Sooner or later it had to happen; a Nerdcore artist, MC Lars in this case, did a tribute to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. The track is called Dragons Blood, and both the video and the song are fun. As someone watching the end product it is hard to tell if Editor Mike Sobo, Visual Effects master Tobias Arturi, or the
Effects Mixer Samarei was the one responsible for the excellent time/speed frame shifting during the combat choreography. It is truly well done, whoever pulled it off.
This is the latest track from Passepied entitled Tokinowa. Normally you would get a bit more animation with a Passepied song, but you are seeing it out of context here; check this page to get the full effect. Tokinowa is the ending theme of the new animation of Rumiko Takahashi’s original Manga Rinne of the Boundary, officially subtitled as Circle of Reincarnation. The song becomes available on April 29th, in about a week and a half, although the Anime started airing in Japan on April 4th. Viz licensed both the Manga and the Anime for hard copy release, and you can watch it stream on Crunchyroll, where it is currently on the second episode.
BBC Radio 4 is airing the first ever dramatization of Ursula Le Guin’s award winning and groundbreaking The Left Hand of Darkness beginning today at 15:00 UT. That’s right around 11AM EST, or 8AM Pacific, and besides airing in real time it will be available in their Listen Again mode for the next week or three. The one hour program is the first part of two, so make sure to catch them both so you can enjoy the whole story. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as 1969’s best novel (one voted on by fans, one voted on by authors), and I can’t wait to hear it as a radio play. Another of her works is being aired beginning on the 27th of this month on BBC Radio 4Extra; Earthsea will be airing at 18:00 UT, and is a series of 6 episodes, 30 minutes long each. I’m not even going to try to tell you how many awards it won.
Of all the Greatest Rap Battles in History entries, this one has to be the shortest in terms of actual unique word count, but it still cracked me up. And then they did the Rap Battle of the Five Armies; Enjoy!
I swear this concept is based on the Rudy Rucker thought experiment turned into the novel The Hacker and the Ants, in which a programmer models virtual ants to work out a system of robotics driven by emergent behavior and mesh networking. That was in the early 1990s, when Rucker was a programmer at Autodesk, Inc., writing 3D CAD/CAM modeling software as his day job. With the state of the technology at that point, that story was officially science fiction; he could have copyrighted the concept, but there was no way to actually build any of it in the real world, therefore no patent. Pretty much the same way Aurthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars in his spare time when he invented the geosynchronous satellite during WWII; it would be almost 20 years before anything could actually launch into terrestrial orbit, and more years after that before any of it could reach the geosynchronous sweet spot 23,400 miles up.
But now, decades later, the folks at Festo in Germany have done it; using a combination of 3D Printing, Piezoelectrics, Mesh Networking, Neural Networking, Heuristic Extrapolation, and just damn good programming, they have created Rucker’s Ants. And yes, it does look like they have hit on a system that supports Emergent Behavior as well. Mind, these ant-like androids are the size of your hand, but that is useful for a lot of tasks, and as they continue to develop the project, they will no doubt be able to miniaturize them more each year (scaling them up was never a problem). I have to wonder if Rucker’s new ant story, Attack Of The Giant Ants, was created once he learned of this project. Thanks to New Scientist for the heads up on this one!
Clive Owens and Morgan Freeman star in Last Knights, an epic fantasy adventure about the fight for freedom and justice against those who seek to oppress. The reviews have not been great, but it could be entertaining. I am a bit more interested in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, taking place in 1943 Calcutta, with a full assortment of potential evildoers both military and civilian. This one is based on the fictional detective in Bengali literature created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, and if the movie does well we could have many more, since the original stories were published at a rate of 1 to 3 a year from 1932 to 1970. Interestingly enough, the author also worked in Bollywood writing screenplays, but not of Bakshy. There have been a number of other movies made about Byomkesh Bakshy, and after I see this one in the theater I am probably going to have to start tracking them down.
Oh, yeah, if you thought the two tracks they used in the trailer were the only good songs in the movie, allow me to correct that misconception by including the official Full Song Audio Jukebox. I wish western movies would do this, but since Bollywood movies are so music-centric it makes sense they would have started making these available before anyone else got around to it. Not just on YouTube to stream either, since they always give you a link to go buy the soundtrack on iTunes after you have streamed it and decided which songs you need in your permanent collection.