Yes, that is the notorious “Welcome to WordPress” message, or the first program you create when learning any new language, just to prove the installation was successful. This is not my first post, but it is the first post on a brand new server, with the things listed as older having been imported from the previous server. Some of which were migrated from an older server still, by hand since there was no working import/export function that didn’t include copying out an entire MySQL database at that time. Hopefully this new environment will be much easier to use than the old one, and I will get back into regular postings here.
The animated choice this time is The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature which is good silly fun, as you would expect. But the live action option has to be Once Upon a Time, the Chinese epic fantasy about love across the incarnations and across time. It looks like the live action version of Tokyo Ghoul is being released as well, but not in this country.
The winner this week is Despicable Me 3 (which is actually the 4th film in the series), hands down and no doubt about it. While I will definitely be in the theater for that one, it is not the only choice. The Little Hours is a very twisted medieval romantic comedy that takes place in a convent, and may give Despicable Me a run for its money on the comedy front but with a noticeably older audience.
This is an exciting weekend for Whovians; we get both the Season 10 opener for Doctor Who, and the series premier for Class, which I can’t help but think owes an awful lot to Sara Jane Smith. Liz Sladen may not have been the first teacher featured on Doctor Who (that honor goes to Ian and Barbara from the very first 1963 episode), but she persisted over the decades, until she became the teacher the new iteration of the series needed. BBC America is running all the Peter Capaldi episodes back to back, counting down the time to the Season 10 premeir and the fist episode of the new series!
The announcement was made today that NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has found 7 rocky planets ranging in size and density from Mars to and a bit beyond Earth. All of them are potentially within liquid water orbital range of their sun, three of them permanently, and depending on the green house gasses composition of the atmospheres the other 4 of them may be. Now that they have located them, every orbital telescope we have is pointed in their direction, gathering data. The star they orbit is nothing like ours, but a tiny rather cool Red Dwarf, which means we have the possibility of habitable planets around many more stars than we used to believe. Of the videos here, the first is a short visual announcement, the second is the full announcement with Q+A broadcast earlier today, and the third is a 360 degree VR rendering to give you a feel for what it would look like from the surface of one of them.
The choice this week is Spectre, the latest in the James Bond series, and perhaps the last that Daniel Craig will be Bond for. I appreciate the whole Day Of The Dead tie in, considering the timing. There are also a couple of other good choices, including The Peanuts Movie for classic animation fans, and Macbeth for straight-up classic fans. Myself, I will probably be making the Bond selection; I loved the Ian Flemming books, so I should support the films made from them.