Artemis II: She’s Not Like Other Missions

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!

It’s been a couple weeks since Artemis II went to space, looped around the Moon, and returned safely to Earth.  One thing really surprised me during this mission: I didn’t hear many people whining about the cost.  Whenever important NASA stuff is in the news, I always hear a ton of people whining about the cost.  But this time, not so much!  Which leaves me wondering: why was Artemis II different?

The most obvious explanation is that while Artemis II was up in space, there was this other major news story happening down here on the ground.  Now this is not a political blog, and I don’t want to dwell on politics too long, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: the war.  Just before Artemis II launched, the U.S. started a war with Iran.  That war is wildly unpopular and also extravagantly expensive.  When we keep hearing about the government spending one or two billion dollars per day on the war, NASA’s budget of $24 billion per year doesn’t sound so bad.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason.  Space launches used to be rare and extraordinary events, but in the last few years, they’ve been normalized.  With private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin in the game, launches happen all the time now.  There were something like 300 launches worldwide last year!  Artemis II was still something new and different and very, very special; at the same time, though, it was just another rocket launch.  If we’re going to have 300 launches per year, it doesn’t seem outlandish for one of them to be a Moon mission.

Do you think I’m right about this?  Was your experience similar to mine, or did you hear more grumbling and griping about Artemis II’s price tag than I did?  Let me know in the comments below.

I will acknowledge that I did hear one complaint.  It was some political pundit who said something like: “NASA just sent billions of taxpayer dollars to the Moon!”  There’s plenty I could say in response to that, but that statement conjured such an amusing mental image in my head.  So I’m just going to leave you with this:

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

It wasn’t just me who felt like Artemis II was different.  According to this article from Forbes, the vast majority of Americans support the Artemis program and followed the Artemis II mission closely.

If you want to know more about NASA’s budget, check out this article from the Planetary Society.  It’s a great resource, not only for understanding NASA’s budget in particular, but for understanding the U.S. federal budgeting process as a whole.

And if you’re up for some more academic literature, here’s a research paper from the journal Space Policy examining how the federal government sometimes does (and sometimes does not) listen to public opinion regarding space exploration.

IWSG: Not Because It Is Easy, But Because It Is Hard

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 12 Comments

Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Melissa Maygrove, Cathrina Constantine, Kate Larkinsdale, and Rebecca Douglass.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Hello, friends!

Later today, if all goes according to plan, NASA’s Artemis II Mission will launch from Kennedy Space Center, carrying four astronauts on a ten-day voyage around the Moon and back again.  Artemis II will not land on the Moon, but this will still be the farthest any human has traveled away from Earth since the 1970’s.  I bring this up for today’s IWSG post because the space program has always been my favorite metaphor for writing.

First off, we writers are always falling behind schedule, always scrambling to keep up with our deadlines, and frequently missing our deadlines despite our best efforts—much like the space program!  Artemis II, for example, was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but there were set-backs.  Unforeseen difficulties.  Stuff happened and got in the way.  It honestly doesn’t take much.  I remember a rocket launch being postponed due to something as simple as a cloud being in just the wrong place at just the wrong time.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve had plenty of writing days ruined by problems almost as simple.

Another thing we writers have in common with the space program: we can’t just do the same thing over and over again.  Every space mission has different objectives, faces exceptional challenges, and requires its own unique innovations in order to succeed.  The same can be said for each new story we writers write.  Sure, there are tried-and-true formulas we can turn to for guidance.  There may be certain methods and techniques that have been helpful before and may be helpful again.  But at some point along the way, we’re going to have to do something we’ve never done before.  That’s the scariest part of the journey.  Simultaneously, that’s the part that make the journey worth taking.

And lastly, both writers and the space program have to deal with naysayers and critics: people who don’t get it, people who don’t see the point.  Why waste so much time, effort, and money reaching for the stars when there are more pragmatic things we could be doing here on the ground?  I don’t think these people understand the difference between the cost of a thing and its value.  The space program is very expensive—I am not denying that—but its value to our species is far, far greater.  Similarly, I don’t believe the value of writing can be measured with money—not my writing, and not yours.

So, my fellow writers: keep writing, keep dreaming, keep reaching for the stars.  It won’t be easy.  Writing is never easy.  But as President Kennedy would remind us: we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Aliens Don’t Exist

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!

Today, I’d like to tell you a little about my 6th grade science teacher.  Oh, I remember him well!  Just not for the best of reasons.  For the purposes of this blog post, let’s call him Mr. M.

