This is apparently a Trek parody of the song Drop It Like Its Hot, put together by K Face TV, and it is a fun little video. In fact, this is the best Trek parody video I have seen this year, quite tasty! I also appreciate they give full credit to everyone who worked on this production with them. I hope they put more of these together, I liked this one a lot.
Terrestrial Human
Hot on the heels of last weeks brush with U.N.C.L.E. we get two spy thrillers, the first being Hitman: Agent 47. He got that number because he is the 47th in a line of genetically engineered soldier/assassins, and he is not terribly happy about his fate. Now someone is out to unlock the secret of his creation and build an army of unstoppable killers, and he is the only thing standing between them and world domination. Then there is American Ultra, where a stoner turns out to be a highly programmed MK-Ultra sleeper agent, accidentally activated while working the overnight shift at his convenience store. Now the government is trying to shut him down permanently and he is running for his life. This one is as much a comedy as an action/adventure film.
Some amazing short animations have been collected up in Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection, which I incorrectly identified as being available last week. Most of them are fantasy, and one or two are sci-fi. Non-genre but no less surreal for that, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a strange and wonderful Swedish film that everyone ought to see at least once. For the musically inclined, the docudrama LAMBERT & STAMP is about a couple of guys out to make a movie about a rock band who ended up being the managers of The Who. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing, but somehow wound up helping to shape one of the iconic rock bands of the last century. Finally the Western animation feature Batman Unlimited: Monster Mayhem has a subset of the Justice League trying to deal with a consortium of criminals in Gotham on Halloween.
TV has Once Upon a Time: Season 4, a show that gets better with each story. The release date gives you a month or so to binge your way through it before season 5 kicks of on September 27th. The week also brings the UK series Atlantis: Season Two Part Two, also a fantasy although not quite as imaginative.
Anime this week is represented by Future Diary: Complete Series, in which a dozen combatants receive a cell phone app which shows them their death three or four minutes before it happens. If they are very quick and very lucky they might live through it, surviving to face the next challenge which will come along much too quickly. If you are a fan of the manga this is based on, you might also enjoy watching the Live Action version, streaming now from Japan.
Pretty much my favorite band out of Asia for the last few years, ONE OK ROCK has the chops, the attitude, and the skill set to own the rock world while based out of Japan. They started out around 2005, proving yet again that it takes about 10 years to become an overnight sensation in the music business. The first live track is called Decision, the second is Mighty Long Fall, then the official studio version of the latter song follows those. The live tracks are both from their recent Mighty Long Fall at Yokohama Stadium release, their 5th live DVD which they posted to their You Tube Channel. You have been able to get these tracks and others from them on iTunes for your permanent collection for a while now. But they signed with Warner Bros. Records recently, in a deal that includes releasing their work on CD and DVD in the US, starting with “35xxxv Deluxe Edition” in September. All songs will be in English, and the US version of the album will include two bonus tracks not on the Japanese version. They will be doing a North American tour in support of that release, with stops including Chicago, New York, Toronto, Silver Spring, and Houston.
Previous ONE OK ROCK posts, with music embeds: One OK Rock: Cry Out, Against The Current, More One OK Rock, Please!, One OK Rock: Taka!, Still More One OK Rock!, More Alt J-Rock, More J-Rock, and One OK Rock.
Associated: Rurouni Kenshin 3 trailer (movie), My First Story (band), RUROUNI KENSHIN 2 trailer (movie).
One of the more amusing Anime’s this season is Actually I Am… , in which Kuromine is a high school student who supposedly cannot keep a secret. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a premise, but the writers take it and run with it, with quite funny results. This is about all I can say without needing to post a Spoiler Alert: A bit over the half way mark through the first episode he discovers the girl he has a crush on, Yoko Shiragami, has a secret. She will be yanked out of school and he will never see her again if her dad learns that anyone knows about her, so he spends the rest of the episode going to great lengths to help keep her secret. Things just keep getting funnier from there, episode after episode, at least through the first half dozen of them. I have no idea if they can keep up the momentum and the humor all the way through the series, or first season, or however long it ends up being, but I really like the show so far. Check it out and see what you think.
When it comes to programming a swarm of robots, the question has always been do you program from the top down or the bottom up? According to the Technology Review, you no longer have to decide between programming each robot individually or programming the flock as if it were a single entity. Carlo Pinciroli and a collection of his friends and colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have come up with Buzz, a programming language that allows you to combine both kinds of commands into a single language. It allows you to tweak the two kinds of command structures to any level of detail you feel is required, and it scales easily to control any size of swarm. If that weren’t enough, they have started building and collecting libraries of program modules of common swarming behavior that researchers and hobbyists can drop into their own programming projects. That means for the first time swarm programmers can actually share their work in a common environment, and not have to be constantly reinventing the wheel someone else already solved.
According to the article Pinciroli did at RoboHub the language syntax was inspired by JavaScript and Python, meaning it should be instantly familiar to any programmer, cutting down on the learning curve involved. And the base run time platform itself is so lean it only takes 12KB, so you can do meaningful programming in the smallest of robots. It also interfaces nicely with other types of languages, such as the ROS, or Robot Operating System. The most exciting part? They released it as open-source software under the MIT license. It can be downloaded at The Swarming Buzz, so you can start programming your hoard of Evil Robot Overlords today!