"Attack On Titan" Season 2 To Premiere Saturday April 1 On FunimationNow, Hulu And Crunchyroll

"Attack On Titan" Season 2 To Premiere Saturday April 1 On FunimationNow, Hulu And Crunchyroll

The wait will soon be over for countless anime fans of "Attack on Titan" across the U.S. and Canada. Funimation Entertainment announced today that "Attack on Titan" Season 2 will premiere on FunimationNow, Hulu and Crunchyroll on Saturday April 1, 2017 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 9:30 a.m. Central. Both the premiere and future English-subtitled simulcast episodes of the new season will be available across all three platforms as well as the Crunchyroll and Funimation channels on VRV. Details on Season 2 English SimulDub episodes will be shared within weeks.

"We're thrilled to be premiering 'Attack on Titan' Season 2 together with Hulu and Crunchyroll to anime fans across the U.S. and Canada," said Gen Fukunaga, CEO and founder of Funimation. "Fan excitement has been building non-stop since our acquisition announcement and our clip reveal last December. 'Attack on Titan' Season 2 will not disappoint."

"Attack on Titan" ("Shingeki no Kyojin" in Japanese) is based on the New York Times best-selling manga series by Hajime Isayama and tells the story of a world in which the last of humanity fights to survive against man-eating giants called Titans. With now 21 volumes in print and an estimated 70 million copies in print today, "Attack on Titan" has inspired spin-off manga and novels, the anime series, a live action movie and numerous video games. Funimation simulcast the original 25-episode, Season 1 of "Attack on Titan" as well as released it on home video throughout North America.

"We're excited to bring the pop culture hit "Attack on Titan" back for a second season after its long hiatus," said Mike DuBoise, EVP and COO of Funimation. "And based on clip reveals, it will be an action-packed season that fans can look forward to watching. It's definitely been worth the wait."

Synopsis

Eren Jaeger swore to wipe out every last remaining Titan, but in a battle for his life he wound up becoming the thing he hates most. With his new powers, he fights for humanity's freedom facing the monsters that threaten his home. After a bittersweet victory against the Female Titan, Eren finds no time to rest—a horde of Titans is approaching Wall Rose and the battle for humanity continues!

Viewers can catch up on all past episodes of "Attack on Titan" on FunimationNow, Hulu and Crunchyroll as well as the Crunchyroll and Funimation channels on VRV.

SOURCE: Funimation

Earth Day Canada asks everyone to #EarthPLAY for Earth Day (April 22) 2017

Earth Day Canada (CNW Group/Earth Day Canada)

With a new mandate to connect kids to nature and build resilient communities, Earth Day Canada kicks off its 2017 campaign by asking people across the nation to #EarthPLAY for Earth Day and support better outdoor play in our parks, schools and on neighbourhood streets.

According to recent data, most children get outside for less than an hour each day. This is having serious ramifications on their health and wellbeing.

"Outdoor, unstructured free play has been disappearing from childhood for the last several decades," says Deb Doncaster, President of Earth Day Canada. "This is largely due to a lack of stimulating, accessible play spaces, coupled with unnecessary aversion to risk and a narrow concept of education. 

If the next generation is stuck indoors, how can we expect them to be connected to their communities and motivated to protect the environment?"

The cornerstone of this year's campaign is the #Pledge4PLAY crowdfunding platform, running April 1st to 30th at earthday.ca. Those who donate receive various perks and chances to win a range of prizes, with donations of $100 or more securing additional entries into a draw for the grand prize: A trip for four to the world-renowned Berkeley Marina Adventure Playground in California, courtesy of the Air Canada Foundation.

A social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter encourages people to share their favourite #PLAYmemory from when they were young — participants include celebrities such as four-time Olympian Silken Laumann, star of hit TV series Survivorman Les Stroud, and children's singer-songwriter Raffi, while renowned environmentalist David Suzuki and Leader of the Green Party Elizabeth May have recorded special video messages to share, too.

Earth Day Canada has created free tool kits for those who wish to #EarthPLAY in their local community, and for schools across Canada, who are invited to demonstrate their support of enriched outdoor play by committing to host an extra or extended recess or even a full day of adventure play during Earth Week.

