Yes, this is the series that asks that age old question: Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Except the protagonist is doing anything but trying to pick up girls, they just seem to collect around him. The anime series is based on the light novel of the same name, what in the US might be called a Novella or Novelette, written by Fujino Omori and illustrated by Suzuhito Yasuda. This is my favorite anime of the spring 2015 season (although there are a few others which are quite tasty and almost as much fun, which I make sure to watch each week), and although the season is winding up, it doesn’t look like the story line is. In fact, becoming the fastest growing adventurer now seems to be the set up for what the quest becomes in the next season, not the goal for this one. Although as we get to the end of the first season, the advice his ghostly grandfather keeps giving him makes a lot more sense once we learn who that grandfather is. If you haven’t been following this one, use the Crunchyroll link and binge-watch it this weekend to get yourself up to speed.
This introduction to the SIGGRAPH convention experience starts with a practical guide to organizing to attend any large convention. He uses the same techniques many of us developed going to Comic Con or any other large Sci-Fi or Anime convention, but without having to go through three or four conventions gradually learning through trial and error how to organize your time and map out the convention space. So I recommend anyone who wants to attend a large convention watch the first 10 or 12 minutes of this presentation. He then goes on to break down the process of computer animation into its component parts by type of activity, giving a very clear understanding of how it works. If you have any interest in creating your own animations this is a great introduction. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group, GRAPHics which started life as an organization in 1967, held its first convention in 1974, and became an Internet NEWSGROUP back in the early 70s as well. The latest convention, coming up at the Los Angeles Convention Center the 9th through 13th of August, 2015, will be the 42nd time the event has been held.
This Disney flic looks like a lot of fun! Zootopia is by definition the kind of Utopia where humans never existed, but the anthropomorphic animals who lived there were extremely HumanEsq. It has a great premise and some good 3D CGI animation that brings the characters to life in ways beyond what the creators were trying for, I suspect. I have enjoyed everything they have shown us of it so far, and can’t wait to see more.