The band is BABYMETAL, and their 1st full album is now out, with the same name. Cute girls in kawaii outfits singing sweet heavy metal harmonies… what’s not to like? The first track I posted is the live version of Gimme Chocolate, the second is the studio version of Megitsune. And I had to include their song Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!!. This band is tearing up iTunes, rated in the top 10 in 7 countries including the US, and their physical media is available as a CD of the studio tracks, or a limited edition with the CD and a DVD with their live tracks, all from the self titled album.
Terrestrial Human
The Live DVD build CAE Linux is a complete engineering toolkit for designing, simulating, testing, and creating/printing your own projects. Everything in the build is free and open source software, allowing you to design your device, do multiphysics simulations to optimize it, and generate the code for building it with 3D printing & milling. You can also design and develop your own printed circuit boards, and microcontroller circuits for automation. Not only do you not need to pay for a license for any of this (because of the GNU/Creative Commons licensing it comes with), you don’t even have to install it on your computer; it all runs directly off the DVD, being a Live Disc. This is pretty much the most powerful open source engineering package I know of, if you have any interest in the design and creation of anything from toy cars to advanced robotics, do yourself a favor and check out this build. You can find the download here, although I recommend visiting their home page to learn all about it and see what kind of support resources are also available.
My friend Shawn just celebrated his birthday the other week, and this is the cake his wife got for him. It is always a good thing to be appreciated for who you really are; happy birthday, Shawn!
Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be in theaters on April 4th, and not a moment too soon in My book. This latest trailer just makes me more aware that I need to be in the theater that day. I pretty much feel that way about any portion of the Marvel franchise that Disney cranks out, and the folks generating the Spiderman films are doing just as good a job.
In the fall of 1965 I received the latest copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the mail, and found inside it a story by Roger Zelazny, an author I had never heard of before. The story was . . . And Call Me Conrad, renamed to This Immortal when it came out in book form the following year, and it blew me away. I must not have been the only one, since it won a Hugo for Best Novel at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention (Zelazny won a total of 6 Hugo’s and 3 Nebula’s in his career) which it shared with Frank Herbert’s Dune. Earth was devastated by a nuclear war, and only a few million humans survived when the aliens invaded the planet, taking it over. Among the people fighting for Earth’s freedom was the god Pan, or perhaps just a long-lived mutant with mortal children. That was only the first of many masterpieces, which included Lord of Light, Isle of the Dead, Today We Choose Faces, Doorways in the Sand, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, and so many more. Besides all the other awards he won, I should probably mention that A Rose for Ecclesiastes was included in Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars, a DVD on board the Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008.
But if he had a single body of work that stood out above the rest, it had to be The Chronicles of Amber. In this multiverse there are only two true worlds: Amber, and the Courts of Chaos. All the myriad worlds between them, including our own version of Earth, are but shadows reflecting combinations of aspects of those two. The royal families of those two realms hold the power to walk the shadows, find the world that holds closest to their heart’s desire, and use the peoples and technologies/magics of that parallel timeline in the ongoing war for supremacy over all existence. Even with the amazing scope of the reality posited for the premise behind the location of the story, at its core this is still all about the relationships between all the people and gods involved with the struggle, and how they change and evolve over time. You should grab all 10 volumes of the original series (from your library or from your bookseller doesn’t matter, as long as you get them) and read them from beginning to end. I suspect you will decide it was time well spent once you do, and if you want more there are some additional works available.
There are no genre entries I have found this week, but the Veronica Mars big screen outing could be fun. It is one of the first mainline motion pictures built from a Kickstarter Project I am aware of, which kind of makes me interested in seeing how well they did with the amount of money they raised.