Skip to main content
Terrestrial Human

Something to Watch: Discs

The top western choice this week is Sherlock: Season Four, an excellent series I can’t watch enough of. The only other release that keeps it from being the only genre option in its category is Guardians of Oz from animator Jorge Gutiérrez who did The Book Of Life.

In Anime, Attack on Titan: The Complete First Season finally comes out in a single box set, for the same money as getting the Part 1 or Part 2 releases by themselves. Garo: Crimson Moon is Season Two, Part 1, for more golden armor vs. demons battle. Triage X: Complete Series has a team of nurses who moonlight as assassins, taking out the bad guys for 23 episodes. Finally, while Infinite Stratos 2 has already been released, they are coming out with a Premium Edition that, for a mere hundred dollars more, will give you an additional $20 worth of booklets and trinkets.

ALL OFF

ALL OFF are a Japanese band that formed back in 2004, starting off by playing the festival circuit, becoming an overnight sensation after a decade of killer rock and hard rock. The first track is Refrain Boy, which is the ending theme song for the anime Mob Psycho 100 and was posted last August. If you have your VR headset handy, put it on for the second song, a 360 degree VR version of In Shadows posted about 4 weeks ago. The last one for this week is One More Chance!!, their 2015 major debut track that launched them internationally,

Something to Stream: Ronja and iBoy

Amazon streaming video is releasing Ronja, The Robber’s Daughter next Friday, the 27th. Based on the Astrid Lindgren fantasy novel and put together by Goro Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli, with Gillian Anderson narrating the story. On that same day, Netflix will launch iBoy, a movie about a teen with cell phone superpowers running around London. I plan to check them both out, as they both look interesting in completely different ways. The Ronja trailer is here, see my previous post for the iBoy trailer.

The Virtual Human: Hellblade

I found this video amazing; it is an explanation of how they used a real person to create a game character, and in the process invented the combination of technology needed to allow that person to act in real time in the game. Which means that anyone with deep enough pockets (which would have to be very deep, at this point) could schedule time to get themselves scanned and processed, buy the gear including the head mounted camera system, and do the same thing. It allows you to be fully immersed in the 360 VR game environment as yourself, with everyone able to see and hear you, right down to your current facial expression. Of course, it will be a decade or so before the price comes down enough that the rest of us get to try this out, but its good to know it is on the way.

Robots At The Science Museum

Picturehouse teamed up with the Science Museum in the UK to give away 10 pairs of tickets to the Robots exhibition. Why is this important enough to mention, even though the odds of my stopping by before it closes are slim to zip? Because I wish I could be there, and if I mention it you might manage to actually make it. This isn’t a collection of metal boxes with faces painted on them; it is the 500-year-old story of humanoid robots and what it means to be human. The presentation is set in five different periods and places, with over 100 robots, 15 of which still work today. If you are one of the luck few that manage to attend this display, I would be grateful if you could take a few pictures and send them my way, so I could post them here. The exhibition will be running from from February 8th to the 3rd of September 2017, so you have a bit of time to catch it.