceship? Wouldn’t an electric car work better? But I digress.
The Doctor and his companions—we called them companions in those days, though I’m sure they were friends—are brought by the Monoids to meet the humans. The leader of the humans welcomes them. However, Zentos—the Freshmaker—remains uneasy and fails to trust the travelers. Zentos is the second in command, and was the prosecuting attorney in the trial above.
The Leader takes a shining to the strangers and even shows them a statue they’re building of a human holding a globe. The statue, though, is barely built, with only its feet complete.
So Dodo goes around touching a lot of things, failing to wash her hands, sleeping with her head on the table, spreading her SARS-CoV-13 everywhere. Eventually, the leader gets the virus and the Zentos hears the Doctor tell Steven he feels guilty for bringing the virus there. Heck yeah, Doc!
As if things weren’t bad enough, the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo are put in jail and forced to watch a sham trial lead by Zantos. Everyone seems to be coming down with SARS-CoV-13, Monoids and Humans alike!
When Steven is called to the stand, he is shown—having clearly touched Dodo too much—to have contracted SARS-CoV-13. He collapses on the stand. Zantos assumes this to be an admission of guilt but saner minds agree that the Doctor wants to help cure the plague and they agree to let him try to experiment with a cure on Dodo.
Meanwhile, the Monoids start stroking animals in order to get samples for the Doctor to formulate his cure.
One wonders just what form of virulation he was trying to conduct. After all, can Iguanas get SARS-CoV-13 even? But I again digress.
Some timey wimey jiggery-pokery stuff happens and the Doctor’s cure works. First, Steven thrashes about, but then he his fever is down and he’s alright. The Doctor then orders the virulation to be performed on everyone.
I think it’s important to stop here and get a little sciency for a moment. Virulation is a form of early vaccination and vaccines only work on people who don’t yet have the virus. or who are at an early stage of infection such that the antibodies for the virus can have time to build up before the virus reaches a critical threshold. If someone is already at an advanced stage of SARS-CoV-13, like the leader, would the virulation even work, or would the disease have progressed too far already.
Anyway, the Doctor’s cure works and Zantos is not longer getting fresh with the time travelers. He thanks them and a Monoid takes them back to the TARDIS.
The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo are off on their next adventure, which just happens to be the same jungle environment from before. They’re back on the Ark. Only this time, the that statue of feet is complete. The whole body is as normal and originally designed, but the head is the head of a Monoid.
We learn that the Doctor and his companions have arrived seven hundred years later, when the Ark is near its destination of Refusis-II. We don’t know where Refusis-II is as the story Refuses tell us, but we guess it’s close to Spiradon. Niash is nowhere to be seen. He must have been trapped in a plot hole.
The Monoids can talk now, and they have taken over and are lead by a ruthless leader, Juan. Juan wants to claim Refusis-II for the Monoids and leave the now enslaved humans on the Ark to wither and die. Juan captures the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo and puts them to work in the kitchens, the most menial of slave labor jobs. Apartnely, the Monoids have huge appetites. Then again, cooking seems to simply consist of a bullion cube being dropped in water to turn the contents into potatoes or chicken. I guess Rey had the same thing on Jakku. But I again digress.
Some humans are considered collaborators and work more closely with the Monoids. The regular humans don’t like them.
Steven tries to attack Monoid number 2 but fails and a human dies. The Monoids are brutal since they stopped using Sign Language.
Juan is worried about landing on Refusis-II, so he sends a collaborator, Monoid-, the Doctor and Dodo to the surface to make contact with the natives and figure out if they will be easy to subdue.
The Refusis-II people though, you never see them. Turns out, they’re invisible. Monoid-2 is no match for the Refusian and is easily disarmed, though he escapes and tries to warn Juan and the others. Unfortunately, the collaborator human dies in the struggle.
Monoid-2 makes it to the shuttle only to have the ship detonate with Monoid-2 on board.
