From February of 2015, the band Rose Windows doing the christening of the new live studio at listener supported KEXP in Seattle. I think they broke up about 6 months after this recording, but they left three very interesting albums as their legacy.
Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, Passengers will be out just in time for Christmas. On an interstellar colony ship, something went wrong and they came out of cryogenic suspension 90 years too early… or did they? Yes, I absolutely have to be in the theaters for this one!
When Anime fans travel to a place where scenes from their favorite shows took place it is referred to as an anime pilgrimage, and enough people have been making those pilgrimages that all kind of cities have had their local economies seriously boosted across Japan. Enough so that a coalition has formed which includes Anime producer Kadokawa Corp., Anime/Manga magazine publisher Newtype, travel agency JTB Corp., Narita International Airport Corp. and Japan Airlines Co., with the goal of increasing that tourist business by catering directly to it. As their initial step, they have set up a web site for fans to log in and do a survey to vote for the sites they really want to visit at Anime Tourism 88, a reference to the 88 Temple Pilgrimage in Shikoku according to Otaku Magazine. Based on the results of the surveys they will be putting together packaged tours designed to bring tourists to a series of locations, including the more rural locations and smaller towns; most tourists to Japan tend to stay in the larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka. The organizations president is Yoshiyuki Tomino, best known for his Gundam series, but I am thinking what a hoot it would be to visit all my favorite places from the Ghibli Studios films. At the very least I would have to stop by the Ghibli Museum in West Tokyo at some point during my tour. They do bribe you with an Anime screen saver to fill out the survey, which doesn’t hurt.
It will be years before a manned Mars mission gets to happen, and all bets are off about which country might get there first. But starting this past Monday they cut the ribbon for the opening of new Destination: Mars exhibition at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It uses a mixed-reality presentation created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to give you a fully immersive idea of what being on Mars would be like. They used all the images they received from the Curiosity rover to build the virtual environment, so you can’t get much closer to an authentic experience than that. They are using the Microsoft HoloLens™ mixed reality headset to deliver the experience, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin will be your holographic guide. For those who missed it, I posted about this last June, complete with a couple of videos demonstrating the process; nice to know it is finally available. I am adding this to the list of fun exhibitions I want to visit, and am thinking some time next year I should be able to make it. Perhaps I will see you there.
Humble Bundle is a great way to get some amazing deals on nerd-centric stuff and support charity at the same time. As an example, right at the moment their home page actually redirects you to their current Game Maker Bundle, with over $1,880 worth of software to let you create your own games and distribute them online, which you can pick up for less than $13. They don’t normally do that, but I think they got excited when even at such a low price they crossed the 2 million dollars in sales mark. That one is still going on for a day or two, but there is another deal you ought to check out: Sci-Fi by Real Scientists, with the charity being the Sci-Fi Givers Fund. That charity fund is one of several being run by the SFWA, and supports all the other funds, including the legal and health care funds, and their educational and grant system. If you are as addicted to reading as I am, this is an excellent way to help the independently employed authors (what, you never heard the expression “don’t quite your day job”?) keep doing what they are doing. The deal only runs for another week yet, until the morning of the 28th, and the e-books download to all the standard formats, so whatever computer or tablet you are running they will read just fine.
This week the 2014 remake of the French film classic La Belle et la Bête, AKA Beauty and the Beast will be available in American theaters. It has English subtitles for those who don’t speak the language although if you know the story you probably won’t need them. Also this week The Girl with All the Gifts is being released in the UK and at Fantastic Fest, going to wide release on October 11th.