So one day, Mr. M. was teaching us about the formation of the Solar System, about how the planets of our Solar System were created from a cloud of dust and gas swirling round and round the Sun.  During this lesson, Mr. M. told us that our Solar System is unique.  He told us that science had not yet discovered any other planets orbiting any other stars, and he hazarded to guess that science never would.  He said that maybe there are no other planets out there for science to find.

Imagine that!  In the whole big, wide universe, there are only nine planets (Pluto was still considered a planet at the time).  And furthermore, the only nine planets in the entire universe all happen to be orbiting the same star!  That sounds pretty silly today, with over 6100 confirmed exoplanet discoveries now in the books.  It was also a silly thing to say at the time.  This would have been in 1996.  The first two exoplanets were discovered in 1992, orbiting a pulsar.  A third exoplanet was discovered in 1994, orbiting that same pulsar.  And then 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was discovered in October of 1995.

So not only would science prove Mr. M. wrong—it already had.

I think about Mr. M. whenever someone tells me we’ll never discover alien life.  I think about Mr. M. whenever someone tells me that maybe there’s no alien life out there for us to find.

Frankly, I think about Mr. M. every time someone claims science will never do this or never explain that.  I may not have learned much in my 6th grade science class, but that class did help me learn one thing: there’s a long history of science proving people like Mr. M. wrong.

P.S.: Mr. M. also told us the Internet was just a fad and everyone would forget about it in a few years.  Again, this was in 1996.

The art in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the “like” button on some of my work helps me a lot (and if you do decide to buy something, that obviously helps me even more!).  Thank you!

IWSG: Why Aren’t You Doing Something Useful with Your Life?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 8 Comments

Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by PJ Colando, Ronel Janse von Vuuren, and Natalie Aguirre.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Hello, friends!

I’m not a scientist, I’m not an engineer, and I don’t work for NASA.  I’m just some guy on the Internet who loves space.  In my last few IWSG posts, I talked about how I sometimes worry that I’m not sciency enough to call myself a science communicator.  Today, I want to talk about the flip-side of that particular insecurity.

Every once in a while, somebody I know in real life will discover my blog.  They’ll see my spacey art, they’ll read my spacey writing, they’ll recognize my obsession with all things outer space, and they’ll compliment me for being so knowledgable about this topic.  Which then leads to an inevitable question: “But why haven’t you pursued a career in science?”

That question stings.  If you don’t understand why it stings, let me translate that question into something that I suspect every writer, every artist, every dancer, every actor, every musician—every creative person of every sort—has had to contend with at some point: “Your art/writing/whatever is good, but why aren’t you doing something more useful with your life?”

When I’m asked why I haven’t pursued a scientific career, typically, I just tell people I’m bad at math.  It’s an easy excuse.  However, if I really wanted a scientific career, if I really felt that that was my calling in life, I could learn how to do math.  Math isn’t that hard.  No, the real reason I’m a writer and an artist, rather than a scientist, is because the world needs beauty.  The world always needs beauty, and so in every generation, some number of people will be called upon by the Muse to make beautiful things.

I am one of the people the Muse has called upon (or at least I strongly believe this about myself).  I will trust others to do the math and the science and the engineering required to understand nature and explore the cosmos.  Meanwhile, I’m going to do my best to make good art and do good writing—the kind of art and writing that celebrates space and science and the future of humanity out there among the stars—because I want people to see those things as I see them.  I want people to see how beautiful it all is.

Art?  Writing?  Creative expression in general?  These things are useful.  More than that, these things are needed.  Don’t listen to anyone who questions that.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Today’s blog post was inspired by We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around And Make Something, by Amie McNee.  If you’re feeling insecure about your writing (or any other form of creative expression), this book might be the pep talk you need.  Click here to see the book’s listing on Amazon.

IWSG: An Insecure Science Communicator

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 21 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and cohosted this month by J Lenni Dorner, Victoria Marie Lees, and Sandra Cox.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, IWSG asks members a question.  The question is optional.  I usually skip it, but this month’s question stirred up some deep feelings and some deep insecurities, so I thought I’d better address that.  The question is:

Many writers have written about the experience of rereading their work years later.  Have you reread any of your early works?  What was that experience like for you?

I’ve mentioned before in these IWSG posts that I feel insecure about my role as a science communicator, given that I don’t have any formal scientific training or experience.  So it’s a little jarring, when I’m looking for information about a specific space/science topic, to see my own blog posts pop up in search results.  I sometimes forget, when I’m looking for information about a specific topic, that I’ve already covered that topic before.