Earth Day Canada is hosting three events in Toronto — StreetPLAY for Earth Day (April 20), SchoolPLAY for Earth Day (April 20) and ParkPLAY for Earth Day (April 22) — drawing a range of government officials, celebrities and kids of all ages to experience enriched outdoor play.

About Earth Day Canada

Founded in 1990, Earth Day Canada is a national charity that inspires and supports people across the country to connect with nature and build resilient communities. We lead an annual Earth Day campaign in conjunction with free, year-round, award-winning programs that get people of all ages outside, interacting with the natural environment — this, in turn, fosters an intrinsically motivated, enduring commitment to stewardship and conservation.

EDC works closely with school-aged children and youth through our renowned EcoKids program and new EarthPLAY initiative, and recognizes via our Hometown Heroes Awards those who are leading the way in making our planet healthier. We engage diverse communities in the environmental sector and help our corporate partners achieve their sustainability goals with our growing employee engagement platform.

SOURCE:  Earth Day Canada

Camp BKB: An Earth Day Festival

A festival to save the world...

Brooklyn Boulders, an indoor rock-climbing and mixed-use lifestyle facility is hosting a 3-day festival at facilities in Chicago, NYC, and Boston in celebration of Earth Day, from Friday April 21 through Sunday April 23.  Clif Bar & Company and High Brew Coffee will be our national presenting sponsors presenting their green philosophies and sustainable practices at all four BKB locations.

Camp BKB will be an interactive, experiential and educational event and will feature live performances by Small Black, Tanlines (DJ Set), Santah, and Bearstronaut; green workshops and demos focusing on sustainability, eco-fashion, and zero-waste from partners Clif Bar, High Brew, Boxed Water, and Lush Cosmetics, vegetarian dinners and happy hour sponsored by Sierra Nevada, family and youth workshops in activism and more.

VIP ticket-holders will experience an overnight sleepover with campfire stories, s'mores from Whole Foods, a quiet meditative climb in the morning, and a Bluegrass Brunch the next morning.  Other activities include presentations by March for Science, sign-making events for the march, and sign re-purposing workshops post-march. 10% of all ticket sales are going directly to The National Parks Foundation.

Presenting sponsors Clif Bar and High Brew will present their green and environmental philosophies and practices through our Climb for Sustainability (Clif) and For Those Who Do Good Clean Up Park Activation (High Brew). The Clif Bar Climb for Sustainability initiative will plant trees to American Forests for each climber that gets to the top of their routes.  The "For Those Who Do Good" campaign spotlights the do-gooders, creators, and innovators of the High Brew community.  High Brew is expanding that concept and getting our attendees out in the field cleaning up the following local parks: Thomas Greene Park (Gowanus location), Mary Bartleme Park, and Hunters Point Park. 

National Events Manager Tim Ryan has stated that: "Camp BKB was conceived to connect our community through an indoor camping experience, story-sharing, and sleepover.  As the political climate has been changing, we were compelled to tie the event with a greater cause: to promote the outdoor industry and improve our community's lives outside our walls. At the end of the day - we hope our engaging activities and this experience will be a first step towards saving the world and making it a better place." 

SOURCE: Brooklyn Boulders

Get Out: Why Racism Really Is Terrifying

© Universal Pictures

By Victoria Anderson, Cardiff University

Warning: this article contains spoilers

Get Out is a comedy-inflected horror story about what it means to be black in America. It’s Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, and until now he has been more widely recognised as one half of comedy duo Key and Peele. But as a director, he makes this movie work – even a little too well. In fact, the only thing more scary than the film are some of the reviews.

To summarise: a talented young black photographer called Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes on a trip with Rose, his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to visit her parents. Having already worried that the parents might be racist, Chris is disturbed to find that the seemingly-liberal family has a number of black “servants” who behave like zombies, seemingly controlled and manipulated by an unseen force. He is further unsettled by (mostly white) visitors to the house who make gauche, racially-charged and fetishising comments, crooning over Chris’s “frame and genetic make-up” and announcing “Black is in fashion!”

Chris’s fears are realised, and worse. The Armitage family turn out not just to be racist, but to be pathological “negrophiles”. They have developed a horrifying system of abducting, brainwashing and ultimately brain-swapping black people, to use them as pets, sex slaves or repurposed body substitutes.