The Doctor and Dodo are stranded. And Juan has left a bomb on the ship, to detonate when all the Monoids have left and only humans remain.
Juan is suspicious and he and Monoid-3 decide to execute the Monoid Evacuation plan. They’re convinced the bomb in the head of the statue will never be discovered.
Juan’s personal servant hears about the bomb and decides to join the resistance. Steven uses him to help him and the other humans escape from the kitchens.
Meanwhile, Monoid-4 is not happy with Juan’s leadership. When all the Monoids get to Refusis-II, they try to find the Refusians but they only find the Doctor and Dodo. Juan is irate but Monoid-4 rebels and takes half the Monoids back to the ship to return to the Ark. Juan warns them about the bomb but Monoid-4 doesn’t care.
Juan decides to ambush Monoid-4’s party on the way back to the ship and a civil war erupts. Monoids are dying left and right. Eventually, only Monoid-4 is left. The Doctor, Dodo, watch the battle and find out the bomb is in the head of the statue. They return to the ship and message Steven, then return to the ship.
The thing you need to know about Refusians, they’re hecka strong. The Refusian lifts up the megatonne statue and chucks it in the airlock, then the prop just sort of teeters out of the ship, falling down toward Refusis-II before exploding in space.
On the ship, all is well. Juan is dead, and Monoid-4 and two of his companions are captured. The Refusian chastises the humans for enslaving the Monoids and the humans agree to treat the Monoids as equals.
Having made they agreements and prepared their landings, they take a hovercraft back to the TARDIS and get on their way. Steven wears my favourite striped shirt, and Dodo wears her zero camisole and skirt. But the Doctor disappears, captured by The Celestial Toymaker…
Many people are trying to show off empty shelves to indicate the panic that is Covidapolis, what I’m calling the panic around COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2. I personally think it’s bad form to post images of empty shelves of Sanitizers, Bottled Water, or Toilet Paper. I mean, it’s bad enough even the backup-backup-backup option from ancient times isn’t available.
Truth is, I already am good in that respect, and I have been since well before Covidapolis. From a Science point of view, though, the Economics of Hording is something I find fascinating.
Personally, I just wanted to stock up on some Orange Juice. So I get to the Tropicana section and as I approach, I am quite delighted to see the bounty. So many bottles ready to be purchased by me. I can just get my Low Acid Orange Juice and be on my way.
The thing is, I am a man with few ailments. But I do have one weakness, the acidity of citrus fruits. It’s a mild allergy. In small doses, I can tolerate even the most acidic fruits, but too much and my tongue starts to swell up and I start to sweat. Thus, I need my Low Acid Orange Juice.
Sadly, the Wegman’s in Dulles, VA has in the past be lax in stocking Low Acid. I have been there at least once where all Orange Juice was in stock except the Low Acid, and I had to drive all the way to Leesburg to get it. So, I knew even with all this Orange Juice, I may end up disappointed.
Big surprise, they were again out. I really think this Wegmans need to keep better track of its inventory of Low Acid Orange Juice, especially since most of the other grocery stores don’t carry Low Acid. It seems to me if they’re often running out with all other stocks a plenty, they probably should be stocking more of it. There’s certainly the demand. It’s capitalism, 101.
In the end, I decided to go with something more like regular juice than Orange Juice since I know the mixed Orange Drinks typically have lower acidity. Fortunately, I found Orange-Pineapple to suit the bill.
One thing that has been sincerely bothering me about this whole Covid scare that I mentioned a couple days ago—as if it wasn’t all over the media already—is how it will most adversely affect women who can least afford it.
The thing is, women aren’t just paid less for equal work in most professions and by many companies, but women also often have to make ends meet in the lowest paying jobs, taking the double hit of low-wage work and lower pay than their male counterparts.
