If you haven’t caught it yet, I would like to recommend a TV program called Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel, one of the Discovery Channel subsets. The host is Morgan Freeman, and the topics range through the tough questions that have always faced mankind, for which we now have enough science to begin to approach an answer. It airs on Wednesday evenings, and here is a sample to get you started…
One of the talents it takes to produce animation is Voice Actors; I know a number of them (and used to be one), and they have a unique skill set. Crunchyroll has a nice presentation on the topic called Adventures in Voice Acting, staring a huge assortment of the best in the business. Now that I have watched the first section, I have to flip a mental coin and decide if I want to buy and download the other segments, or just get the DVD for the permanent collection.
For some eye candy gone wrong, stop by SFX’s It’s Gone a bit 2001, a humorous review of ten movies that tried to imitate the psychedelic ending of that classic film and failed miserably.
I enjoy all Variations of Steampunk, from Clockpunk to Gaslamp Fantasy, and what could be more steampunk than H.G. Wells War of the Worlds as performed by Trek stars? You can hear it stream online for another few days yet only, so don’t wait to listen. I also thought a song might be fun to share, and Abney Park just uploaded a remastered MUCH higher quality version of Airship Pirates at the beginning of the month. The Gatehouse Gazette has a good article this week about Victorian Halloween and another on the Steampunk variations of H. P. Lovecraft, and MTV has a video you might want to check out as well.
WB is doing a Supernatural Sweepstakes giveaway as a tie-in with today’s release of the season 4 DVD and the rapidly approaching start of season 5. You can grab the official rules here, but the short version is you become a WB Insider Rewards Member, bounce around the site downloading freebies and earning reward points. That gets your first entry; you can submit another entry each day of the sweepstakes period (but only one per day) by logging back onto the site and submitting a sweepstakes form. You have from now to 2Oct09 to get your forms in; thanks to SF Universe for the heads up on this one. Did I mention the prises include props that have appeared in the show?
You have until Sunday or September 4th (or possibly both, if you own a working Tardis) to enter the SF Signal Shatner/Nemoy giveaway. They are handing out 2 digital copies of Mind Meld – Secrets Behind the Voyage of a Lifetime, the 2001 presentation in which Shatner and Nimoy talk about the series, and how it changed everything for them. The title obviously refers to the famous Vulcan mind meld, a phrase that is used for everything from interviews with Nimoy to selling programming language extensions. It has been used to good effect in SF Signals own Mind Meld series, where they put a question to some of the best speculative fiction writers, editors, and thinkers on the planet and compile the responses into a coherent article. Now that I have digressed sufficiently, go enter the contest before time (however much of it is left) runs out.
The first pictures have come in from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, with detailed enough images to see objects 10 feet across on the surface. You can see the pictures at their official web site at Arizona State University. This follows close on the heels of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Lunar satellite Kaguya sending back excellent images of the Moon from its orbit and hard landing. In honor of the holiday, stop-motion fireworks at their finest…