The Thousand Day Farewell

What importance the Love Life School Idol Festival mobile game plays in its multimedia franchise, among live concerts and CDs and the anime series and movies and all the ancillary merchandising, I don't know. That it has kept being updated with new content and features probably means it's a mark in a corporate plus column. One feature added a while ago, though, did focus my mind on the time I've spent playing it since I saw the movie that closed out the first anime storyline and went on to a source of additional content. That the game now tracks the time you've spent playing it and gives you a special bonus every hundred days is something, but the thought of getting to a thousand days playing did get to me and have some consequences at last.
( It's been a while )

The Winds of Mars

When the InSight probe landed on Mars, I said I ought to try and keep better track of what's happening with it than I've seemed to do for previous missions, and I have been looking at the official NASA site every so often. The news the probe's seismometer, still sitting on its upper deck before a robot arm lowers it to the Martian surface, had recorded vibrations converted into "the sound of the Martian wind" did spread beyond there, and it got me thinking back to impressions I'd seen a book by Arthur C. Clarke from the 1960s proposing a first Mars lander might not be able to send pictures back from the surface, but could well have a microphone attached. I picked my copy of his The Promise of Space off my bookshelf, but couldn't find that there. After a moment's wondering just where those impressions had come from then, I thought of something else all of a sudden and hurried downstairs to find a copy of Man and Space from the Life Science Library, which Clarke had written the text sections for just before starting to work with Stanley Kubrick on "the proverbial 'really good' science fiction movie." There, I found the description of the first microphone on Mars, all the way up to the possibility of it capturing "a sound that grows louder and louder, closer and closer," building to "clangings and bumpings and rattlings, all ending suddenly in a grinding crunch and the abrupt cessation of the radio signal." Certainly, I'm not expecting that in a further update from InSight, but Clarke could have been forgiven his optimism for having written that before Mariner 4 reached Mars.