Reading those old blog posts of mine—those blog posts I forgot I wrote—is not fun.  They’re pretty cringy.  The art (in my judgment) is bad, the writing is worse, and the jokes aren’t funny.  However, setting aside these issues of style, the substance of my old blog posts is surprisingly decent.  The important thing is this: I came looking for information about a specific space/science topic.  Sometimes it’s a super niche topic that nobody on the Internet would think to write about (except me, apparently).  And whatever information current me is looking for, past me provided it.  Past me also did a good job citing his sources, usually, so if I want to learn more, I can learn more.

I still feel insecure about my place as a science blogger on the Internet.  My writing could be better.  My art could be better, too, and my jokes need work.  But after rereading some of my old blog posts, I can feel reassured about this: I stick to the facts and communicate information well.  I’m at least doing that part of the job right.

Betelgeuse and Siwarha

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love space, but I also love language and words and names, and I especially love it when people put thought and care into the naming of things.  Betelgeuse is a super famous supergiant star in the constellation Orion.  For as long as I can remember, it was generally assumed that Betelgeuse was a loner.  A single star, all by herself, with no binary companion.  But now it seems that Betelgeuse does have a very small, very faint companion star, which astronomers have (very aptly) named Siwarha.

Back in 2019/2020, astronomers noticed Betelgeuse start to flicker and dim.  There was a rapid 30% decrease in Betelgeuse’s brightness, leading to rampant speculation that Betelgeuse was about to go up in a supernova explosion.  That would have been an amazing sight for all of us here on Earth!  But then, nothing happened, and Betelgeuse’s brightness eventually went back to normal.

The Great Dimming of Betelgeuse, as this event is now called, was caused by something less spectacular than a supernova (less spectacular, but still interesting—check out the “want to learn more?” section below if you want to learn more).  Still, during the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse got a lot more attention from astronomers than usual, and astronomers started noticing patterns in her behavior—including a pattern that (based on reexamining historical records) seemed to repeat every 2100 days.

One possible explanation: maybe Betelgeuse has a companion star with an orbital period of 2100 days.  This hypothetical companion star was initially nicknamed “Betelbuddy.”  But then, in December of 2024, astronomers at the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii were able to directly image “Betelbuddy” in mid-orbit.  At that point, Betelgeuse’s companion stopped being hypothetical, and somebody needed to give it a more official-sounding name.

Betelgeuse is an Arabic name (as most traditional star names are), and it means something like “the hand of the giant.”  The giant in question is, of course, Orion; however, the Arabic name for Orion is al Jawza, which is a female name from Arabian legend.  Therefore, since this newly discovered star circles round and round the hand of a lady giant, the Gemini North team proposed naming it “Siwarha,” meaning “her bracelet.”

How perfect is that?

Siwarha would have been hidden behind Betelguese during the Great Dimming, so it was not visible to Earth-based astronomers at that time, no matter how hard they looked for it.  Even after Siwarha emerged from behind Betelgeuse, spotting it stretched the limits of one of the very best telescopes in the world.  After crossing in front of Betelgeuse, Siwarha should appear again (on the opposite side of Betelgeuse) in late 2027, at which point astronomers should be able to learn much, much more about it.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s a brief article published by NASA announcing the discovery of Siwarha.

And here’s a link to the actual research paper explaining how the Gemini North team detected Betelgeuse’s companion star.  The proposal to name it “Siwarha” is near the end of the paper.

As for the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse, it was caused by Betelgeuse burping a big, giant cloud of dust up into space, which partially obscured our view.  Click here to learn more about that.

P.S.: The art in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the “like” button on some of my work helps me a lot (and if you do decide to buy something, that obviously helps me even more!).  Thank you!

IWSG: Answering My Inner Critic

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Shannon Lawrence, Olga Godim, Jean Davis, and Jacqui Murray.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, IWSG asks members a question.  Answering the monthly question is not required.  It’s totally optional, which is good news for me, because there’s a different question plaguing my thoughts today.  A different question that keeps getting in the way of writing.  It’s a question that my inner critic keeps asking in snide, Smeagol-like whispers:

You’re no scientist.  You don’t work for NASA.  What gives you the right to blog about space exploration?

And I admit, my inner critic has a point.  I’m a huge fan of space exploration, and I probably do know more about space than the average person.  But still, I’m a long way away from being a true expert.  Plenty of others can speak with greater authority about space than I can.  Some of my readers know more about space than I do.

However, when my inner critic asks these sort of questions—questions like “What right do you have to blog about space?”—I think my inner critic misses the whole point of my blog.  I love space.  I’ve committed myself to learning as much as I can about space, and I believe that learning is a three step process:

  • Passive learning, which is the passive consumption of information from books, online lectures, etc.
  • Active learning, which means (among other things) reexplaining the information you’ve learned in your own words.
  • Receiving feedback, which involves people correcting your mistakes, asking interesting questions, suggesting topics for future research, etc.

