The latest teaser trailer from this franchise is just as amazing as you knew it would be, and I am so ready for Star Trek Into Darkness. And Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain has so nailed Picard’s voice, channeling him for a whole new layer of New Universe twistedness.
Tom Hanks showed up recently on the late night talk show hosted by Craig Ferguson and briefly discussed Doctor Who. Based on this my best guess is he saw a Tom Baker episode involving the Daleks, got completely confused, and never watched another episode. Of course, it would have been even more amusing had he said the Doctor was the British equivalent of Captain Picard, but I take my amusement where I can find it.
A quite tasty series of givaways centering around the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary have begun, and you can join in over at BBC America’s Anglophenia site. This week’s entry runs until midnight Saturday, the 8th of December; they are looking for your favorite quote from the new season seven opening episode, Asylum of the Daleks. But just giving them the quote isn’t what helps you win; you have to tell them WHY it was your favorite quote, and looking at the answers already posted, it looks like a very stiff conpetition indeed. The prizes are itunes downloads and bragging rights, and this weeks winner gets the Best of Christmas Specials program; good luck!
This sounds a lot more like a commercial than I would normally share here, but the concept is unique; using a small spherical robot as a real time marker for your 3D Augmented Reality character to manifest on. This gives you flexibility and mobility not previously available to interact with your environment. While the usage they are targeting is within a game, the potential applications range far beyond that.
For instance, this could be used as a personal tour guide in a museum, slaved to a GPS, a museum map, and an extensive database of facts on each exhibit, along with speech recognition processing. It would be able to answer your every question about any exhibit in great detail. Or linked to the camera and a library of geometry and trigonometry functions, you could use nearby buildings and moving vehicles to learn various math functions with literally real world examples, and again query the system to get a full understanding of what you were learning, with your virtual tutor traveling your city or town with you.
OK, for the outdoor applications you might want to carry a pocketful of the round robots with you, to replace the ones crushed under city bus tires or swept into storm drains by sudden showers as you go along. But those bots are extremely simple, and after another 6 months of producing them ought to become quite cheep as well, making their use in such environments quite cost effective. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the heads up on this one.
There are several choices this weekend, although none of them are the action/adventure I tend to look forward to at this time of year. Bad Kids Go to Hell is The Breakfast Club meets The Ring, and there is something about the trailer that makes me think that was exactly how it was pitched to get the funding to make it. Based on the graphic novel of the same name, this is a comedy/thriller.
Dino Time is a time travel jaunt into the world of T-Rex and friends, and the kids who make the ride don’t have much time to figure out how to get home again. The animation looks quite good in this joint US/Korean production, with CJ Entertainment doing the art and story, and the US supplying some quality voice talent. I have found at least one source that believes the release date will be January 1st and another from a few days ago listed as Unknown, but most everybody else is pointing to this Friday.
Top movie spot this time obviously goes to The Dark Knight Rises, but if you don’t have any of the Nolan collection yet you can also pick up The Dark Knight Trilogy and save some money over getting them individually. While I can not recommend the other super hero movie coming out this week anywhere near as highly, Elf-Man should be good fun for families with small children. And for completeness on the super hero front I should also mention the Power Rangers Super Samurai: The Complete Season.
The only TV release worth mentioning this time is Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXV, with yet more silly commentary tracks overlaid on some of the worst movies ever made. I actually enjoy watching these with a group of friends, because everyone in the room starts making comments trying to out-do the ones on the DVD, which can get very entertaining.
The western animation selection this time is machinema, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn.
In anime, Bleach The Movie: Hell Verse is a rescue mission for Ichigo’s sisters, to get them out of Hell and back to Karakura town. Mashiroiro Symphony: The Color of Lovers complete collection is a war of the sexes anime TV series, in which two schools, one for girls and one coed, are merged. The amusing results are generated by the women at the exclusively feminine school who don’t want to see the boys invade there campus. As near as I can tell there are no ghosts, elves, aliens, robots (giant or otherwise), mutants, cat girls, trans-dimensional visitors, time travelers, or any other kind of genre characters in this series. But at least it is a comedy, and I happen to like comedies. Umineko: When They Cry is the third season of this anime franchise to make it to the US. If you liked the earlier ones, this should also be interesting. I should comment that the pictures on the web site bare no resemblance to the plot description, so I hope I got the link right.