Japanese commercials look strange to western eyes mostly because we do not have the cultural context to appreciate them. While some of these look very like what you might find on TV over here, some are just bizarre looking. Enjoy.
I am more than ready for Pacific Rim to hit the theaters! Finally the US gets its own Giant Mecha vs. Monsters kind of movie!
It has been quite the expedition this week, with all kinds of amazing and exciting events, but it has also been exhausting, and at this point even The Luggage is ready to go home and take a break. We will all be resting up and thinking about everything we want to make sure we can attend next year, but for now a gaping Luggage yawn followed by the fluffy sound of impacting face first into the pillows is the best thing for us. See you all again soon!
I have been waiting for Pacific Rim for quite a while, and finally It Is Gojira Season! We get to don our Giant Mecha suits and battle the monsters head on, at least in the virtual universe of the big screen. I fully expect to be completely entertained by this one, and will probably come home only to spend the rest of the day being fully immersed in more Giant Mecha excitement.
The movie The Host was a surprisingly enjoyable story of alien invasion, sort of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters redone as a fem-centric YA story with an ending based on collaboration rather than conquest. Which makes sense, since it is also a romance, but much better done than the authors other movie series with all the sparkly vampires.
In TV we have season 4 of Warehouse 13, a fun little series full of artifacts with strange powers. Too bad Eureka isn’t still around to go with it, I loved the crossover episodes they did.
In Anime, Blue Exorcist: Complete 1st Season is the ultimate in inter-generational infighting; Th son is becoming a world-class exorcist going after demons. The father is Satan, infiltrating his minions into the world of humans. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack! is more scientific, with mechanically augmented sea creatures attacking the land dwellers. Our protagonist leaves Okinawa and heads to Tokyo to see if her boyfriend is OK, only to discover the city overrun by the mechanized monsters.
There was a Discworld game that came out way back in 1995, and as such games do, it had a collection of 8 bit music. It also had Eric Idle doing the voice of Rincewind, which I think is a brilliant bit of casting, and Jon Pertwee doing a whole lot of the other voices. It was based on Terry Pratchett’s book Guards, Guards! but somehow wound up with Rincewind instead of Vimes in charge. If you still have the game you no doubt need a legacy system to play it on, but thanks to Sorek142 you can still listen to the soundtrack, or at least the incidental music, from the various scenes. Note that does not include Eric Idle’s song That’s Death, ranked by PC Gamer as among The best songs in PC gaming in 2010, because that was on the Discworld II game.