If the images from the Tahoe Donner firewatch camera are reliable, we can virtually prove that Kiely Rodni’s CR-V did not enter Prosser Reservoir on the night of the Prosser party. This is assuming that Kiely was there to begin with – but that is another matter altogether. So let’s go through the steps I took to get to this conclusion.
Eyes in the rock that spy Eyes in the pine-tree dark
Euripides, The Bacchae
Not long after Kiely Rodni’s CR-V was discovered in Prosser Reservoir by Doug Bishop, Nick Rinn, and the rest of the AWP team, many people began to wonder if the car was placed there after the official searches had concluded. There were at least three agencies, including CHP and the FBI, who searched the reservoir up and down, multiple times. They used all the right tools, and Kiely’s car was discovered in an area which wasn’t that deep. If the car was there, it would have been found. The only sensible conclusion we can make is that Kiely’s car was not in Prosser Reservoir until after August the 17th.
Steve Fischer, a P.I., shot aerial drone footage on Saturday, August 20th. The car may be visible in this footage. If so, this means that the car was probably put into Prosser Reservoir between the 17th and the 20th:
I looked through footage I shot Saturday afternoon at Prosser. Footage I had not uploaded yet. To think i was just feet from her. Thankfully AWP would find her 18 hours later #kielyrodnipic.twitter.com/aC8zNfQYpA
— SF INVESTIGATES • STEVE FISCHER (@SF_investigates) August 25, 2022
Last year, I had an idea about the images from the Alder Hill firewatch camera. I suspected that the nighttime frames did not correctly align with the daytime frames. This has serious implications, because so many people dropped this case due to the Alder Hill images. The conclusion among many commentators was that Alder Hill proved that Kiely’s car entered the reservoir at 00:33 on August 6th. And they put the story to bed.
If this imagery was improperly interpreted, this should be rectified as soon as possible. I did notice a small alignment issue between day and night images, and I did some preliminary work on trying to align them. What I was seeing showed that the object that seemed like Kiely’s car was someone else’s car. I did show this to a few people privately, and they all agreed. However, I noticed a mistake, and I decided to publish it later, after I had fixed the issues. But, I don’t think it’s relevant anymore, because the Tahoe Donner images seem to be much more reliable, as I will show.
Some quick background: some months ago, I had downloaded a bunch of frames from the Tahoe Donner firewatch camera. I did not get the memo about this camera before then. I then proceeded to completely forget about them until last week.
In any case, I decided to check these images, and I overlaid a nighttime frame over a daytime frame. There is a little bit of frame float with these Axis cameras, probably due to the camera mounting mechanism. But the alignment seems pretty good otherwise.
There is one problem: these Axis cameras are not properly set up. When the light levels get too low, the camera has to switch from colour to b&w. This is by design, and if you look through the frames, which are separated by two seconds each, you can pinpoint the exact moment when this switch occurs. The problem is that when light levels get too low, there is not enough contrast in the scene, and the camera doesn’t know what to focus on. So it defaults to closest focus instead of infinity.
This AF problem is very annoying because it makes it difficult to precisely align any two frames. Not to mention the fact that light sources become blobs instead of points. That matters, because if a light source is too faint to form a blob, it won’t be picked up by the camera’s sensor. Despite all this, I have managed to find something meaningful.
I won’t focus on the Alder Hill camera too much. I wrote a blog post about that already. But just for context, here is, apparently, the last few seconds of light from Kiely’s CR-V in Prosser Reservoir, according to Alder Hill:
The last moments of Kiely’s car (supposedly), overlaid with an image from earlier that day
(Although not directly relevant to this post, note that a car’s electrics can last for much longer than a couple of minutes submerged).
It was this series of images which led to so many people declaring Kiely’s case as ‘closed’. Again: in my opinion, and the opinion of many others, Kiely’s car was not in the reservoir until after August 17th, when the searches stopped. This is very much a leap of faith, because I personally do not believe that the Alder Hill frames are manipulated. I just think that there is an alignment issue. Perhaps it’s partly due to the wind; or perhaps that unit has a lens which changes perspective between near focus and infinity focus.
Let’s now look at a daytime frame from the Tahoe Donner camera. Like many cameras in this network, it is an Axis model Q6075-E. Here is the view of Prosser Reservoir at 17:00:
Here is the same view, but at night, supposedly just as Kiely’s car is sinking to the bottom of the reservoir:
How good is the alignment between these two frames, over seven hours apart? Let’s overlay them and see:
These would be much easier to align if the camera had retained infinity focus. Anyway, as far as I can tell, the alignment is very close. Good enough to try and draw a conclusion? That is up to you to decide. So now we will put a crosshair over the defocused light in the night frame, which is supposedly Kiely’s car. We will be as precise as we can, given the vague nature of defocused highlights:
Now, we combine the crosshair frame and the daytime frame:
Now we remove the nighttime frame, and put a little dot in the centre of the crosshair, and overlay that onto the daytime frame:
Now, a crop from the region we might call the ‘little peninsula’, the last point that Kiely’s car supposedly touched land:
If we sharpen and saturate the image, as best we can, it’s evident that the green dot sits on land, not water:
To the best of my knowledge, and to the best of my visual perception, that green dot, which is the centre of the light blob, which was supposedly the point at which Kiely’s car sank, appears right at the tip of the little peninsula. Perhaps due to alignment issues, it’s a little bit further back from the water. But it appears to be on land, not on water.
If all of this is accurate, and correctly done, then we can conclude that we have virtual proof that Kiely’s car did not enter Prosser Reservoir on the night of the Prosser party. And it follows that Kiely’s car must have been dumped into the reservoir after police searches ended, but before AWP arrived. This evidence matches very well with the fact that the CHP, FBI and local police did not find any car in Prosser. If it was there, they would have found it. The only question is why the Alder Hill images do not tell quite the same story.
“I’ve got the front desk now. He was never here.”
The questions that remain: how did Kiely die, when did she die, where did she die, and where was her body kept? We have no evidence that she was at the Prosser party. It is further concerning that we have no evidence that Kiely was alive before the morning of Friday the 5th.
Bayes’s Theorem (BT) is a statistical equation that helps determine the probability of a hypothesis or explanation. You can apply BT to almost anything: history, science, medicine, law, criminology, cryptology, etc.
If you saw a UFO, what are the chances that it was an alien spacecraft? What are the chances that you actually have breast cancer, based on the data from a mammogram (albeit a now obsolete test)? What are the chances that a criminal suspect committed the crime? What are the chances that a police detective will order an espresso at the local café?
Like anything in statistics, the output can only be as good as the input. Here, I want to do a quick and simple Bayesian analysis to determine whether or not Kiely Rodni died from the result of foul play.
Bayes’s Theorem (BT) includes two main variables, and two supplementary variables, all between 0.00 and 1.00. 0.00 is 0% and 1.00 is 100%. The easiest variable to understand is prior probability. That is, in general, how likely is is that your hypothesis is true, based on previous experience? In the case of females found dead in submerged vehicles, we do have fairly good prior probability: 66%, properly written as 0.66. SAR diver, Nick Rinn, explains it:
Nick Rinn: “about 2/3 of those (women found dead in submerged cars) end up being homicide or foul play.”
Before I go any further, here is a basic illustration of Bayes’s Theorem – it’s actually not difficult to understand:
Adapted from Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Dr. Richard Carrier
And here is the formal way to write it:
And here is the basic form, just in case you don’t notice it in the above versions:
It’s basically asking this question: out of all possible outcomes, how true can your hypothesis be, given the evidence you have for it?
Just as a very simplified example, let’s say that there is a room filled with 100 computers. I own five of these computers, and therefore, other people own 95 of those computers. So, if you randomly selected one computer, what are the chances that it’s mine? You already know the answer, which is 5%: 5/(5+95) = 5/100 = 0.05, or 5%.
So, you have a 5% chance of randomly choosing a computer in that room that belongs to me. To be honest, that was an overly simplified application of BT. But it showed, hopefully clearly, the function of the equation, and why A appears both above and below the line.
Bayes’s Theorem works with two main variables: the chances of your hypothesis (or explanation) being true, and the chances of it not being true, both based on background information. A shorter way to put it: your explanation versus the total of all other explanations. Logically, they both must add up to 100%, or 1.00.
Each main variable has a supplementary variable. The function of the supplementary variable is to modify to main one. Each main variable has a maximum value, and this can be reduced depending on the strength of the evidence for it.
In our case, based purely on background information, there’s a 66% chance that Kiely died by means of foul play. That’s prior probability. But wait a minute! We have evidence specific to Kiely’s case. That specific evidence cannot increase the prior probability, but it can reduce it. This specific evidence can be given a value between 0.00 and 1.00. So, the figure of 66%, or 0.66, can be as low as zero if none of the evidence supports it (0.66 x 0.00), but no higher than itself if all the evidence supports it (0.66 x 1.00).
