I have been waiting for Pacific Rim for quite a while, and finally It Is Gojira Season! We get to don our Giant Mecha suits and battle the monsters head on, at least in the virtual universe of the big screen. I fully expect to be completely entertained by this one, and will probably come home only to spend the rest of the day being fully immersed in more Giant Mecha excitement.
The movie The Host was a surprisingly enjoyable story of alien invasion, sort of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters redone as a fem-centric YA story with an ending based on collaboration rather than conquest. Which makes sense, since it is also a romance, but much better done than the authors other movie series with all the sparkly vampires.
In TV we have season 4 of Warehouse 13, a fun little series full of artifacts with strange powers. Too bad Eureka isn’t still around to go with it, I loved the crossover episodes they did.
In Anime, Blue Exorcist: Complete 1st Season is the ultimate in inter-generational infighting; Th son is becoming a world-class exorcist going after demons. The father is Satan, infiltrating his minions into the world of humans. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack! is more scientific, with mechanically augmented sea creatures attacking the land dwellers. Our protagonist leaves Okinawa and heads to Tokyo to see if her boyfriend is OK, only to discover the city overrun by the mechanized monsters.
There was a Discworld game that came out way back in 1995, and as such games do, it had a collection of 8 bit music. It also had Eric Idle doing the voice of Rincewind, which I think is a brilliant bit of casting, and Jon Pertwee doing a whole lot of the other voices. It was based on Terry Pratchett’s book Guards, Guards! but somehow wound up with Rincewind instead of Vimes in charge. If you still have the game you no doubt need a legacy system to play it on, but thanks to Sorek142 you can still listen to the soundtrack, or at least the incidental music, from the various scenes. Note that does not include Eric Idle’s song That’s Death, ranked by PC Gamer as among The best songs in PC gaming in 2010, because that was on the Discworld II game.
A wonderfully creative person in Second Life by the name of Janeel Kharg has actually built a virtual version of Ankh-Morpork, with all kinds of interesting details, hidden ways, goodies and giveaways. Be sure to pick up a free map when you arrive so you can find your way around. To get there, use this SLURL. There are also some excellent Discworld Avatars available at the sim, which you can look at here.
Today is the opening ceremony at the NADWCon, or North American Discworld Con, in Baltimore, MD. Obviously Sir Terry Pratchett is the Guest of Honor, but a lot of other folks will be there as well, including another favorite satirical author of mine, Esther M. Friesner. I recommend haunting the media area, in case you might be able to see some footage of the new TV series The Watch, assuming they got the money to make it. Note this is supposed to be a full TV series, and not a miniseries like Hogfather, Going Postal, or The Color Of Magic. 13 hour long episodes!
Hope everyone is having a great 4th, including all those folks for whom it isn’t a holiday. I spent a lot of years working for Zambelli Bros. every 4th doing fireworks displays at various places, which was very exciting. Something I never would have expected before doing the shows; even when you are lighting off the launch charges on the firing line, you can still hear it when a few thousand people all go “Ooohhh” and “Aaahhh” at the same time. In the interest of retaining what little hearing I have left I no longer do fireworks from ground zero, but enjoy watching the results of other peoples pyrotechnic expertise. I also like virtual fireworks, and thought I would share a nice one I picked up from the Free Flash Animations web site. If you are interested in creating your own, watch the Flash fireworks tutorial, one of a huge collection of animation, coding, and scripting tutorials put together by Adam Khoury. He covers HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and a lot of other really useful languages and server environments.