More than a trailer, a bit less than a featurette, it looks like they are doing a first class job of relaunching the Robocop franchise. And for the easily confused, no, this was not filmed at CES the other week. Looks like it could have been, though.
Terrestrial Human
If Astronomy and Space excite you, there is some good news. It seems Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has teamed up with Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane to create a new show, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, very much in the tradition of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos. Ann Druyan is the widow of Carl Sagan and one of the co-producers of the original Cosmos series, while animator Seth MacFarlane helped pull in the network funding. The two of them will share the Executive Producer duties for the new show, which will be running on Fox and National Geographic on the same night. Word of this project was first announced back in 2012, but now we are getting close: the first episode airs on March 9th.
We get animated silliness this week in the form of The Nut Job, a comedy about some overly ambitious squirrels who destroy their home while trying to stock up for winter. Also out this week is Collider, which looks pretty interesting. The official site is a bit unclear as to what country it is coming out in; it might just be Ireland. I hope it includes the US, since this one appears to have an original plot line, something that is getting hard to find out of Hollywood.
In Movies Riddick hits the shelves this week, both as a stand-alone and as part of the Riddick: The Complete Collection 4 film package. For those scratching their heads, this includes an animated story called Dark Fury that was released direct to DVD just after the first film came out. The remake of the cult film Carrie is also out this week.
I haven’t found any genre TV coming out this week, but Top Gear: Season 20 is being released, and they are always a lot of fun.
In western animation, Marvel Knights: Wolverine versus Sabretooth is being billed as the final battle between these two long-time foes. The Marvel Knights brand is for showcase stories that allow the best writers and illustrators to push the bounds of cannon, if not ignore them entirely, so anything is possible. I should also mention that this is a motion comic, rather than a true animation, a media style that Marvel excels at.
In Anime, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic is your basic dungeon quest, merging and changing the stories of Alibaba and Aladdin. This set is season 1, giving you the first 13 episodes of the series. The show is also streaming on a number of services, including Crunchyroll and Hulu. The release of Naruto: Shippuden Box Set 17 brings us episodes 206 through 218 of the ongoing story of the 9 Tailed Fox. The current episode streaming on their site is 344, if you were wondering. Also beginning to catch up, One Piece Season 5 Part 5 brings the tail of Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates to episodes 313 to 324. Of course, the currently streaming episode from Tokyo is 627.
Another great alt rock band out of Japan is Owarikara, their new single came out in October. I can’t tell you what the names of these tracks are, but I really like them a lot, especially the way they use rhythm and the instrumental melodies. The lead singer definitely adds an edge that wraps the whole package up; now if only I could understand more than one word in three of the lyrics. Of course, I have that same problem with a lot of rock songs sung in English, too.
If you are an artist or creative media enthusiast of any kind, I would like to recommend the boot-from-DVD Linux build known as Open Artist. They took the kitchen sink approach, throwing in every piece of free and open source software that might be useful, and compiled them into folders organized by the type of task you were trying to accomplish. So if you feel like creating or modifying your own font, there is a subfolder under Graphics with about 5 different font editors, as an example. They have some general category icons across the top of the screen, 2D, 3D, Audio, Video, and so forth, as well as the main menu, to help you jump right into the tool suite you need to create or modify your current project. After booting it a number of times and exploring (and launching a bunch of programs to check them out), I can honestly say I have never seen a more far ranging collection of creative programs. It includes everything I would expect to be in such a tool set, and a bunch of stuff I never even knew existed. It also includes a full range of servers and other distribution tools, plus all the normal software any good operating system should have, so you can surf the web or read your email while working on your projects.
The build is based on Ubuntu 12.04 but they installed a lot of non-Ubuntu programs, configuring them to play nice in the environment, including not just other flavors of Linux but also Windows code running under Wine. One of the most impressive details is they tweaked the GNOME and NAUTILUS interfaces so the key-press shortcuts don’t interfere with most of the program shortcuts; so you wont accidentally launch an FTP program while you were trying to save a graphics image, again as an example. There was a lot of thought put into making the entire package work as a whole, and keeping the fiddly bits from biting you in the posterior while trying to use it.
If you want to make it boot and run faster, update your software packages to the latest and greatest versions, and have space to store your raw materials and project files, but don’t want to impair your computers normal operating system, the 2.5Gig live boot DVD can be installed to a 16Gig USB stick. That gives you 10Gig for the existing software to unpack and install itself to, 4Gig in a separate partition to save all your project files to, and another 2Gig of expansion space to add any other software you think might be useful. It also gives you the option of using a lot of other features only accessible from an installed version, like alternative desktops with a minimum footprint, launching a specific program or set of programs you always work in at boot, and so forth. And let’s not forget being able to set up all your software to load with your own preferences already configured, which is always a plus.
You can also do like I did, and use a 32Gig USB stick, partitioning the other 16Gig in Fat32 (or whatever your preferred Windows file system format is). Then you can use that partition as both still more storage for your project files, and a convenient way to transfer the various media between your two operating systems. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
Bottom line, I like this Live DVD build a lot. Download Open Artist, burn the ISO (Image File) to DVD, and start checking it out; you might be just as impressed as I am! Be sure to grab the DVD version, which is a Live DVD, rather than the Base Distro, which needs to be installed to a hard drive before you can add the other programs yourself (WAY too much work for me!).