In the real world, there is almost no such thing as 0% or 100%. There are just all the values in between. So, we might find that the evidence in Kiely’s case is really not expected if we assume foul play. It might be low, like 0.05. So in that case, the 0.66 figure gets reduced to 0.033 (0.66 x 0.05), which is very low. But, if the evidence is mostly what we expect to see, we might give it a score of 0.90, and so we will see a figure more like 0.594 (0.66 x 0.90).
Did Foul Play Occur?
Let’s apply BT and try and give a value to the probability that Kiely died from foul play. By foul play, we are allowing for more than just murder. We are allowing for a cover-up of an accidental death: whether that death was due to reckless behaviour (Kiely took unnecessary risks of various kinds); whether it involved the participation of someone else (a ‘friendly’ fight that went on for too long); or whether it was unforeseeable (she slipped on wet ground and fell, hitting her head on a rock).
If Kiely did slip and fall, you would assume that a cover-up would not be necessary. People drown at the beach. Or they get hit by a car due to icy roads or very poor visibility. Tradesmen fall off ladders. Infants die from SIDS. Accidents happen all the time.
However, if an ambulance was called, there might have been a fear that the other party guests would have been questioned and tested for drugs and alcohol. If the party guests and organizers were selfish enough to want to avoid this, then we have a motive to cover-up a death, even though the death was totally unforeseeable, with no moral burden on anyone else.
As we learned from Nick Rinn, the chances of foul play in our scenario are 66%. So, the chances of a car accident are 34%. In this case, when I say “car accident”, that simply means that Kiely drove herself into Prosser Creek Reservoir.
The prior probability that Kiely died of foul play is 0.66. That statistic, as I discussed above, is supplied already. But how expected is the evidence we have if our explanation of foul play is true? The only thing we can do is estimate. We don’t have to be absolutely precise. We can come up with a reasonable number, as long as we are intellectually honest about it.
So let’s try to find a reasonable number. We know it can’t be 0.00. It can’t be a low number, either. Why not? Because we observed the following:
Jagger Westfall, Kiely’s ex-boyfriend, claimed that he was an official filter for information, which PCSO denied.
Sami Smith, a party guest, tried to put herself between other party guests and the police (Teen-to-Teen Talks).
Sami Smith gave an unreliable recollection of the party to Tony Dodge on All American Dream Chaser. This has yet to be completely analysed by a trained statement analyst. Deception Detective, who is a trained statement analyst, did analyse Sami’s interview, but he did not finish the video.
Sami Smith said that she and Kiely were very close friends. But Kate Cuneo, a confirmed friend of Kiely’s, said that Sami wasn’t friends with Kiely.
Sami Smith supplied a night exterior photo of a group of teenagers to the press. This photo turned out to be from a party in Michigan from a previous decade. And some people caught on quite early, before Kiely was found.
Sami Smith claimed that she last spoke with Kiely at 12:36 AM. Yet, the Alder Hill camera seems to show Kiely’s CR-V entering Prosser at 12:33 AM.
We have no photos of Kiely from the Prosser Party.
We have no photos of any kind of the Prosser Party which took place on the night of Friday, August 5th, 2022.
A lot of teenagers who were supposedly at the Prosser Party deleted some of their social media posts. One of the teen volunteer searchers deleted everything in August of 2022 from their Instagram account.
Police supplied a photograph of a security monitor showing Kiely at the Truckee River RV Park on Hirschdale Road, supposedly at around 6 PM on Friday. But they did not supply any of the footage (compare with Brissa Romero, Jolissa Fuentes, Riley Strain, etc.). They did not even tell the public where Kiely was at that time, which could have hampered the search.
We have no solid evidence that Kiely was alive on Friday, August 5th. The implications of this are very concerning.
Police used magnetometers and many other tools and techniques to search Prosser Reservoir. Yet Kiely’s Honda CR-V was not spotted. The car was found in water that was less deep than the length of a BMW 7 Series. At that depth, it would have been visible from the air, given a clear sky.
Adventures With Purpose found Kiely’s car relatively quickly, using fewer tools than police did, suggesting that Kiely’s car was placed in the reservoir after police searches ended.
The autopsy report was sloppy and possibly invalid under State law, indicating the possibility that the body extracted from Prosser Reservoir was not Kiely. Alternatively, the report was forged, and Kiely’s body was never properly examined.
Some people claim that RAW files from the Alder Hill camera were shown to selected investigators. However, even if the cameras produced RAW files (extremely unlikely), nobody else has seen them, which raises suspicion. This is not the same thing as police withholding data to preserve the integrity of the investigation.
We now want a value for P(e|h.b). What score do we give the above? Remember, we’re trying to convert qualities into quantities. How expected is the evidence if our hypothesis (foul play) is true? That’s a lot of evidence that suggests foul play. Not proof, just evidence. Some of the evidence, such as the autopsy report, could be explained as an attempt by officials to make the case go away. In other words, officials want to forget about it, because it’s too hard. But collectively, I think that the evidence very closely accords with foul play. You can give your own score, but I am going with between 70% and 90%.
Now let’s see how well our evidence fits the hypothesis of a car accident with no foul play. There is some evidence we do have that we would expect in this scenario:
Police did not doubt that a party occurred, or that Kiely was there. They claim to have video of Kiely at the party.
The firewatch camera on Alder Hill did capture what seemed to be Kiely’s car entering Prosser Reservoir, at about 12:33 AM on Saturday, August 6th. It captured evidence of human activity in and around The Sanctuary. (Keep in mind that Kiely could have been dead before her car entered the water, but that is what we are trying to solve).
According to the Alder Hill camera, it seemed that one or two cars did drive up to the little peninsula after Kiely’s car supposedly entered the water. This could indicate that some people might have been concerned that an accident happened. Or, they could have checked to see that their plot, to dump Kiely’s body into Prosser, was completed. Again, we want to avoid begging the question. But these possibilities must be mentioned, to acknowledge that the Alder Hill footage doesn’t necessarily show an accident.
We now want a value for for P(e|~h.b). How expected is the evidence if our hypothesis (foul play) isn’t true? There is some evidence that points to a car accident. But not very much. I’m going to give a value between 25% and 33%.
For the calculation, I’m going to use the mean of each set of evidence values. So, for P(e|h.b) I’m using 0.8, and for P(e|~h.b) I’m using 0.29. This is what the equation looks like:
The output, or posterior probability, is 0.528/0.6266, which is about 0.84. Therefore, if our input values are sufficiently precise, there is an 84% chance that Kiely died as the result of foul play.
The lowest output we can obtain, using 0.7 for P(e|h.b) and 0.33 for P(e|~h.b), is 0.8. The highest output we can obtain, using 0.9 for P(e|h.b) and 0.25 for P(e|~h.b), is 0.87.
Afterword
In the first paragraph, I wrote that you could apply Bayes’s Theorem to almost anything, like criminology, pathology, etc. Even literature and art, if you know what you’re doing. But, there are some problems to which you cannot apply it.
For example, what are the chances that God exists, using BT? You would not have the faintest idea how to establish background information for that. Any attempt to establish some kind of basic framework will instantly lead to begging the question, or circular logic, or just pure redundancy (I propose that for the universe to exist, a non-contingent first cause, or God, must be present. And if that is true, then why are we using BT at all?). It’s such a big question that the best we can do objectively is to apply our best reason and logic (ontology).
We can also apply our own personal experiences, but of course we have to be careful. Because some people might not necessarily know the difference between a spiritual experience, a hallucination, or a drug induced psychosis. And this is before we get fancy with ESP, synchronicity, and divine providence. So the God question is either ontological or experiential, but not statistical.
Bayes’s Theorem is a powerful statistical tool with real world applications. It has uses which are classified by the CIA. Some STEM professionals don’t understand it at all. It can even be completely useless in some cases. But, it has legitimate application in criminology and forensic science, where statistics are available and well understood. Kiely’s case is one such application.
It’s my hope that in the future, a statistician or criminologist will take Kiely’s case further, and apply BT more rigorously. Understanding the statistical formula is the easy part. Weighing the evidence, and ascribing quantities to qualities, is the hard part. At the time of publishing, we still don’t have the accident report from California Highway Patrol. That report may very well change our posterior probability in a major way.
Resources and References
‘How We Found Kiely: Murder or Accident?’ by Adventures With Purpose:
(47:09)
Deception Detective’s statement analysis of Sami Smith’s interview with Tony Dodge. DD concluded that Sami was just inserting herself for the sake of attention. This conclusion might be part of the truth, but it is not the whole story. Many people would like DD to not just finish watching the interview, but to also examine this case further:
(1:15:02)
This is the complete interview with Sami Smith by Tony Dodge:
(31:44)
Bayes’s Theorem was used to find a lost sailor, a missing submarine, and millions of dollars worth of gold which was lost before the American Civil War:
(16:18)
Is Bayesian thinking a sham? (Answer: no):
(8:19)
A method to visualize Bayesian probability as a table instead of a formula:
On December 2, 2022, Kas Thinks examined search results for Kiely Rodni’s name. To her surprise, people were searching for Kiely Rodni months before she made the news. How did Kas know this? She put Kiely’s name into Google Trends:
So, is something nefarious going on? The first two things I thought of were:
Psychics had visions or dreams about Kiely, and wanted to see if those were about someone who had already died
Google Trends is corrupt and has serious flaws with its database
Both of those could be true. All of us are psychic, to some degree. ESP, or extra-sensory perception, exists in everyone. Most people don’t have particularly strong ESP, but some do. However, could it be that there are that many people who had visions about Kiely? I am not so sure.
