Anime: Reign The Conqueror

Life has been moving twice the speed of the Japanese bullet train, so blogging had to take a backseat. There's new music coming in the next few weeks, first the title track off the album "Tha Audio Bully," then another single.

In between the music, I checked out this series Reign: The Conqueror. It's the story of Alexander the Great. The series replays his conquest over Persia, Greece, and other lands, with a modern twist. The animation is done by  Peter Chung, the guy who created Aeon Flux.

The story is straight forward. Alexander is son of Philip II, king of Macedonia and Olympias, a snake witch. He went to battle at age 16 on a wild man-eating horse that he tamed in the woods with two friends. Alexander has a lust for speed that would shame a Formula 1 driver. He's relentless in his desire to move quickly from country to country toppling kingdoms. 

Needless to say that behavior infuriated a lot of people. First his father tries to kill him during a fest to honor his second born son. Then assassins from every organized religion see Alexander as the anti-Christ and try to take his head. The main protagonist are the order of  Aristotle. 

A group of sorcerers seeking the Plato-Hedron, the device which contains the knowledge of the entire world. According to a prophesy seen in the Plato-Hedron, Alexander was going to destroy the world if he invaded India. (which he does) How he does it and what happens after, make this series worth watching. Check out the short battle clip below.

Test-Tube Beef

There's been talk of famine and food shortages all over the world. Science has been pushing the boundaries on what can be considered food by creating meat from all sort of products. 

Recently a group of scientist in the Netherlands successfully grew beef from the stem cells of cow muscle tissue in a lab. The end result was a hamburger that cost $250,000 to create. The man who funded this project was none other than Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The ideal is simple...if we can grow beef from stem-cells at an affordable rate. It can reduce hunger problems around the world within a decade. 

The test-tube beef was served at an expensive restaurant in London. The people who tried the meat found it similar in consistency to beef but missing some of the flavor. Another problem was there was not enough fat in the meat to simulate the natural fat found in beef. These are issues that the scientist are still unraveling, but the initial results have proven successful. 

Beef grown in a lab isn't the worse way to get it. Awhile back I posted an article about a company in Japan that made burgers from human excrement. To learn more about research into test-tube beef read the article Scientists Cook Up Lab-Grown Beef by clicking the link. 

If you're curious about a burger made from human feces and food made from other peoples trash check out the article "Stew From Trash and Steaks From Feces…desperate Dining."

Big Brother is Watching

The ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System). is the next step in high imaging surveillance. It’s a 1.8 Gigapixel (which translates into 1.8 billion pixels), super camera created for complete surveillance in an area the size of a city. It’s the world’s most advanced high resolution camera.

The Argus is carried by a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and performs whats called “wide area persistent stare”. This surveillance is the equivalent to having 100 predator UAV’s survey an area the size of a mid-sized city at once. It’s so precise it can clearly show the details of a vehicle license plate or a person’s facial features from 17,500 feet.

What makes the Argus so incredible isn’t the high image resolution pictures...it's what they can do with the video footage. Watch the video below to learn more about the Argus and its surveillance capabilities…because big brother IS watching. 

New Muzik

The weather scorching and the New Muzik is too. The time of popcorn and bubble gum rap seems to be coming to an end. (not a moment to soon I might add)

It's the return of the boom bap music and dope lyrics. Below is some New Muzik from a wide range of artists. I'm not going to waste time writing a dissertation on each persons history. Everyone in the list gets busy and if you like their music check their page in the link list.

Original Ostrich Helicopter

In the past I posted about a man who turned his dead feline Orville into a modern helicopter.

Since then there have been strange developments in the field of Animal Aeronautics. In July 2013 inventors in the Netherlands released their Original Ostrich Helicopter at the annual Zwarte Cross Festival. The helicopter was made from the carcass of a male specimen that died of disease on an ostrich farm. The ostrich copter has four rotating propellers, is radio controlled and is much larger than its counterpart Orville.

The inventors reasoned that this original piece of art and technology would be a good selling item for their company. I personally think its a bit creepy…but I judge no ones taste in aerial devices or art. The Ostrich copter is a mix of both. Once you get past the ideal that you’re looking at a motorized flying corpse. You can appreciate the engineering and technological skill it took to get an Ostrich to fly.

Below I posted a video of the new Ostrich copter, if you like strange flying devises, check it out.

