According to Famous Monsters, Kage Baker is dead. She created a wonderful world of time travel at The Company, and according to hints at her formerly author maintained home page there may still be some stories to come from that universe. If you are not yet familiar with Dr. Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company, you have some excellent reading ahead of you.
Not really; there don’t seem to be any new genre films hitting the big screen this week, although Shutter Island could be interesting. So you might want to take this weekend and see one of the films that recently came out that you haven’t caught yet. I was planning to see Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, as I hadn’t dug out from the snow last weekend, and based on the trailer it looks like something you really want to see on the big screen.
For live action, 20th Century Boys 2: The Last Hope, part 2 in the trilogy, is the clear import winner for this week. The gang continues to do their best to save the world from improbable attacks, and succeeds even against the scriptwriters assaults. The sad part is, staying true to the original Manga is what bogged the story telling down, but they got it going again in time to retrieve the film. If they shoot some properly selected extra scenes, they even have a chance to redeem the slower parts of the movie; I for one would love to purchase a Directors Cut version of the DVD that brought it all back into center focus.
Loosely based on the game of the same name, the movie Zombie Apocalypse is hardly worth mentioning here. But there don’t seem to be any other US movies worth commenting on, so there it is.
In the realm of animation, there are actually a few good choices this time round, from rather diverse sources, and in somewhat different styles. If you can only get one of them, I recommend Shaun The Sheep – A Woolly Good Time, created by the team that brought you the various Wallace and Grommet movies. There is little to no dialog in these animations, and everything is G rated, but neither of those details will prevent you from laughing your ass off. These 6 episodes appear to be from the 2007 run of the Brit TV series.
Halo Legends gives you seven stories from the gaming universe that go beyond the original Red-Vs-Blue structure I loved so much. The animation itself borders on Machinima, blurring the lines between the 3D game enviro and that of the animation studio.
I can’t believe I am missing Farpoint again, and only realized it because of the Farpoint Hashtag running rampant through the folks I am following on Twitter! Not only is it one of the best Fan-run Cons ever, it takes place within an hours drive of where I live! Of course, even if I had remembered I would have missed it this year, because I seem to have broken my foot while fighting my way free of the Snopocalypse. Project for the weekend: build a database of events I don’t want to miss on one of my home computers, and set it up to propagate automatically to a few select servers. Project for next weekend: set up one module on every server farm in my cluster to spam me across all the devices I own one month in advance of every event in the local database, and resend the alert once a week until the event happens. Who knows, perhaps by 2020 I will stop missing events from ignorance, and only miss them for actual reasons.
This is a wonderful compilation of Star Trek: TNG segments, with the first iteration rumored to be a two minute long blooper reel assembled by Gene Roddenberry himself. As you can see, it has grown a bit since then, evolving into this 10 minute presentation called The Sexed Generation. But after that, I went looking for variations, and found a few…
Thanks to the folks at Sci-Fi Geeks for the initial heads up on this one. They were also the place I first learned Korea upgraded Avatar to 4D, adding 30 physical effects to the movie (including moving seats and the smell of explosives), because 3D was just not good enough.
I love Steampunk, but mostly it seems to be a European kind of thing, although the US had a major hand to play in it between Edison and Tesla. But did you know Japan had its own real-life Steampunk roots, just like the western cultures? I am not referring to the modern Steampunk instances, like the many Animes (Fullmetal Alchemist, Last Exile, and Steamboy being my personal favorite examples). But the roots of Steampunk, the technology that Could Have Been, had things gone a bit different (and yes, that is Paratime again). The best examples of true Japanese Steampunk I have found so far are in the realm of Karakuri; 16th through 18th century Japanese robots.
For a basic introduction to the topic I can think of no better example than I, Karakuri, a wonderful short explanation of both the concept (dolls that would surprise/trick observers by preforming human actions, such as serving tea, while hiding the mechanical bits that allowed them to do so; the humans would suspect an animating spirit, rather than a device, back in those days) and the history of the technology (watches imported by the Portuguese in the 1500’s, reverse engineered and by the early 1600’s the Edo period craftspeople had developed them into mechanical wonders to rival any cuckoo clock Switzerland ever dreamed up). These were developed completely independently of the similar proto-robots in Europe, and had a different style and sensibility even if the mechanical functionality was the same.
