The videos of KYARY PAMYU PAMYU’s music have always been some of the most surreal footage coming out of Japan, but her latest seems to be somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a cast of munchkins played by Easter eggs. The track is, appropriately, called Easta, which is Japanese for Good, and I can’t help but feel there is a bit of a second language pun going on there. The new single (which has 5 tracks on it, but tow of them are just instrumental versions of two of the others) is her 14th, and was released this past week on the 5th. At the same time, she also released her KPP 5 Years Monster World Tour 2016 DVD, filmed at the final performance of the tour at Budokan. Here’s the bit I find really interesting; folks picking up the limited edition version of the disc get a VR headset included with it, so they can get the full 360 degree immersive effect of the concert. That’s right, they filmed a VR version of the show, and put it on disc.
Terrestrial Human
You can go to the NASA site to pick up some NASA Software, and a surprising amount of it is actually free. You can download the NASA Software catalog in PDF format, or browse the collection by category from the home page. A lot of it models real-world systems and physics in ways that allow you to simulate all kinds of dynamic systems, but they also have a lot of process management and scheduling tools available.
Back in 1991 there was an Autodesk DOS program called James Gleick’s CHAOS: The Software., written by Josh Gordon, Rudy Rucker and John Walker. It allowed you to generate visual representations of a lot of Chaos Theory’s best math, and Rudy wrote most of the algorithms, except for John Walkers Fractal Landscapes algorithms. Rudy has now posted it online over at GitHub as a free open source download under the GNU license. It will run on pretty much anything that has DOSBox installed on it, which is itself free open source software that runs on Windows, Linux, MACs, Raspbian and more.
The 2017 Hugo Award Finalists have been announced, and as usual I find myself both excited and conflicted. The Conflicted part is because there are so many excellent favorites in some categories that I find myself in the strange position of wishing there could be multiple winners because I know they all deserve the award, but of course it doesn’t work like that. Let me give an example of that; in the Best Series category they include The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, and The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I have read every book in both series, they are all good and many of them are brilliant, but the series as a whole are truly marvelous examples of world building, creating entirely fleshed out universes. Picking between the two is difficult, although being an official Space Cadet (and I have the certificate to prove it) I am cheering on Miles just a tiny bit more often than Lawrence. But, of course, it isn’t that simple. Also in the finalist list for best series are The Expanse by James S.A. Corey, and the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch; I have read a single book in each of those (and am watching the TV series they made from The Expanse), and based on my limited sample set I have to believe they are also serious contenders for the prize. The Excited part of my reaction is obvious; I have the rest of the books in the latter series still to read, plus I have to believe The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and The October Daye Books by Seanan McGuire may be every bit as good, since they also made the finalists list. And that’s just a single category; I can’t wait to discover how many other reading and viewing adventures await me tucked away in these lists!
The latest iteration of The Mummy looks better than ever, but I really loved the humor in the last trilogy, and I see no sign of that here so far. Still, I live in hope, and the new trailer rocks!
The number one box office sensation of 2016 in Japan finally comes to US theaters this weekend: Makoto Shinkai’s masterpiece Your Name. That’s the one I intend to see, but another interesting option is Colossal, about a woman connected to a gigantic alien trashing downtown Seoul (because I guess it couldn’t afford the ticket to make it to Tokyo, which has a rich cultural heritage of being trampled by giant monsters). Actually, I might have to see them both this weekend.