Having heard way to many creationists, pundits and other idiots and con artists going on way too much recently; this truism has got to go viral. Thanks to the great George Takei for bringing it to my attention.
Yuki Onna has made several appearances in this strip. What can I say she’s one of my favorite characters in Japanese Folklore. In the popular media I’ve enjoyed her appearances in both Kwaidan and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams as well as numerous anime (there’s a pretty good list in the wiki link.)
Somehow I never thought she’d stoop this low.
Well one of my favorite audiobook channels on Youtube got the axe. It was a shame as it was all of the early Discworld books read by Nigel Planer that I had been having no luck finding anywhere else so it will be missed.
I always feel just a little conflicted about audio books on Youtube. Technically I should be against them because obviously this is copyrighted material but at the same time I go through a lot of them and the more sources I can find the better.
Whenever I stumble over something good I will listen to it as quickly as possible because since it is all copyrighted material it is only a matter of time before the owner finds out about it and sits on it HARD. Even though I want to spread the word I don’t want to draw attention to it as you don’t want the wrong (well technically right but you know…) people to find out about it too soon. Therefore it’s best to give your friends broad hints on how to find it but strictly word of mouth and never, NEVER post a link. The best posters know to label their material in a relatively round about way and regrettably a lot of the best channels rock the boat in a way that feels like a balance between cluelessness and sociopathy.
So sooner or later these pages and channels are found out about and cease to exist. They will be missed. Still they were fun while they lasted.
Today’s Rhapsody is Guy Ropartz‘s Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra.
Well I had a fun weekend for the most part. Saturday was spent doing a little bit of catchup then checking a friends house while he was out of town and walking his dog. After that I spent the rest of the day at this year’s Bite of Seattle. at the Seattle Center That was fun more for the people watching than anything else.
Sunday I had been told about a Pow Wow at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park which sounded a lot more exciting than a second day at the Bite so I had a very nice Bike ride over to the park only to discover if I had bothered to research it just a little bit I would have found it was not free to get in and had the necesary five dollars on me. (thanks to modern technology and a bicycle I am happily cashless most of the time but every now and again it bites me) So instead I took a walk in the Wolf Tree Nature Trail and did a few pages worth of thumbnail sketches of trees.
I took my own sweet time going home with a brief stop at Gasworks Park to draw sword fighters and then ran some errands and had a nice relaxing evening.
I have five words to say about Pacific Rim.
Get To A Theater Soonest.
Anyway I was certainly expecting to enjoy Pacific Rim after all I like Kaiju movies, I like mecha and most important I really like Guillermo del Toro. But having said that I was only expecting to enjoy it I was primarily there to give support to del Toro’s work because if his “paying dues” films don’t get enough love then the films he really wants to do might not get funded.
So I’m going in more for the art and special effects and while going out of my way to ignore the rule of cubes am looking forward to nitpick it to death. And for the first half an hour or so that was exactly what I got and I was having fun nit picking asking all of the usual questions like “if they have Jaeger technology why do they have humans working on that huge project” and “why is the cockpit in the robot’s extremely vulnerable head?” … and then it got better… and BETTER and I stopped asking questions and spent the rest of the movie gripping my chair in excitement and occasionally applauding.
In a way despite being very much a del Toro film I found myself thinking of it as a Tarantino film in that it was a love letter to a specific genre with all of the in jokes and cliches going down a long checklist… but in a good way. We had the damaged ace with a dead brother, we had the dying commander, the asshole rival, comrades sacrificing themselves for the greater good and Bushido all the way I don’t think a single thing was missed and I loved every minute of it.
So what did I like about this best ? This was a movie that ran on rule of cool all the way and I loved it for it everything from a future Hong Kong that made the set from Blade Runner look like a resort spot to robots using freighters as clubs it was glorious. It’s one thing for a movie to have spectacular effects it is another thing for an artist to know what to do with them. Also it was great seeing actors having fun for a while it was hard to see who stole more scenes Ron Perlman or Idris Elba.
An on a final not the Ramin Djawadi soundtrack is now on my list for jingoistic Fourth of July firework music.