#now ill try to practice drawing robots wish me luck

[0yorixu]

update: i'm done with midterms and i did pretty aight

[ostermahaus]

It’s Morphin’ Time!  Eventually... Power Rangers Review

Saban’s Power Rangers opens darkly.  You see a blasted torn up landscape of prehistoric Earth with the Red Ranger dragging himself across it, obviously injured.  He crawls to the Yellow Ranger, also lying prone who morphs into an alien and hands her coin to him, telling him to hide it before dying in his arms.  Yikes.  He morphs into Zordon (Bryan Cranston) and puts his coin with the others he’s carrying, instructing Alpha via communicator to fire a meteorite at his current location.  He turns to find himself face to face with a female Green Ranger named Rita (Elizabeth Banks) who he accuses of being a traitor and killing his team.  She boasts that she’s won when Zordon informs her it’s too late and a meteor comes crashing down on them sending her to the bottom of the sea.  Also wiping out the dinosaurs, I presume.  I guess nuking from orbit was the only way to be sure. Smash cut to a bunch of jocks leading a bull into a locker room as a prank and we meet Jason Scott (Dacre Montgomery) who informs us that he calmed the cow down by milking it.  Womp womp.  Your protagonist can’t tell an udder from a dong, not a great start.  The cops show up and after the most nausea inducing go-pro car chase I’ve ever encountered (Seriously, I saw Gravity on the UltraScreen in 3D and this almost made me vomit) he gets in a horrific wreck and we have a title screen. Go go Power Rangers?  If you never watched the show this may seem exciting.  If you did, well here’s why it might not be what you were expecting.

 Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers hit children in 1993 with a blast of popularity that overpowered the Ninja Turtles and kept kids riveted until Pokemon came along at the end of the decade!  A Japanese import, it was cheesy, silly, campy and formulaic and pre-teens ate it up!  As well as some teens.  I was just hitting the age where I felt like I was outgrowing Saturday morning/after school shows (Thank God that phase didn’t last) so I was never a die hard fan, but I knew enough people that were that I kept abreast of the original shows run.  I watched a fair number of episodes with my friends more due to our love of riffing it a la Mystery Science Theater 3000 than anything else…  Although I will admit that Kimberly (Amy Jo Johnson)  kept me on board a bit as well.  The premise was simple.  Five teenagers from Angel Grove are given magic coins that allow them to morph into Power Rangers.  Spandex clad ninjas with full coverage helmets who can summon robot dinosaurs called Zords and merge them Voltron style into a giant Mega Zord to win the day.  They answer to Zordon, a giant holographic head, and fight the monsters that Rita Repulsa repeatedly sends down from the moon.  Ninjas, dinosaurs and giant robots.  It was famous for the obvious cut between the American actors doing their day to day thing and the original Japanese footage being used once they were in costume.  Ever wonder why Kimberly was the only Ranger wearing a skirt?  Because the Yellow Ranger in that Japanese footage is a dude.  (The more you know!)  That’s all you needed and it’s still on the air in some iteration to this day!  Why mess with a good thing?  If it’s not broke, right?

 Unfortunately Hollywood is following a current and overused trend of trying to make things dark and gritty when they reboot them right now.  That’s not to say it can’t work, but it really feels like a forced excutive decision by the movie companies some times.  This new Power Rangers update has a lot of things that work really well for it as they try to make a serious and less campy approach to one of the most popular cheese fests ever.  They also make some big missteps.  I know that Zordon famously asked for “teenagers with attitude” in the original and wound up with the nicest kids in town, but this version makes an over correction by having three of them meet in detention and one of them just not go to school at all.  Turns out Jason has to wear an ankle bracelet now and report to detention for the rest of the year and lost all sorts of football scholarships.  As soon as he walks in he sees Billy (RJ Cyler) being bullied for OCD behavior arranging things on his desk.  Jason puts a stop to it and Billy immediately declares him his new best friend for sticking up for him!  I really liked Billy in this movie, but they make a very clear point early on to have him state that he’s on the autism spectrum and they play it pretty well until he becomes a Ranger.  Then it just seems to disappear and he’s merely giddy all the time.  He’s adorkable, sure, and probably the most likeable character but it would have been nice to see them stick to his spectrum tendencies.  Jason is fairly dismissive until he offers to use his skills to hack Jason’s ankle bracelet in order for them to hang out.  How all true friendships begin!

