Turn out the lights, the party’s over. spoilers I was never a huge fan of Falling Skies. The special effects were often terrible, the stories were often hokey and silly, the acting was often a bit over the top. Falling Skies could never quite decide if it wanted to be a campy 1950s horror moive or a campy 1980s morality play. In the end, it didn’t really matter. After five years of losing a handful of people every week, but never anyone we knew or cared about, the 2nd Massachusetts Militia drags itself into Washington DC to do battle with…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Selling Photos Online-Or Not So Much
One of my Twitter Buddies asked me advice on selling photos online. I’m a professional photographer. Taking portraits is how I pay the bills and what allows me to travel around the country. I don’t sell portraits online. I now do Shoot and Show, as the Assembly Line Portrait business calls it. I take portraits and then turn around and show the subjects proofs of their images. On a good day I sell around a thousand dollars worth of portraits. On a bad day, a few hundred dollars worth. I’m not very good at selling. The hot shots at The…
Star Trek Renegades
Fan Fiction and Kickstarter, a wicked combination. Star Trek Renegades is a collection of older actors and very bad special effects. The big name stars here are Walter Koenig and Tim Russ, both familiar to fans of Star Trek. Sean Young and several other blasts from the past have roles as well. Time has not been kind to these people. There is an odd production error early in the film when we see a monument to Admiral Nimoy that should have been to Admiral Spock. Or maybe it should have been to Leonard Nimoy, without any military titles. Star Trek…
1Q84
The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts. ~Willy Wonka [easyazon_link identifier=”B00E84D060″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]1Q84[/easyazon_link] is a deep novel. It has many layers. We start off following two main characters. We hear about their work, their passions, their hopes. One is a writer and there is a good deal of talk about the publishing industry. The other is an assassin, and there is a good deal of talk about who she kills and why she kills them. For such a long book, it clocks in at about a 1,000 pages, we really have only a handful of characters. At one point…
Salvage City
One of the fun things about living in hotel rooms is that you get to see all kinds of random crap on TV. King of the oddball show is The Discovery Channel. There are all kinds of goofy shows here from sort of reality shows to sort of educational shows. Amish Mafia and Naked and Afraid are two recent titles that kind of boggle the mind. Salvage City was a very short lived show. It has all of three episodes and you can watch them on YouTube. The idea here is what if American Pickers found a pile of junk, and…
Limitless
It’s a popular myth that people only use ten percent of their brain’s potential. This would make evolution look pretty bad. A big brain that never reaches its full capacity. Of course, the brain does more than remember the random crap we read online, it keeps the heart beating, reminds us when to eat, when to sleep, tells us who to flirt with, and also remembers rather a lot of random crap that we read online. Limitless takes the idea that we only use 20% of our brain power and offers up a pill that allows us to use all of…
Extinction
Ice Ice Zombies Ice [easyazon_link identifier=”B011M5B1Y0″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Extinction[/easyazon_link]. In classic, post apocalypse style we open up with a group of people crowded together. Random people on buses heading for parts unknown. Then something happens. All but a tiny handful are eaten by zombies. We flash forward about ten years and find three survivors living next door to each other. Two men and one little girl. The world is a frozen wasteland covered in white. The survivors are kind of nuts. Even though they live side by side, they appear to hate each other, or at least, one of them hates…
Minority Report
It’s been awhile since I read [easyazon_link identifier=”140723093X” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Philip K Dick[/easyazon_link]’s story or watched [easyazon_link identifier=”B00A2FSXHK” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Tom Cruise[/easyazon_link]’s movie, but I do recall liking them both. It seems to me that the book was set in a slightly richer world. While PreCrime was kind of an experiment in the film, it appeared to be a well established fact of law enforcement in the story. I always had the feeling that every large city had its own PreCrime bureau. And if the Precog range is a hundred miles, then there should be a set of PreCogs every hundred miles. In Fox’s…
Fantastic Four
If you loved Lost in Space…. Spoilers, if anybody cares. Yeah, Fantastic 4 is right up there with 1998’s Lost in Space. A story that makes no sense, special effects that look like a school project, and a group of actors that all looked like they wanted to be somewhere else. The music was pretty generic soundtrack fare, but it’s not like Philip Glass and Marco Beltrami could have saved this pointless turkey with a great score anyway. The bulk of the film is an origin story. I hate Origin Stories. We are treated to precocious kids who build a transdimensional portal…
The Ghost in My Brain
Ain’t that a kick in the head? [easyazon_link identifier=”0525426566″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]The Ghost in My Brain[/easyazon_link] starts off with Dr Clark Elliott coming close to freezing to death. This happens as he makes the two hour trek from his office to his car in the college parking lot. He goes into mind numbing detail about why this trip is taking him two hours, as opposed to the ten minutes it would take anyone else. He talks about his decision paralysis. About how he knows that he should just lay down and die-only he can’t remember how to lay down. He eventually makes…