Add to that self-quarantining that South Korea, Italy, and now the United States are doing, at least in a patchwork of states. Many white-collar jobs offering benefits like telework and paid sick leave. But on the lower end of the economic scale, you have women working jobs in the service industry, such as in restaurants or retail. Although some retailers are also offering paid sick leave, it looks like Congress will not require it and so workers are at the whim of their employers when it comes to containing the virus.
Consider, therefore, for a moment, what a single mother who is working in a restaurant. She is paid below minimum wage, a practice under the dangerous assumption that she can make it up in tips. Add to this she has her children home from school so even if she’s healthy she may still need the time off. If she gets the time off, even paid time off, though, she’s still deprived of her tips.
Interestingly, under Virginia law, a server can be paid as little as $2.13 per hour, under the assumption she will be making at least $5.12 per hour in tips. As long as the net is $7.25 per hour, the Virginia state minimum, the Restaurant doesn’t need to pay her the full state minimum wage. Of course, when she takes off, assuming she’s paid, she’ll be paid the minimum wage of $7.25, but now the at best understaffed, and at worst closed restaurant has to pay her $5.12 more per hour to cover the lack of tips.
Keep in mind most restaurants fail. Thus, a two week slowdown or closure could leave a struggling establishment to deeply in the red to recover and if the restaurant fails, that single mother is out of work.
It’s hard to say exactly what the consequences of a fortnight of bringing the U.S. Economy to a grinding standstill, but there will be consequences. And consequences in a quadrennial election year. No-one knows for sure. But one thing we can almost certainly be sure of: it will hurt women the most.
As a software engineer, I pride myself in honesty. If I say to you, the problem has yet to be solved for any number not leading to in Lothar, it’s because I did my research, studied the Collatz Conjecture, and developed the game around the unsolved mathematical challenge to prove it wrong by entering an arbitrarily long positive integer and see where it leads. As yet, no-one has found a solution, but I welcome you to download my app and try.
So it drives me crazy to see adverts on Facebook which purport to give an interesting challenge, like what levers to pull to rescue your little guy, only to be delivered to some stupid knockoff game that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is an example of false advertising on Facebook. Although this is not the advert for the game listed in the article, the gist is similar to pulling some levers to rescue a bloke, which had nothing to do with the actual gameplay.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you want to play a game just like this. Pull the levers and try to come up with a solution where the little elf is saved and the goblin is toasted by laval. Especially when you’re told it’s really hard to solve. I so want to play that game. So I click on it, and then I get this!
This is the actual game the advert leads to. As can be seen, it’s just a glorified Farmville Knockoff with a few more bells and whistles with modern-gaming quests but mainly not enough resources for game play because you need to pay money for energy or feed grain to get anywhere.
Farmville!? Are they bleeping kidding me!? I don’t want to spend time planting crops, reaping products, hammering stones, just to do it over and over again with constant Grain shortages and energy shortages. This is not my idea of fun. This is total balderdash and a complete waste of my time. I wanted to rescue elves, not visit some stupid plantation called Taonga! I want a challenge that takes at most a half-hour, like Sudoku, or rescue elves by pulling levers, … or by guessing numbers in Lothar.
The problem with false advertising on Facebook has become so pervasive that there’s actually a petition to ban it. Unfortunately, most false advertising suits hang on financial loss, like you paid money thinking you’d get one thing but in the end you got another. In this case, with Freemium games monetization, the cost to the victim isn’t so much money as it is time wasted trying to play the game in the hopes of getting to the elf-rescue level only to finally realize it’ll never come. If the player does spend money to enhance game play, then there may be a suit, but by that time it’s likely the user already accepted the alternate game play and was just falling into the Freemium trap.
So the next time you see an advert on social media that claims to allow you to rescue the elf, or the princess, or the adventurer by pulling some levers to redirect lava, or water, or slime, just scroll past. Just scroll past. And play some Lothar because I wrote it and I’m available for hire.
