I am gearing up for the New Year celebration tonight, so to keep it easy I thought I would pass along a couple of gems from AMNH, the American Museum of Natural History. But first, I need to send my congratulations to Action Flick Chick for winning this years Women of the Web competition.
Mur Lafferty has a blog posting today about a special fund raiser to help Spider and Jeanne Robinson; she has cancer, and 100% of the money collected for this ebooks sales will go directly to the medical expenses. You only have until tomorrow to contribute, so please respond quickly.
In Austin, TX, this weekend brings IkkiCon, three days of Anime and Japanese culture. The musical guests include The Browncoats, kind of hard-rock filk. My vote for favorite event name: Steampunkapalooza!
Also this weekend, MagFest takes place in Alexandria, VA, a game and music con. This year they have 12 bands preforming, four per day.
No new film fests again this week, but if you haven’t seen it yet, let me point you to Bobby Llewellyn’s LlewTube web site. This site is where he keeps his Car Pool programs, a unique format in which he drives around with his guest and interviews them. He isn’t wearing the Kryten head gear, but his trademark humor shines through.
For those who haven’t seen Amanda Palmer’s Gaga, Palmer, Madonna, here it is… be sure to comment on YouTube, and join your voice to over a thousand others.
No new SciFi movies this week (that I can find, at least), but the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus goes wide next week, opening beyond NY and LA to how up just about everywhere. In the meantime, Sherlock Holmes is worth seeing more than once…
These came along just a hair too late to take advantage of the holiday gift giving season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some wonderful selections available.
From the world of Live Action, A Princess of Mars goes into public release. This is a Hi-Jack Movie example, starring Tracie Lords, not to be confused with John Carter of Mars coming out in 2012, even though the first story in ERB’s Mars series was The Princess of Mars.
Also in Live Action, Lesbian Vampire Killers is being released in the US under the shortened name Vampire Killers. The cast includes a former Doctor, Paul McGann, and if you were wondering they kill lesbian vampires, rather than being lesbians who kill vampires (that’s a different movie).
The dark animation of the film 9 puts Shane Acker onto a playground dominated by Tim Burton stories, with rag dolls out to save the world after the apocolyps strikes.
From the Anime choices, the one I have been waiting for is Genshiken 2 volume 3, which completes the third series of The Society For The Study Of Modern Visual Culture. This is the true Otaku Anime series, as the fact that each volume includes an episode of the story the characters are watching on TV tends to tell you. And yes, that means on the Genshiken series disks they had the Kujibiki Unbalance OVA episodes built in as extras to the disks. When they followed that up with the second series, Kujibiki Unbalance (official page HERE, in case you want to grab any extra videos or radio play goodies), the Genshiken OVA was embedded in the extras. I assume the Kujibiki OVA 2 files are embedded in the Gensiken 2 disks (I don’t know, since I haven’t bought them yet), but I was sad to learn there would be no boxed set of the third series.
Season 1, part two of Dragonaut comes out this week. To avoid Earth’s impending destruction from an extinction level event (an asteroid impact from a rock many kilometers along each axis), a Dragon’s Egg has been cloned and grown, the resulting DRAGONs paired up with human pilot astronAUTs. But as with any good plot line, there are complications (it would be boring otherwise), and as I really liked what they did in the first half of the season, I look forward to seeing how this works out.
And then there is Baccano, the Copmplete Series, a truely unique anime with almost as many primary charactors as there are episodes. While it starts out a bit confusing, the various story lines all come together by the end of the series as long as you pay attention. This one is worth the price of admission, and very much worth getting all at once, since you have no time to forget various subplot details while waiting for the next disk to be released.
There is also season 2 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle coming out with this Tuesdays collect of Anime TV series. This one is the companion series for XxxHolic.
FYI, there are a few leaning-to-documentary programs I should mention here, like Time Warp 2, for the Science crowd (of which I am a member). But I won’t.