The folks doing the Japan Night Tour in the US just announced the addition of a few more bands. The new bands are Dirty Old Men and Special Thanks, added to a list that already included Detroit 7, FLiP, Omodaka, Samurai Attack, and many more. The tour kicks off in Austin, TX, at the South by Southwest Festival, then hits other cities, including New York, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and LA. Here is a taste…
I stopped by the KADOKAWA Anime channel, and the focus is on the new Haruhi Wii game released in Japan on Thursday. Based on the video the game play looks a bit simple, but perhaps that is just level one. Word is that the Kadokawa site will be streaming the first episode of season two of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan at 10PM on February 13th. That is Tokyo time, convert for your local time zone. The group at LITA, the Library and Information Technology Association (part of the American Library Association), has put together a video singing the praises of the Hi-Fi Sci-Fi Library and posted it on Libraryman. Nerdcore at its finest!
Neil Gaiman’s story The Day The Saucers Came is online for free reading. It is a wonderful little short story (or perhaps a poem), and the illustrations are perfect for the tale. And here is the first Coraline trailer Neil himself likes…
Wall-E got several nominations, including Best Animated, where its main competition is Kung Fu Panda. Hell Boy II only got one category (Makeup), and Iron Man and Wanted only a few each. Dark Knight did noticeably better, but the two runaways are Benjamin Buttons and Slumdog Millionaire. I will be watching this years Acadamy Awards with interest, as always.
This is a tool we should all have in our arsenal: Portable Apps, the ability to take any open source program and use it anywhere the mood strikes us. Just because using any program wasn’t enough, using that same program in any operating system is even more important. For the final tweak, you should be able to use it from any local launch platform; the two most important being a Memory Stick and a LiveCD. This system does all of that, built in. Then it gives you a simple programing environment to add your own additional software, modify the basic environment (wallpaper, sounds, security protection, etc.), and otherwise make it your own. It comes pre-bundled with some very powerful software, like FileZilla, The Gimp, and NVU Portable. Then it gives you some more build-your-own tools, like Virtual Dub and WinMerge. My favorite bit, is it is dirt simple to add your own open-source programs to the arsenal; see the Development Guide for specifics.
It looks like there will be Science Fiction at Sundance this year, not one but three films. The news is a little late, since the festival itself started on the 15th, and the story was posted nine hours ago; but the films themselves look very worth checking out. Moon is told from the perspective of the single human (and his robot, voiced by Kevin Spacey) on the Lunar base. Cold Souls sounds to have something of the sensibility of Being John Malkovich meets Kiln People, with Paul Giamatti playing himself and loosing his soul to Russian smugglers, but not in the way you would expect. Finally, The Clone Returns Home rounds out this trio with a story about memory and family and all that comes with it. I am going to have to watch for these on IFC’s Video On Demand, since they probably won’t play to every theater in the country.