This post is about the PandemicNovel Coronavirus discovered in 2019, commonly known as COVID-19. Unless you’ve been vacationing on Mars, you’re almost certainly aware of this latest pathogen and heard enough frightening tales about it to keep make even Michael Crichton blush.
The trouble is, what are the facts and what is misinformation from all corners of everyday life. What I want to do is instead do some research, share my sources, and give my best interpretation on what best practices should be based on all the information that’s been made available to date.
First of all, we know the Coronavirus is related to SARS and the Common Cold. It is not a novel Flu bug. For one thing, it hits similar respiratory beats that those the Cold and SARS do. Indeed, the official name given to the Novel Coronavirus by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses is SARS-CoV-2. The virus is also rather spikey, just like the Cold and SARS—Corona comes from the Latin word Coronam, meaning crown. For another, it’s the first pathogen to, within months of its discovery, to be entirely, genetically sequenced.
The virus itself is driven by a Positive-sense, Single-Stranded RNA, +ssRNA. The one of the first to decode a complete RNA sequence were the Chinese on 11 February, 2020, from a December 2019 sample. In that sample, the proteins encoded in the RNA are listed, where each letter in the sequence corresponds to a different protein. Since the Chinese sample, as of this writing 146 sequences have been decoded, though not all of them have the Protein analysis.
The beauty though is that, as we build a digital model of how the virus works, we will be able to much better adapt and derive pathways to block its effects or transmission, maybe even helping to develop a vaccine. That said, a vaccine at least a Phase 1 Clinical Trial to prove that it’s safe and non-toxic and what the right dose is among healthy individuals. Because it’s a vaccine, it’s unlikely to require Phase 2 and later trials in individuals with the condition as the vaccine is meant to be prophylactic. However, if the Phase 1 trial is small, a second trial is likely with just a larger healthy cohort. This whole process, however, will take months. With the sequences, it will be faster, but it’s not instantaneous.
From what we know about SARS, we expect the virus to mainly be transmitted from sneezing and coughing. Thus, it’s good to try to maintain a physical distance from others of about 2 meters (around 6 feet). Normally, beyond that distance, the respiratory droplets will desiccate and render the virus inert. But, some surfaces provide platforms which allow it to survive for hours or even days. Thus, it’s necessary to make sure you keep surface clean and disinfected.
Try to wash for at least 20 seconds, get between your fingers and rub the soap into your palms. Then rinse thoroughly and turn off the tap with your towel. Also, please wash your hands frequently—and don’t forget to moisturize to prevent them from cracking from the increased cleanliness. If a sink and fresh water isn’t available, try a 60%-alcohol sanitizer.
Consider washing after you step away from your computer or video game. Generally, after you touch anything that may have been touched by others. Also, avoid using your hands when possible. For instance, use your hips and elbows to open doors without a handle. And be mindful of where your mobile phone has been been.
The safest thing you can do is be mindful of your behavior. The western habit of shaking hands may finally become as outdated as spitting. Namaste, y’all!
Today in my friend C.J.’s Author Meetup, the wonderful PR person, Ami Neiberger-Miller came and spoke about what goes in to promote your brand. As usual, C.J. held a wonderful event and I was able to get some great advice on how to increase my public presence to help sell my books, my speaking engagement, screenplays, acting performances, and my many advocacy issues.
The first question you must ask yourself: What are your personal goals? Who are you writing for? Personally, I am not sure. I think I write for folks who want to escape reality, who want to get away from their dreary lives and see what could be. Who want to see what science teaches us and what the future will bring. Who like fast cars and fuel efficient cars and cars based on domestic energy that drive themselves and help protect the Environment. Some have said no woman would ever willingly read my material. I would be sad if that were true and I don’t believe it to be so. I love it when women, men, young, old, African, Indian, Chinese, and European all love my work. But I know I need to focus.
