I am not a sports fan, but I would love to be at the super bowl this year. Since it is apparently being held in Huston, NASA decided it would be a great place to set up their Mars VR simulator Future Flight. The ride runs for two minutes and takes you through real 360 degree Martian terrain captured by the most recent rovers, and ends with a 90 foot drop (using a carnival ride drop to make it real) for the free fall of reentry on your return to Earth. They have a number of other activities and exhibits set up, including a replica of the Curiosity Rover which gathered the images and is doing some serious science, and a full size replica of the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year. If you are in Huston the entire exhibition is free, you should really check it out!
Terrestrial Human
With Scarlett Johansson, Beat Takeshi, and Pilou Asbæk heading up Section 9, the live action version of Ghost In The Shell is a movie I have been waiting roughly 25 years for someone to make. Only a few more months to go before we get to see it! The Super Bowl spot has some new footage we haven’t seen before.
As I am sure most of the folks who visit this blog know, for the first week of every month, TOR Books makes an ebook available as a free download. It is always an excellent book by a very good author, and this time they chose the first two volumes of The Merchant Princes series, The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross. This is a Paratime story about 3 different timelines and the families that can teleport between them, with criminal activities, social injustice, treachery, and revolution in the mix. The protagonist is smart and quick on the uptake as she literally falls into the middle of this while trying to learn a bit more about her birth mother. I couldn’t stop rooting for her through the entire series, and I really hope the author returns to that universe with more tales soon. The link at the top of the Tor page takes you to a place to buy the paperback version, so instead scroll down the page to get the link to sign up for the newsletter and claim your free ebook version.
This animated short is too adorable for words! The audio is Moses Supposes from 1952’s Singing In The Rain, the animation itself is very well done. Thanks to GoBoiano for the heads up on this one, and thanks to Bowing for doing the animation and posting it. At least it looked like he was one of the creators when I fed his statements through Google Translate.
The winner this week may be The Space Between Us, about the first person born on Mars. When he returns to visit the Earth, find his father, and meet the first new people in his life, they discover his body can not handle the environment. We also get Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, the second movie in the Steven Chow series.
The Western releases are all animated this time around. Justice League Dark has Batman teaming up with various DC heroes with supernatural powers to fight a demonic assault on Earth. It seems like Dreamwork’s Trolls was just in the theaters, but now it is coming out on Disc as well. I should also mention Disney is re-releasing 1940’s Pinocchio in Blue Ray format, for those who appreciate classic animation.
In Anime God Eater Pt 2 is the second half of a 12 episode series, but with a list price of $89 for 6 episodes, I will be watching it on Daisuki or Crunchyroll until the distributor comes to their senses. Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz continues the Magical Girls story begun in season 1, where the unasked-for powers continue to turn the most mundane tasks into adventures to be survived. I don’t think this last one is really genre, but the story line of Shomin Sample: The Complete Series is off the wall enough to be considered fantasy, so I am including it here.