“Neo, you’ve been living in a dream world.” Morpheus There was a time when I held the belief that I possessed total recall. I took a bit of pride in recalling all kinds of things. I remain a hoarder of vast stores of useless information. But I no longer completely trust my memories. And neither should you. Countless studies have shown that both short and long term memories can be altered with ease. Like the idea that the Earth is flat, our believes about memory appear simple and obvious. They are not. We like the…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
On Going Blind
Well, going blind in one eye anyway. A few weeks back I noticed a smudge at the bottom of my vision. Like a bit of fluff stuck to my eyelash. I couldn’t clear it, so I went to a doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who sent me to yet another doctor. Seems to be glaucoma and/or some kind of optic nerve damage. The new Doc prescribed a couple of eye drops. I’m mostly blind in my right eye. Imagine a large bit of cardboard with a fairly large hole in it. The hole is covered with gaze. That’s…
The Bicameral Mind
One my favorite podcasts is Stuff to Blow your Mind. Lots of fun stuff. They had a couple of episodes on the theory of the bicameral mind. The main idea is consciousness is something new. Humans used to function by using both sides of thier brains. The Voice of God was really just a voice in your head. One half of the brain talking to the other. I read a book a couple years back by a man who suffered a brain injury. The Ghost in My Brain was filled with interesting stuff, but the most amazing to me was how the…
Star Trek Discovery
Spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery. If The Orville leans a little to the silly side, Discovery leans a little too much to the dark side. In the first two episodes, we met a Captain, crew, ship, and villain that will soon be dust in the wind. Just as well, they all had names that were impossible to pronounce anyway. On the whole, Star Trek Discovery is better than Enterprise, which is not too high a bar to jump. The show and its theme song hit a lot of familiar notes and bring up a lot…
The Orville: First Impressions
Seth MacFarlane is the creative genius behind Family Guy. My favorite episodes on that show are the ones that see Stewie, voiced my Seth, and Brian the dog, also voiced by Seth, using a time travel device. These are funny, serious, and often a bit profound episodes. This is the bar I was expecting The Orville to hop over. I didn’t expect The Orville to be Star Trek, which is kind of what the ads wanted me to expect. The Orville is neither as funny as Family Guy nor as serious as Star Trek The Next Generation. The first episode…
Ghost in the Shell
If you like CGI, this is a movie for you. Every frame is chock full of special effects. It looks good. It looks really good. But, well, it isn’t very good. The Anime Ghost in the Shell from 1995 cost around $10 million. The shinny new Hollywood version cost around $110 million. It was not money well spent. American movie goers, for the most part, like the Aristotelian model of story telling. That is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anime doesn’t always follow that model. The anime Ghost in the Shell seemed like a bunch of…
T2 Trainspotting
Twenty years ago, our heroes went on a crime spree in the great city of Edinburgh. Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle return as the older, and slightly wiser, childhood friends and all around losers. I had forgotten that Jonny Lee Miller was Sick Boy, but I remembered the rest of the guys well enough. It’s directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge. Trainspotting was an awesome movie. I loved it from the first time I watched it, though it does have a few heartbreaking, disturbing, and disgusting scenes. I love the closing scene…
A few thoughts about HBO’s Confederate
The first great alternate history book I remember reading was Guns of the South. It was by Harry Turtledove and told the tale of a group of South African racists that wanted to change history by giving the Confederate Army machine guns. It was an interesting read and spawned countless sequels set in the alternate universe. I read The Man in the High Castle at about the same time. I also grew up watching The Twilight Zone, which featured a lot of alternate history stories, time travel stories, and parables of one sort or another. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an interesting…
Passangers
In 1998 the brilliant Douglas Adams wrote a computer game called Starship Titanic. The game play involved a sole passenger wandering around a cruise ship trying to keep it from blowing up. The only other people on board are a collection of robots, well, more correctly, androids. Passengers reminded me of Starship Titanic once or twice. This is one of the problems with being a Science Fiction fan, everything reminds me of something else. Ok, so Passengers got all kinds of bad press for no good reason. This is a perfectly fine science fiction film. The acting is good, the sets…
Colossal
At first I thought this was just a low budget movie that had done a good job of finding an Anne Hathaway look alike, but turns out it really is Anne Hathaway. This is an odd movie. One of the rules of sci-fi is to not explain too much, but I think they might had kept a few too many secrets to themselves in Colossal. At first Colossal looks like your average Rom-Com about a 30 something failure who moves back home. Well, that is if you overlook the opening scene of a little girl in South Korea confronting a…