I couldn’t help it, this song was too much fun. I Kveld Med YLVIS isn’t a band, it is a Norwegian talk/variety show with an attitude, and they originally did this track as another comedy skit on their show. It went somewhat viral, pulling in 359,757,676 views (as of the last time I checked), the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in the US watching it. They brought it to the BBC Children In Need Special produced every year to aid kids who might otherwise not get a chance to grow up, and were joined by a bunch of singers you should recognize; how many of them can you name? And then someone mashed it up with 2013’s other runaway silly song, Gangnam Style from Psy. Just goes to show, sometimes when you get silly the world notices and sings along.
My car got buried under the 19 inches of snow that fell last night and today, and then it changed to rain which made me hope it would wash it all away so I wouldn’t have to shovel. 30 minutes later it changed back to snow, laying just enough liquid water down to put a layer of ice over everything when the temperature dropped again. The folks on TV say we can expect another 4 to 6 inches of snow before it ends tonight. This year has kind of made me wish I owned a sled or a pair of skies, so I could get some entertainment out of the unusual weather. At the point I took this picture we were at about the 12 inches mark.
In movies, Ender’s Game was one of the rare films that is true to the book it is based on; both versions are telling exactly the same story. With an excellent cast, powerful performances, and amazing special effects, it is definitely worth joining anyone’s permanent collection. I don’t remember seeing The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box in theaters near me, but it is now coming to disc. It was meant to be the first in a series of YA Steampunk stories based in the Victorian Era’s British Empire, but it did not get good reviews or much in the way of box office revenues, so I suspect it will be the last, instead.
In TV, Sherlock: Season Three continues the brilliant series driven by Steven Moffat. I am seriously waiting for season 4 next year. The Returned is a twisty little series about a group of people who came home to learn that they had died years ago, and when the currently living start dying off it becomes obvious something has followed them back. It isn’t quite a remake of the TV show Les Revenants, but it lives in the same zip code. Doctor Who: The Moonbase is one of the lost stories, available only in partial video episodes, audio drama, or picture book form. It is one of the Patrick Troughton tales for which they have now used animation to restore, so you can watch all four episodes. Not as good as they did for Enemy Of The World or The Web Of Fear, where they actually recovered the original video footage to restore, but a step closer to getting the whole story the way it was meant to be experienced.
In Anime, Kamisama Kiss is about a ordinary young girl who suddenly became a god at the touch of a stranger’s lips. As she struggles to get her new realm under control, she realizes that life may be worth going for, after all. MM! is about a masochist named Sado who joins a club to seek help with his emotional problems. The clubs president may or may not be a god, but certainly wields some interesting powers, and some of the other members include a girl terrified of men and a nurse who forces all her patients to cosplay. The other club members are a bit strange, even by this groups reckoning. Finally, Strike Witches: Season 2 S.A.V.E Edition gives you the girls who were airplanes continuing to defend the home planet from alien invasion during WWII, at a very affordable price. The Funimation home page seems to be saying Season One S.A.V.E edition on BR/DVD is also about to come out, but since I already own it I have to believe they mean they will be re-releasing it. Or maybe the blurb is for a different country.
The 50th Anniversary was in November, but there are still a lot of fun things being released for it. One of those things is the from Silva Screen, in three different assortments. The important one to be aware of is the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary presentation, which includes 129 different musical pieces.
In Movies About Time is a romantic fantasy involving the Groundhog Day premise; you do each important event over until you get it right. It was in the theaters just a month or two back, I feel certain they are going after the Valentine crowd with this one. It is a very nicely done movie with a lot of heart, so not a bad choice. The animated comedy Free Birds also comes to disc, but although I am an animation fan I can’t say this one really caught my attention. A better bet for animated entertainment this week is Justice League: War, a direct to DVD feature film.
In TV, while not a fantasy, the historical epic The White Queen deserves a mention, about some power mad women who stopped at nothing to get on the British throne.
We do much better in Anime this week, leading off with Fairy Tail – Part 8. This magical guild continues to do as much damage to their fellow guilds and the surrounding buildings and terrain as they do to the demons they are called upon to defeat. AKB0048 Next Stage Complete Collection is a bit silly but a lot of fun, as season two rolls out the 77th generation of the ultimate IDOL group going across the galaxy singing and shooting. Why shooting? A number of planetary governments have outlawed “things that disturb the heart”, including music. So the girls swoop down on a planet, set up a live concert which is also spread on the planetary net, and sing and dance until the police and soldiers show up. At that point, they have to fight their way back off the planet and head for the next one. If nothing else, this series is a great way to collect a bunch of AKB48 music. BTW, the English version of their home page is broken at the moment, dumping you back to the Japanese version if you try to go to it, but all of their other English pages appear to be working.
Blessing of the Campanella: Complete Collection is a mash up of medieval quests and robotic harems, with supernatural meteor showers and automaton artisans. Plus a lot of time spent hanging out at the beach in between quests and mysteries. This package includes all 12 episodes of the series plus the OVA. I found the provenance of this a bit confusing at first, since the home page with streaming video in the US is over at Funimation, but the DVD release is coming from Nozomi/Lucky Penny/Right Stuf. It turns out that the original simulcast run was at Funimation in 2010, with a DVD release from that distributor in 2011. Normally I do not post re-releases here unless they are important in some way, but I completely missed the series the first time around. Since it is new to me, I am claiming that as justification and posting it anyways.
AV Linux is another incredibly powerful boot-from-DVD build focused on a specialist task set and workflow, and once again it is centered around audio/video production (hence the name). It has all the tools most of us will ever need to create, edit, and compile our projects into coherent multimedia presentations. Like most Linux builds, the default menu buttons and icons are aligned across the top of the screen (although you can move them to any screen border you like best), and they have a small collection of the links to the stuff the developers felt was most important on the screen proper, like help files and the install tools.
Like more and more operating systems, they also have an Icon Bar running down one edge of the screen, giving you a smartphone-like collection of apps/programs to access from your start screen. Again, you can rearrange any component of the desktop to suit your own preferences and habits, like throwing the Icon Bar to any other border, but since this is a Live DVD, you will either have to remaster it, or install it on a Flash Drive/Hard Drive, to get it to remember your preferences from boot to boot. Besides making your choices persistent, installing it on a thumb drive will also allow you to update all the programs and install more of your own, so you can tweak it into the perfect tool set for your projects.
The build itself includes an amazing range of Audio, Graphics and Video content creation software demonstrating the excellence of Open-Source solutions, and the fact that they are free is just making a good thing better. This one is designed for a 32bit computer, meaning this Operating System is designed to turn a regular OLD PC or Intel Mac into an Audio/Graphics/Video workstation with power you won’t believe. I have been somewhat surprised to discover some of my legacy computers are able to outclass some of my newer Windows systems for multimedia creation after booting them from this kind of Linux Live DVD.
The video at the end of this post is for the LAST version of AV Linux; this version is way better! But he covers a ton of stuff included with the OpSys (no great surprise, he coordinated building it, so he knows it best), and most of the basic stuff is the same. Only the names have changed, to protect the innocent Apps (sorry, I couldn’t resist). It gives you a wonderful overview of a lot of the software packages included in the last release, and as always the latest version has all of that and so much more. If you are an audio or video creator and work inside computer environments, this will give you an excellent understanding of which tools you will want to call up for what processes.