AniManga: Highschool DxD

 

Summer is in full effect and Holland is hot. It's been so hot I would gladly take a trip somewhere cold for a vacation.

I just finished watching season 1 of the AniManga, Highschool DxD. Season two has already begun and the first three episodes have been good.  

Highschool DxD is about a boy named Issei Hyodo who becomes a demon when he gets killed by a girl on his first date.  Issei gets resurrected by Rias Gremory a high ranking, she-devil and heir to the Gremory clan. He is given the option to serve as her slave or die. It's later revealed that the girl who killed Issei was a fallen angel, and she did it because she sensed he had power.

The show is funny and full of fan service.The first season follows Issei as he learns what it means to be a demon, while going to school. Issei attends a former all girls high school. He and his two friends are perverted teens in love with the female form. I can honestly say Issei reminds me a little of myself at 15. He loves breasts more than anything else and spends a good deal of time trying to see and feel them. 

His master Rias Gremory is aware of Issei's lecherous mentality and uses her large breasts to motivate him in his demon training. Issei must learn to control the hidden power within him called a Boosted Gear. The entire back story to what the Boosted Gears are and how their bestowed has yet to be revealed. Hopefully it will be fully explained in season two.

The main protagonists in season one were other demon clans. The Gremory clan along with a few other clans make-up the royalty in hell.  The story takes place after the last great war where Satan was killed and the older brother of Rias Gremory takes his place. The enemies of demons are the Angels which exorcise the evil ones using holy swords. The swords are blessed by god and even the slightest scratch can kill a demon.  There are also fallen angels which are angels who move between hell and heaven. They are more like mercenaries who do assassinations and seem to be as corrupt as demons.

In between the laughter and fan service there is a lot of action and battles. The fight sequences are a mix of magic and swordplay with a little martial arts. Demons organize their slaves into teams based off chess. Issei is a "Pawn." Rias is the "King." She also has a Queen, Rook, and Knight as part of her team.When they go to war with a rival clan, they show the moves of the pieces on a chess board.

The swords are a main plot of season two. The most powerful holy sword is called Excalibur and it was broken into 7 smaller swords to better distribute its power. When the church separated Excalibur into pieces they experimented on children to see which were compatible. When they couldn't find a match, they killed the children. There was one survivor of the experiment and he serves as the knight of Rias Gremory. Both the church and the demon clans want the Excalibur swords destroyed. The  problem is that rogue priests and fallen angels have them and the church and Gremory clan have to unite to defeat them. 

If you like action packed, comedy, shounen, anime....check out this series. I posted a clip from a battle between the Gremory Clan and Pheonix Clan below. 

Random Sh*t

Like the title says, this post is about some random shit that recently happened. If you came to read something scientific or musical...wait for the next post. 

So I just came back from seeing the movie World War Z. It's one of the movies on my waiting to watch list. The movie was spectacular, which is a description I rarely use to describe a film. The plot was realistic, the action was fast paced and the zombies were more of a bit player in the whole film. 

The scary part of the film was how easy a pathogen could spread globally and decimate the population. We now have the technology to reanimate the dead and viruses like H1N1 and Ebola in government facilities. The movie just played that "what if" out in a realistic way but still with zombies to give it a horror twist. If you like zombie movies with a good plot then I recommend watching it. 

Before the movie I had to go to the restroom. While I was in the restroom washing my hands a man came tumbling out of a stall screaming and fell to the floor. I gotta say... it was one of the funniest things I've seen in my life.  Okay wait, let me back up and elaborate. 

I'm standing in the theater restroom where there are a row of urinals against the wall behind me.  There's a row of  sinks to wash your hands in the middle where I was standing. Then a row of toilets against the wall in front of me. To my right there are more urinals on the right wall and the exit is to the left. Inside the restroom there were two other guys. One was standing to my left at the end of the row of sinks using the electric hand dryer to dry his hands. The second was to my right using the urinals at the far right wall with his back towards me. 

As I stated earlier...while I was washing my hands a man fell out of the toilets in front of me. His pants and underwear were around his ankles and he was screaming like a woman, that something had touched him. I was startled by the man's comical dismount from the toilet and almost started to laugh until I saw how serious he was. The man smelled like he was in the middle of doing his business before what ever made him get off the pot.

