The animated romp Spark: A Space Tail comes out this week, for those of us who consider silly fun an art form. There is also a documentary I am hoping to see, to see if they did the man justice: Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary brings the story of this musical legend to the big screen. He created music the world had only dreamed of until then, and I suspect it will still be played 100 years from now, and longer.
The best movie this time is a true story: Hidden Figures has to be one of the best films of the year, or last year at least. If you haven’t seen it yet, now is your chance! Mars: Season One is a mini-series presented on National Geographic all about the upcoming Mars Colonization project. Monster Trucks is silly fun for the entire family, a very friendly invasion indeed. And then there is Tangled: Before Ever After Volume 1, an animated prequel; the production values on this one are way below the original films (1930s at the most recent, it appears), but they are at least trying to tell a new story.
In Anime, Is the Order a Rabbit?? – Season 2 brings us lots more silly fun, and Toriko: Parts 1-4 contains the first 50 episodes (4 seasons, or one year, depending on how you prefer to count) of the ultimate food porn combat comedy! I think the streaming service is up to episode 148 or so at the moment, to put that in perspective.
The videos of KYARY PAMYU PAMYU’s music have always been some of the most surreal footage coming out of Japan, but her latest seems to be somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a cast of munchkins played by Easter eggs. The track is, appropriately, called Easta, which is Japanese for Good, and I can’t help but feel there is a bit of a second language pun going on there. The new single (which has 5 tracks on it, but tow of them are just instrumental versions of two of the others) is her 14th, and was released this past week on the 5th. At the same time, she also released her KPP 5 Years Monster World Tour 2016 DVD, filmed at the final performance of the tour at Budokan. Here’s the bit I find really interesting; folks picking up the limited edition version of the disc get a VR headset included with it, so they can get the full 360 degree immersive effect of the concert. That’s right, they filmed a VR version of the show, and put it on disc.
You can go to the NASA site to pick up some NASA Software, and a surprising amount of it is actually free. You can download the NASA Software catalog in PDF format, or browse the collection by category from the home page. A lot of it models real-world systems and physics in ways that allow you to simulate all kinds of dynamic systems, but they also have a lot of process management and scheduling tools available.
Back in 1991 there was an Autodesk DOS program called James Gleick’s CHAOS: The Software., written by Josh Gordon, Rudy Rucker and John Walker. It allowed you to generate visual representations of a lot of Chaos Theory’s best math, and Rudy wrote most of the algorithms, except for John Walkers Fractal Landscapes algorithms. Rudy has now posted it online over at GitHub as a free open source download under the GNU license. It will run on pretty much anything that has DOSBox installed on it, which is itself free open source software that runs on Windows, Linux, MACs, Raspbian and more.
The 2017 Hugo Award Finalists have been announced, and as usual I find myself both excited and conflicted. The Conflicted part is because there are so many excellent favorites in some categories that I find myself in the strange position of wishing there could be multiple winners because I know they all deserve the award, but of course it doesn’t work like that. Let me give an example of that; in the Best Series category they include The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, and The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I have read every book in both series, they are all good and many of them are brilliant, but the series as a whole are truly marvelous examples of world building, creating entirely fleshed out universes. Picking between the two is difficult, although being an official Space Cadet (and I have the certificate to prove it) I am cheering on Miles just a tiny bit more often than Lawrence. But, of course, it isn’t that simple. Also in the finalist list for best series are The Expanse by James S.A. Corey, and the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch; I have read a single book in each of those (and am watching the TV series they made from The Expanse), and based on my limited sample set I have to believe they are also serious contenders for the prize. The Excited part of my reaction is obvious; I have the rest of the books in the latter series still to read, plus I have to believe The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and The October Daye Books by Seanan McGuire may be every bit as good, since they also made the finalists list. And that’s just a single category; I can’t wait to discover how many other reading and viewing adventures await me tucked away in these lists!