This girl sings in a hoodie… and never lets you see her face. The artist is Nano, the first album is West Ground, and the first track is Born To Be. The second track is Savior Of Song from her collection My First Story. I do like her voice and her style, and I appreciate her Robin Williams reference in her URL (nanonano, a rather Mork-like greeting)!
Guardians Of The Galaxy is a bit different than the other Marvel film outings so far, and I am definitely looking forward to it. Let’s see… a bunch of misfits who ended up together because no one else understood them, and then the Galaxy As We Know It was threatened with destruction and they are the only ones who can save us from the danger. Yep, sure enough, that was never used as a Marvel plot line or premise before. 🙂 Seriously, though, I WILL be in the theaters on opening day, or at least opening weekend. I have really been waiting for this one for a while.
It started out as a project to patch Android so you could run the open source operating system on netbooks and laggy tablets. They still have a long way to go before they have a run-anywhere version, but Release Candidate 1 of Android x86 shows some promise. With this build, you should be able to run Android on any computer, quite an improvement over having it stuck on your smart phone. Once they get the bugs out of it, it ought to be a lot of fun to be able to run all of those apps on your desktop.
A bizarre blend of Edo era Samurai action, and wild west Cowboy violence, the Japanese remake of Unforgiven is just a little surreal. Taking place in Hokkaido in 1880 with Tombstone right next door, it looks like they did an excellent job blending the two cultures to tell a story that is equally heart-wrenching in either one. I particularly liked the scene of the cowboys riding off across the western terrain against the backdrop of Mt. Fuji.
Daz 3D is a powerful free 3D modeling and animation software package that has everything you could want to create your own animations. Mind, if you are not careful, the content store may drain your wallet in short order. But that is mostly a problem for the lazy, who are not willing to do the work to create their own stuff when they can just buy it off the shelf.
Once you have downloaded and installed the free software package, knowing how to use it would be pretty useful, so some tutorials would help out. As with most training and tutorials, any of these concepts apply equally to a lot of different software packages that do the same general job. The major real differences between them are what the buttons are called and which menu they live in, although each program seems to have 1 to 3 things it can do with a click that the other programs need a procedure for. So if you use a different program for your 3D modeling and rendering, most of the info will apply once you figure out where those buttons live in your software.
The first one is a basic intro to 3D modeling and animation, demonstrating the basic components any animation is made of. Once you understand what the components are, it is just a mater of learning how to do each of them in whichever program you prefer, and finally how to put them together to create your finished product. The second tutorial is about the program itself, Daz Studio, showing you where these functions live in this software and how to use them. Again, most of the concepts work in any software, so you might want to at least watch it once, even if you use a different program. And if you don’t already have a 3D modeling software package you prefer to work in, then I recommend downloading and installing either Daz or Blender, as the best free 3D programs on the market today. There are more tutorials where these came from, keep your eyes open and you will find a lot of good ones.
This is more about the author and his books than the movie; perhaps I should call it Something To Read? I have been waiting for a decade or so for them to turn Dean Koontz’s wonderful character Odd Thomas into a movie, and I have heard about them doing so for the last few years. It has finally gotten beyond the rumor stage; a week from Friday, this one hits the big screen! The delay was caused by some legal issues between film making partners which should never have gotten in the way. From the trailer it looks like they have built the perfect film version of the first book in the series, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that they pull the box office numbers necessary to allow them to continue cranking out the entire collection of stories for our viewing enjoyment!
Have you read the Odd Thomas books or graphic novels? Oddy is a short order cook working the breakfast crowd at the grill, because that simple job allows him to zen out and let his mind come up with the proper solutions to help the various dead who appear to him. They don’t speak to him, for the dead do not talk. But they do make him aware of what their problems are, so he can help them. Most often they are looking for Justice, to have their killer stopped so they can not kill others. Sometimes they just need to be reassured they will be remembered, or that their mother knows how much they loved her, or maybe they just need that final ball to fetch. Odd Thomas has been seeing the dead since he was a child, and he is finally beginning to figure out how he can best serve them.
Dean R Koontz is a unique writer because his genre is horror, and his message is about how beautiful the world is, and how wonderful most of the people in it are, and most of all how full of hope and love even the most terrifying situation is. I never liked horror until I started reading this author. Actually, I still don’t like horror, but when the story carries this strong a message about how the world is right and good when good people stand up against evil, how could I not like it? The other series Dean does that impresses the hell out of me is his Frankenstein set, where Victor is trying to reduce people to slaves/robots, and not just a couple of folks, but entire cities and states. Meanwhile, the first Monster he created is still alive a few hundred years later, has learned the trick of quantum teleportation from the Dali Lama, and is out to save humanity from him with the help of some New Orleans cops, a sentient cancer tumor, and the 10th clone of Victor’s first wife. Trust me when I say Dean will always take you on a fun ride with lots of surprising stops along the way and will always leave you grinning ear to ear when you finally get to your destination.