If you are playing with 3D modeling, be aware of MakeHuman, a free open source tool for creating 3D characters. Written in Python, it integrates seamlessly into blender, and allows you to instantly generate a fully rigged and ready to animate human or near-human. It’s slider set has over a thousand morphs you can apply to modify your character, including (but not limited to) Age, gender, height, weight, body proportions, face shapes, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, neck, hands, feet.. the list goes on. And it is licensed under the CC0 license from Creative Commons, giving you unparalleled freedom to use your creations however you like. The folks over at Games From Scratch did an excellent introduction video on this, which I am including here so you can see just how easy and powerful this package is.
Nevertheless She Persisted is a sci-fi/fantasy flash fiction collection featuring unique visions of women inventing, playing, loving, surviving, and – of course – dreaming of themselves beyond their circumstances, according to the event’s page at Tor. It was the reaction of some world-class authors to the statement made when Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the floor of the United States Senate for reading the words of Coretta Scott King last month:
Yesterday, on International Women’s Day, a number of those authors ran with it, turning an attempt at subjugation into the inspiration behind a collection of stories you absolutely need to read. And you don’t have to pay a penny to do so; they are posted online at Tor, free and accessible to all. Enjoy, and perhaps even be inspired; I certainly was.
Have you read the Pitchfork article The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs? If not you should read it now in honor of International Women’s Day, and then watch the songs themselves; you just might learn some interesting things.
Acapella Science has put together a great little song giving you the history of Exoplanets, from its beginnings back in 1990 to the present, culminating with the TRAPPIST-1 discovery. You have to appreciate him when he says I’m a harmony addict working on a master’s in theoretical physics; what ELSE was I going to make a YouTube channel about? This is his latest, but far from his only such production; he tries to crank one of these out each week. So I thought I would include a few more, with Entropic Time for the second tune, and the final one is CRISPR-Cas9 (Bring Me A Gene). I don’t usually include videos with a stinger at the end hyping the person’s channel, but this isn’t just music, it is science at the same time, and that is a combination worth supporting. The man creating these is Tim Blais, and I hope he keeps making these for a long time to come.
Tomorrow we get Sword Art Online the Movie -Ordinal Scale- in a one night special event presentation. I had to include one more trailer for it, since this one is different than the others. When we hit Friday Kong: Skull Island, with what appears to be the biggest King Kong ever put in a movie. I had to include that trailer as well, because I think both movies are going to be a lot of fun.
This time around we get Moana, a quality animation telling one of the stories of the transpacific culture that spans a range of islands from Tahiti to Hawaii. They have been some of the most successful explorers the world has ever known, and have an artistic and musical tradition unique on the planet. As near as I can remember, this film is the first sympathetic treatment of that culture to receive world wide distribution and major box office success. Also out, Bad Kids of Crestview Academy, what you wold get if they filmed The Breakfast Club in the Nightmare on Elm Street neighborhood, a comedy/horror. About the only thing we get in Anime is the S.A.V.E. edition of Wanna Be the Strongest in the World!, which has both the complete series plus the OVAs. I am not certain that that one is even genre, but being a series about an Idol who becomes a Pro Wrestling Diva I am going to call it Fantasy, if only so I don’t have to skip the Anime entry altogether.