Glynis Mitchell

Someone’s made a working prototype.

Peter Jansen, the engineer responsible for the tricorder has even given you helpful instructions on how to make your own! He’s like it to be as accessible as possible to lay people and children:

“I’m also actively designing the next model, and keeping it inexpensive in the hopes that children and ‘big kids’ like me will have easy access to them sometime in the near future,” he says.

His tricorders are “portable sensor systems that can measure atmospheric measurements (ambient temperature, pressure and humidity), electromagnetic measurements (light or magnetic fields), and spatial measurements (distance and location). ”

I totally would have made this (maybe with Dad or Sister’s help…) as a kid. Awesome way to learn about a bunch of different branches of science!

Hey Time Travelers!

As I said in a previous post, it’s convention season! With the Women in Webseries panel at Emerald City Comic Con* now over, we’re moving on to our lobby table at Norwescon 35. We’re pretty excited: we’ll have some free swag as well as tshirts for sale if you want to proudly display yourself as the first kid on the block to support Causality.

Let’s look at that magnificent Genesee prequel again, shall we? The reason that our work is taking so long to come out is that this is what we want the show to look like; this or better. We want you to fall in love with the characters and art the way we have. We’ll be showing our two promos, the Season One trailer that we premiered at ECCC, and the prequel at our table, too. If you weren’t at the panel at ECCC, this will be your very first chance to see the trailer!

We’ll be taking cash for retail items as well as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover, we’ll be there all four days! We’re excited to meet you all, so please drop by to see myself, Montoure (whose genius set this all up), Ralph, and the Chef. We’re trading off shifts, so I can say that the one day I won’t be there (Friday!) is the day I get (most of) my awesome new tattoo from George at True Love Tattoo! Yes, I’ll show you if you ask. It’s Dune-related.

*Video for that is on it’s way…stay tuned!

We got a great kinda-review from on this woman’s blog around Xmas time. So cool! And there’s our friends from Standard Action! Love it. Thanks, Theresa! We’re blushing.

…but I’m looking forward to it. No, I’m not going this weekend.

Hilarious spoilers below.

Soooooo yesterday we released some pictures of our new Causality tshirts on Twitter*:

Awesome, no? They were made for us at a very reasonable rate by This That, a screenprinting service here in Seattle — about two blocks from my house! I highly recommend them: the shirts are a great, soft quality and the ink is cleanly rendered with no mistakes. We have Women’s (which turned out to be pretty slim cut but shapely; I’m wearing a medium in this picture) S-XL and Men’s average size S-XXL. There may also be zip hoodies on backorder…just sayin’. All are pre-shrunk.

Maybe we’re putting the cart before the horse, but since we already have stickers and buttons to just give away as swag and we wanted tees for ourselves, this seemed the way to go. We’re happy to start selling them now to our hardcore fans, but we originally planned for them to be on our table at Norwescon, where they will be cheaper than online. We actually got a double order from This That because they were super sweet and offered us a deal we couldn’t refuse. They also generously donated some pullover hoodies with the logo on the back in white and unstable mark on the front in red for us to auction off. They look just as good.

Anyway, Ralph tweeted the pictures yesterday with the hashtag #timetravelicious, which caught the attention of one nice gent who wrote what I have decided is our first piece of fan fiction. It’s lovely and abstract, and, strangely enough, makes me feel thematically the way our show makes me feel. You can catch up with him at @hashtagsongs or #hashtagsongs. Have a listen.

*Model is 35-29-42, jeans size 8-10. Mostly 10.

We’ve obviously been out of our own loop, what with personal and professional problems, not to mention making the damned show! But GUESS WHAT.

Never mind, I’m going to tell you.

We were nominated for Best Trailer for the Second Annual Indie Intertube Awards on MingleMediaTV.com!