As for Google’s database, it might seem unlikely that a team of experienced programmers don’t know how to index HTML pages or YouTube videos. Remember that YouTube and Google have the same parent company. But, the sum of the codebase that comprises Google is very large and complex. Also, programmers may create perfectly stable code, while at the same time not considering that the choices that they made are the most appropriate ones.
Have you read or watched Jurassic Park? Without spoiling anything, some of the characters found that, although the computer code that automated various functions in Jurassic Park was solid per se, it didn’t take into account anomalous scenarios. In other words, the programmer, Dennis Nedry, made one too many assumptions.
Dennis Nedry wrote all the software for Jurassic Park
It’s worth making a very important point here, which applies to software and to life in general: it’s impossible to predict if your assumptions are the correct ones, because you can’t be presented with every single scenario that could ever happen. Climate models, for example, are notoriously unreliable. But not because the programmers don’t know physics. To start with, their fundamental assumptions may not be appropriate. Secondly, because while they understand known unknowns, they cannot understand unknown unknowns – by definition.
And so, if there is a flaw in Google’s code, we didn’t discover it by looking at the code, but by using it in an anomalous fashion. Were it not for Kiely Rodni, we may not have stumbled upon this problem for a long while – if there is a problem with the code to begin with.
I think that there is a flaw in Google’s code, but I can only solve half of the equation. If people were searching for Kiely Rodni’s name before she died, what information would be returned? Her Instagram account? Her Facebook account? Why not just search social media platforms directly? Isn’t that how you would search for someone?
Also, if potential kidnappers or traffickers knew who she was, why were they searching for her? Surely they already knew where to find her.
Kas has already shown us worldwide results for “Kiely Rodni”. Below is a result just for my country, Australia, for the past 12 months:
You can see that there is a spike that occurs in early 2022. Now let’s try “Kiely Rodni cause of death” just for Australia:
Look at that huge spike in early 2022. It’s bigger than any of the spikes in August. What the hell is going on here? Let’s try that search term, but for the entire world:
That’s more like it, although we still see small spikes around March 2022. But then I looked at search engine results for more clues. And I think I found something. Let’s try Bing first:
See that crappy spam website at the top, next to the date, Feb 15, 2022? Keep that in mind. Now let’s try Duck Duck Go:
Hmm. More spam sites. It looks like they have created search term magnets, where they include any date that you search for, plus your search term. This shouldn’t happen though, surely? Because any website, no matter how crappy, has a creation date. Right? Finally, let’s try Google:
We don’t get those crappy spam sites. So that’s nice. But we get ABC, Fox, and Apple Podcasts. Those sites are used by millions of people every day. And yet those results are being returned with dates before August 6th. But when you click on them, it turns out that those Web pages were not actually created on those dates – 2 August, 5 August, 4 March, etc. It turns out that they just mention those dates somewhere on those pages. And, in one case, ABC writes that she went missing on August 2nd, in an article published in October:
ABC news incorrectly reports that Kiely went missing on August 2nd
But it gets better. I think I found a single clue that can help us understand why our search results are dated earlier than August 6th. Have a look at the last one, dated March 4th. Guess where that links? You might think that it links to the YouTube page of Adventures With Purpose, the group who found Kiely and her car on August 21st. But no, you would be wrong. It links to this video by EWU Crime Storyline:
This video does not mention Kiely Rodni at all (as far as I can tell). The above video has over 5.5M views as of December 7th, 2022. The video by AWP which documents their search for Kiely has 3.4M views. But, look again at the Google result. Do you see what is going on with the search terms? Give yourself a minute.
Notice that the AWP video has 3.4M views. And the link is dated 4 March. Do you see it yet? Google saw the term “3.4” and assumed it was the date, March 4th. For whatever reason, Google doesn’t take into account the creation date of a page, but the text inside the page that might indicate a date. This is not very helpful, because we are not searching for dates, we are searching for terms in a given time bracket. Those are different concepts, and it seems that Google does not differentiate between the two.
As for the problem with Google Trends, perhaps the solution is tied to the above problem, common to Google Search as well as Duck Duck Go and Bing. In other words, what might have happened is this: people searched for “Kiely Rodni” after August 6th, but their searches returned pages with dates that were earlier. Those pages weren’t created before August 6th, they just mentioned dates before August 6th. And Google Trends counts those pages as being created in the past.
So if my hypothesis is true, that Google’s code is flawed, then that explains why it appears that people were searching for Kiely long before she went missing. There is absolutely nefarious activity surrounding Kiely Rodni: the cover-up of her death and disappearance. But there were no traffickers or criminals searching for Kiely Rodni before August 6th.
As for the psychics, I don’t doubt that some people did have visions of Kiely. But from what I understand about ESP, not that many people would have sensed her disappearance. If they did, they might have documented it on a blog somewhere. If you know of such a blog, do let me know.
Compiling the footage of Prosser Reservoir from the Alder Hill fire camera
Heads up Tails up Running to your scallywag
Night falls Morning calls Catch you With my death bag
Prosser Reservoir and its surrounds are beautiful, melancholic and haunting. Most people would not have heard of Prosser were it not for the death of Kiely (pronounced exactly like ‘Kylie’) Rodni, a girl who was a month away from her 17th birthday. From what we know about Kiely, she was happy, vibrant, and musically gifted. Truckee itself, though, is somewhat well known as being one of America’s most haunted towns.
Kiely and her car, a silver 2013 Honda CR-V, went missing after midnight on August 6th. Law enforcement, including local police, CHP and the FBI, supposedly scoured Prosser Reservoir, in the case that Kiely had driven her car into the water. After all, her phone last pinged right near the water. Surely, but sadly, this had to be a typical case of a driver who took a wrong turn and drove straight into the water.
They found nothing, although it came out later that the diving teams were instructed to go no further out than 25 feet. Nonetheless, her car was seen in the water by several people, including Stoney Stone, who used satellite sonar imagery. He found the car on August 7th, and reported that fact. Yet, nothing was done.
CORRECTION: I just discovered that Stoney Stone did not in fact located Kiely’s car. He interpreted an artefact on Google Maps as a sonar image of the car. But in fact this artefact is still there on Google Maps:
Further, this spot is not where Kiely’s car was found.
Nothing, that is, until the Internet called upon Adventures With Purpose (AWP) to investigate. Their claim to fame was locating cars in bodies of water, often related to missing persons cases. Their good work has helped many families find closure when they otherwise would have had none. However, AWP has never before involved themselves with open cases.
AWP was told that Prosser had already been searched, so they searched all the surrounding bodies of water where Kiely’s car might be found. They came up with nothing, and so they decided that they would search Prosser after all. It was their last shot.
They found her car on 21st August, around the middle of the day, 50 feet out from shore and 14 feet down. To give you an idea of how deep the water was, the 2013 CR-V is a little bit longer than 14 feet (slightly more than 4.5m). If you stood the car vertically on the bottom of the reservoir, at the spot where the car was found, the other end would stick up a few inches out of the water.
Not long after that, it was revealed that footage existed of the car going into the water. As it turns out, there are firewatch cameras all over California. The one that captured Kiely’s car going into Prosser is located on Alder Hill. It doesn’t always face Prosser, but thankfully it did on the night of August 5th and the morning of August 6th.
The footage is actually 0.5 fps – one frame taken every two seconds. The images from the firewatch cameras are archived and can be accessed publicly. That is where I got the frames from. You can download the frames yourself from here.
There are a few problems with the footage. One is that it’s a wide shot. Remember that these cameras are firewatch cameras, not surveillance cameras. They exist solely for the public to help in spotting fires before they grow too big. So it’s nobody’s fault that we can only see pinpoints of light at night.
Secondly, and infuriatingly, there is a red light near the site of the Alder Hill camera which turns on and off all night. And it spills into the camera, causing annoying flares. It doesn’t obscure what we need to see but it really is annoying.
Thirdly, the cameras often lose focus when it gets dark. This makes it slightly more difficult to see precisely where light sources are located. It also doesn’t help that the camera is not completely rock steady, and there is a slight about of ‘gate weave’ (even though digital cameras don’t have gate weave per se).