Rose’s hypnotherapist mother mesmerises Chris to make him believe that he is trapped at the bottom of a deep pit. And while Chris wonders how to escape without appearing rude, Rose’s neurosurgeon father auctions him off – to be stripped of his brain – to a blind art critic who wants nothing less than to “see through [his] eyes”.

Meet the parents. © Universal Pictures

Seasoned horror buffs will know that the standard resolution to a survival-horror film of this type (police turn up at the final hour, villain is dispatched, hero is saved, all’s well that ends well) is not to be anticipated. The “black guy always dies first” has become a self-reflexive horror-movie trope. And if Facebook Live videos have taught us anything, it’s that this uneasily applies to the real world as well.

Then again, we might also recall that other classic horror that happens to feature a black male protagonist. In George Romero’s 1968 film Night of The Living Dead the hero gets all the way to the end of the film, only to be shot dead by the authorities – just in time for the end credits.

The horrors of slavery
Coming in the wake of a slew of slavery-themed dramas such as Roots, Underground and Twelve Years a Slave, Get Out is a transparent nod to the genre. The slavery subtext is hinted at early on when we find that Rose’s liberal, professional mother goes by the name of “Missy”: a common appellation for the Mistress of a slave-holding. Yet the film’s subtle genius lies in its ability to trace almost invisible, yet indelible lines of continuity from the centuries-long slavery period to the present day.

Historically, anti-slavery rhetoric – which traces its own history back to the late 18th century – tended to focus on the inhuman physical conditions of the slave ship, and the moral incongruity of human chattel. There remains a cultural tendency to view the “horrors of slavery” in the same concretely objective terms, but it bears stating that white abolitionists were not necessarily of the opinion that blacks were equal to whites. They saw the practice of slavery as dehumanising and degrading to all those who participated in it. During the 19th century, slavery increasingly became both a liability and an embarrassment to what purported to be civilised societies.

Lobotomised. © Universal Pictures

This residual sense of embarrassment, shame and disavowal arguably persists in Western liberal democracies, where the recollection of slavery and its role in Western history is a source of discomfort. But this easy sense of revulsion doesn’t require one to address slavery’s underlying ideology of racial supremacy, much less the sexual fetishism and sadism that characterised much of its practice, as contemporary accounts will attest. What Peele’s film forces viewers to consider is whether such underlying power relations and warped desires remain wholly intact in our modern society.

What has often been missed in the discourse around slavery, and the persistence of post-slavery power relations, is the strategic and enduring psychology of slavery. It is this elusive quality that Peele’s film manages to capture.

The institution of slavery necessitated not just sailing and ironmongery skills, but a systematic regime – embedded in law, and lasting for centuries – of unrelenting terror, torture and dehumanisation resulting in absolute control over a cowed and docile workforce. Peele’s film parodies this on a micro-level. Rose’s family mentally break their victims using a multi-stage process that begins with hypnosis and ends with lobotomy. It is no accident that both Mr and Mrs Armitage are professional brain specialists.

Check your privilege
But what about those reviews? Variety calls it a “searing political statement” disguised as an “escape-the-crazies survival thriller” – where “the crazies are the liberal white elite, who dangerously overestimate the degree of their own enlightenment”. Since the “crazies” in question are complete psychopaths, I’d argue that they have very little investment in their own “enlightenment” – unless that term was intended as a pun.

Many reviews – this one included – describe Get Out exclusively as a satire on white liberal elitism, one which asks (white) viewers to “check their privilege”. But they are, perhaps, reading it from just such a privileged perspective. In so doing, they unwittingly repeat the dynamics parodied in the film, invalidating the black experience and ignoring the possibility that the film might not be primarily about the experience of whiteness, nor created specifically for the edification of white audiences.

But the Variety review gets worse. Besides a dubious comment about “love [being] color-blind”, the reviewer describes Chris as “a dark-skinned black man” – at which point I started making the same side-eyed facial expression that Chris makes when he first meets the liberally-racist parents. Why the need to doubly-emphasise his “darkness”?

This is a minor point, to be sure – and the comment was no doubt made innocently. But the effectiveness of Peele’s film plays on the very real fear that behind every throwaway racial remark lies something of an entirely more sinister magnitude. This, by the way, is what makes the “n” word so explosive.