From time to time, my inner critic reminds me that I’m not an astrobiologist, not a planetary scientist, not an aerospace engineer, and shames me into not writing.  But that doesn’t just shut down writing.  It shuts down my whole learning process.  If I don’t do my blogging, how will I learn?

Is that answer enough to silence my inner critic?  Actually, it is.  Inner critics are cowards.  They don’t know what to do when you talk back to them, they don’t know what to say when you stand up for yourself.  Much of what I said in today’s post is specific to my own writing and my own issues with my own inner critic.  But if your inner critic has been asking snide questions and shaming you into not writing, then I hope you’ll start talking back like I did.  It really works.

Mission Statement

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 1 Comment

Hello, friends!

Today is New Year’s Day, so I thought today would be a great day to restate the mission statement of this blog—except it seems I never stated the mission of this blog in the first place.  I could’ve sworn that I had.  Maybe that’s because my mission seems self-evident.  I love space.  I love learning about space, and I love sharing what I learn with others.

The learning part is really important to me.  My love of space doesn’t mean just looking up at the stars and thinking, “Ooooh, pretty!”  I don’t enjoy wonder for wonder’s sake.  My love for space means looking up at the stars, wondering what’s up there, wondering who’s out there, and then putting in the time and effort to find answers (to the best of my ability as someone who’s bad at math and doesn’t have any professional scientific training).

Learning is hard.  Finding good sources of information can be tricky, and even when you do find trustworthy sources, science is still a challenging subject.  Scientists aren’t always the most engaging or entertaining communicators.  But if learning this stuff were easy, I don’t think it would be fun.  The greater the challenge, the greater the reward when you finally do understand a difficult and complicated concept.

So on this blog, I want to tell you about all the cool stuff I learn about space.  I also want to talk about the process I go through to learn this stuff, because the research process is part of the fun.  If you don’t know much about space, I hope to inspire you to love space like I do.  And if you already love space, then I hope to inspire you to love space even more!

But there will be some of you who don’t really care about space and never will.  I want you to know that that’s okay.  We can still be friends.  Not everybody has to love the same things.  I have an I.R.L. friend who’s not very interested in space, no matter how much I talk about it, but she paid me one of the very best compliments I’ve ever received: “You make me want to go learn stuff.”

That’s the real mission of this blog: to spread the love of learning.  I want to set a good example by picking a topic that fascinates me (space, obviously!) and learning everything I can about it.  For you, maybe it’s sports trivia, or Greek antiquities, or horses, or the history of music in video games, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright… it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that learning is one of the greatest joys in life.  I love learning, and I hope you do, too.

Thanks for reading, friends!  Talk to you soon!

P.S.: If you like my art, click here to visit my art store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t want to buy anything, just visiting and maybe clicking the “like” buttons on my art will help me a lot (and if you do want to buy something, that would help me a lot, too!).

IWSG: Is Writing by Hand Better?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 19 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Tara Tyler, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Pat Garcia, Liza, and Natalie Aguirre.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

As you know, I love space, and I love science.  It may surprise you to learn, though, that I do not love technology.  I’ve never felt comfortable sitting in front of a computer, especially when I’m trying to do something creative.  I do all of my writing by hand, with pen and paper, then mindlessly transcribe whatever I’ve written into the computer when I’m done.  Some people call me old-school for that, or they say I’m a Luddite, or they tell me to get with the times and stop wasting paper.

But recently, I saw a popular science video on YouTube that said writing by hand increases connectivity in the brain, promotes creativity, and improves your overall neurological health.  The YouTuber in this video said all writers should do basically what I do: limit your time on the computer and do as much writing by hand as possible.  I was excited to share that video with you today.  I was excited to write a whole blog post based on that video, saying: “See?  My way of writing is better than yours!”

However, I don’t share things on the Internet without fact checking them first.  So I read the research paper that that YouTube video was referencing (the paper in the links below), and I found that it did not say what that YouTuber said it says.  What it says is that writing by hand activates different parts of the brain than typing on a keyboard or touchscreen.  It also says that the brain is more active when you’re writing by hand compared to using a keyboard or touchscreen.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean writing by hand is better.

