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Something to Watch: DVDs

The movie worth checking out this week is Priest, an action film based on the graphic novel of the same name. Kind of a vampire post-apocalypse western, the vampires are hungry and the clergy are heavily armed.

In TV, Outcasts: Season One could also be called The Entire Series, since it got cancelled before it had finished airing in the UK, and well before it was brought to the US by BBC America. Which is sad, because even though it started out slow, by the end of the season they had built up quite a powerful storyline that just got better with each episode. Also out this week is both season 5, and the entire series to date (seasons 1 through 5) box sets of Dexter, a program that is just strange enough to be genre itself.

There doesn’t seem to be any interesting genre Anime coming out this week unless I missed something. For western animation, there is Batman The Brave & the Bold: Season 2, Part 1, which seems a bit Saturday morning cartoon-like to me.

Bunraku US release

It wasn’t that long ago that I commented on the Bunraku movie showing at Otakon and making the film festival rounds, with a link to the Bunraku homepage. We now have release dates for those of us not able to catch it at a Film Fest. On September 1st it becomes available on VOD (Video On Demand) for home viewing, on September 30th it hits the big screen across the country in at least a limited run basis, and on November 1st you can bring this puppy home as a DVD or Blu-Ray. From everything I have been hearing, this is a fitting successor to Kung Fu Hustle but with a more international cast; I can’t wait!

Space Elevator update

Physicist Michio Kaku, the originator of Sci-Fi Science on the Discovery Channel, recently got together with The Daily and explained the latest advances that may finally make the Space Elevator a real possibility.

Like space stations and airlocks, this is another space technology originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky back in 1895, long before most of his contemporaries consider space as someplace you would go. Along with Germany’s Hermann Oberth and America’s Robert H. Goddard, Russia’s Tsiolkovsky completed the trio who invented rocketry and astronautics, paving the way for today’s modern space programs from around the world.

With the development of Buckey Tubes (Named after Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic structure they use, they also named Fullerines aka Buckey Balls after him), or carbon nanotubes as they are also known, we finally have a material both light enough and strong enough to build the elevators. At the moment we can only build Buckey Tubes in small batches, so they are used for things like Biochip interfaces, Nano Radio control systems and other microscopic to nanoscopic scale projects. But now that we have been building them for such applications for the last decade or so, we are beginning to ramp up he production batch sizes, so the space elevator may be able to begin serious construction in another decade or 3. Thanks to the Science News Blog for the heads up on this one.

Metroid Music download

If you have been playing games for a while, you have no doubt run across the classic platform shooter Metroid, which has been around since 1986. According to the folks a Crunchyroll, in honor of the games 25th anniversary there has been an album recorded of the themes from various versions of it called Harmony of a Hunter, and released as a free download from ShineSparkers. A lot of the music is in what I think of as the 8 Bit Boogie format but some is in Metal, Chiptune, and Dubstep. Thee is currently no physical media you can buy, but if they get enough response on the download they are considering releasing it on disc. Considering how key to the franchise the game music has been since the beginning, I think this is an excellent tribute. Be aware, if you download the whole side files (which shows just how old school the creators are: each “whole side” disk is the normal 16 or so minutes long of the traditional vynal record album), the songs slide from one into the next with a cross fade between them. If you want the songs as stand alone so you need only add the ones you like to your playlist, you will want to download the individual tracks.

Marvel Superhero on Castle

According to the folks at io9, next season will see a Marvel Superhero on Castle sometime in the next season. I am having a hard time imagining who it could be, because Castle is a reality based series; it has to be someone without actual superpowers, or perhaps an actor playing an actor in a costume playing a superhero, if that isn’t too recursive. It should be fun, whatever it is.

Lifetime SIGGRAPH: Charles Csuri

Congratulations to Charles Csuri for receiving the 2011 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. As far back as the 1960s he was introducing computers to artists and art to programmers, creating computer art and animations, and creating curriculum’s that would teach those skills to others. Any one who has been to the movies over the past 30 years has seen the results of his work in CGI special effects and animation, but it was equally important to the development of computer sciences, resulting in advances in flight simulators, computer-aided design, architecture, magnetic resonance imaging, and the visualization of scientific phenomena. The 2011 SIGGRAPH Conference is going on this week in Vancouver; check the video for some highlights of the presentations.