Over the course of three or four hundred years, the International Space Station changes as hundreds or thousands of aliens dock and never leave. We have a cute montage of humans greeting new visitors to the station, with each race being a little more alien than the last. We watch as a race of uber peaceful aliens living on the planet Tahiti Screen Saver go about their day doing a number of bizarre and incomprehensible things. Then they watch helplessly as wreckage from a battle raging in close proximity to the planet rain down on their perfect and defenseless paradise.…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
The Circle
If The Circle had been released about ten years ago, it might have been a terrifying glimpse of the future. If it had been released five years ago, it might have still been a bit of a warning of things to come. But since it was released in 2017 and everything seen on screen is already possible, if not actively happening, its a tale of closing the gate after the cow has left the pasture. The Circle is a bad movie. It’s an odd mixture of a Steve Jobs bio-pic and The Truman Show. We start with our hero, a…
Coffee shop
I love the story that JK Rowling wrote her first Harry Potter book in a coffee shop. To me it tells how she was able to fall into flow and block out the rest of the world. I do love that feeling myself. It also makes me think that she needed to get away from home. Homes are very demanding places if you care about things like clean dishes, floors, and porcelain. So nice to be away for a bit. I remember drinking coffee while sitting on my father’s lap. One of a handful of fond memories having to do…
Smartphone
About six months ago I joined the rest of the world and got a Smartphone. In December a hit and run driver slammed into my 2006 Grand Caravan. It was a minor wreck. I called the police and when I was done, I drove home. But that was it for the van. A car that had taken me all over the country. Totalled…as the insurance company that wrote me a check for six hundred dollars called it. Now my world is altered. I have things to think about. Choices to make. I decide that I need a newer car and…
Before I Fall
Image Groundhog Day, only you hate everyone. spoilers Before I Fall is the story of five total and complete losers, four psycho bitch mean girls and one pathetic emo girl. This is a time loop story, that like Groundhog Day, resets as each day begins again. Our ‘hero’ is one of the mean girls, a total bitch to everyone she knows. Her big plan for the day is to have sex with her boyfriend and end her time as a virgin. We follow her as she is mean to her sister, her mother, her father, and everyone else who happens…
Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman
Thor is a bit dim. Neil Gaiman is a great writer and a great reader. I love listening to his audio-books. Norse Mythology is a collection of tales from the legends of Odin, Thor, Loki, and countless lessor gods, giants, monsters, and whatnots. These are odd stories. Our Heroes are, for the most part, not nice people, not good people, and shocking very much like normal people. They are often hungry, they worry about growing old and dying, they are petty and jealous, and they are not to be trusted. But Neil doesn’t give them the bloody and gory treatment.…
Alien Covenant
For people who thought Prometheus made too much damned sense. spoilers Alien was a great horror movie. Aliens was a great action movie. The next three movies just sucked. Alien Covenant follows proudly in the tradition of Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, and Prometheus. It’s not so much that Alien Covenant sucked, as it just tells the same boring story as Prometheus. A group of Red Shirts land on a planet and die stupid and meaningless deaths. Oh yeah, and David is back and he’s still a bad guy. The setup is a colony ship, the Covenant, meets with an unfortunate…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“We’re all one head injury away from being someone else.” -quote from a book about the brain I have forget all of but this line. I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about thirty years ago. At about the same time I read If You Meet The Buddha On the Road Kill Him. Another very interesting book. I remember enjoying Zen and it’s tale of a madman traveling around the Northwest with his son riding along behind him on his trusty motorcycle. I mainly remembered a scene near the start of the book about a clumsy mechanic…
The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire tells the story of a handful of people living in the far flung future. Humans are scattered around the galaxy or the universe or something. Lots of random settlements, two of which we see, are connected by a McGuffin bit of sci-fi called The Flow. This is much like a Stargate system or a series of Portkeys or Jump Gates or a Warp Field or any other made up means of transport over vast distances you have ever seen. Like these other constructs, the tech doesn’t really matter. So it’s kind of odd when John puts a…
The Chemist
Stephanie Meyer writes long books. The Chemist is a nice cosy 530 pages long. Plenty of time to get attached to three main characters and a handful of supporting players. We open up with our hero talking about how much she loves the Bourne novels…except they aren’t very realistic. And thus we enbark on a Jason Bourne novel starring a woman instead of a man. I liked The Chemist except for one thing. Our hero tortures and occasionally murders people. Nothing wrong with that…she maintains she’s a good person and like Arnold in True Lies…she only tortured bad people. It’s…