This short video pretty much explains exactly why Firefly was the greatest science fiction show on television – even more so than Battlestar Galactica.
Author: fledgling otaku
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Ponyo is coming
Good news – Ponyo on a Cliff will have much wider distribution than most previous Miyazaki films have had thus far in the US market. The voice line-up for the english dub is suitably all-star, including Matt Damon and Tina Fey.
In other news, there’s a lot of interesting anime coming out soon – including Eden of the East:
and Cat Sh%t One, a retelling of the Iran hostage crisis, with animated bunnies:
There’s also a new Fullmetal Alchemist (which other otakusphere stalwarts have been mentioning of late), a sequel to Battleship Yamato, Evangelion 2.0, and a bunch of original stuff that looks pretty interesting. More details at ANN.
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gaming in the cloud
Brian drew my attention to this:
Just announced at this year’s GDC, OnLive is an on-demand gaming service. It’s essentially the gaming version of cloud computing – everything is computed, rendered and housed online. In its simplest description, your controller inputs are uploaded, a high-end server takes your inputs and plays the game, and then a video stream of the output is sent back to your computer. Think of it as something like Youtube or Hulu for games.
The service works with pretty much any Windows or Mac machine as a small browser plug-in. Optionally, you will also be able to purchase a small device, called the OnLive MicroConsole, that you can hook directly into your TV via HDMI, though if your computer supports video output to your TV, you can just do it that way instead. Of course, you can also just play on your computer’s display if you don’t want to pipe it out to your living room set.
When you load up the service and choose a game to play (I’ll come back to the service’s out-of-games features in a bit), it starts immediately. The game is housed and played on one of OnLive’s servers, so there’s never anything to download. Using an appropriate input device, be it a controller or mouse and keyboard, you’ll then play the game as you would if it were installed on your local machine. Your inputs are read by the plugin (or the standalone device if you choose to go that route) and uploaded to the server. The server then plays the game just like it would if you were sitting at the machine, except that instead of outputting the video to a display, it gets compressed and streamed to your computer where you can see the action. Rinse and repeat 60 times per second.
I know Shamus is distracted right now but I can’t wait to see what he thinks.
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after Galactica: what to watch next?
somewhat inspired by Mark’s list of games, movies, and anime he intends to watch next, I wanted to list some of the upcoming (and older) series on television that I am going to sample to try and replace the gaping void that Batttlestar Galactica’s ride off into the sunset (literally) has left behind. In no particular order:
- Stargate: Universe. This takes the Stargate franchise into a fresh direction, into the unexplored universe far beyond the scope of the previous series (SG1 and Atlantis). The plot premise sounds like a cross between Quantum Leap and Star Trek Voyager – but wit the Stargate writers, the extreme suckage and wasted potential of ST:VOY will hopefully be avoided. This is,however, the Stargate franchise, so expecting the series to take actual risks or bold storylines is probably wishful thinking indeed. Unlike BSG, Stargate plays it safe – characters never die, there are never any major changes to the status quo, and the series prefers technobabble exposition to simple character interaction (a failing it has inherited, though to far less degree, from the Star Trek-ification of science fiction).
- Caprica. This prequel series to BSG is styled as a soap opera/drama rather than an action and adventure series. Still, it will be interesting to see how they respect/extend/desecrate the BSG canon. One thing that worries me off the bat is the insinuation that we will be seeing humaniform cylons instead of toasters. Still, with Ron Moore aboard as a producer, hopefully they will avoid the temptation.
- Chuck. I caught an episode of this engaging series on a recent United flight and I found myself intrigued. I barely know what it’s about apart from what I inferred from the episode, but Chuck appears to be an ordinary schmoe who somehow has some super classified database implanted in his brain, neccessitating protection by the CIA and involvement in all sorts of silly capers with foreign agents who are trying to learn his (protected) identity. In teh meantime he works at a Best Buy (suitably modified for trademark purposes). This is funnier than it sounds,but it also had some honest emotion too. A major appeal was seeing Adam Baldwin (Jayne from Firefly) playing major supporting role.
- Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles. I know this series is rumored for cancellation, but it’s got Summer Glau.
- Warehouse 13. This is probably the most anticipated show on my list. The basic idea is to try and mix X-Files with Raiders of the Lost Ark, with two (FBI?) agents assigned to Warehouse 13, a desert government facility where all manner of supernatural objects are stored (think the big warehouse where they stored the Ark in Raiders). The agents are tasked with going off around the world and retrieving more of these objects. The previews suggest that the agents are a lot more interesting, personality wise, than Sculder or Mully ((I mean, they were both deadpan and taciturn. Even Scully’s supposed cynicism about the paranormal became hollow by the end of the first couple of seasons. The only characters with any genuine warmth were the Lone Gunmen)).
I’ll take this moment to ridicule SciFi Channel’s universally-panned name change to SyFy.com (or, as I like to think of it, Siffy). Then again, despite being home to 3 of the 5 series listed above, there’s barely any science fiction on the channel anymore. Most of the time they are showing bad horror flicks like Anaconda or whatnot.
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Samurai 7 revisited
I burned through Samurai 7 quite quickly a while back and intended to say a few words about it, but never quite got around to it. I am reminded of it now by Mark’s list of anime on his queue to watch, and I can definitely offer a recommendation for S7, though it wasn’t the kind of anime that really grabs you (unlike, say, Death Note). Samurai 7 was simply a good story, with some interesting themes, but ultimately didn’t leave any significant mark. I’d recommend Samurai Champloo far more enthusiastically to anyone looking for a good samurai anime.
Incidentally, now that I am dipping my toe into the Fullmetal Alchemist waters, I notice an interesting parallel between Kikuchiyo and Alphonse. Of course I am only a few eps into the latter but still, the idea of a cyborg samurai seems to be an anime trope of sorts. Are there other examples I am not thinking of?
FYI – the earlier discussion on my previous post was pretty interesting – talking about the influences of Kurosawa’s original movie (which I’ve not yet seen) on this anime, as well as more mainstream movies like Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven.
(aside – my apologies to Mark and Nick for the confusion. I blame my feedreader. This is the reason I created @otakusphere, incidentally…)
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The End of Twitter: You can stop tweeting now
This is the Final Tweet to End All Tweets.
Twitter is Over. This is Twitter’s End. There are No More Tweets.
(inspired by the eoti)
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solar cells from powdered donuts and starbucks passion tea
I am not a chemist, so it would take me at least an hour to verify that the following has some basis in actual science, and even then I wouldn’t be able to really tell you for sure that this is kosher. But anyone who has access to a rudimentary lab setup should be able to reproduce the experiment.
I don’t think they were serious about the “lightning setting” on the multimeter, though.
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Defense against the Dark Arts
Saudi Arabian Aurors working for the Ministry of Magic, Promotion of Virtue, and Prevention of Vice have arrested a rogue sorceror.
The potential for jokes is unlimited. camel caravan to Hajjwarts? games of Qaddafitch played aboard flying carpets? Young Harun Potter, facing off against Voldamerica?
(I actually have some more serious analysis at City of Brass, but I just needed to get those quips out of my system)
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let the world be your PC
ok, anyone who watched Dennou Coil will immediately recognize where this is headed:
Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.
The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.
The thing is a project at the MIT Media Lab and can be built for $350 in off-the-shelf hardware. And just to make the obviousness of it all even more so, compare the following:
I posited in this slideshare presentation on the future of the Web that mapping a virtual layer on top of reality would be “web 4.0”. I think i may have been more right than I realized.