The footage may not seem to reveal much, except to confirm the exact time that Kiely’s car hit the water. However, a reasonable estimate of the speed of the car was calculated by several observers, and that speed was about 10mph. We don’t know if the airbag deployed, but based on the estimated speed, it’s not likely that the impact with the water was enough to trigger the airbag. And in that case, it’s not likely that the car’s Event Data Recorder was triggered (it only records 30 seconds worth of data around an event).
From page 21 of the Honda 2013 CR-V Online Reference Owner’s Manual
We can see a lot of other activity occurring before and after Kiely’s car was submerged. We can see what seems to be people – i.e. car headlights – meeting for non-trivial periods of time. Were they trying to figure out where Kiely was? Did they suspect that she drove her car into the water? If so, everyone knew she was dead not long after half past midnight.
And if people knew what happened to Kiely, nobody said anything to police or to the press. And the search parties, the Teen To Teen talks, all of it, was a smokescreen.
I don’t really want to go into the conspiracy of how Kiely’s friends and family failed her. This is just a place to share my time-lapse videos of the Alder Hill camera. However, make no mistake, even if Kiely simply drove her car into Prosser purely by accident, there is absolutely a conspiracy of silence and deception about it. That is the best case scenario. But I think it’s worse that that.
There are two time-lapses that I have prepared. The first is all the frames from 5th August 4pm to 6th August 6am. The second is all frames from 4th August 3:15pm to 6th August 9am. In both cases, I have overlaid a daylight frame, where appropriate. I have also prepared a blink comparison video, which covers 3.5 minutes up until Kiely’s car’s headlights are no longer visible.
The shorter time-lapse:
The longer time-lapse:
The blink comparison:
I have made my observations, and I will let you make yours. Perhaps in the near future I will make a post about what I think are noteworthy moments.
A Jurassic Park inspired logo design for Del Boca Vista, the retirement village from Seinfeld
I created these recently and I finally got around to making them available for public distribution. Make your own posters and postcards, as large or as small as you like. The clip art I used is licensed for personal use, and obtained from clipart-library.com.
There are:
Three versions of the postcard, to be printed on A4 paper in pairs
Three versions of the poster
One 9:16 image for phone lock screens.
There is also a document that you can print on the back of the A5 postcards, which contains a place to write your message, a stamp box, and a place to write a recipient’s address.
There are three versions of the poster and postcard
The best way to print these at home is to use thick paper, like a 300gsm weight or greater, and print at the highest quality level. You will get great results with photo paper, too, but that’s not really necessary. If you try and use draft mode, you will notice some overhang from some of the clipart around the yellow ring. Keep in mind that if you’re printing on paper, the black ink might rub off on your hands.
A basic statistical overview of the likes and comments on Gabby’s 98 Instagram posts
Post 37. Hollywood, CA. 28 October, 2019.
Some time ago I had the idea to plot the number of likes and comments on all of Gabby’s Instagram posts. I noticed early on that her most recent post, dated August 26, 2021, had way more likes than the next most liked post, the one just before it. And the number of likes went down dramatically after that. I thought, this could be interesting.
But, I put that idea aside indefinitely. That is, until I watched this video on True Crime Rocket Science, a video channel owned and hosted by photojournalist Nick van der Leek:
“Statistics shouldn’t be applied as Gospel, but merely the logical jumping-off point.”
He discussed the use of statistics to help guide us – and law enforcement – to the most likely possibilities in any given scenario. Of course one can always appeal to Occam’s Razor, but that on its own isn’t very specific. In the case of Kiely Rodni, one statistic that should have been used, but was ignored by many, was that most of the time, a missing person is found near the location of their phone’s last ping to a nearby mobile network tower.
And so, energised by Nick’s discussion of statistics, I decided to go to Gabby’s Instagram account and start counting likes and comments. This kind of information is by no means meaningful to the investigation of her murder. Far from it. But I think it does have some utility in showing the ways that people interact with social media platforms, especially when their intentions towards a stranger are beneficent and well meant.
It’s also worth noting how few posts Gabby made on that platform. One would assume she would produce more than a mere 98 posts. Of course, YouTube is the more relevant platform for Gabby’s project, but at the same time, posting on Instagram is not especially time consuming. You would think she would have put up much more than she did – assuming that Brian didn’t delete any.
If you plot these data points on a graph, you get what a statistician would call a ‘long tail’ – large initial values, followed by rapidly decreasing values thereafter. In the case of Gabby’s posts, the long tail pattern exists, more or less, with the data points in chronological order. That is, from her most recent post to her very first post.
Likes, with anomalies notedComments, with anomalies noted
Of course, there are anomalies, for various reasons. Some of her posts happen to be significant for one reason or another. And by significant, I mean emotionally meaningful. For instance, a photo of Gabby looking her best, or posing in front of an angel wing mural, or with her boyfriend’s hand around her throat as they kiss.
These anomalies are highlighted with an image from that post. There are proper statistical methods to determine anomalies from the trend, although I just judged them visually.
Instagram posts can be shared via URLs outside the platform, and via stories within the platform. They can’t be shared in the timeline, as would be possible with other platforms like Twitter or GETTR. So the fact that certain posts got more likes than you would expect, given their place on the graph, is a reflection of individual interest more than it is of what is popularly shared. Those versed in psychology can better explain this kind of thing, where people independently come to similar conclusions about the same data.
Worth noting is that iOS lets you easily scroll to the top of a document or timeline, simply by tapping the very top edge of the screen. That’s the equivalent of the Home key on most keyboards, which, to the best of my knowledge, debuted on IBM keyboards in 1986. But in iOS, you can’t scroll to the bottom in such a way. Perhaps this, along with the chronological order that social media tends to use, explains why few people bothered to scroll all the way down to Gabby’s first post. The long tail shape of the graph is thus easily explained.
However, it’s interesting to note that only Gabby’s most recent post got a number of likes in the mid six figure range. Her penultimate post got in the high five figures – one sixth as many likes. That’s a significant difference. Maybe most people felt that the best tribute to her was to simply leave one like on her final post.
For what it’s worth:
Her least liked post was post 23, with 3397 likes and no comments.
Data was acquired on 29 August, 2022. Likes and comments were taken from hovering the mouse over the images on Gabby’s Instagram account while I wasn’t logged in. This was done on a desktop browser. But, Instagram does not allow users to view photos past a certain point without logging in. So, from post 59 and down, I had to use the Instagram Likes Calculator on phlanx.com. That site seems to accurately convey the data, as far as I can tell.
If you want to download PDF versions of these graphs, you can get them here:
I love a great idea. When I saw the promotional video for The Chenoo, it got my strict attention. I’ve seen quite a few promo videos for ComicsGate projects. The funniest was the one for Cash Grab, made by Scotty Richard. But the one for The Chenoo had depth and instantly created a great atmosphere, even if I thought the chosen music felt overdone. This book surely has promise, I thought.
The promotional video for ‘The Chenoo’
I received the book not that long ago – the middle of January 2021. I had no problem waiting, as that is the nature of crowdfunding. The benefit of backing a comic book project is that you know that some time in the near to mid term future, the book is going to arrive. You will get emails which keep you up to date about the state of the book, which does take away little of the surprise. But, it’s still rewarding when the finally receive the book in the mail.
Graham Nolan packed the book very well. Really, if there is any further protection that he could have given the book it would have been redundant. My copy arrived in mint condition. It came in a Gemini mailer, which a lot of ComicsGate publishers prefer. Inside, the book was further protected in a plastic sleeve with a piece of white cardboard behind the book.
Included in the package is one trading card, a rather odd bookmark, a sticker, and a letter from the author thanking the backers. The trading card is great, and is printed very nicely, but it should have been a bit thicker. The piece of backing card could have been printed with Chenoo themed art, or something similar.
Graham Nolan always remembers that it is the customers who make his work possible
You really could spend hours and hours fantasising about what extras could have been included with any given book. Foil stickers, keyrings, a full set of cards, what have you. We can hope that with each new book that the author releases, we will get more extras, and that they will be more sophisticated.
The book itself is the most nicely printed comic book I have yet seen. Not that I have handled very many comic books, much less premium ones. But without anything to compare, I am impressed. This is in stark contrast to the disappointing design of That Umbrella Guy’s first book, The Case of the Littlest Umbrella (which I reviewed last year).
This book is perfect bound, which means that it has a spine. I don’t have any issue with this, but the book isn’t thick or long enough to warrant perfect binding, and I would have preferred it to be stapled like a traditional comic book. The cover is a lovely satin finish, with the title being printed with a special glossy plastic. The pages are also of high quality stock.
One of the problems of perfect bound books is that you can’t always lay them completely flat. In any case it presented no challenges to handling. One aspect I find odd is that Nolan’s signature appears twice on the cover – once as part of the print file, the other done by hand. There is no need to have a signature on a cover more than once. If a CG artist is also the author, and they are signing the cover by hand, there’s no need to include their signature in the print file.
I had high expectations for this story, and I wish that I could say that they were met. The promo video was so well done that I got a feeling of being immersed in a rich environment with varied characters and lots of background.
