Have you been following the action on Robocup 2010? Robocup is taking place in Singapore this year, with a hoard of soccer playing robots from all over the world competing against each other. The organizations goal is to be able to field a team of humanoid robots that can beat their human opponents in the World Cup by the year 2050. It seems that some American Robots from Carnegie Mellon University have been programed with a new algorithm for predictive ball physics that may give them an edge. In the video, the bot with the blue center dot is the one running the algorithm.
I am happy to report that the Google Pacman now is permanently online at that link!
Craving some Steampunk? Allow me to recommend the alternate history series Clockwork Century from author Cherie Priest. Some of the books and stories in this series are up for some serious awards, so it is worth your attention. If you are looking for a Build Your Own project, I was just passed the link to the Gamepunk Woot Shirt design. While it has been forever since I last silk-screened a T-Shirt or poster (yes, another one of those jobs we have all had that doesn’t directly relate to our main goal in life, but that was fun and educational), it has inspired me to start working on creating 3D VRML/2ndLife/Machinema objects based on the Portable Games In A Steampunk World concept. Perhaps you have a design idea? Triple points if your 3D object can actually activate a HUD and run an interactive game within the virtual environment!
I am glad Chuck got renewed for a 4th season, because I love that show. For those who enjoyed the season finale last Monday but were hoping for more music, thanks to the Chicago Tribune you can watch the Jeffster Music Video in its entirety.
And one last detail, for the Punk Rocker who needs to remember their roots; Linda, Linda…
The main movie for this weekend has to be Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. If the film is half as good as the trailer, it is going to be a blast. And it looks like you don’t have to be a master of the game to enjoy it, unlike some movies built from games.
If you are a George A. Romero fan, then you might want to go to George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead, which is something like the 6th Dead movie he has made.
This weekend has Con-G, an Anime con in Guelph, ON, Canada (and personally I love the pun in their name). The events at this one lean heavily to Cosplay and music, and it looks like a lot of fun. At the west end of the Great White North Tsukino-Con will be happening in Victoria, British Columbia. Being on the tip of Vancouver Island, Canada, they may just pull in a few folks who were in the neighborhood to do something Olympic.
Anime also lives in Kansas City, MO, at Naka-Kon, where they have some amazing guests and events lined up, including Peelander-Z. Saturday brings on Chibi Chibi Con 10 in Olympia, WA, as well.
In the general Fan category we have ConNooga, at the historical Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel and Convention Center in TN. They are covering all aspects of the genre, but it looks like their strength lies in their Artists Guests
For the gamers, Total Con-fusion claims the title of New England’s largest gaming event, and Owl Con covers the game gamut in Houston. The Bash Con gaming fest is in Toledo, Ohio, and like OwlCon takes place on a collage/university campus.
Finally, Furry Fiesta in Dallas is for those who wear the fur.
Out of all the online Advent Calendars this holiday season, two of them have been outstanding. I didn’t know what an Advent Calendar was when I stumbled onto the first site, and by then I had missed the first ten days or so of the offerings. Rest assured that next year I will be searching for them in early November, and post a list of the best ones I find Thanksgiving weekend, so we can all be ready come 1Dec2010.
The first is the AppVent Calendar, a project put together by Blacksmith Games. Starting on December 1st, each day they made one to three of their IPhone/IPod games available for free, and several of them were quite impressive. Most of the games offered for free for one day were also offered for dirt cheap ($.99 for a normally $3 piece of software, on average) for the remainder of Advent.
The other one that gave me useful presents was the WP Engineer’s amazing offering, where each day the tech-savvy team handed out another way for you to rebuild your WordPress driven web site into a true powerhouse. Each entry in this arsenal is a small bit of code, usually in the 5 to 25 lines category, but sometimes as simple as using the Custom Fields entry in the Query Post function to sort entries in a way that would normally take you some development time (as a single example).
I am pretty sure their goal was to offer a VAR (Value Added Resource) to their site in order to attract another one or three hundred potential customers. I am also pretty sure they added a lot more visitors to their web site than they were expecting, and even if most of the new additions do not end up being paying customers today, it will be a good thing for them in the long run. Congratulations to WP Engineers on creating my personal favorite holiday site this year!
We have two top domestic live action choices this week! The first is Terminator Salvation, and Warner Bros. is holding a online event on December 5th with the director. If you are interested in the history of this kind of event, read all the way to the bottom of this posting to see my latest rant on the topic.
The other big film is Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which I just missed seeing at the Smithsonian IMAX theater premier event (tickets were WAY tight). It is also being released as a two movie package if you didn’t get the first one already, Night at the Museum/Battle of the Smithsonian.
If there was a live-action speculative fiction TV show released this week, I managed to miss it. Someone will no doubt point it out to me about 15 minutes after I post this.
It is a DVD, and Fantasy, but it is a DVD Game, not a movie: Harry Potter DVD Game: Wizarding World also comes out on Tuesday.
There are several interesting Anime releases this week. For the classics, there is My-Otome Complete Collection: Anime Legends edition. The Anime Legends series are extremely popular programs re-released with an economical pricing structure. Out as a compilation for the first time this week is Chevalier D’Eon – The Complete Series, a beautifully crafted alternate history sequence, but definitely not a lighthearted story.
Hunter X Hunter Box Set, Volume 4 continues the push for Gon and his friends to track down power in the form of treasure, magical beasts, and so forth. The Gunslinger Girl OVA gives some more background on a few of the formerly human characters, and trust me when I say these are children you would NOT want to meet in a dark alley.
‘Rental Magica’ DVD Collection 1 is an assortment of strange magic users out to battle evil, and come from a variety of magical traditions. Most sites claim this was actually released last week, but since I missed the Anime section last week I though I should mention it now.
About the Warner Bros. Special Events. This is something they have started recently (there is another one coming up for the new Harry Potter DVD release), and seems to involve group watching of the DVD together with an internet connection to the meeting software that allows you to type in questions, which the director (or actors or anyone else they involve from the movie production team) can answer verbally.
If you have been in moderated celebrity events in Second Life this decade, Virtual Places Chat in the ’90s, or live Usenet (meaning IRC or Internet Relay Chat) in the 80’s, you have already experienced this. And yes, I know the Usenet example I cited was from the 90’s, it was just the one I had handy courtesy of a recent post on a different topic. I actually have transcripts from moderated IRC sessions with SciFi authors I asked questions of going back as far as 1984 from QNet (the Commodore version of AOL and Compuserve in those days), but I didn’t have a link to any of them to point to. Perhaps this reference work will help, should you need it.
The bandwidth, and therefore the resolution, has just gotten better each decade; text only in ’84 at 300 baud, downstream-only audio in the mid ’90s at 56K, entire 3D virtual worlds with 2-way audio chat and streaming video by the mid 2000’s with 2-way asynchronous broadband. From the description of what they are going to do and how they will be doing it, this application of the event environment appears to be something we had the technology to do by 1998 or so, except for the Hi-Def video. But since the Video is going to be played locally from a DVD player and not streamed over the Net, it does not in any way change the bandwidth requirements.