Once the man fell out the toilet stall, I looked to my right and the guy standing at the urinal had started walking over to see what was happening. I looked to the left and the other guy was gone...all I saw was the door finish closing. The man on the floor at this point was no longer screaming but he was babbling in barely intelligible Dutch about something touching him. The man from the urinal had now made it over to the man from the stall, then helped him up and asked what happened. 

The man from the stall pointed to the empty toilet stall and said something touched him while he was shitting. The stall was empty except for the visitors the man on the floor had left in the bowl. The urinal guy looked at me as if to say... is he crazy. I shrugged my shoulders and began walking toward the exit. The urinal guy went into the stall to investigate and I was almost at the exit when I heard him yell out "Jesus". 

Now I was curious, cuz the urinal guy didn't seem crazy in the brief two minutes we had been acquainted. So I turned around and walked back to where I had been standing on the opposite side of the sinks and looked into the stall. The man from the stall was standing to the side with his pants half pulled up pointing at the toilet. The urinal guy had stepped back out the stall and began walking towards the exit saying he was going to get somebody. 

In front of me the toilet seat had been lifted and on the underside was a big brown spider. It wasn't huge or even menacing, it was about the size of a pencil eraser. If the man seen that spider on the street he would've probably squished it without a second thought. But even that small arachnid found in the most inopportune places could give a person the fright of their life.

I left the bathroom and headed to the movie thinking there should be two rules to using a toilet in a public restroom. It doesn't matter if its a bar, nightclub, movie theater, library, restaurant or where ever. 

Whenever using a public toilet, follow these two rules. 1. Cover the seat in tissue (unless they provide paper seat covers), and 2. Always lift the toilet seat to make sure there aren't any insects or other vermin. Because finding a spider under your ass can make a 40 something year old man...weep like a two year old who lost their mommy. (food for thought) 

Chicken Dinner Date

Chicken Dinner Date is a short, romantic, comedy about a guy trying to impress a girl by making her dinner. The film is based on a screenplay written by Writer/Producer Benn Flore. I finished editing the project days ago but the soundtrack took awhile.

I never appreciated how much influence a soundtrack has on a movie. Different sounds help convey the emotion of the story, other sounds set the pace. I've been on a few movie sets and more video sets than I can count, but I've never seen all the components that go into making a movie until now. This project gave me a whole new appreciation of the craft.

Below is the movie trailer, check it out, leave a comment and if you like it tell a friend.

Waiting to Watch

Things have been busy so I haven't had a chance to see any new movies for a while. The short movie I'm working on will be done tomorrow so I'll post it.

Talking about movies, I finally got to see the new Star Trek movie "Into the Darkness" and I wasn't impressed.The movie wasn't bad but I like the original "Wrath of Khan" version better. It was more grimy and the dialog between Capitan Kirk and Khan was intense.

There's a few movies I'm waiting to see. Most are science fiction cuz I love the genre, but there may be a thriller or two in the list also. Top of the list is The Wolverine! Most people are waiting for Superman, but I was never into Superman comics. I collected Wolverine for years and like how they told his origin story in the first movie. Hopefully they repeat the fine blend of story-telling and action in this film.   

Below are the trailers for some of the films I'm waiting to watch. 

Semen the Superfood

If the title didn't deter you...then the information in this article will prove quite interesting.

Researchers in Australia discovered that in some species of animals the female voluntarily consumes the sperm of the male. The reason they do this is because semen is highly nutritious. The study was conducted on squids but the finding are cross-species. This means that the results are applicable to other species of animal... including humans. The results showed conclusive evidence that semen is a Superfood.

This information may be new to some people but research into the medicinal properties of semen have been going on for years. Last year I posted an article about a different study conducted by psychologists at the State University of New York at Albany. Who published a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior looking at the potential role of semen in alleviating depression in women. The researchers presented evidence supporting an earlier hypothesis that the hormones in semen have a mood-boosting effect on women.The article is called Sexist Science and it's based on a study done back in 2002.

So what makes semen a Superfood? Contrary to urban myth it does not provide only protein. The average male ejaculates about a teaspoon of semen. In that semen are over 200 separate proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Naturally the specific nutritional value is determined by the diet of the male, but all semen has nutritional value.The amount of protein in that ejaculation is roughly equivalent to what you would get from two egg whites. What makes semen a Superfood is that in one teaspoon you get all your daily required amounts of copper, zinc, calcium, vitamin C, fructose,  and 7% of your required amount of potassium. It's an all natural superfood that's healthier than taking a multivitamin.

For more information check out the video below.