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This time a few tracks from the band Androp out of Japan. The first song is One from their third full length album, Period. The other track is Voice from their 3rd single. They have a lot of other good music worth your time to check out.

The folks over at Crunchyroll have announced that they will be streaming the new Sword Art Online II beginning on July 5th. As usual, that pretty much means you get to see it an hour after it airs in Tokyo if you are a premium member, and one week later for everybody else. This is a great show with a large audience, I am looking forward to finding out if they keep up the quality level in the new series.

There is an Indie Game Maker Contest that starts today and runs to the end of June, and the software to build your game is available dirt cheap this week only. The grand prize is $10,000, and the development system and the games run on Steam, for the best in online game play. To get your game development software hit the Humble Bundle site and pay what you think is fair for the package. They have tiers for those who exceed a certain minimum, with more content added as various levels are passed, but those amounts are very small. In addition, every project Humble Bundle has on offer is tied to a couple of charities, and you can select who gets what percentage of your purchase/donation. This is another variation on crowd funding, and one that I have been really impressed with, since it allows you to access some excellent stuff (including a Book selection for those of us addicted to reading) for not a lot of money. Their offerings change every week, which does put you under something of a time constraint, so you might want to consider joining their mailing list to be reminded each time new stuff comes out. I should also mention that Steam also provides the Steam Workshop, where you can learn how to create, and then upload and share your own game content for games like Duke Nukem 3D, Lords of Football, Skyrim, Legend of Grimrock, Left 4 Dead II, and a few hundred others. Any of these projects is worth checking out; all of them together? That’s a no-brainer in my book.

The folks over at Viz have licensed not only the new Sailor Moon series, but all the original series as well. They are bringing the classic ones back, uncut and unedited for the first time to North America. You will be able to buy them on DVD/Blue Ray combo packages put out two box sets per series, or you can watch them streaming on Hulu and Neon Alley. with two more episodes each week. By the time they are done, they will have put out a full 200 episodes of the various original series, and without editing out any of the dialog or relationships deemed not appropriate for a Saturday morning cartoon show. Heck, they are even keeping the character’s actual names this time, rather than changing them to something American. The first handful of episodes are already on line, with more coming every Monday. Thanks to the folks at Otaku USA for the heads up on that one, who got it from Anime News Network.

OK, maybe just the teaser-trailer, but Big Hero 6 does look like a fun ride. The 3D modeling/animation software the boy is playing with to create his robot looks like the kind of interface the animators used to make the movie, which makes sense. You use what you know to create, after all, and today’s animator certainly knows 3D modelling software. This has to have one of the first uses of 3D Printing I have seen in a cartoon, but that should happen more often now that the technology has gotten cheap enough that ordinary hobbyists can afford them for casual use. I should mention the Big Hero 6 Game, and the fact that there are Anime tropes embedded all over this feature, putting it solidly in the J-Pop Culture category. I find that kind of interesting for a Disney project; perhaps they are missing the recently retired Miyazaki. Then again, the film is based on the Marvel Graphic Novel of the same name, which takes place in Japan and is itself a non-stop tribute to Otaku culture and sensibilities. The premise is the Giri (a secret consortium of government and private sector interests) decides it needs its own set of superheroes, and sets out to create them. A 13 year old super genius they try to recruit wants nothing to do with them, until his mother is kidnapped by Everwraith, the spiritual remains of everyone killed in the 1945 nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acting as a kind of group poltergeist.

As far as I know is the first Marvel property to get the full Disney Animation treatment. I don’t count Motion Comics as full animation, no matter how many of the same tricks are used in Anime to make the productions less expensive to create. I am looking forward to this one, which should be in theaters on November 7th.

It get’s its world premier in L.A. on Wednesday, but on Friday Maleficent is on big screens everywhere. Another Disney prequel, this time about the evil witch who cursed the newborn in Sleeping Beauty, only to realize later she may have made a mistake. If you are looking for something funnier (notice I didn’t say lighter, since it is just as dark) there is A Million Ways to Die in the West. The trailers have been funny as hell, and the theme song is an instant classic. I am thinking I need to see both of them this weekend, although if I only have time to see one, I think the comedy is going to win out.