That is to say, each of these uncomfortable moments threatens to reveal a deeply-entrenched racial ideology that some would say has both underpinned and facilitated the cultural and economic development of Europe and America during the past 400 years. Success relied not just on forced labour and territorial expansion/exploitation, but on the carefully-wrought ideologies that enabled it: crucially, the ideological conceit and pseudo-science of race and white supremacy. Colonialism, slavery and Nazi Aryanism evolved from the same fundamental set of beliefs.

The terrorism of white supremacy is that it is not only an extremist movement. It is the spectre haunting Get Out, just as it is the spectre that continues to haunt our modern, liberal societies. And in the gaslight of Trump’s America it is, quite literally, terrifying.

About Today's Contributor:
Victoria Anderson, Researcher/Teacher in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Update On Campaign To Stop Rupert Murdoch Taking Over Sky [Hint: It's Good News!]

Straight from my email inbox: here is the update on the petition organised by the peeps at 38 Degrees I've received today... proving, once again, that online petitions do work.

(For those of you who've missed it, the petition was posted on here, by the way.)

This is great news (but not for Rupert Murdoch, obviously) and definitely worth a read.

Enjoy and stay safe!

Loup Dargent

The Email:

"Dear Loup, 

This is huge. You - along with thousands of other people - have helped throw a major spanner into Rupert Murdoch’s plans to take full control of Sky. Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, just announced an investigation into the takeover. [1] 

This means that instead of getting waved through, Murdoch’s plan faces a fresh obstacle. Ofcom, the media watchdog, now has to look into Murdoch’s dodgy media empire. Spoiler alert: Rupert Murdoch probably won't like what they say. [2] 

Here’s how we helped make this happen: 

• When news broke about his takeover back in December, we sprung into action. Over 319,000 of us signed a petition asking Karen Bradley to refer the deal. [3] We delivered it straight to the government - and it was covered in national newspapers! [4]

• When we found out Karen Bradley was on BBC Question Time, we all chipped in to drive a huge mobile billboard to the studio, so it was right in front of her as she arrived. 38 Degrees-ers took to Twitter, sending thousands of tweets asking her to refer the deal. [5]

• Next, we crowdfunded an advert in a national newspaper with the total petition signatures, asking Karen Bradley to stop the deal - even when other papers refused to publish it because it was so controversial. [6]

• And on the same day, we parked the mobile billboard outside Karen Bradley's office, the Department of Media, Culture and Sport - and delivered hundreds of leaflets to her staff as they arrived for work. [7]

Last time Rupert Murdoch made a bid to take over Sky, it was public opposition to the phone hacking scandal that stopped him. [8] Today's news proves that if enough of us get involved we can stop him again. [9] 

It's not everyday you can say that you've helped stop someone as powerful as Rupert Murdoch. So please take a moment to give yourself a pat on the back. 

Today's news is a huge step towards stopping the takeover. In the next few weeks, we will have more to do. But for now, why not take a minute to watch this video on all we’ve done - then share it with your family and friends? 


Thanks for being involved, 

Maggie, Holly, David, Jo and the 38 Degrees team 


NOTES: 
[1] BBC News: Fox takeover bid for Sky to be reviewed
Gov.uk: Department of Culture, Media and Sport: Statement from Culture Secretary: Sky/21st Century Fox merger: 
[2] The Culture Secretary, Karen Bradley, has asked Ofcom to investigate the Sky deal on two grounds, plurality and commitment to broadcasting standards: Gov.uk: Department of Culture, Media and Sport: Statement from Culture Secretary: Sky/21st Century Fox merger 
[3] 38 Degrees petition: Stop Murdoch taking over Sky 
[4] The Guardian: Murdoch Sky bid is ‘serious threat to our democracy’ 
[5] 38 Degrees blog: Tweet Karen Bradley!: 
[6] The advert ran full page in the Daily Mail, on Page 32. The Daily Telegraph refused to run it! 
[7] 38 Degrees blog: Karen Bradley - Stop Murdoch taking over Sky 
[8] 38 Degrees blog: Victory - Murdoch withdraws BSkyB bid 
[9] Together we’ve been working with our friends at Avaaz, the Media Reform Coalition, Hacked Off, and others to stand up against the deal. "