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Ubuntu Studio Live DVD

Another excellent collection of creative software for the artist, animator, movie maker, musician, and publisher built into a Boot-From-DVD Live distro, Ubuntu Studio is ready to help you make some amazing stuff. While they don’t have the huge range of software Open Artist contains, what they do have still covers a lot of ground, and almost all of it is very powerful, stable, intuitive, and user friendly. There is a definite advantage in having access to tools you don’t need to go through a steep learning curve to get a useful result out of, after all.

The workflows they cover are audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing, and within each workflow they include an entire suite of tools for each step of the process. And while I dearly love the large selection of utilities in Open Artist, it can get a bit confusing at times when you just want to crank out your project. It is very nice to have a toolkit available where the best (or at least most commonly used) program for each step is at your fingertips, leaving you no ambiguity about what to launch as you go through creating your masterpiece, in whatever medium.

The latest release is built on Ubuntu 13.10 (Codename: Saucy Salamander), and it has all the latest and greatest updates for all the software. But because it is that new, and not fully vetted for the long haul, it is only supported for the next 4 months. Early adapters will want to go that way, but most folks will probably find the build layered onto Ubuntu 12.04 (Codename: Precise Pangolin), which is supported through 2017, a more reasonable way to go.

Any way you approach this software package, I suspect you will find it a very valuable addition to your creative arsenal. I certainly keep booting the disc over and over and use it to create new things, so I suspect you might find it as interesting after you have seen it a few times.

Amazing Spider Man 2 Trailer

Yep, Sony finally released it today, and it looks amazing, as befits a movie with the name The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I can’t wait for the new episode for the franchise, I like the reboot of the films a lot (although I still like the original trilogy, which had its own set of good points). I love all things Marvel, and still wish my mom hadn’t thrown out my comic book collection in the 70’s. It would be worth a fortune now, including as it did the first hundred or so episodes of Spider Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Thor, Avengers, and more, all of them bought new starting at issue #1.

Looking back, I realize I never collected Iron Man, Captain America, or Doctor Strange because I didn’t care for the artwork, but the same style of artwork was OK for Spider Man and a few others, because I related to the character so well. I guess you could say I loved styles like those Jim Steranko created over those like Steve Ditko made, as a general rule, and if you compare those two artists styles you can extrapolate the rest of my preferences easily enough. But the STORIES from all those universes were riveting, both for their sci-fi wonderfulness and their depth of character development with the accompanying interpersonal relationships. To this day, I want more excellent graphics with killer story lines and dramatic emotional development, and I suspect that combination is why the Marvel Movie universe has been such a delight for me. Yes, I will be in the theater for this one. Hopefully in I-MAX 3D for probably two showings in a row.

Doctor’s Girls

I wish I could post the image here, but the artist has asked that no one does that, but rather gives a link to her work on her Deviant Art site. Mimi-Na’s Doctors Girls is quite a nice work of art, and she really caught the iconic female companions perfectly, so you know at a glance who each one is. Between the facial expressions and the font used in each word balloon she even manages to convey the basic personality of each companion. While you are there, take a look at her other sci-i art, including a bunch more Doctor Who images.

New Passepied Song

Sounding a bit like everybody’s favorite virtual idol, Passepied just released a new CD this week, and the first track is a song called S.S from that release. They have been around since 2009, getting their major label deal with Warner Bros. Japan in 2012, doing some great music fusing a lot of different styles, but centered around pop and impressionistic. The fact they named themselves after the last movement in Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite pretty much says it all. Their music videos are also a treat, the lead singer having graduated art school influences them all, and I just had to grin about the Power Rangers in this one. The second track I included is an older song of theirs Yūyake wa inochi no umi, which makes their impressionist influences more obvious. And yes, that third video is from them as well, originally posted in December of 2012.

H.P. Lovecraft Graphic Novels

These are just amazingly detailed works from Jason B. Thompson, an American Manga artist (yes, there is a difference between Manga, Graphics Novels, and Comics) who has put together a few tasty interpretations of some classic H.P. Lovecraft stories. The White Ship was the first one I looked at, and I knew instantly I would have to read them all. Next I hit The Doom That Came to Sarnath, and again I was sucked right in. These are from the Dream Cycle, as are all of his fully realized stories, but you can find his interpretations of other Lovecraft characters and settings in his Lovecraft Sketches section. Thanks to the folks at io9 for the heads up on this one.