But the story did not do justice to the idea. Nolan obviously could not spend 20 pages establishing a prologue. He set himself a limit of so many pages, which is logical, as he wanted to get the book out in a timely manner and with a reasonable cost.
But that is the problem here. The book isn’t ambitious enough. There is no room to develop a build-up, rich character history, or anything like that. Perhaps my expectations are much too high, but I stand by those expectations. I do not see the comic book as a trivial story telling medium.
I have read two of Alan Moore’s graphic novels, the most important being From Hell. I’ve also read pretty much all of Michael Crichton’s novels, and all those of Dan Brown (though his recent one, Origin, was a dud). Recently I’ve been reading more novels of the ‘outback noir’ genre.
I’m used to grade A storytelling, and I am beginning to question whether comic books of such short lengths can offer anything challenging or satisfying. The Cyberfrog saga is spread over four books, which is probably going to be a total of something like 200 pages or more.
The Chenoo contains 57 pages of story plus a few pages of art, and a list of names of every person who backed the campaign. Nolan is a professional who is considerate to his audience, and who knows how to present a finished product.
57 pages sounds like a lot, but it is paltry, even when compared to a short story or a one-act play. That’s mainly because comic books do not have a large number of words on the typical page. Short stories are a very different animal to comic books. The comic book is primarily visual and is itself a product. The short story does nor require a specific medium to exist. You could print it in your office, copy it out by hand, read it aloud, put it up online, broadcast it, publish it in a magazine, whatever. Comic books exist in a particular format, and must be physical (digital comic books are not popular).
What a good short story has is depth, immersion and hopefully engaging characters. Truman Capote was very good at this. Usually, an adapted screenplay is based on a novel. But the movie Blow-Up was loosely based on a short story by Julio Cortazar – you can find it online as a PDF, and I recommend it highly.
Nolan has fewer than 60 pages to work with, and that doesn’t leave much room for character development. The characters are fine as they are, but we don’t know much about them. And if we don’t know much about them, we can’t empathise with them as much as we could.
In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock spent almost 20 minutes establishing the background and motivations of Marion Crane. That’s a large part of the script, and it’s longer than it takes to read The Chenoo. You see the problem here.
Alfred Hitchcock gave the audience plenty of time to know Marion Crane’s character in ‘Psycho’
You can of course achieve a lot in a short time or space. I refer you to the short story Blow-Up which I mentioned above. But there is usually no substitute for the time necessary to establish characters. If you’ve seen the film, 30 Days of Night, you’ll remember that it took some time to establish some kind of background before getting into the meat of the story.
In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, we get a terrifically written and performed introduction to FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. In contrast, we don’t know very much about Laura Palmer until later episodes. But she is enigmatic in any case.
One more example of how to establish character: Rear Window, another masterwork by Hitchcock. Note here also that Hitchcock does not rush into the story – he lets things settle and evolve first, and as a result, the audience is immersed. Feature films don’t offer the same scope for character as novels do, but there is enough room to work with, especially for a top class writer.
Films like ‘Rear Window’ give the audience time to settle in before launching into the plot
In the beginning of The Chenoo, the two characters aren’t really that interesting and have nothing about them which could elicit curiosity. We just don’t know that much about them. One way that Nolan could make us empathise with the two men would be to make one of them homeless. Or an army veteran getting back on his feet after years of struggle. Or we could have seen the beginning or the end of a relationship between two disparate characters, such as a rich man and a poor man.
Overall though, the art and panel layout are top class. Nolan has drawn the entire book in grayscale, rendering only blood in colour. This device works well enough. It would ruin a book of photographs, but for a comic book it is certainly valid.
Panel layout is well disciplined. Where necessary, Nolan takes some creative liberties with the layout that work very well, given the context. Nolan also knows how and when to use full page panels. I’m not a fan of overlapping panels or odd panel shapes, but it’s a testament to Nolan’s skill that I really didn’t notice until after I had finished the book.
Lettering is supposedly by someone named Carlos Mangual. The lettering is very neat and legible, but all of it looks like it was typeset. This applies to the sound effects, too – it looks like they were taken from stock effects. I see no evidence of hand lettering in this book. There’s nothing wrong with using fonts in comic books, as this is exactly how every other form of text is published. But if you are using fonts or stock sound effects, then state as much.
Nolan used stock SFX, as well as a lettering font, both of which should have been done by hand
Speaking of SFX, I find that they are often overused. I recall seeing page of Jawbreakers: Lost Souls that had a sound effect that was not only redundant, but it weakened the effect that it was supposed to impart. I strongly believe that the sound has to come from the imagination, triggered by the art. Comic books are a visual medium, so the visuals should be allowed express themselves. In The Chenoo, there are many SFX that don’t need to be there, although for some reason this is only a problem in the later pages of the book.
There is one moment right near the end of the story, where one character utters a statement which is way too expository, and this takes you out of the story. But Nolan is in good company here. Interestingly enough, it is his namesake, director Christopher Nolan, who makes this boo-boo on several occasions in his otherwise terrific film, Dunkirk. Dialogue which is obvious in its exposition is clumsy and drawn attention to itself. Expository dialogue is useful and necessary, and is very important in theatre and cinema, but good writing hides it.
The basic ending of The Chenoo is, in principle, quite good. It’s solid compared to a decent Hollywood script. But there is no foreshadowing. Good storytelling usually features several mechanisms. Confict is one of them. Foreshadowing is another, as well as the anti-climax, the denouement, the red herring, etc.
The Chenoo seems to lack all of these elements, and comes across as very one-dimensional. Sure, there are moments where you might identify conflict here and there, but not in a meaningful way. You may think that there is a lot of conflict in this book – after all, we have a monster that is chasing down the main characters, right?
Think of Jaws. Where is the conflict in that film? Between the main characters and the shark? Between the characters? Both? What about other monster or horror movies? I’ll let you think about that one.
I do not consider myself a dramaturge, but if a story doesn’t grab me, I can usually figure out why. Not all good stories have obvious traits that you would expect. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – the story by Truman Capote – is extremely compelling and yet I cannot recall any obvious conflicts. The only conflict I recall is implicit: one day Holly Golightly was here, and then one day she wasn’t, and nobody knows if she will ever return. One of the keys to great drama is when characters face obstacles in getting what they want.
As far as conflict goes, a lot of David Lynch’s short films and TV commercials don’t have any obvious conflict either, although in many cases you cannot resist playing them again and again. Sometimes there’s a magic to a story that you can’t easily explain.
When you’ve read some of the world’s best novels and short stories; when you have seen some of the greatest movies; when you have read the greatest graphic novel ever written; when you’ve seen some of the most famous and celebrated stage plays, you have high expectations when it comes to storytelling. The Chenoo is a terrific idea. It could have been written with enough depth to create something that could have attracted a long term following.
Finally, there are two events in the story, occurring near the end, which are internally inconsistent. Needless to say I will not be specific. But they are so obvious that I am amazed that they are there. One of them might be excused because Nolan has only so much room to work with, but by this point I was just frustrated and disengaged completely.
Graham Nolan deserves high praise for his attention to detail as far as presentation goes. And he never forgets that it is the customers that justify his work. His book, as an object, is an example for other creators to emulate. He made sure to have it printed in North America, too. It’s a shame that some ComicsGate creators went for the cheap option of having their book printed in China. Nolan may not have written great fiction but he proves himself to have very high standards as a publisher.
So, do I regret backing this campaign? No, I absolutely do not regret it. The more comic books I read, the more I can figure out what they lack, and what they need to be truly engaging. I have a few ideas that I want to realise one day. One thing I need to do, as an aspiring author, is to get a feel for what’s being created, and how. In addition, ComicsGate people are just terrific. I am happy for Graham that his campaign has been a success, in the same way that I am happy for That Umbrella Guy that his two campaigns have been successes.
I hope that Nolan’s next book, Alien Alamo, is written with the care and attention that the best scripts are given, whether they be stage or screen. Because otherwise, his art and ideas and standards of production quality will all be for naught.
The Case of the Littlest Umbrella is the first book written by That Umbrella Guy, an independent creator who has never before published a comic book. TUG is a prominent member of ComicsGate, and has his own online presence, including a YouTube channel.
If you’re not familiar with ComicsGate, it is an idea that creators should have the freedom to pursue their own IP, that treats customers with respect, and that is free from politics or any other divisiveness. CG includes customers, fans, and creators alike.
The book was launched as a crowdfunding campaign in 2019. The initial funding period saw the book reach over $75,000, and it made a grand total of $109,580 before the campaign closed. Following this unexpected level of success, TUG wrote a second book, with the same protagonists, which is currently in production. So far it has taken $143,280 in revenue, a significant increase over the first one, and it is still In Demand.