 Next we meet Kimberly Heart (Naomi Scott) who was set up by her cheerleader ‘friends’ for an incriminating picture that’s been circulating around school and they show up to inform her that she no longer gets to be a plastic.  It makes her so angry that she gives herself a kicky new haircut in the bathroom that Jason is immediately smitten by when she returns from the restroom!  After Billy hacks the ankle device, he and Jason go into a restricted area of the gold mine outside Angel Grove because apparently Billy likes to blast there.  Even though it’s an active mine with security.  Shrug  While Billy is setting his charges, Jason goes off to hike around and spies Kimberly cliff diving while We get Zack (Ludi Lin) and Trini (Becky G.) dropped in as just random kids who are also hanging out in an active work zone after dark.  Her to practice her Karate Kid poses and him to watch her through binoculars.  Like you do.  Anyway, Billy’s blast draws them all and they discover 5 glowing coins embedded in the rock.  After cutting them out, they each grab one and then alarms go off, summoning security and another slightly less vomit inducing chase that AGAIN ends in a horrific crash, this time with a train.  The next morning they all wake up at home with no injuries and no knowledge of how they survived the wreck, plus sick abs and super strength!  Wanna know how they managed that without being seen?  Or what Billy’s mom’s reaction is to the destruction of HER van?  (You see the wreck later on being pulled off the tracks)  You’re out of luck!  Anyway, they get together and decide to go back to try to find answers about the coins and discover a buried spaceship manned by Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) and Zordon’s memory in the ship’s computer.  He informs them that they’re the Power Rangers and they need to learn to defend the universe once they can learn to morph!  Eventually…

 I don’t know if it came with the casting of Bryan Cranston but the biggest drawback of this film is that at 2 hours almost every minute of the Rangers suited up has been shown in the trailers because it only happens in the films final action scene, similar to my beef with Godzilla not having enough Godzilla.  There are training montages aplenty and I really did appreciate the effort it made to give the core cast some substance behind there characters that wasn’t there before, but it’s pace could best be described as deliberate.  The film seems to work the best when it’s trying to have some fun and not brooding so much, which is all too often.  The scene of all the nerd kids idolizing Billy after he knocks out a bully without trying and then being in awe when he gets pulled from the table by Kimberly?  Great!  Fun little scene, use more moments like that as opposed to repeated instances of people mispronouncing Trini as DeeDee.  ???  I assume it’s a joke but I just don’t get it and boy do they keep pushing it.  I wish they had done more with Zack as he had a lot of potential in his backstory.  He doesn’t attend school any more because you find out he’s caring for his terminally ill mother but aside from that reveal he just gets all the “I’m gonna shout quips!” style lines.  Don’t try taking a drink every time he calls Trini “Crazy Girl”, it won’t end well.  Jason is fine in his role as the leader, but as is the curse of the leader role (Cyclops, Leonardo), is pretty bland.  Kimberly and Trini are both solid female role models although I wish they would have come right out with Trini’s sexuality/crush on Kimberly rather than just heavily alluding to it.  Although I was disappointed by him dropping the autism traits halfway through, I thought Billy in the second half was the most relatable character.  He’s just so giddy every time they bring up the fact they get to be Rangers!

 I was not a fan of the design choices for Alpha and the Zords.  Alpha was thankfully less obnoxious than the original, but his super long arms on the tiny body just looked weird and creepy.  Props to Hader for making me not hate him!  The Zords…  I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.  I’ll be honest, aside from the T-Rex and the Pterodactyl they could have been anything.  I had to go online after the movie because I couldn’t remember if the Triceratops was Blue or Black because I couldn’t tell them apart.  Turns out it’s Blue.  For as many montages as we were dealt and given the movies run time, I’d have preferred to see them learning their suits and Zords right off the bat as opposed to trying and failing to Morph a half dozen times and then finally getting it right just in time for the final battle where they go in operating things they’ve never used before.  I know I’m overthinking it, but I hate when people just innately know how to use things like that.

