Life After Beth follows in the footsteps of Warm Bodies, being a romantic zombie comedy. When Beth dies, Zach is devastated and goes into serious grieving. When Beth rises from the dead, Zach sees it as his chance to do and say all the stuff he was too shy to go for the first time around. The critical reviews look pretty good on this one, and the fact that it is opening in theaters nationwide two weeks after it stormed through Sundance is a good indication that it is something special. The Girl at the End of the World just came out, about a couple in a long distance relationship, until a disaster knocks out all technology. They have to travel across the planet to be together, just in time for the end of the world. It isn’t in a movie theater, though, it is being released as a digital download; but I thought it was a great title and wanted to mention it.
Terrestrial Human
There is not a lot coming out this week, but there are a few things. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is animated silly fun, and the only US movie I can recommend this week. From Korea we get The Cat, a story about a woman murdered on an elevator with her cat being the only witness. Park Min Young takes the cat in at the request of the police, only to have strange visions and mysterious events start to happen to her. And from Italy, France, and Spain, Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D has all the sex and violence they could cram in and still get an R rating, with Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing. That last is an interesting choice, since he played Dracula in 2005’s Dracula III: Legacy. And I am not quite sure why the only web site I could find for this Italian movie was in Japan.
The only TV show worth mentioning is Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain, an award winning animated series about trying to take over the world, which was wiped out by the network that bought it for broadcast.
In Anime, Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan: Demon Capital: Set 1 is the only new release, continuing the story of the Nura Clan’s fight against the Yokai. One of the most powerful Yokai, which are somewhere along the demon-monster-spirit spectrum, has returned to Earth after his defeat by the Nura several generations ago. They will have to defeat him again to protect their town and family. These 13 episodes are part one of season 2. There is a cyberpunk classic being re-released this week: Serial Experiments Lain – The Complete Collection. The artwork and animation are amazing, the story is a surrealistic mystery that takes place among the Wired, from a time before the world went wireless. If you haven’t seen this one before, you get another chance. You can also watch it online at the Funimation home page linked here.
How can 2NE1, the band who did so many amazing songs and my favorite Korean Girl Group, have any doubts about themselves? But apparently they do, as the interview released earlier this week indicates. Of course, this amazing foursome also put out the song UGLY, which I assumed was a diatribe against the advertising companies who spend millions of dollars every week to convince women they will never be attractive if they don’t buy their sponsor’s products. But perhaps I misunderstood what was going on in that song; or perhaps this is all a ploy to get more votes in the current World Music Awards competition, for which they have been nominated in 4 categories including Best Band, Best Song, and Best Live Show. Or maybe they just want to sell more tickets for their AON World Tour. I don’t really care which choice turns out to be the real one, as long as they keep generating more incredible music for us to enjoy!
The Musix Linux Live and Install build was originally built strictly for music creators of all kinds, but with the release this week of the stable version of Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 they have expanded out to include some graphics and video creation software. One of the strong points of this Distro is that everything included is completely free, with no proprietary programs or modules, so you do not need to pay any licensing or other fees for things you make with it. This live disk is Debien-based, so there is a huge world wide community constantly developing and debugging everything included.
This distribution was created primarily by the Spanish speaking computer aware musical community, headed up by Marcos Guglielmetti (or at least, he is the person doing their announcements these days, and his name is all over the disc; I have even fewer words of Spanish than I do of Japanese, so I don’t know more than that). Don’t let that put you off if Spanish is not your first language. They have done an excellent job of translating everything into English, as well as French, German, and several other European based languages. Their User Forums likewise support both English and Spanish to give you all the help, tips, and hints you could ever require with your projects.
When you boot from the DVD and the initial selection screen pops up, be sure to scroll to your two letter language indicator; it defaults to /es for Spanish, I went for /en for English, and so forth. If you have problems seeing it on your monitor, they have a VESA selection for the English selection to give you legacy hardware support, on some others it is identified as 800×600. Make sure you see “live” in the boot name so you run it directly from the DVD. Once it all finishes loading the log-in is “user” with the password “live”.
I should probably mention that this Distro used to be a geek-oriented package, requiring a Linux nerd to operate it. Things like knowing you had to launch the JACK server to give the various music programs a way to talk to the hardware meant you were doomed to failure without such an expert. They claim they have corrected that issue, and to a goodly extent they have (there are still some “gotcha’s” in the collection; us geeks have a hard time remembering which are the bits other folks don’t know about). Now, the JACK server launches on boot, and if you run something that conflicts with it, it gets shut down automatically.
The menu system launches Icons in the task bar at the top of the screen, and each time you pick one it gives you another set of icons on the screen to access a different set of programs. This visual interface structure gives you a way to access the basic core programs of this build organized by workflow, but does not give you access to the entire collection. If you prefer a smartphone this is perfect, it has that look and feel. In order to get past the icon interface and have access to the actual menu, select the calligraphy M at the left of the icon menu; it will give you the traditional drop-down Linux menu, complete with the usual organized sub-directories.
This particular build takes a unique approach to helping. They created the folder /home/user/demos/starters/ and packed it with .starter demos (yes, the dot indicates a file extension; Linux has a longer string than Windows for extension names). Use the File Browser to go to the folder, right click on the demo you want to check out, and open it with -> musixstarter. While the process may not be as mindless as doing the same kind of things in Windoze, the price tag will be a world smaller for the same capabilities, which seems like a fair trade off to me.
The last stable release for Musix came out in 2009, so the operating system it runs on and the various software packages themselves have both gone through some major improvements over the last half decade. But to me, what makes Musix special is the thought the developers have put into trying to make it the best one-stop solution for musicians/composers and recording artists/producers. While some of the included tools still require a bit more of a learning curve than some people may want to devote to the effort, the complete toolkit is a rival to anything else you will find online for these tasks, and often better at the same task for the price (did I mention it was free?).
If you are building your own artwork, or animations, or videos, or perhaps a button set for a web site, it can be fun and useful to have some Science Fiction Fonts in your toolkit to give a bit of flavor to your creations. A great place to start is with the complete Futurama suite. It has both of the alien languages fonts (and if you didn’t already translate all the jokes on the signs that use them, you may want to go back and re-watch some of the episodes, with you cheat sheet close to hand) as well as the Title, Ambient, and Bold Fonts used in the series. The RoboCop font is a classic, Back To The Future is a good choice, Alien is a classic, and Splash Gordon is also quite a good catch. Because of the way that last web site does everything server side with Javascript, that link only gets you to the site. You will have to drill down to get to the font itself.
There are a number of other series that make their font set available which you should search out, but you will also find some quality resources at the font compilation sites. 1001 Fonts includes 137 free Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fonts, and Da Font has several hundred more, for instance. FontSpace includes a bunch more, as does Fonts2U. Note that on several of these sites you will get different results with different search terms; try several of them and see what other goodies you come across.
The NASA Valkyrie Robot looks like a useful toy to have to help build the Mars base, or any other non-terrestrial habitat. Unfortunately it didn’t do so good in the Darpa Challenge, tying for last place, but NASA JPL’s Robosimian came in at 5th place.