The “Real” Avatar.. “Last Airbender”

I’ve been waiting for this movie ever since I saw the first trailer! I’ve watched the series (“Avatar, the Last Airbender”), I highly recommend it for kids, and it’s not something that adults will get bored with while they watch with them! The series has just the right mix of humor and seriousness, and the world the creators wrote is both different enough to be intriguing, and familiar enough to be accessible, based on various Asian influences rather than the traditional European stories. If Shyamalan can capture the humor as well as the drama from the series, this will be an excellent trilogy of movies. C’mon, July!

I WANT ONE!

This looks like one of the coolest things to come along, to convince you you’re living in the 21st Century! A battery-powered turntable, that lets you hook up to a USB port to rip your favorite vinyl-only songs into your computer, and it has a headphone jack and speakers to listen wherever you are! If I can get one, I’ll be using it to rip all the albums and 45’s I have, that have never been on CD!

I WANT!

(click on the picture to go to the website)

battery-operated USB portable turntable!

Some more Worldcon pictures

I didn’t really get a lot of pictures during Worldcon, there wasn’t much to photograph other than the Dealer’s room exhibits and occasionally some of the panel discussions. I wanted to show the Art Show but like most of them at other conventions, photos weren’t permitted.

One of the biggest exhibits at Worldcon was one produced by Comic Market, nicknamed “Comiket”, a convention held twice a year at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. The latest Comiket had over 500,000 visitors in 4 days, and this exhibit provided a history of the convention since it started in 1975. The convention is centered around fans of anime, manga and video games, who love to write and draw their own comic books, called “doujinshi”, often using characters created by others, including copyrighted characters. Many professional creators and their publishers allow these fans to produce doujinshi, because they are doing it out of love and not out of desire to make money, and because many current creators got their start producing doujinshi. Companies often scout the best doujinshi creators and hire them to work on new manga. This display shows each of the floors at the last Comiket. Each square represents a table, which is rented by two groups of creators, called “circles”, where the circle can display and sell a handful of copies of their doujinshi. A circle usually consists of one or two artists, a writer, and an editor (sometimes one person does all of this), and they usually produce one issue for each Comiket. These are covers from a handful of circles from different years, and you can see the variety of styles and artistic skills these circles have.

Of course, no convention would be complete without people wearing costumes of their favorite characters. There were others, but I didn’t get the chance to photograph them.

Since there wasn’t much to photograph, I decided to eat lunch at the bayside park down below the convention center. It was a beautiful day, and there were families enjoying themselves, eating lunch and playing. The giant wind turbine was working, generating electricity, but I don’t know where it was being used.

Worldcon pictures, day 1

On the first day of the 65th World Science Fiction Convention, Worldcon, the first Worldcon held in Asia, I went to register with my friends John and Sonia. Sonia had been living as a student in Osaka for a year, and was getting ready to head back to the US, and was quite unhappy about it, she had fallen in love with Japan. In a strange coincidence (not the first on the trip), the man in the yellow shirt in line was someone who works at the same company I do, on the same contract, in the same building, but one floor up from my cubicle! It was definitely the last thing I expected to do, to run into someone from work half a world away!

The Worldcon was small, in comparison to other Worldcons in the past, and the Dealer’s room was still being set up after we registered. There were dealers with some interesting things, like the dancing humanoid toy robots. There was a group of engineers and artists who are trying to recreate a working personal flying wing, modeled after one from the movie “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind“. They displayed the actual unpowered glider that they have been using for aerodynamic testing. They will eventually build a version powered by a small jet engine, like the device in “Nausicaa”.

After the con was over for the day, we went back to the hotel, passing “Cosmo World”, an amusement park near the convention center. The park is dominated by a huge ferris wheel surrounded by a roller coaster. Near the park is the Nautical Museum, which has a sailing ship “docked” in a pond nearby. The ship is called the “Nippon Maru” and was used for years as a training ship.

That night I also got a beautiful shot of the Landmark Tower, and later on that night, after seeing a movie, got a view of Yokohama near the Yokohama train station.