 Lastly we come to the villains.  I’ve got really mixed feelings on this part.  I appreciate they wanted to take it more seriously, and I like what they did with Rita but DAMN.  They may have made her a bit too intense for the audience that’s generally associated with Power Rangers!  Banks is great and and she is wonderfully creepy and terrifying but there is a scene where she’s killed some police officers and you see that she’s ripped the teeth out of one and has dismembered/is CANNIBALIZING the other.  This is while she’s still in her slightly mummified state after a fishing boat pulls up her body and it’s horror movie levels of creepy as she gets her power back to create Goldar.  Because he’s made of gold, see?  I don’t quite get her power set because at first she’s brutally murdering people for their gold, then eating it (WTF?) then just pointing at it and drawing it to her in liquid form.  At least she gets to say “Make my monster grow.”

 Overall, it’s not bad.  It’s not as action packed as you’d expect, but what references do show up are all well placed and fun.  You get some cameos and throwback lines.  Ay-yi-yi and what not.  My favorite reference was when two boys were arguing who got to be the Red Ranger while they’re playing and Trini tells them, “Why not Yellow?”  “That’s a girl!”  “How do you know?”  lol  Love the message and the nod to the original Yellow I mentioned earlier, but unfortunately undercut by the obvious sculpted boob armor on Pink and Yellow…  Best moment, bar none, was when they played the original theme.  Unfortunately it’s just one refrain then back to generic orchestration, but the theater I was in was electrified when it came on!  I’m not made of stone, that riff is freaking amazing.  You could tell everyone was a bit bummed when it didn’t continue throughout the fight.  As usual anymore, stay through the credits.  There’s a mid credit scene that I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to call before it happens but it’s there.  LOL at the guys behind me talking loudly throughout the film complaining about the very thing the scene was about and leaving before it happened.  That’s what you get for being terrible movie attendants!  If you were a fan of the show as a kid, I think you’ll have a great time!  If you’re bringing your kids because of how much YOU loved it…  Just be aware it gets really dark and creepy in places and might move a bit slow if they have to wait over 90 minutes to see any Morphin’ Time.

[technologywearables]

HTC Vive Pre and SteamVR review - hands on, specs, price and release date

This year's most innovative online fact headset, the HTC Vive, has ultimately launched in the UK. Costing ₤ 689 (or ₤ 746.60 once you include delivery expenses for those ordering online), it's considerably more pricey compared to its closest rival, the ₤ 500 Oculus Break, as well as almost increase the price of Sony's PlayStation VR, which will go on sale this October for ₤ 349.

That stated, the Vive comes with a lot a lot more set compared to either the Oculus Break or PlayStation VR, as everything from the controllers to the base stations as well as the needed cabling all comes in the box together with the headset. Oculus Break, on the various other hand, only obtains you a headset, the cam and an Xbox One controller, while PlayStation VR just features the headset and the port box, so you'll should acquire the PlayStation Video camera as well as a controller separately. Oculus has yet to reveal how much its motion-sensing Touch controllers will certainly set you back. When you aspect in all this, the Vive probably isn't really rather as pricey as it may initially appear.

If you prefer to skip those rather dreadful shipping expenses, then you're in luck, as HTC has just announced that the Vive will certainly be readily available for hands on demonstrations in Harrods beginning from today (Fifth April). You'll have the ability to have an individually session with the Vive and also order one right there then after your presentation.

Harrods isn't really the only store to be getting HTC Vive demo sheathings, however, as you could also try it out at getting involved Dixons Carphone (or Currys COMPUTER Globe) stores in Reading, Leeds (Birstall) and Tottenham Court Roadway in London, as well as Overclockers UK in Newcastle and Check Computers in Bolton. Similar to Harrods, each shop will have a complete Vive demonstration terminal offered for members of the general public, and you have the ability to take down an order for one afterwards.