Once you’ve decided your audience, it’s time to set goals. You need benchmarks to see where you stand and see where you need to improve. You should make sure you’re not overextending yourself either. Take some time to think about what you think is feasible and work towards that. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Once you have your goals, make a plan. What do you plan to post, tweet, share, or whatnot on which days. Make a schedule. Perhaps Mondays are Lasagna days, Wednesdays are Beach days, and Saturdays are days for green plants. Check off your progress as the month progresses. C.J. has some great books, in fact, to help you keep yourself on schedule.
At the end of the month, track your progress. Use things like Facebook and Twitter Insights. What worked for you? What was a total failure. Who are your fans? Which posts/tweets got the most likes? Where is there room to improve? Where should you cut your losses? All these questions will help you plan the next month and where to focus.
And then you repeat.
All in all, a great event. Thank you C.J. and can’t wait to see what you have planned for our next event.
Someone mentioned some of the links were hard to see on my site because I was only changing the text color and not the link attributes. Now, this should be a lot easier to do because instead of coloring my text blocks manually, I will be coloring them with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Using the palet of CSS, I came up with a number of potential color schemes.
With this template, I can check all the themes before they’re deployed to see how they look, at least in terms of text and hyperlinks. I will add CSS for Spoilers and other special text like #CO2Fre and #CO2Fre1, but for now this is what I’m working with. And I’m available for hire.
I started this book right after finishing 18 Miles: The Epic Dreams of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather. Overall, I found the book a bit repetitive but it does bring up some interesting topics. I think the conclusion of we being born of both order and chaos is a nice ides given other books I’ve read that go into great detail on how unusual it is for biologic life to arise and how even more astronomical the odds are that a bacterium would take up residence in an archaea to make eukaryotes.
The survey of extrasolar planetary configurations was fun, however. I love the description of unusual systems like tight packing of planets, binary star systems, and life evolving on a Gas Giant moon. Although there are multiple ways a binary star system could have planets. For instance, one could have one star is a large (but not huge) one like our sun, and the other is a red dwarf, a bit larger than Jupiter, with the planet orbiting only the major star. But what Caleb Scharf seems to present is something more akin to two stars of relatively close mass orbiting one another tightly and a planet much farther out which orbits them both. In the later case, the idea that suns eclipse each other in regular cycles making the nature of a solar-centric universe much more amenable to budding intelligent life was a great and interesting flight of fancy that will help inform my better authorship of Science Fiction.
My main nit goes back to the first issue, though, with the mention of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the prologue. I thought the author did better introducing astronomical elements than he did biological elements and it was in the biological sections in which I was bogged down.
I am happy though to concede that with the modified Drake equation: where,
: the average rate of star formation in a galaxy
: the fraction of those stars that have planets
: the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
: the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life (like bacteria or archaea) at some point
: the fraction of planets with life (like bacteria or archaea) that develop complex life (like eucaryotes)
: the fraction of planets with complex life (like eucaryotes) that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
: the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
: the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
We know is about three percent more stars per year, and that is often greater than one, perhaps an average of four in modern surveys. is a little harder to determine as we generally define it as a goldilocks zone, but as the book points out, life with radically different chemistry could have a different universal solvent than water. Methane, CH₄, for instance. is a harder one but it seems this may indeed be quite common in any planet large enough to have plate tectonics and a hot core. The harder question is if is common or not. As we don’t exactly know how eucaryotes evolved or, more specifically, how such a symbiosis could evolve so stably without consuming it. Finally, , , and are all based on how intelligent life evolves and sustain itself, which, again, we have only one data point and can’t draw any conclusions from that at all. The main point though is we are getting closer to answering the first five terms at least and all are looking, even , a bit like we are not alone.
One of the most interesting aspects, however, were the Zodiacal Light display. I never knew that was possible and now I definitely have it added to my Bucket List. It was fascinating to learn about all the planetary and extrasolar debris that just sits along the ecliptic plane. And I enjoyed the author’s discussions of the origin of our solar system and how it compares to the many other stellar systems possible.