The Case of the Littlest Umbrella is described as a family friendly horror story, an “all-ages Lovecraftian experience”. Perhaps this sounds contradictory, but in fact this specific genre is quite common. You may be familiar with Goosebumps books, or Scooby-Doo, or The Simpsons Halloween Special (there’s only one good one). In fact, you could argue that Halloween itself is family friendly horror – kids indulge in it far more than adults do.
Being a crowdfunded campaign, this book did take a while to deliver, but the ongoing global health crisis caused further delays. I suspect that TUG will move printing to North America for future books, for various reasons. That is actually the norm – most CG books are printed in the USA or Canada, to the best of my knowledge. There is no criticism here of the delivery schedule, but I should point out that crowdfunded books are published in a different way than mainstream books.
My first criticism is that the book doesn’t look like a real comic book should. Now, the paper stock and print quality are terrific. But the cover looks very much like a self-published book would look like, which is to say, a bit… cheap.
Yes, this is actually a self-published book, but that’s not the point. The point is to give the look and feel of a proper comic book (or graphic novel). This is easy to do. This does not require the use of flimsy cover stock or newsprint (not that those things are necessarily bad).
It does not even require the inclusion of charming advertisements, although it would be wonderful to see some creativity applied here, particularly for fictional brands and products. I’ve invented a few brands myself, purely for fun, due to my obsession with advertising. Once you flip through a collection of ads from the 1990s, your imagination will involuntarily deliver.
This is the book’s actual cover (the banding is due to my half-dead scanner):
And this is closer to what it should look like:
Notice: some kind of logo or hallmark should be in the top left corner. The title should be prominent, even though it risks obscuring the cover art (Jawbreakers: Lost Souls makes this mistake of undue reverential treatment of the cover art). Finally, the cover art should be a full page bleed, even if it’s a small graphic within large white space.
Once again, the paper stock is great and it feels good to hold and turn the pages. It’s arguably too good, depending on your tastes. However, the good news is that the book does stay open by itself. That includes both the first and last pages. This book is designed well as far as function is concerned, despite the lack of the aesthetics of a traditional comic book.
To my disappointment, the 44 page book contains three stories, not one. The main story is the interesting one, and it is 26 pages long. It is written by TUG and Keung Lee, and drawn by Keung Lee. The other two are more aimed at young children, and are written and drawn by Peter Gilmore.
The latter two, The Case of the Littlest Dino and Escape from Dino Island, are not really that interesting and could probably qualify as cereal box comics. Dino Island actually has a lot of promise, but it would need its own book of at least 44 pages to grow into. The art is superb, and the characters include TUG and his daughter, Little Umbrella Girl, both of which you will grow fond of, especially if you are familiar with TUG’s channel and personal life.
But these stories are unnecessary and together take up almost half the book. They force the main story to become diluted and therefore lacking in any depth. And that is the key as to why this book does not deliver what it ought to.
I’m not a horror fan, preferring spookiness and brooding to horror or gore. However, a good story is a good story, and the classical nature of this book’s inspiration, H. P. Lovecraft, promises much. I can appreciate films that have horror in them, such as Silence of the Lambs (terrifying), Twin Peaks (hypnotizing, brooding and creepy), The Exorcist (unsettling), and the series, Millennium (which dealt with evil more than it did with horror). In addition, I have read a few Stephen King novels such as It and The Shining. I’m a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, which should be required reading for everyone.
Good storytelling has many facets, not all of which are required in any one story. Michael Crichton wasn’t always great with characters, but his stories were superbly told. Dan Brown is a terrible writer, but his best novels are so eye-opening that you never notice.
I wish I could say that I have read Lovecraft, but I have not. One podcast I listen to now and again, The Bible Geek, talks about Lovecraft a lot, and eventually created a podcast dedicated to that topic, The Lovecraft Geek. I have pretty much no exposure to anything Lovecraft, although now I’m tempted to give his work a look.
TCOTLU is set up quite well. I like the premise, the foundations, the characters. It appears to have elements of Millennium, or perhaps The X-Files, and goodness knows what else. TUG and his daughter, LUG, are the two protagonists. The supporting character, Bill, is also somewhat engaging – at least in principle, as we don’t see much of him.
The story begins with a short prologue: a writer in what seems to be a haunted hotel. Or is it all in his head? Starting off with a prologue is a very effective way to give a story depth. The best prologues are as disconnected from the body of the story as possible. The best example is The Exorcist. Do you remember the prologue? You probably don’t unless you’ve seen the film in the past few years. And if you don’t, you will be pleasantly surprised with what you see. That is excellence in storytelling.
However, the prologue here doesn’t have much impact. And that’s precisely because the main story in this book is only 26 pages long. We don’t really have any idea as to who the character is. We don’t know what he is writing, or why. On the surface, what is on those pages should be interesting. But it’s not. We don’t even know what might be on those pages, or why the author behaved the way he did before he left the hotel.
It’s the same for the opening scene of the main story. We should be interested in where TUG works, how he got there, what cases he is working on, and so on. And we are once again disappointed. The reason is quite obvious. It has nothing to do with the number of pages, but the lack of depth. Depth is created in several ways. The simplest way is to give characters and places dimension, and you can only do that with details. What is the name of the agency for which TUG works? Where is it and why does it exist? Where does TUG live? How did TUG get this job and what was he doing previously?
These questions don’t have to be completely answered, but they do need to be hinted. In the pilot episode of Millennium, we are given some glimpse into Frank Black’s background. Not a whole lot, but enough to establish something about him. The episode, like most serialized TV, is self-contained, but does lay down ominous hints at what the future will bring.
I have not forgotten that TCOTLU is supposed to be kid-friendly. The events that occur in Millennium are so disturbing that I would not expect to see them in TUG’s book. But what I do expect is just not there.
To give you an example of how time or space limits can produce incredibly engrossing and compelling stories, I point you to three films, all created by David Lynch. Premonitions Following an Evil Deed is but 63 seconds long. It was made as part of the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere Brothers’ first cinema camera, and is part of a collection, Lumiere and Company.
The next example is one of the shorter stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Sphinx. I would be very surprised if you didn’t find this incredibly effective:
At the end of the day, we need to tell our own stories in our own style. Nobody appreciates copycats. But, we can certainly find inspiration and illumination from storytellers who came before us.
The second story, The Case of the Littlest Dino, at five pages long, is obviously intended for parents to read to their younger children. But it takes away valuable space from the main story.
The third story, Escape from Dino Island, at ten pages, is potentially interesting in its own right, but again, it takes away valuable pages that could have been used for the main story.
Dino Island throws us right into a situation where LUG is tied up by a supercriminal who owns a dinosaur infested island. But, there is no immersion. There is nothing here that stokes the imagination, either. It seems that Peter Gilmore has little of interest to add to the genre of dinosaur island sci-fi. But his art is superb here, and on the level of that of Keung Lee.
The world which TUG has created has promise, and the fundamentals are all there. The art, to say it again, is grade A. The characters are likeable, especially LUG, bless her little gumboots and pigtails. Yet the execution is lacking. The cover should have been more dynamic, the book was not printed in the USA or Canada, the story didn’t arouse my curiosity, the characters lacked depth, and I didn’t feel as immersed as I would be in a Poe story or a Crichton novel.
But I certainly don’t regret backing this campaign. When you back the campaigns of creators, particularly ComicsGate creators, you’re not merely interested in the books, you’re supporting people. I do not regret that I spent US$25 plus postage for this book. In fact, I backed the sequel, Another Case for the Littlest Umbrella. If you are CG, and you have the budget, go to the campaign page and give it a look.
Nimiq is a blockchain crypto asset built from the ground up to focus on Web browser operability, from holding the coins, all the way to actually mining them. Just as importantly, it’s also the most fun you’ll have in the crypto space right now.
Overview
Nimiq, exchange code NIM, properly launched in Q2 of 2018, when its mainnet went live. The mission of Nimiq is ease of adoption for the general public, and the method to execute that mission is the Web browser. While you can use other methods to hold and mine NIM, you can do everything right in the browser. And that means you can mine it on any device with a Web browser and an Internet connection.
Like a lot of people, I’ve spent and wasted a lot of time messing with mining hardware and software over the past two or three years. It’s as frustrating as it is rewarding. Sometimes, the instructions haven’t been updated, and so in those cases you find yourself having to figure it out on your own. But a lot of people, who otherwise want to get into crypto assets, find that sort of thing terribly off-putting.
Enter Nimiq, nine years after the launch of Bitcoin. NIM is very much a modern crypto coin – browser based, easy to use, and aimed towards the general public. There are important features that can’t be avoided, such as a set of 24 Recovery Words (which we’ll get to below), but you need that kind of thing to make any blockchain product truly useful.
The best way to create an account is to simply go to nimiq.com. If I have to write a tutorial for you to get started, then perhaps crypto isn’t for you. This is not a put-down. But if you can’t make use of NIM by yourself, at least for the basics, then the creators haven’t succeeded.