Wait till next month, though, as well as you should have the ability to stroll into these stores as well as buy one directly off the shelf, given they do not market out quickly, naturally. Obtain one early sufficient as well as you'll additionally obtain three VR encounters totally free. These consist of Google's 3D painting video game Turn Brush, Work Simulator: The 2050 Archives (both which you can find out more about on the next page), as well as Northway Gamings' building game Great Contraption.

We went practical with the initial version of the Vive remain year at Gamescom, however the Vive you'll wind up buying in April in fact births a quite close resemblance to the Vive Pre, the second developer version that was first revealed at CES. I have actually been practical with the Pre at this year's MWC, as well as I have to claim it's by far the most immersive as well as extraordinary VR encounter I've had yet, so below's a full rundown of exactly what to get out of Vive come April-time.

What is HTC Vive?

The HTC Vive is perhaps the most innovative VR headset presently available. It not just tracks your head activities, however it can likewise track your physical hand and also body motions, too, allowing you to walk in digital fact and interact with items like you would certainly in day-to-day life utilizing its pair of wand-like controllers.

This is many thanks to its set of bundled-in base terminals, which sync with the headset wirelessly and could track your motions 60 times a 2nd with sub-millimetre accuracy. It does this by bouncing lasers off the surface of the headset as well as each controller, which are studded with a myriad of sensors to get the most exact monitoring information feasible. The lasers also maintain latency degrees to an outright minimum, which ought to assist stop any type of sensations of nausea or motion illness while using the headset.

Technically, you only have to be tracked by one base terminal each time, yet the benefit of having 2 is that it will certainly never ever misplace where you are if you reverse or vacate variety. Because of this, you'll wish to place each base station in other edges of your space to get the ideal protection, and also they have a maximum operational distance of regarding 15m, which ought to be more compared to sufficient to fill up a huge, spare bedroom.

Oculus Rift as well as PlayStation VR, on the other hand, typically aren't efficient in doing fullscale 360 degree VR, yet both will certainly be able to track your hand activities offered you get every one's corresponding extra controllers - Oculus' Touch Controllers for the Break and Sony's PlayStation Move controllers for PlayStation VR. Most of the time, however, you'll most likely be using these headsets resting down, as well as you'll operate them with a standard video game pad instead of walking around the room.

In terms of the headset's technical requirements, the Vive isn't really in fact that a lot more advanced compared to its competitors. Inside, there are two 1,080 x1,200 OLED displays-- one for each and every eye-- as well as they refresh around 90 times a second, supplying very smooth feedback for your head and also hands. It likewise has a 100 degree field of vision, so it could still appear like you're peering through a black-rimmed porthole sometimes, yet you quickly fail to remember regarding it when you're shooting robotic drones precede or looking an enormous blue whales from atop the damages of an undersea shipwreck.

It does not have any type of integrated headsets like the Oculus Break, however it does have a set ear buds simply in situation you don't have your very own set of earphones already. HTC says it's thinking the majority of people will most likely have their own set of over ear headphones they'll desire to make use of with the Vive, and also these can be quickly affixed utilizing the audio cable television which appears of the top of the headset.

The only mild snag, rather actually, is the 5m tether cable television protruding from the rear of the headset, as I nearly got mesmerized in it several times as I tipped backwards or relocated back and forth throughout my demonstration. This is required to connect the headset to the heavyweight pc gaming COMPUTER you'll should make its 90Hz visuals run smoothly, yet it's an embarassment HTC hasn't develop a more elegant solution to its instead dangerous cord administration in the interfering months given that we first tried the Vive last year.

HTC Vive vs Vive Pre vs Vive Customer Version-- exactly what's changed?

The Customer Version of Vive is extremely much like the Vive Pre. HTC informed us that the only main distinctions would certainly be a somewhat different strap that goes rounded your head as well as a deeper ridge round the lower fifty percent of the round thumb pad on the controllers so you do not mistakenly hit the power switch directly below it. As the Consumer Edition was secured away inside a glass box at MWC, it's difficult to understand precisely just how it will look when it's all cabled up, yet it looks as though the cables will trail over the top of the headset and also down your back.