Talking about how Copernicus made our universe more knowable by virtue of it being ordinary and nothing special was a great way of presenting the conundrum between Anthropocentrism and ubiquity implied by Copernicus. I think that is the most important conclusion: that we are both special and ubiquitous. That our journey to intelligent life was unique, but that there are many ways of for the universe to know itself, and we are only one of those ways.
The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
I got in to cosplay a number of years ago. I was aware of it for quite a while but I really started to take an interest on a trip up to Connecticut to visit me mum. Back then I was in #CO2Fre3 or #CO2Fre2 and in those Nissan LEAFs, I had to stop a number of times to get enough electricity to get to my destination.
So, I stopped a Hotel in Baltimore to use the CHAdeMO charger and get some fuel when I passed some cosplayers going to a convention. I asked to get a picture and kept it as part of my trip log memories on Swarm, as I used to do back then.
Of course I was intrigued so when I heard about this new group, D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot, forming on Facebook, I joined right away, getting in on the ground floor. I remember that phone call very well as I was driving #CO2Fre home from work. Sarah Brice, an amazing cosplayer in her own right, was there with the other founders. That’s when we planned out what the group would be and how it would be organized. In those early years I was more of a lurker rather than a participant.
I started going to a local Doctor Who convention, ReGeneration Who, now defunct. Seeing all those Whovian cosplays, I decided it was time for me to start building my own cosplays. That’s where I met one of my very best friends in the entire world, Ilona Hull Berberich, who is a dead-ringer for Susan [Foreman].
I was finally ready to attend my first D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot event. I invided Ilona so I would have someone I met there and we made a great team, having a number of photos taken of us.
From that point I attended a number of D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot events, building my cosplay database up from a since Doctor Who companion to various other media franchises, getting some great photos and making some great friends.
One of the best parts of all from those events was the Munchie Squad. After an afternoon of posing and snapping picture, we’d all gather and have a friendly meal together. I so enjoyed chatting with my very dear friends Rachael S. Norberg, an amazing cosplayer, and Kevin K. Nguyen, an outstanding photographer, and so many others! It was the perfect capstone to a great event.
I was going to do a Tegan crossplay for the convention. Ilona was coming and would be in a Turlough crossplay. We were both very excited.
I had commissioned a Tegan crossplay months before the convention. I obtained all the COTS elements of the cosplay: blouse, pantyhose, pumps, wig, and purse. I just asked the commissioner for a skirt, a belt, a jacket, and the pill-box hat. I hoped it wouldn’t be too hard. I would have done it myself but I didn’t feel up to the measuring and sewing, especially by hand.
Days before the convention my commissioner said she couldn’t do it. She really, valiantly tried, but it was just beyond her. I hold no ill will and have not asked for my money back but the whole event soured me to cosplay. I prepared and prepped for this perhaps once in a lifetime photoshoot and to come up short. It still hurts, to this day.
Today there was a D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoots event in Leesburg, VA. I haven’t been to a photoshoot in years because I have no new cosplays to share but I really wanted to go to the Munchie Squad! I miss all my cosplay and photographer friends, like Rachael, and I go to Leesburg at least once every fortnight, so it would have been no big deal.
But I forgot.
I really miss cosplay. What will you see me as next?
problem has yet to be solved for any number not leading to 
in 
where,
: the average rate of star formation in a galaxy
: the fraction of those stars that have planets
: the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
: the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life (like bacteria or archaea) at some point
: the fraction of planets with life (like bacteria or archaea) that develop complex life (like eucaryotes)
: the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
: the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
is a harder one but it seems this may indeed be quite common in any planet large enough to have plate tectonics and a hot core. The harder question is if 
is common or not. As we don’t exactly know how eucaryotes evolved or, more specifically, how such a symbiosis could evolve so stably without consuming it. Finally, 
Follow my socials!