This animated short is too adorable for words! The audio is Moses Supposes from 1952’s Singing In The Rain, the animation itself is very well done. Thanks to GoBoiano for the heads up on this one, and thanks to Bowing for doing the animation and posting it. At least it looked like he was one of the creators when I fed his statements through Google Translate.
The winner this week may be The Space Between Us, about the first person born on Mars. When he returns to visit the Earth, find his father, and meet the first new people in his life, they discover his body can not handle the environment. We also get Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, the second movie in the Steven Chow series.
The Western releases are all animated this time around. Justice League Dark has Batman teaming up with various DC heroes with supernatural powers to fight a demonic assault on Earth. It seems like Dreamwork’s Trolls was just in the theaters, but now it is coming out on Disc as well. I should also mention Disney is re-releasing 1940’s Pinocchio in Blue Ray format, for those who appreciate classic animation.
In Anime God Eater Pt 2 is the second half of a 12 episode series, but with a list price of $89 for 6 episodes, I will be watching it on Daisuki or Crunchyroll until the distributor comes to their senses. Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz continues the Magical Girls story begun in season 1, where the unasked-for powers continue to turn the most mundane tasks into adventures to be survived. I don’t think this last one is really genre, but the story line of Shomin Sample: The Complete Series is off the wall enough to be considered fantasy, so I am including it here.
Earlier this week I mentioned the upcoming North American theatrical release of Your Name, and included the main theme by RADWIMPS. I thought this was a good opportunity to share a few other of their many songs, the first of which is the 2017 version of Iin Desu Ka, AKA Is That OK?, recorded just a few weeks ago. The next track is KigÅ to Shite or As a Sign from December of 2015, the third is their 2009 song The Mind, the last is 2011’s With You and Sheep and Blue, or close to that. The band’s been around since 2001 and got their first major record deal in 2005, and have released a lot of music over the years. If you like what you hear, there is a lot more of it to track down and listen to.
Over at Deviant Art the creator Breath Art has posted some excellent images of the Planets as Stained Glass in his Solar System series. I am putting a few here to give you the idea, you can click one to go directly to that images page. These are absolutely amazing, you should go take a look at the entire collection.
solar system:Saturn by breath-art on DeviantArt
solar system:Jupiter by breath-art on DeviantArt
The folks at Blitab have created a tablet with a touch screen to search and select with, but it is not the main display. Instead it translates text from the Web and other digital sources into Braille at about 65 words per display (depending on what you are reading). There have been Braille display devices for a while, but they have been limited to a single line which can only hold about 5 words on average by moving rigid pins up and down to form each letter. They also cost thousands of dollars. The Blitab Braille display uses layers of fluids and a special proprietary membrane they aren’t talking about to form an entire screen’s worth of words, and when they finish refining it they plan to put it on sale in the fall for around $500. Using it 8 hours a day to read will give you a battery life of 5 days, a discharge rate I wish my own tablet could match. This has the potential to open up a lot of the online world and its resources to the visually impaired at an affordable price in a way that has never been available to them before. There is a similar project in development at the University of Michigan, but so far it is mostly in the research stage. Thanks to the MIT Technology Review for the heads up on this one.