Otherwise, the Pre and also Customer Edition are nigh on similar, and among the greatest new enhancements to the Pre and Customer Edition of Vive is the front dealing with cam. This offers you a look right into the real world around you from inside the headset, so you do not finish up walking right into furniture or have to remove the headset when another person has to talk to you.

^ The Vive Customer Edition (revealed over) is nigh on similar to the Vive Pre we attempted out at MWC 2016

With a straightforward dual faucet of the power button on the newly-designed controller, the world around you all of a sudden happens as a kind of neon-blue heat trademark. It's not specifically life-like, but I can effortlessly select the rest of HTC's MWC stand from inside my flexible display. I could possibly likewise see my hands et cetera of my body here me as well as it offers you greater than a great adequate picture to interact with your loved ones normally-- although rather just how it looks from the opposite of the headset is one more issue entirely.

Depending on the rundown of your area, the Vive will certainly likewise reveal you a grid-like cage when you obtain also close to the wall or the side of your area. The dimension and form of the cage will certainly transform depending on the size of your room, too, and also you could draw rounded any type of furnishings you could have with the Vive's integrated Surveillant method so you don't crash into them. The cage disappears once you move far from the boundaries of your area, however, so it will only break your immersion when it's completely necessary.

The Pre headset itself has likewise been upgraded since we remain saw it. It's even more compact, and also the head band currently has 3 points of adjustment: 2 at the sides which can turn backwards and forwards through the headset's joints, and also one over the top of the headset. It includes 2 face cushions to fit different face kinds-- a standard curved one and a slightly flatter one for broader faces-- and also every one has a groove for glasses, so you can still utilize the Vive without needing to take them off. You can change the range between your face and the lenses by pulling the front of the headset away from the sides, and you can even change the range in between the lenses. Even a lot better, the headset will certainly guide you via every step of the calibration process, ensuring it's as comfortable as possible.

The lenses are now made from exactly what HTC's calling 'Mura-Glass', which is indicated to provide a clearer, sharper picture compared to basic glass. HTC told me that the initial variation was nearly like browsing an unclean window, but the Pre's 'Mura-correction' is meant to remove that. Each demo absolutely looked very clear and in-depth when I had the headset on, but it still doesn't get rid of the individual pixels you could see on the display. This is an usual problem on every VR headset I have actually attempted, though, so it's a pretty small drawback overall.

The initial thing you see regarding the Pre, though, is simply exactly how light it is. While I haven't tried the final version of the Oculus Break yet, the Pre most definitely feels lighter than Sony's PlayStation VR headset, and also I barely noticed it was there during my demo. The bands also felt extremely protected once I would certainly tightened them to fit rounded my obviously 'instead little head', according to HTC, and the spongey face rest really did not allow any kind of light bleed whatsoever in spite of the intense expenses lights from the show flooring merely outside my demonstration booth.

The controllers likewise now have a massive opening removed in the top of them to aid ease its weight circulation. This 'space', as HTC wants to call it, additionally permits them to load in also more sensors to improve its rotational movement monitoring, as these motions are by much the hardest to track accurately. They absolutely functioned incredibly well while I was using them, as well as they're an enormous improvement over the Vive's original, rather a lot more angular controllers, which had a certain first-draft kind of feeling to them when we initially used them remain year.

Instead, the Pre's controllers are wonderfully shaped to fit easily in each hand, with the trigger button existing at simply the ideal elevation for your forefinger, and also the squeezable grip button on the side is within simple reach of your center finger. They're charged through Micro USB, as well as could last at the very least 4 hours away from the keys. In truth, HTC informed us that they 'd had the ability to run demos all the time at MWC without should cover up the fee when during the day, so it's likely they'll last a lot longer than the company's rather conservative-sounding estimate.

The base terminals, at the same time, have actually continued to be largely the exact same. They're still little, instead inconspicuous little black dices, and also they could either be wall-mounted or put on a rack.