Revolution kicks off on NBC on September 17th, and I was planing to be watching it anyways because it is science fiction by J.J.Abrams. But after watching the trailer I had to mark it in my calendar so I don’t miss it; this one looks like fun.
It started out with Starship Sofa, a wonderful podcast that had both a news and a Radio Play segment. Later they added Tales to Terrify, with audio stories for the horror fans. They have now launched District of Wonders, which includes both of the aforementioned series as well as two new ones: Protecting Project Pulp with some wonderful gold and silver age SF and Fantasy stories from the pulp magazines, and Crime City Central, which is the same thing from the True Crime type pulps. Whether you prefer the individual sites or the aggregate collection, these are some classic and world class stories you will really want to hear for yourself. And if you like those, don’t forget to check out Holodeck Workshops if you are one of the aspiring writers out there. Thanks to SF Signal for the heads up on this one.
I don’t have a clue what this was doing posted on CultBox, nor do I care, really. This is an amazing video, and the music to go with it was an excellent selection.
They changed the name, but The Watch is about a neighborhood watch team that is out to protect their town from aliens from outer space… whether they are a danger to anyone or not. Somehow this one doesn’t really appeal to me, probably because I don’t find either Stiller or Vaughn more than boring. The plot seems to be an Americanized remake of Attack The Block except without the inter-character relationships that made the original film interesting. But it does have Richard Ayoade and Billy Crudup, and I suppose they might manage to save the movie.
It doesn’t look like we get any genre movies this week, so I thought I would mention the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about the award winning ten seat sushi restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo and the man that runs it.
We do a little better in TV this time, with both Touched By An Angel: The Complete Fifth Season and Touched By An Angel: Seasons 1 through 5. The show ran 9 seasons, so the latter set brings you to just past the halfway point. If you missed it when it originally aired it was quite a well done fantasy about helpful spirits. The other TV release is Sheena: The Complete Second Season, which completes the series which ran from 2000 to 2002. The original Sheena TV series ran in the 1950s, and both series were based on the comic book which ran from 1937 to 1953, the very first comic book series with a female protagonist. Wil Eisner and Jerry Iger created the character, which they based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1886 book She.
The anime release for this week is Golgo 13: The Professional, and that is more spy thriller than sci-fi or fantasy. It is also a re-release, the original feature length film came out in 1983. And yes, this is the movie, not the OVA.
A Tesla Coil is a transformer that is able to generating extremely large voltages, which allows it to throw huge but extremely short-live sparks. So what looks like one long spark is actually a bunch of sparks each second. As any musician with a scientific background will tell you, a given tone is a given frequency of vibration, producing each unique note. So by adjusting the sparks per second from the coil, different notes can be played. And that is exactly what they did in this video; enjoy!
The coil was invented by Nikola Tesla, who also invented AC power, the electric motor, the alternator, the generator, the audio speaker, radio (they took the patent away from Marconi when it turned out it was based on 17 of Tesla’s patents), the florescent light four years before Edison used brute force slave labor to invent the light bulb, and ever so much more which he patented. He also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy and the related wireless charging of batteries (a company finally figured out how to make a profit on that one a decade or so ago for all our portable electronics), Ball Lightning, Radar (it was WWII before anyone decided building that could be useful), and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with. Tesla has been one of my personal heroes since I was a kid, and if you don’t know about him it is time you learned.