The Japan Foundation and MIT Singapore have both done live presentations on Karakuri in the last few years. KaraKuri Info is another great source of information on the background and history of this unique robot lineage, which is enjoying a renewed interest by modern robot inventors in Japan.
If you want to build your own, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can pick up a kit for the Karakuri Gakken tea serving doll from Maker Shed or other similar outlets, and the detailed instructions at Make Zine can guide you through the steps needed to create one of your own. There are kits for a few of the others, of which the most amazing (and expensive) may be the Bow Shooting Boy doll, but they may no longer be available.
While these are dolls, in the sense of being something made out of wood or plastic that looks like a person, they are also actual robots. Hard to believe because there are no computer chips in the device? True, but the logic is built in at the mechanical level, allowing them If/Then/Else choices even without the silicon chips. That means they can be programmed just like any other robots to follow out a sequence of instructions, with any given action only taken when the preset conditions are met (such as turning around and heading back to the tea pot when the weight of an empty tea cup is placed on its tray). The main difference comes when you want to reprogram it; instead of typing or uploading a new sequence of instructions, the gears, shafts, and spindles have to be changed for a set that processes the new logic and decision tree. Brutal but true: reprogramming means rebuilding!
If you have a hard time imagining how that works, the simplest example to explain the process comes from Europe of the same era; the music box. In 1600 Geneva or Paris, if you wanted your portable music player to play a different song, you put a different metal cylinder into it and wound the spring. As the spring unwound the bumps sticking out of the cylinder pushed and released against the differently tuned metal tongues, playing a pre-programed sequence of tones. While the music box did not have mechanical logic circuits built in (at least not until you got up to the ones installed in church towers), it did go through a prerecorded sequence of instructions to create a desired result without needing human supervision. Thus Automation was born.
There are also some inexpensive paper variations available, if you are trying to interest your young child in moving mechanicals, like the Karakuri Teeter Totter Robot or the Smoking Robot. These are not actual robots, and have no logic built in, but they are entertaining psudo-automatons that move when you crank the handle and demonstrate some basic principles of mechanical animation.
This week, I thought I would mention a few Science Fiction Museum Exhibits that look like fun. Like Festivals, Museum Exhibits have a limited life span (usually 3 to 9 months) before they are off to another location. Another similarity is the difficulty of finding the things on display (be they films or objects) outside of those venues, at least for a time. Should I call it Rare Ephemeral Things To Do… nope, too cumbersome, and only true sometimes, I am sure.
There are a ton of things I could point to about the various Air and Space Museum locations, like the POP Observatory or the fact that you can still see the IMAX versions of Star Trek 11 or A Night At The Museum in the theaters on the Mall and at Dulles. But what I would like to mention is the ray gun exhibit out by the airport; it is amazing. It is in the room just behind the hall where the original space suit developed by balloonist Jean Piccard (name stolen for the TNG captain) is on display.
If you are in D.C. for that, you will also want to stop by the National Geographic Terracotta Warriors exhibit, where you can meet up close and personal some of the 2,000 year old statues that have guarded the Emperor (and were more recently seen in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Another Museum Exhibit to be aware of is the Maidens and Monsters presentation, running now through April 18th, 2010, at the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens in Winter Park, Florida. While the Polasec Museum has a lot going on, this display is something special, with original artwork by N.C. Wyeth, J. Allen St. John, Frank Frazetta, Virgil Finley, Hannes Bok, and many others. These paintings, posters, pastels, and other formats became some of the best known covers of Sci-Fi pulp magazines from the 20s to the 90s; get a glimps here of the wonders in this exhibit. Oh, and did I mention that while you are there you can also play a Theremin?
Touring for a few years now, Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television, organized by the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, runs from the 6th of February until the 16th of May, 2010, at the Orange County History Center in California. With outfits from the Wizard of Oz, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, and Star Wars, this is a display no Cosplayer can afford to miss!