In fact, I think the correct interpretation of that research paper is that we all should do a little of both.  According to the paper, writing by hand slows down the writing process, which promotes problem solving and “fosters deeper thought and creativity.”  So if you’re someone who writes exclusively on the computer, writing by hand might help you problem solve your way out of writer’s block.  Meanwhile, writing on a computer or tablet “may favour brainstorming and fast generation of ideas […].”

Personally, I’m going to keep doing most of my writing by hand, because that’s what I’m used to and it’s what I enjoy most.  However, as of right now, I’m at the very beginning of a brand new writing project (think Harry Potter, but on the Moon, with magical spaceships and magical extraterrestrials).  I have a lot of stuff I need to figure out for this new project.  As someone who does all his writing by hand, maybe a few brainstorming sessions on the computer would do me some good right now.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s a link to the paper I read.  It’s titled “The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle?”  I didn’t cover everything that that paper says in this blog post, so it is worth your while to check it out.

If you’re not up for reading a neuroscience paper, here’s a popular science article that (in my judgment) covers a lot of the same material well.

As for the original YouTube video that inspired this post, I debated whether or not I should include a link, and ended up deciding not to.  That video is spreading misinformation, and I don’t want it getting any more views than it already got.

3I/ATLAS: But What If It Were Aliens?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!

Right now, there’s an interstellar object passing through our Solar System.  Astronomers have named this object 3I/ATLAS, and in my last post I explained how 3I/ATLAS is just a comet and NOT an alien spacecraft.  But let’s pretend for a moment that an alien spaceship were traveling through the Solar System, perhaps on some sort of survey mission.  What would the aliens see when they turn their scientific instruments toward Earth?  How much would they learn about us and our planet?

Much depends on how technologically advanced we imagine these aliens to be, of course, but we humans have been observing Earth from space for decades now.  We know some things are pretty obvious about our planet, even when viewed from a great distance away.  For a start, the aliens would notice that Earth has an abnormally large moon.  They’d also notice that Earth has oceans.  The glint of sunlight reflecting off water would give that away.  And then there’s oxygen.  The spectrographic fingerprints of oxygen are all over Earth’s atmosphere.

Do these aliens breathe oxygen like we do?  Maybe, maybe not.  Either way, Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere would make the aliens stop and think, “Huh, that’s weird.”  Most planets don’t have atmospheres like that.  Even weirder, though, the aliens would also detect traces of methane in our atmosphere.  Methane is an easily oxidized chemical, so you’d think all that oxygen would oxidize any atmospheric methane out of existence pretty quick.  Something must keep replenishing the methane as quickly as oxygen destroys it.  Something alive, perhaps?  It’s hard to guess if the aliens would reach that conclusion yet.

As the aliens draw nearer, they’d soon notice this odd green stuff covering much of Earth’s landmasses.  To say that in a more technobabbly way, the extraterrestrials would detect a chemical substance with a strong reflection spectrum in green light (and an even stronger reflection spectrum in infrared).  You and I know what all that green stuff is, but would the aliens figure it out?  Do they have plants back home?  Do their plants contain chlorophyll and perform photosynthesis like ours do?  Hard to say, but Earth’s green stuff would at least make the aliens think, “Huh, that’s also weird.”

A few more things our hypothetical aliens would notice: a substantial ozone layer, continents shaped by recent (or possibly ongoing) tectonic activity, a complex hydrological cycle with water existing as a solid, a liquid, and a gas… oh, and radio emissions.  Lots and lots of narrow-band, amplitude modulated radio emissions, which cannot possibly be a natural phenomenon.

The idea that aliens many lightyears away are watching I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, or The Dick Van Dyke Show is probably false.  As radio/television broadcasts propagate through space, those signals grow weaker and eventually blend into the background radiation.  But for the purposes of this blog post, we’re imagining that an alien spaceship is right here in the Solar System with us.  They’re close enough to pick up our broadcasts.  At that point, the aliens wouldn’t just think, “Huh, weird.”  They’d be forced to conclude not only that life exists on Earth but that intelligent life exists on Earth (unless they start watching our news or listening to our talk radio; if they do that, they might second guess the “intelligent” part).

How much more could the aliens learn about us?  Again, it depends on how technologically advanced these aliens are.  Consider the stuff I listed in this blog post to be the bare minimum of what they’d know.

WHAT TO LEARN MORE?

This blog post is based off several research papers, which are listed below.  Detecting life on a planet—even a planet teeming with life, like Earth—is more of a challenge than you might realize.  If that’s a topic you want to learn more about, please check out some of the papers below, especially the first one (the one written by Carl Sagan).

The art in today’s post is my own original work.  I didn’t take it from the Internet or ask an A.I. to generate it.  If you like my art, please consider visiting my store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me!) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!