Happy Valentines day; it is a bit difficult to find references worth noting about science fiction Valentines, but I did rather like Geek Love’s 10 Couples from the Big and Small Screen the other week. They also put together a nice collection of Geek Valentines Cards that had a couple of real winners in it. For something more interactive than reading a web site, you still have time to Send a Doctor Who Valentines Card to your significant alien. Finally, the best Steampunk Valentines Song I have ever seen; enjoy.
The 10th Visual Effects Society Awards were handed out this past Tuesday, and as is often the case, a small number of shows got several awards each. Transformers: Dark of the Moon seemed to get the most (no, I didn’t count them, so I could be wrong), but Hugo, the animated Rango, the semi-animated live action Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and various episodes of Game of Thrones walked away with more than one each. But there were a number of projects that got a single award each, such as Captain America, and this little gem here, called A. Maize, which was awarded Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project
It is more Captain Robert, of course, than the band as a whole, but the first several chapters of The Wrath Of Fate are available to purchase, or to listen to online if you need a taste before making your decision. This is the fictionalized story of the origin of Abney Park, a kick-ass Steampunk band, and personally I love the way it is evolving so far. Just in case you didn’t know what kind of music a Steampunk Band plays, the second video shows them practicing one of their better songs, Airship Pirates, although the audio with it is from the studio version. This is the music you would have been listening to when the semaphores or telegraph finished sending the digitally processed signals, and Babbage’s Difference Engine used an array of tuned saw blades struck by hammers to play it back out to you. In those days, we would have been called clackers rather than hackers because of the sounds the steam-driven brass logic switches would have made while they ran our calculations, algorithms, and apps.
And a couple of pictures taken in London a few months ago; the first is a picture I took while staring at the actual, completed Babbage Engine (Babbage never finished building the full sized one himself, although he did have a bunch of smaller versions that allowed Ada to develop the worlds first programing language). I tried my best not to drool all over the case, but I may have failed in that particular.
The second was a picture taken of me and the Babbage machine by my traveling companion, proving I was there with it. I know that in this era of photoshoping anything and everything this does not constitute proof in most peoples minds. Since I have the added data point of having been there and remembering the moment the photo was taken, I could really care less if you believe it; for me, this is the photo that locks it down in my memory.
Finally, a bit of Captain Robert’s own attitude, as distributed by G4, about what Steampunk really is…
Now that the TV series Chuck is over, Zac Levi’s next project is The Nerd Machine, which is pretty much what you would expect from the name. They threw the must-attend party at the last Comic-Con, and their most recent public presence was at this year’s CES. The key component of their web site appears to be the forum at this juncture, although they do have a respectable number of nerd related videos.
The life size Gundam Mecha returned to its home in Odaiba recently, and the folks at Darwin Fish 105 did their usual incredible job of filming the event. This time around, the footage was taken at night, with a very nice overlay (if something in the background can be considered an overlay, since it is really in the masked screen areas under the primary video) of wide aperture star fields doing extended time exposures and then compiled into an animated setting. The next video is called Tokyo Heartbeat, and shows some world class utilization of the classic time lapsed photography process. If you ever wondered if a city was alive, wonder no longer; you can see its pulse throbbing in this one. Finally, Ginza At Night completes the triptych, this time using high speed film (or the digital equivalent) along with wide aperture light gathering settings on the camera to render a movie that could never have been created in daylight. I am quite impressed with the Darwin Fish processes and results; great job, gang!
This one is from the folks at College Humor, and it sure as hell had me rolling on the floor laughing! Enjoy…