This is the first new release from Fungus in 3 years, entitled Dishwasher and Punk, or Punk and Wash depending on who is doing the translating. It just came out this past week, released on Space Shower Music, and this first track sounds pretty good in a Ska kind of way. There are 13 tracks altogether on the disc, so far this is the only one that has been posted online.
Knoppix 7.4.2 is a security and bug-fix update which corrects the Shellshock vulnerability in Bash among a number of other vulnerabilities according to the good folks over at Distrowatch. Plus it has the latest and greatest versions of Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, LibreOffice, and a lot more. And since it is a Live Disk, you don’t have to install it on your computer; just pop it in your DVD drive, reboot your computer, and watch it load and run. Enjoy all the software, and when you are done and shut it down it ejects the disc; if you take it out of the DVD tray, the next time you boot your computer you go back to whatever operating system you have on your hard drive. It defaults to the KDE desktop, but you can select others during the boot process, including GNOME. I am going to download the .ISO file tonight and burn that image to disc so I can check it out!
Just in case you wondered how this should all work together… Big Hero 6 from the Anime Con I enjoyed this past weekend!
The live action version of Black Butler was released in January in Japan, June 14th in Canada, and comes out next week in the UK. Unfortunately it is not scheduled for movie theaters in the US that I could find, but it has been released on all-region DVD here. Originally set in the England of Queen Victoria, the new movie is set in 2020 to give the mingling of the cultures a more realistic environment. When a girl’s parents are killed, she sells her soul to a demon, in return for which he becomes her butler and serves her in all things… including tracking down her parent’s killers. The Manga was excellent, the Anime was quite good as well, I am looking forward to seeing how well they did with the live action version.
The AnimeUSA con this past weekend was a lot of fun, even though the folks organizing it waited until the week before to announce the full schedule. They also abandoned the Guidebook app in favor of something I could not get to work on my iPad or iPod Touch, any of my Android tablets including my Nook (which will actually run the 3D graphical app for Second Life), or any of my computers. Because of some strange formatting that apparently required software to display it properly that I didn’t have, the PDF version of the schedule only allowed you to see what was scheduled on Thursday. I ended up having to track down the printer-friendly version of the schedule on their web site, print it out, and mark the things I wanted to attend with a Sharpie; how 20th century! It didn’t really matter, since the people who were doing all the different parts of the program worked their butts off to make sure their portion was done properly. Bottom line, a good time was had by all, thanks to the individual contributors and the wonderful attitude all the attendees carried with them everywhere they went. This matches the original concept for the event; BY Otaku, FOR Otaku. Most of the professional level guests were from Japan or the Left Coast companies who bring their Anime/Manga products our way. I loved the panels the Voice Actors put on, with the Inside The Voice Actors Studio segment perhaps being my favorite. The Cosplayers were fully represented and owned the hallways, and the panels I managed to attend were excellent, both Fan and Pro run.
I tried to take notes at the various panels, but was usually too busy enjoying them to remember to do so. Perhaps I can remember enough about some of them to post a few notes here. There was so much going on that most hours I had to pick between 3 to 6 things I wanted to attend that were scheduled at the same time. For those wondering, that is me in the picture taken at the con, holding up the sign for next year’s event, and wearing my Planet Tokyo shirt. Note that the shirt does not refer to the Puffy AmiYumi song, but to the radio show by Willow Leafstorm on Krypton Radio, Sci-Fi for your Wi-Fi.
Ths weekend we get Dracula Untold, a story about the ruler and hero Vlad Tepes sacrificing much to save his family and his subjects from the invading armies. In some ways this is a lot closer to the historic facts of his life and times than most Dracula movies, and includes his Impaler tendencies, although with those scenes adjusted to retain the PG-13 rating. Except for that whole Vampire thing they could have passed this as a historical epic, but that just helps spice up the story. I will be in the theaters for this one.