This really isn’t a post in and of itself. Actually it is just a place for me to upload an image file and test it against my browser. I will do a valid post a bit later today, or tomorrow, or the day after that, I suspect.
Terrestrial Human
SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.
The clear winner this week is the reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., bringing the 1960s best Spy TV series back to life again. The premise is slightly different from the original, or perhaps this is an origin story, since Napoleon Solo is a CIA agent while Illya Kuryakin is a KGB operative rather than both of them working as spies for the UN. It has been quite a while since we have had a new U.N.C.L.E. story to watch, so I am looking forward to it. Also in limited release this week is Walt Before Mickey, the story of the young Walt Disney and how he got started.
Movies have no genre this week, but they do have the latest in Jackie Chan’s breakout drama series Police Story: Lockdown. Police Captain Zhong Wen is seeing his daughter for the first time in many years, and meeting her fiance in his nightclub. But the fiance has plans to take her, him, and the entire club hostage; plans which the Police Captain has to defeat if he wants to save his family. The original 1985 film Police Story was the movie that went beyond anything his comedy’s had done, making him a major star once and for all. The Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection has some excellent animated short features, including Frozen Fever and Tangled Ever After. They have been previously released as extras on various Disney feature film blue rays, but this is the first time that a number of them have been compiled together.
TV brings us Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, based on Susanna Clarke’s award-winning novel of the same name. The battle between these two magicians over who was the more powerful was fought while the Napoleonic Wars raged around them.
In Anime, Captain Earth: Collection 2 has things looking grim for Earth’s defenders. The Planetary Gear’s direct attacks have been beaten off so far, but the numbers against them slowly get worse as the enemy strips off various layers of their defenses and allies. Kawai Complex Guide to Manors & Hostel Behavior may be a slice-of-life type Anime rather than Sci-Fi or Fantasy, but it has a ton of humor built in and is quite entertaining in its own way.
Then there are a few re-releases; the Kite Collection tells you the whole story about this pint-sized assassin, and just how bleak her situation is, while Basilisk: The Complete Series give detailed information about the rivalry between the Ninja clans who saw to the end of the Samurai era.
The band is Kankaku Piero (Sense Clown, approximately), and their first album Break came out at the beginning of June. They aren’t as new as that statement might make you think, because they put out 5 mini-albums before this latest release. The first track is A-Han!, new on their first full album. The second song is Mary from their 2013 mini-album, or Mary-san as they say at the beginning, and it was re-released as part of the new full album. Likewise the third song, O P P A I is also both from 2013 and the new album, I am not even going to try to guess what that tune translates into. The final track is 2014’s Japanese-Pop-Music, also on the new album.
The series Rin-Ne is about Sakura, a girl who accidentally crossed into the spirit world as a young child, and ever since she sees all the ghosts around her. It is about Rinne Rokudo, who is one quarter Shinigami, a group of Japanese supernatural creatures occupying the same spiritual niche as the Grim Reaper. Some of them help lost spirits pass on to be reincarnated, while others try to lure people to their deaths. And the show is mostly about all the trouble those two get into any time they are hanging out together. The show started last season, and Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting episode 18, with new episodes airing each Wednesday at 3AM EDT. It is based on the Manga of the same name written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, the hardest working, richest and most famous female Mangaka in Japan. Pretty much everything she has ever done has sold millions of copies and been turned into iconic Anime classics. One last detail; the closing theme for the series is the song TOKINOWA by Passepied, one of my favorite art-rock bands from Japan.