This is frackin’ hysterical….
Someone did an amazing job of editing this Sesame Street footage to have the Cookie Monster sing the Tom Waits song God’s Away on Business. It’s already found all over the web, I got the heads up from Kellytastic.
The Radioactive Orchestra has an assortment of over 3,000 radioactive isotopes which you can use to create music. Strange as that sounds, it is a first class way to get an instinctive understanding of radiation decay behaviors and patterns, allowing you to directly perceive the activity. And, with a little mixing of isotopes and adjusting your BPM rate and root frequency you can actually end up with an interesting music bed from which to build your own compositions. They also have some wave filter functions; it defaults to a sine wave, but try a square wave or sawtooth for some interesting acoustic variations. Thanks to the folks at New Scientist for the heads up on this one.
From Norway we have Troll Hunter, a fantasy adventure done in the venerable Blair Witches style of pseudo-reality film style (think no budget, shoddy film gear, and total lack of skill sets). Three collage students take a cheap film camera and follow a hunter into the wilderness, eventually figuring out that he was hunting creatures the government claimed were bears, but which turned out to be much less of this world. Also out this week, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage is a compilation of three short films that together make up a prequel to Assassin’s Creed II, bridging the gap between movie and game.
For TV, the primary selection this week is The Event: The Complete Series. I haven’t actually seen any of this shows episodes, because the premise and trailers struck me as somebody trying too hard to jump on the Lost bandwagon, which was kind of silly considering Lost was terminally past tense long before then. Much more interesting is the Live From Tokyo documentary about the city in Japan that has 1,000 bands playing each and every night.
Live From Tokyo Trailer from Lewis Rapkin on Vimeo.
In western animation, I have to vote for the New Adventures of Captain Amazing-Lad, pretty much a parody of any other superhero cartoon going. In eastern animation this weeks winner has to be Samurai Girls, which takes place in an alternate timeline where twenty first century Japan is still ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate. The entire series may only be 12 episodes long, but they cover a lot of cultural and social upheavals in that time. Also out this week, the new Eden of the East: Paradise Lost brings us the next feature film in the exciting series. It would have gotten my top spot vote if it had been a season instead of a movie.
If you have been playing games for a while, you have no doubt run across the classic platform shooter Metroid, which has been around since 1986. According to the folks a Crunchyroll, in honor of the games 25th anniversary there has been an album recorded of the themes from various versions of it called Harmony of a Hunter, and released as a free download from ShineSparkers. A lot of the music is in what I think of as the 8 Bit Boogie format but some is in Metal, Chiptune, and Dubstep. Thee is currently no physical media you can buy, but if they get enough response on the download they are considering releasing it on disc. Considering how key to the franchise the game music has been since the beginning, I think this is an excellent tribute. Be aware, if you download the whole side files (which shows just how old school the creators are: each “whole side” disk is the normal 16 or so minutes long of the traditional vynal record album), the songs slide from one into the next with a cross fade between them. If you want the songs as stand alone so you need only add the ones you like to your playlist, you will want to download the individual tracks.
Thanks to Japanator, I was turned on to this wonderful AMV featuring the visual input from Full Metal Panic: fumoffu. The series is funny as hell, with a military minded giant mecha driving high school age combat veteran without a clue about how to act in non-combat situations assigned to guard a high school girl. If nothing else, his threat evaluation skills need retraining and his responses could be a little less lethal. After watching the AMV, I am ready to break out the series and watch the entire thing again, starting with season 1, episode 1.