In Movies Hitman: Agent 47 is the story of a genetically engineered assassin who is not terribly happy about his fate. He teams up with a woman who may be the offspring of one of the earlier iterations in his lineage to try to stop a multinational corporation which is out to unlock the secret of his creation and build an army of unstoppable killers. They are the only thing standing between that group and world domination, and the world could really use their help. Sadly, that seems to be all the new releases we get this week in any genre category, but that isn’t terribly surprising considering the holidays were last week, and the buying gifts season is officially over for this year.
All forms of audio/video/text storage
The best music of 2015 has to include the Ulfuls, who had several killer releases this year, with Sporty Party at the top of their list. Did I mention that 2015 was the year of One OK Rock, when after a decade of working their collective tails off they finally broke into the US market with a major record label giving them full distribution across North America? They are the last few tracks in today’s group, truly the best new music of the year.
More amazing music that I consider some of the best out of 2015, including Ore Ska Band doing Hands Up Girl back in September (did you know they played Live at Otakon this year?). Next is Wake Up!, an amazing collaboration between Asian Kung-Fu Generation and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, two of my favorite bands out of Japan, which is why I kept it in even though it happened in 2014. Sense Clown did A-Han this past June, and Singapore’s Indi Fusion group In Each Hand A Cutlass released Satori 101 back in April.
Merry Xmas Eve, ya’ll; hope you and yours are together and enjoying the holidays this year. For the final image of this set I am using the Impressionist tool, which gives you a very Vincent Van Gogh kind of virtual painting. I will no doubt be posting more about this type of software soon, or at least the variations of it I have been playing with, once I figure out a bit more about how it all works together.
As I said, when we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and this time the same two pictures are being modified using two different tools from Painter Essentials. While the results of these two processes look similar when you look at the images they created, the parts of the original pictures which were enhanced were quite different. I suspect it is going to take me a while to learn what kind of image requires which tool to bring it to its best advantage, especially considering what its best advantage is will change depending on what I want to use it for. Computer wallpaper, animation background, and 3D model textures each have different ways of presenting the results, for example, with the first a static screen image, the second being shadowed and moved by the characters in the foreground, and the third changing continuously with both the camera viewpoint and the orientation of the scene lighting.
When we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and I am sure everyone will be shocked and surprised to learn many of them were taken on, in, or around steam powered locomotives. I took a few of those images and processed them through an art program, Corel Painter Essentials 5, which is the stripped down successor of their earlier package Paint It!. I wanted to share a few of those results, this time using the Colored Pencil Tool.
