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Earlier this week the audio/video production powerhouse AV Linux released it’s newest version, 6.0.3. This is a minor update, mostly focused on fixing bugs and updating software packages to the latest and greatest stable versions, but they did make one non-trivial change; they changed the default kernel to the 3.10.27-PAE low-latency build. This gives improved performance for all aspects of media capture and processing, but especially for PCI audio devices or firewire interfaces. Performance on older platforms and hardware is also enhanced by this change. Whatever type of multimedia creation and processing you were thinking of doing, this Live DVD has all the resources you need for every aspect of the production workflow. You can download the Torrent or the Image and burn it to disk to get your own free toolkit. After you have booted it from the DVD and had a chance to see just how complete the software collection included in this OpSys is, you can also install it to your hard drive if you so desire.

It is the end of the school year and time for graduation in Japan, a theme reflected in the latest video from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. The track is called Yume no Hajima Ring Ring, and is being released today; if her past releases are any indication, you should be able to pick it up on iTunes if you live in North America. And if you do live in North America, she is on a world tour at the moment, and will be playing in New York, Toronto, and Chicago in March.

There had been talk of the Wild Cards shared universe series being made into a TV show. It was to be a joint project between Universal Studios and Syfy, with Melinda Snodgrass doing the screenplay and her and George R. R. Martin executive producing the series. That announcement came out in 2011, and I haven’t heard a single mention of it since, so my hopes are getting pretty faded now. That is a shame, because the Wild Cards books are my favorite shared universe (the short stories) and mosaic novels, and was one of the first portrayals of super heroes as if they were real people with all the real life baggage that entails. Authors in the first 1986 volume included George R. R. Martin, Howard Waldrop, Roger Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Lewis Shiner,Victor Milan, Edward Bryant, and John J Miller. They re-released the original Wild Cards I in 2010 in an expanded edition with new stories from a handful of authors, including Carrie Vaughn. Volume 23 of the series is coming out soon, and it continues to be excellent.

The premise of the series is simple; aliens from outer space want to take over the Earth with all the buildings and infrastructure intact, but without all those pesky Humans around to dispute ownership with them. Or perhaps one renegade Mad Scientists from the aliens wants to use the human race as a testing ground to see how the virus they have created to rewrite DNA actually spreads through a live population. I tend to remember it both ways, since one plot line seemed to be the hidden agenda behind the other. Either way, a space ship arrived to carpet bomb the world with the infection just after WWII has ended. Except… WWII has just ended, and War In The Skies is something humans have gotten pretty good at. Especially Jet Boy, a normal person who has become, in Batman-esque fashion, the most dangerous person in the air. When the ship arrives at Earth and begins the bombing run, he immediately recognizes an attack pattern and starts fighting back. It is destroyed, but not before it drops a single viral bomb on NYC, and they both fall burning from the sky.

The sole virus delivery bomb to reach the ground wrecks unimagined destruction and havoc on the population of the City That Never Sleeps. 99 out of every 100 people die outright. Of the 1% of the survivors, 99 out of every 100 of them become Jokers, with twisted mutant bodies looking not very human at all, although about half of them have some power to compensate them for their loss. The final 1% of 1% become Aces; people with normal or enhanced appearance, and some superpower they can use for themselves. They break down another layer deep, because they are, after all, people. Some become heroes and champions of justice, some become villains, and others are only in it for themselves; like everyone through the ages, they have to decide who they each want to be.

I should mention that my favorite character from this series is Croyd, The Sleeper, and that he was created by one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny. Croyd isn’t like any other Joker or Ace; they are all who they are. Croyd, on the other hand, is only who he is at the moment. Once he falls asleep, he could wake up as anyone, Joker or Ace or Human, and that gives him a flavor no one else in this shared universe has. It also gives him a problem no one else has, with its own set of issues; such as being terrified of falling asleep, since he never knows who or what he might wake up as. The solution he usually chooses for that problem is to consume massive amounts of no-doze and other sleep avoiding chemicals, which has its own drawback. After the first 48 to 72 hours of being awake, one’s mind starts to get a bit flaky. When you hit one week of being awake, you have begun to enter the realm of the psychotic, and things go rapidly downhill from there. So even when he starts out as one of the Aces with full superpowers and an intention of doing only good, within a week or so he is doing demented things with no rhyme or reason, and LOTS of unintended consequences.

