If you hang out in Second Life, there are several Doctor Who events you should be aware of. Coming up this Sunday, at 1PM SL time, the Sci-fi & Fantasy Portal on Info Island will have a Doctor Who Discussion. The link to get there can be found here. The folks at Gallifreyan Embassy and Podshock also have meet-ups inworld periodically; do a search for Podshock, and again for Doctor Who. They had a really nice Tardis HUD that is fun to teleport with.
Big record companies are famous for being greedy and short-sighted, and a great example of this is what happened when online music videos came around. At first, the artists went after them as a means of getting their music in front of the public, generating buzz and fans; free advertising in an online world. The record companies let them do it, and thousands of fans would embed their favorite songs on their pages, exposing still more people to the music. But the record companies always want to be paid for things other people create and distribute, so the lawyers worked out a way to make YouTube pay on a per-play basis for the music. Since it worked out that YouTube only has to pay when the music is streamed on YouTube itself, most record companies refused to allow any music they had under contract to be embedded. This shut the bands out of gaining thousands of new fans by having their songs on all kind of pages, while the record companies themselves aren’t making any noticeable amount of money from the streams (assuming they aren’t just cooking the books to avoid paying the bands their royalties); a loose/loose situation. But after hammering on their record company for weeks, Chicago’s alt rockers OK GO got them to allow this amazing video to be embedded, and I predict it is going to bring them thousands of new fans, mostly mad scientists in training who love rock! For the background on this one, visit DVice.
A Fan-run con in Bloomington, MN is MarsCon; they have a goodly collection of guests and some interesting events, including Steampunk Bullwhip displays and Dragon Making by Committee.
CoastCon 33 in Biloxi, MS, is another Fan run con, this time with David Drake for the writer GoH and Nicky Clyne as the media GoH (the full guestlist is here).
StellarCon in High Point, NC is a general SciFi con. What I find interesting is it claims to be a smaller event, generally pulling around 500 attendees, and yet the guest list is large and includes some excellent authors.
Pikeville, AL will be hosting a Horror, Paranormal, and Cult film fest/con event called the Dark Woods Con. And RagnaroKon 10 is a Gamer con in Columbia MO.
One of the MediaCons this weekend is Creation Entertainment’s Twilight Con GA in Atlanta. The other media event is a Back to the Future reunion in Florance, AL
I came across an article on the Null Set about Making Anime Personas for Firefox, with some excellent examples (that set is listed under Steelbound). I also found rather nice collections by Songbird, Bellas, Kawaii Mooru, and Fleur, to name just a few. I also found huge selections of other science fiction themes, but these should give you the idea.
Building your own seems pretty simple and straightforward; the short version is you create an image each for the top and the bottom of the browser, both 3000 pixels wide, with the top at 200 pixels tall and the bottom 100 pixels. For slightly more detailed information, check the Persona Create and Test page. These are too much fun; I think the trick is building ones that look good but don’t interfere too much with the tool bars. If you need to install the personas Add-on, you will find it here.
There is only one movie to mention this week, the Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland.
Two films mark this week as a major release date for the young and young at heart. Ponyo was supposed to have been on the shelves before Christmas, and then again in January, but each time they pushed the date back. Unfortunately I can’t read the official Studio Ghibli site, nor do I know which country it is telling us the DVD date is for. But Amazon seems to think it will come out Tuesday, so unless they pull another last-minute reschedule we may hopefully see it this time.
The award for best drama performance while wearing a rug-thick costume with built in animatronics goes to Where The Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze implementation of the famous children’s book. This live-action film is designed for slightly older kids than the animated Ponyo, but both are wonderful stories that any adult can relate to.
Then there are two made-for-TV programs that you might think were for children, but they aren’t. The 1966 BBC program Alice in Wonderland was definitely built for adults, and even originally aired after 9PM. This masterpiece had such starts as Michael Redgrave, Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, and John Gielgud in it, and its release onto DVD is long overdue.
The other one goes by the shorter title Alice, and was on the Sci-Fi Channel in December. Also designed for adults from the same source material, this one stars Caterina Scorsone, Andrew Lee Potts, Matt Frewer, Tim Curry, Colm Meaney, Cathy Bates, and many others. I don’t think it is any great surprise both of these are hitting the shelves the same week that the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version opens in Theaters. And that one also has some amazing actors, including Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway; one would think this story draws almost as many quality actors as Hamlet, a tale everyone wants to be in at least once.
For fans of disaster movies, 2012 does its best to kill off the entire planet, and you can’t get much more disastrous than that while we are all stuck in a single gravity well. While this one feels a bit more like a thrill ride than a movie, it is fun.
Speaking of fun, do not miss Gentlemen Broncos; while more a story about a Sci-Fi author than science fiction itself, this one is downright funny.
For classic TV, this time around it is Doctor Who: Dalek War, two John Pertwee era stories. Frontier in Space is grand space-opera told on a tiny budget, and features not only the Daleks but is also the last time we saw Roger Delgado as The Master. Planet of the Daleks may look like a Hartnell story, but it does have some original Dalek background information, plus after the photo layout I just have to grin any time I see Jo Grant with a Dalek.
Besides the previously mentioned Ponyo, there are several other anime titles this week. The Yozakura Quartet don’t play instruments, but are a mixed-blood (demon and human) demon fighting team; this boxed set is the complete collection. Season three of ARIA The Origination is also out, and the 13 episodes are packaged up with the OVA for extra value.
Eureka Seven: Good Night Sleep Tight Young Lovers was a re-imaging of sorts; they took all the same characters from the same world but changed the core premise of Eureka herself. That change to the character’s origin completely changed the dynamic of the plot line. Which means, even if you own the original TV series, you haven’t seen this story yet.
Kurokami The Animation Part 1 show a run time in the product description of 200 minutes, which tells me it is only the first 8 episodes of this 24 episode series. Since that would make the combined total for all three DVD releases somewhere around $90, I think I will watch it on Crunchyroll first and decide if it is worth that much cash, or if I should wait for a less expensive “Complete Series” release.
And I think I finally understand why they delayed Ponyo; because also on Tuesday there will be Special Editions of three other Studio Gibli classics; Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and My Neighbor Totoro. If you are missing any of these, now is the perfect time to add them to your collection.