Seen driving around Burning Man this year; what a hoot! Thanks to io9 for the heads up on this one.
Terrestrial Human
Netflix has added a few tasty titles recently to their streaming service, of which the silliest has to be Mystery Science Theater 3000: Gamera, in which the team makes fun of all 5 of the original Gamera franchise movies (I think they missed the most recent one). The most interesting alternate history title is Night Raid 1931, which has a team of psychics in Japanese occupied Shanghai trying to keep control before the next major war breaks out. On the flip side, it looks like Netflix did lose its Starz deal, cutting off its best source of current movies.
The sad part is, most folks don’t know who he was. Michael S. Hart invented electronic books (now called eBooks) in 1971, when he typed the text of the free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence he had been handed into a plain ASCII text file and sent it over the net to his friends. In 1971 almost no-one knew there was a net, still decades away from evolving into the web, but even back then Mike realized it was a powerful tool for education and literacy, and he kept typing in and disseminating royalty free literature. He later went on to found the Gutenberg Project and became an advocate for both literacy and for the preservation of public domain rights and resources, all for the greater good of the human race. In case it wasn’t obvious by my statements, this is one of my heroes, and one of the giants who helped build today’s modern world of the future. He will be missed.
Browncoats unite! Love this tune…
You have to love anything called TeslaCon, and even more when it is a Steampunk gathering. It will be happening in Madison, WI, in November, and just might be a lot of fun. Don’t count on seeing everyone named in this video, it is from last year’s event; check the current web pages guest list for the new names.
Teslacon 2010 opener from Jon Sovey on Vimeo.
In limited release this week, Shaolin looks like the most interesting selection. It is a historical epic of the feudal warlord period of China’s history (yes, I know that only narrows it down to a few thousand years, but the fact that they have rifles helps narrow it further, to the last several hundred years). The name from the cast everyone should recognize is Jackie Chan, and as you can see from the trailer the cinematography is excellent as is often the case with Chinese made epics.