And that is just one character and his basic issues. Wait until you meet Tom Tudbury, the Great and Powerful Turtle, who’s lineage appears as the House of Tudbury in George’s Game of Thrones series. Every author who came to play in the Wild Cards shared universe created one or more characters, and every character was a human being first with all that might entail, and a hero or monster second, using their abilities to write their personal self large on the world stage.

You can, of course, read any book in the series as a stand alone volume, but you will get a lot more out of it if you gather a selection of the books in a specific subset and read them all in a row. For myself, I would recommend starting with the first one in the set, Wild Cards, and then continuing through the next 9 volumes. If you have done that already, grab the second set starting at volume 11 and read from there. Often a set of 3 book will tell a complete story, even when it is a subset of a larger arc; each book is self contained, but the first 3 books are a single story, residing inside the first 10 book story arc, as an example.

Want to read a few of the stories online for free, before you decide if you should dive into this shared universe? Tor has made a number of them available, so here are a few to check out:

When We Were Heroes by Daniel Abraham
The Rook by Melinda Snodgrass
Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan by Carrie Vaughn
The Elephant in the Room by Paul Cornell
The Button Man and the Murder Tree by Cherie Priest

Drop by George R. R. Martin’s Blog to catch up on a lot of the news and ongoing details.

Topping the list this week is the long awaited Odd Thomas, the Dean Koontz masterwork series now in Movie format (at least the first volume). There are also Webisodes of Odd Thomas you might enjoy. While it opened last week at an extremely limited number of theaters, The Wind Rises goes into wide release this week. The latest creation of Hayao Miyazaki is a biography for once, the story of a real person who designed some of the most innovative airplanes in the world for his time. It is up for an Academy Award for best animated feature film, you have this brief opportunity to see it on the big screen. Even though it is a Japanese production, this is animation, not anime; like all Studio Ghibli works it is very much in the style of Walt Disney. Even though it isn’t genre, Stalingrad looks like a very unusual WWII movie you might want to take note of, and catch if you are in one of the towns it is playing in.

We actually have a decent assortment of programs this week, for the first time in a while. In movies, Thor: The Dark World leads us off with yet another excellent entry into the Avengers Universe franchise. The previous film promised, and this one delivered. Gravity is no slouch itself, up for a boatload of awards, an adventure set against the most amazing background of all. Ice Soldiers is about human genetic engineering by governments gone wild, a Canadian creation that owes a lot to the Cold War mentality some people are still hanging onto. Finally, Mr. Nobody might be the most powerful story of the collection for this week, and is certainly worth exploring. If you never make a choice, anything is possible.

In TV, there really is only one choice this time around: Search was a sci-fi spy cult classic back in 1972, and even though lots of aspects of it are dated now, a ton of its revelations became the future we are still in today.

In Anime, Appleseed XIII: Tartaros & Ouranos pits anti-clone terrorists bent on bombing their post-apocalyptic paradise into oblivion against the cyborgs and biodroids defending civilization. In this series from Sci-Fi mastermind Masamune Shirow, creator of Ghost In The Shell, we once again get an opportunity to explore the range of possible options humanity faces as it grows into everything it might become, and still be called human. Dallos is a tale of the lunar rebellion, when the Helium 3 miners had finally had enough of their economic enslavement and fought for their freedom. This one is a 4 episode OVA, not a full season of a series, and is from Osii Mamoru, another well known science fiction author and creator. A lot of folks credit this as the very first OVA ever made back in 1983, which gives it its own unique place in Anime history. It is also debated whether 1995’s Mighty Space Miners 2 OVA story is a direct descendent of the original series, but it is also being re=released this week.

Blast of Tempest: Complete 2nd Season sees Hakaze jump back in time to find the truth behind Aika’s death, only to hear something unexpected from Aika himself. Is the present meant to turn out this way after all, or is there something more behind events? Meanwhile, in Di Gi Charat: Winter Garden, the most powerful Earth magic hits the alien Princess hard, as she discovers her future is not as set in stone as she thought it was. Finally, in K: Complete Collection, Shiro will have to evade the clans of seven powerful kings and desperately try to prove his innocence before they all manage to kill him.

Even though it isn’t genre, I also have to mention Love, Election & Chocolate as some serious silliness!