The home page actually shows you how to get started with an animation in the top right corner. You choose a randomly generated identicon, or Nimiqon, create a password, and proceed to the next steps.
At least one Nimiqon is required for each account, but you can create as many as you like, as they represent deposit addresses. It’s like having multiple accounts with the same bank.
The next thing you will be asked to do is to download a QR code card that looks something like this:
This is what you will use to login to your account, whether it’s your 27″ iMac or your cheap Android phone you got at Woolworths. This code is basically an encrypted version of your Recovery Words.
After you download your QR code, you will be asked to write down your 24 recovery words. They suggest that you don’t keep them anywhere online, and that you print them out and store them somewhere safe. These recovery words let you rebuild your account in case you lose your password or your login QR code.
Finally, you will be asked to verify that you followed the instructions. It might sound redundant, but unlike your Netflix account, your crypto wallets are so secure that you will never be able to call a help desk if you lose access. Even when you log out, it will ask you to type in a short phrase, and remind you to keep your login details safe. This is exactly how all of this works, because you are effectively your own bank.
Logging out of your account
At this point, you have access to your wallet, or, as Nimiq calls it, your safe. You will be given the chance to obtain one free NIM. It’s not worth much at the time of writing, but you should certainly take it.
The fun begins
Okay, so now you have an account, one deposit address, and one NIM, which is probably worth US$0.002 at the time of writing. Great! Hopefully you found the process somewhat enjoyable and comfortable so far. But wait – there’s more!
From now, there are two ways to obtain NIM. You can buy it from an exchange, if they sell it. Or, you can mine it.
If you aren’t familiar with mining, it’s the common term for proof-of-work (POW), which means that an active node on the network gets rewarded with coins while it’s running. POW is a kind of consensus method, which helps maintain integrity in the blockchain. So, Bitcoin miners get rewarded with Bitcoins, or BTC, and Nimiq miners get rewarded with Nimiq coins, or NIM.
Mining is where the real fun begins. Because Nimiq supports mining right in the browser. You don’t need any special software. You can mine on a cheap Android phone, or a fully featured Mac Pro (wheels included!). Or anything else: an iPad, an Android tablet, a cheap PC, a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, as long as the Web browser is relatively up to date.
To start mining, log into your account. You will always require your QR code file and your password. Once you’re logged in, the easiest way to access the miner is to type miner.nimiq.com into the browser’s address bar. You will be asked which address you want to mine to. At this point we’ve only created one address, so use that by selecting its Nimiqon.
You’ll be taken to a world map, coloured in purple, with nodes marked in orange. You will be asked to join a mining pool. To do that, click on Mining Pool. For now, it doesn’t matter which pool you choose. Just pick one, then close the pop-up box. Eventually the miner will started connecting and validating. You know you’ve started mining when you see a hashrate displayed. A desktop browser will display something like this:
This is what you will see while mining NIM on a desktop computer
You might even be able to mine on either old or specialised Unix workstations, if you can install a modern Web browser on them. Of course this is starting to get a little deeper. But there are certainly those of you out there who are advanced hardware users who also want an easy and fun way to get into the crypto space. If you’re familiar with Sun, Silicon Graphics or IBM Power System computers, you’ll know what I’m referring to.
A Silicon Graphics Octane 2 from 2003; the original Octane was released in 1997
Two caveats, though. Firstly, mining with a Web browser isn’t as efficient as mining with a specialised application. You do have the option of downloading a dedicated mining application, but most people don’t have to worry about that.
Secondly, mining does use a lot of CPU cycles, which means: you will use more electricity; your battery in your mobile device will be hit harder; your device may overheat; other applications won’t run efficiently while you’re mining.
However, I have not noticed any real problems, apart from the lower performance of other applications. The phones that I have used so far have gotten warm, but nowhere near their safe limits. Just as an example, an iPhone 6S uses 1W while plugged in and fully charged. While mining, it uses 5W. That’s nothing compared to other appliances, but then again, you aren’t mining much either. You can pause and restart mining whenever you like while you’re logged in.
An iPhone 6S mining NIM
You can determine how much processing power that your device is going to use for mining. Select the option, My Hashrate:
You will see a slider at the bottom of the screen, which lets you choose how many threads you want dedicated to mining. You can choose from one or more:
The benefit of mining is that you don’t need to own any amount of a coin or token to obtain it. You just have to run your miner. This will cost you electricity, but it will also make it unnecessary for you to purchase the coins on an exchange. The only problem is that mining does not currently yield very large rewards. Having said that, some people run miners not so much for profit, but for either fun or for supporting the network.
A cheap Android phone mining NIM
Not only can you mine on your personal devices, you can mine on anything from a work computer to a demo unit at a retailer. You should only do this to benchmark these devices – mining without permission is in some places a sackable offence, and in some places it may even be illegal. However, retailers will let you play around with their demo units if you just want to collect benchmarking information.
If you’re benchmarking a computer, you’ll need to take a USB stick with you which contains your login QR code. What you need to do is to open the Web browser, log into your Nimiq account using your QR code image, then begin the mining process. Give it a couple of minutes at most and make a note of your hash rate.
But, what about iPhones and Android tablets? Most iOS devices don’t let you attach external storage, and that’s for maximising security. So your QR code image has to be downloaded to the device another way. What you can do is to store it on a service such as Postimage or Dropbox, and then write down a shortened URL. Here’s what that shortened URL might look like:
Load that image from the Web browser, save it to the device, then open the Web browser to log into your Nimiq account and start mining. Remember to delete the Login File from the device in all cases.
There are problems, though, with Android devices. Some cheap devices will occasionally interrupt the mining process with system alerts. Some will not allow you to disable sleep mode, which means you might have up to 30 minutes of mining before the system puts the device to sleep. Thankfully, iOS does allow you to disable the sleep mode on all devices.
Going forward
And now we come to the future of Nimiq. Right now, Nimiq has a POW consensus method, explained above. For Nimiq 2.0, we will likely see a change in the consensus method from POW to POS (proof-of-stake). This means two things: mining will be eliminated and replaced with staking; and in order to accumulate any useful amount of NIM, you will have to buy some up front.
The positive aspects of staking over mining are significant. Firstly, there is no need to worry about electricity consumption. While mining pools share workload, the work is all done by the members of that pool on their own devices. But staking pools are different: the client’s devices don’t need to be operating. All you need to do is place or reserve your coins in that staking pool.
Staking is actually very much like bank interest. The more coins you stake, and the longer you stake them, the more staking rewards you get. Most coins use the POS consensus method, or something similar. And most of them apply compound interest – in other words, your staking rewards are more coins. Some coins such as Vechain (VET) reward users with secondary tokens. VET requires no action on the part of the clients, but the payouts are not in VET, but in VeThor tokens.
Depending on whom you talk to, mining is more fun despite the requirement for powerful hardware for significant gains. But, as a blockchain matures, difficulty increases, and so miners have to keep upgrading their hardware. Staking is somewhat boring. But, instead of buying hardware, you just buy the coins and let compound interest go to work.
Some would say that staking encourages saving whereas mining encourages spending. That’s because staking is like compound interest and the more you save, the more you receive. But mining hardware depreciates, even if the coin grows in value, and so miners feel the need to sell some of their coins to offset the depreciation of their hardware.
Full disclosure: I do own a modest amount of NIM and I probably will slowly increase that over time. This is not financial advice, but I feel I should declare it.
Further reading
This is a solid overview of the Nimiq project by Coin Bureau:
It’s easier than you think to install a cryptocurrency miner on an Android phone – and you don’t even need to hack the system software
Note: the mining pool referred to below seems to be non-operational. Please use https://poolium.win/ instead. I will update the tutorial later.
If you have an Android phone or tablet that has passed its use-by date, or if you just want to set up a low energy miner, it’s relatively easy to do. The basic tutorial is found here, on the iMineBlocks channel:
(26:06)
There are two things to note with that tutorial. Firstly, it was specifically devoted to Fireworm, a fork of cpuminer. Fireworm is a Verium miner exclusively. The good thing about Verium is that it is a CPU coin, which means that GPUs will not give you any advantages over a CPU that uses the same Wattage. Secondly, the tutorial was based on Linux Deploy, which requires root privileges. That sort of stuff is unnecessarily complicated, and you will not always succeed, depending on what rooting method you use, and what device you are using.
This tutorial will eventually discuss how to set up an account with a mining pool. A mining pool is a collective of individual miners who share the burden of mining a given coin. Mining solo is possible but you will have more consistent rewards if you’re a member of a pool. But we want to get the miner successfully installed first.
This tutorial is based on the video above, and you will be installing Fireworm. But there will be one change: we are going to base our installation of Fireworm on UserLAnd, a Linux installation that does not require root privileges. Rooting an Android device is a pain, as you don’t know if the process is going to work or not. While Android is based on Linux, it is not Linux proper, and so you do need to install a distribution of Linux to use Linux applications.