Since we have two promo trailers, and Ralph is editing the for-reals-and-true trailer (cut from footage on our beautiful new camera, thanks to DP Brian Liepe) pretty much as we speak, the nod must be for either the Mason or the Holly promo. Those are right on the front of our blog, so please watch them if you haven’t, and check out last year’s Q&A! Compared to what we’re working on now, the promos are heartfelt but rough, yet make our nomination an even more astounding honor.

We could not be prouder. It’s no lie: it really is an honor to be nominated. Thank you to our friends at Indie Intertube: Destini, Shadhavar, who work so hard to promote independent television, and also Mingle Media TV.

The Second Annual Indie Intertube Awards are on Mingle Media this Sunday, March 11th. Check it out!

Convention season! It’s coming up fast, isn’t it?

I’m going to be on another Women in Webseries panel at Emerald City Comic Con. There are going to be some wonderful, smart women there to talk about the webseries format, some of whom you may recognize from our Geek Girl Con panel. Thanks to our sponsors from Moon Bullet Studios, producers of The Collectables (which is having it’s world premiere at ECCC!), for setting that up!

And we will have a Causality table at Norwescon 35, with swag, promotional video, info about cast and crew, and some friendly faces from the whole Causality family. We want to meet you, so come on down! We’ll be on the west side of the corridor, just down from Artist’s Alley.

And if you forget…don’t worry, I’ll remind you again. I’m cool like that.

It’s hard when you’re writing a role for yourself to act in not to be selfish. You have to not only think about the technical aspects of writing, which is challenging enough, you have to write the character holistically, in service of the whole story and as a fully-realized human being. In Causality, I am being selfish: I wasn’t getting cast — there are never enough roles for women to go around — so I wrote a character for me! I have a lot of opportunities for interesting moments, both sad and funny, in my show. Shooting it has been some of (if not the) toughest acting, physically and emotionally, of my life. But I love Holly Wells. I really do.

But it keeps me up at night that I might have been either too selfish (or not selfish enough, which is another post) when I wrote her. What if she’s just too…precious? Or heroically goes through too much, or people love her too much? In other words, what if she just a flat character, with no failings and no flaws? Or just too much like me? There’s a name for that: Mary Sue, and it has all kinds of permutations from extra sweet and perfect to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl sort to an evil (but irresistiblel!). It comes from fan fiction originally, but can be applied to other kinds of fiction and RPG characters. (I’m looking in your direction, Bella Swan.)

I’m lucky that I have other people to work with to help me craft her and the other characters. Of course they tell me that she’s a well-rounded person, and under it all I know she is. But it was still fun to take this test to see where Holly falls.

Ready? Go!

So, what’s Holly’s score, in the categories of “Original Fiction Characters” with “De-Suifiers” added? -8.

By the measures of a fun little internet quiz, Holly Wells is probably not a Mary Sue. What a relief!

I should do the other characters now…

Our music is great. And it’s all original. It helps our story make an impact in a way that we never imagined possible. And we owe it all to Jesse Plack.

We’ve talked about our fantastic composer Jesse Plack (or maybe you’ve heard him on Podcast to the Past Classic!). You’ve heard his trippy electronic themes in our promotional shorts. You’re going to hear even more of his instrumental work in Causality soon, but he’s going on tour this month and just released a new album! This guy is crazy busy and crazy talented, and we’d love it if you gave him just a little direct appreciation.

Jesse is selling his new album, Nightsong, on BandCamp for just five dollars. You can give him more, of course, but that’s a great deal for 11 tracks of some of the finest music ever created by the biggest Star Trek geek in town.

Download Nightsong here. You won’t regret it.

Ralph and I will be chatting about our usual that that and the other science fiction news and pop culture ephemera (and scifi dirty talk). We’ll also be joined by Todd Downing of Seattle webseries The Collectables! So if there’s anything you want to hear us cuss about, leave it in the comments or email me at gmitchell@watchcausality.com. In the meantime, catch up with last week’s episode on Cazador Radio.