Robert Picardo hosts Planetary Post, launched this month by the Planetary Society as a monthly Video Newsletter designed to keep you up to date on space news. For its pilot episode Robert had Bill Nye the Science Guy as his guest (not a difficult thing to get the leader of the Planetary Society to volunteer to hype his organization), and it was all silly fun. I am looking forward to seeing a lot more episodes in this series, some of which may accidentally include news and video from Space!
Released last week, Flumpool‘s new CD includes the theme song for the TV and Movie series Ajin: Demi-Human, Yoru Wa Nemurerukai? (Can You Sleep At Night?), which is the first track here. The Anime series itself just started airing in January, and runs for 13 episodes. This song was also the OP for the trilogy of movies of the same franchise; the first hit theaters in Japan in November, the second should be out roughly in May. According to Cruncyroll it will be streaming in North America on Netflix soon, but as of yesterday I wasn’t finding it.
The second track is their 2012 single Because… I am, and the third is Awakening Identity, which was posted online in April of 2015. I am not sure when it was actually released, as this was posted in support of their album The Best 2008-2014. The band also has a nice collection of ballads, but I tend to prefer music with a pulse, so I posted the ones I liked.
Another excellent CG animation, Exode won a dozen awards on the festival circuit, including one from SIGGRAPH last year. The animation was done by Kathleen Cartier, Sandrine Gimenez, Nicolas Mrikhi, Baptiste Roy, and Thomas Saez, with Yuichiro Maeda creating the music. This was another graduation film project from Supinfocom Arles in France.
EXODE from Exode movie on Vimeo.
There are less than positive implications sometimes when a Humanoid Robot With AI meets the cold, cruel world. This interpretation on how it might work out is not exactly comforting to the intelligence at the core of this story, and should not make the rest of us feel very easy about it. When the time comes that we face these situations, I hope you are ready to stand up and be counted among those who believe in freedom and justice.
Japanese rock band Bump of Chicken have a new album coming out this Wednesday, February 10th, called Butterfly. The first song is the title track, the next is their 2014 hit Ray, and the third is Hello World, released as a single last April and now part of the new album. These tracks are a little more pop than I usually prefer; they started as Alt-Rock with some mainstream Rock tracks, but the songs that sold a lot of copies sounded like these, so their style has changed over the last few decades. But not every time; the tunes used in the Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original series) and Blood Blockade Battlefront were excellent, so I had to include one of them here as well.
I usually leave music for Saturday’s entry, but this one is about 3D modeling and motion capturing to create an amazing video. When The Chemical Brothers and Beck got together to record Wide Open they decided they needed the dancer in the video to be wide open as well. So they made a 3D model of Sonoya Mizuno and used it to transform her gradually into a 3D printed matrix of herself. The result is as enjoyable on the eyes as the music is on the ears. Thanks to Digital Trends for the heads up on this one.