Firstly, let’s have a look at the commands as Lee, the channel owner, has written them:
Fairly simple. All you have to do, after you have installed your preferred version of Linux, is login to Linux and run the commands. But hold that thought just for now. The first thing you will need to do is install UserLAnd.
UserLAnd is fairly straightforward. You download it from the Play Store and run it. Then you select which distribution you want. You don’t ever have to think about root privileges. For this experiment I decided to buy a cheap, discounted phone with Android 7. The CPU is a quad core 1.1GHz Cortex-A53. Not exactly a powerhouse, but it will do. There are potential issues with these cheap phones that could cause frustrations – but hold that thought, too.
A cheap Alcatel phone. Because it’s not going to be used for anything other than mining, I kept the plastic film over the screen instead of buying a more durable screen protector.
A suggestion before you begin: create a Google account just for your mining devices. I have a Gmail address for everyday communication, but I created another one just for this and future miners. If that email address somehow gets compromised, I won’t care so much. Remember that if you use YouTube, Google Docs etc, your account includes those. So keep your mining and personal accounts separate.
After you download and run UserLAnd, your screen will look similar to this:
Select Debian and give the app the required permissions.
Create a username, and for the sake of convenience, use the same password for your username as for VNC. Usually you wouldn’t do this, as it’s a security hazard. But you are just running a crypto miner, so it doesn’t matter.
Once you tap on a text field, the keyboard will appear, just like normal. The icons to the right of the password fields let you see the text you are typing. It’s wise to make use of that feature, as you aren’t asked to confirm your passwords.
When you are done, tap the blue checkbox at bottom right. You will see the Continue button.
Tap on Continue, and select SSH.
Once you do that, you will be taken to the login screen. It’s pretty much like any other Linux login screen you’ve seen that doesn’t have a graphical interface. Don’t worry about the text above the login prompt. I have no idea what it means, either.
After you have successfully entered your password, you will be logged in.
Now all you have to do is type in, or paste, the commands that install Fireworm. The easy way to do this is to send the commands to your preferred Gmail account that you can access on the device, and then copy and paste them into UserLAnd. I’m going to show you what that should look like before explaining what you’ll be doing.
You’ve noticed that there are a few differences with the list of commands listed near the beginning of this document. I’ve changed two things. Firstly, I’ve added the double ampersand between each command. This allows you to string together multiple commands that can run one after the other.
If you want to run the commands one at a time, you copy one command, paste it into the Linux command line interface (CLI), press return, and wait for it to run. For example, you might type ‘apt-get update’ into the CLI, then press return, and let it go until it completes. Then you would type ‘apt-get upgrade’, wait for that to complete, and then go on to the next command.
But I’ve strung them together, so you would type ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade’ and they would run one after the other. But I’ve also added an extra command in front of those: ‘sudo’. Sudo, in common language, lets the commands after it run as if they were typed by the superuser. But the cool thing is that you aren’t actually the superuser – it’s like getting most of the power of the superuser with the protection of normal user status. That is a little bit too technical for most of us, but all you have to know is that sudo lets you run commands with maximal potency and minimal risk.
I didn’t need to use sudo for ‘cd veriumMiner’, as that simply changes the working directory to ~/veriumMiner.
However, just because you strung together a bunch of commands doesn’t mean that the commands behave differently. They behave exactly the same way as they would if you entered them one at a time. So if user input is needed, the system will wait until user input is given. Once you run the commands as written above, you will soon come across a prompt to type ‘y’ or ‘n’. This should happen twice:
Because we included the command ‘cd veriumMiner’, we are in the sub-directory, ~/veriumMiner.
Remember that we started in our home directory:
The tilde is a shortcut for your home directory. In this example, I chose the username of miner, so if I typed the command ‘pwd’ (‘print working directory’), the returned value would be ‘/home/miner/veriumMiner’.
So, back to the main exercise. We are now in the ~/veriumMiner directory:
If you typed the command ‘ls’, you should see a list of all the items in ~/veriumMiner:
At this point, the miner has been downloaded, including all the dependent software packages, and compiled. It’s ready to go. However, we do need to get to the business of setting up an account with a mining pool. Thankfully this is very easy. Because I use a pool called Beertendr, that’s the example I’ll be using here.
Because this sort of thing is not complicated, we will go through the process quickly. Firstly, click on ‘Sign Up’ at the top right of the screen.
Next, enter your details. For now, you do not need a coin address.
Then you set up your workers. In general, one device or computer uses one worker. In my case I have had up to three separate devices mining on Beertendr. Because of that, I have set up three workers. One for a PC, one for an old Samsung tablet, and one for the cheap Android phone. Your workers are visible by going to My Account -> My Workers.
You’ll notice that none of them are active at this point. Worker passwords aren’t crucial to account security as far as I know. In fact, many pools either don’t require them or don’t use them. I recommend using them anyway, if you have the option.
So now you have an account with a mining pool, and you have at least one worker. There are three variables derived from that: your mining pool username, a worker name and a password for that worker. The miner does not ever ask for your account password, as that is completely unnecessary. It should be obvious, but you do not need to be logged into your pool for your pool account to be active.
So, now we have two things: a mining pool account and an installed mining app. Let’s go back to the shell prompt and type in the command and variables that will get the miner working. It will look something like this:
If you’re not used to seeing that kind of input, have a look at it more closely:
‘cpuminer’ is the command. The ‘./’ that precedes it tells Linux to run the following command (an executable file, or process, or application, or program) in the current working directory. Because cpuminer is not a part of the shell, you can’t just type it without the preceding dot-slash. The ‘-o’ specifies that the following variable will be the URL of the mining server. The ‘-O’ specifies that the following variables will be the username, workername and workername password, all in one statement.
Here is what I would type in to run cpuminer with my Beertendr account. My username is Panatomic, the workername is phone, and the workername has a password which is typed in after the colon. I have redacted the password:
There are some problems which you may encounter, depending on the phone you’re using. Sometimes when you copy and paste from an Android app into the Linux shell, the command may be 100% correct, but Linux returns an error. That’s because the system clipboard pastes extra characters into the shell that you may not notice. In this example, the clipboard pasted ‘\302\240’ (I blanked out the password) :
This was no doubt due to the fact that I typed the command into the notepad app and copied it from there. All you have to do is backspace part of the way, and then manually type the command to get it to work.
Assuming that everything was done correctly, once you tap enter, the miner should start. Mining crypto is full of frustrations, so be prepared to fail when you’re starting out. In fact, prepare to fail at all times. The rewards are not always going to seem worth it. But if you want to support the network, and earn some coins on the side, it is quite satisfying.
This is the sort of output you should see after you tap enter:
If you want to stop the miner, tap CTRL and then tap the c key. If the keyboard is hidden, just tap on the screen and it will appear. Linux will return ‘SIGINT received’ and you will be taken to the prompt.
You can run the miner in the background, or when the screen is locked. Most higher end phones should allow this by default. But on this phone that you see here, it’s not the case. It’s not a very high performance device, so by default, the miner will quit when you lock the screen or go to the home screen. However, there is a way around that. In settings, select Duraspeed, if it is available:
You will be given a number of options. The first thing to do is to deselect as many apps as you can. This will free up more resources for the miner. Or, at least, that’s what appears to be the case. Then, turn on Duraspeed:
Right, so because you turned on Duraspeed, the miner will continue to work when you are looking at other apps, or when the screen is locked. You may still get issues, however. In this case, Android is alerting me to the fact that the Maps app isn’t responding:
This is annoying, but it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that there is a problem with the miner. Just watch the screen, and if the miner appears to be working, you don’t have to do anything. Of course you probably should just tap on ‘Close app’ anyway. This may happen a lot, and you might get several alerts, stacked on top of each other. On certain occasions, the miner process will be killed, and you have to restart it. That’s actually easy to do, as you tap the up arrow key until the ./cpuminer… command comes up again, and then you just tap return.
And, perhaps every now and then, the process will be killed for no reason. But, maybe it’s just with cheap phones. I have a Samsung tablet from 2010 that has never shut down by itself. But its performance is so anemic that it’s almost not worth it except to test the concept. Thankfully it cost me very little money – a good example of taking an informed risk in op-shops.
Power consumption for most phones is very low, even though mining performance isn’t great either. But, higher end phones will offer much more performance and use either the same amount of electricity or only slightly more.
As an experiment, while the miner was running, I let the battery drain to 80%, then plugged in the phone’s charger to the mains. My domestic energy consumption meter returned a maximum of 3.8W. Then I turned off the screen and nothing changed. When the battery reached 100% charge, the energy meter returned the same value while the screen was on. Turning off the screen returned a maximum value of about 2.8W.
I hope to eventually write a similar tutorial for mining Monero with the new algorithm, Random X. For intermediate and expert users, that should be easy to do, based on the information I’ve outlined here. For those who aren’t so comfortable with this sort of thing, check back every couple of weeks, or just subscribe to the blog.
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