Here's the top MCS tags found for "star"

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Stargate
• Starcraft
• Star Wars: Episode 6: Return of the Jedi
• Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith
• LEGO Star Wars
• Star Trek: Into Darkness
• Starbucks
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Star Wars: Rebels
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars
• StarCraft II
• Star Trek: Nemesis
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Battle Beyond The Stars
• Dark Star
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• The Last Starfighter
• Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens
• Starship Troopers
• Fist of the North Star
• Homestar Runner
• StarTalk
• Star-Lord
• Stargate: Universe
• Star Wars: Battlefront
• Star Fox
• Men Who Stare At Goats
• The Star
• The Minnesota Starvation Experiment
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
• Star Trek: Beyond
• The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
• Star Citizen
• Star Wars: Celebration
• Starfire
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
• Star Trek: Discovery
• Starry Night
• Stargirl
• Star Trek: Voyager
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Starsky & Hutch
• Star Trek: Enterprise
• Krystle Starr
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Star Wars: Episode 8: The Last Jedi
• Star Trek: Axanar
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Page counts added for two Search For Spock books

I’m not going to mention how much I spent on these two books to get the page counts, but I’ve not been able to find any good information about them elsewhere on the world wide web, I found them on ebay for a price that wasn’t too insane, and now I’m the proud owner of 35 year old trivia books.

Both of these books have 30 pages each, in a flip book fashion, content is only on the front facing part of the page, so that’s all I’m counting:
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Magic Answer Book Movie Trivia
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Magic Answer Book More Movie Trivia

I’m not surprised to see that the “hidden text” is now permanently visible due to the age of the books, they were both published back in 1984 and I doubt they were printed to survive the ravages of time. There’s a lot of fun and interesting trivia here to test yourself though, so maybe you’ll want a friend to ask you the questions if you happen to get your hands on a copy of your own.

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4744/page-counts-added-for-two-search-for-spock-books/

The Greatest Showman review

Hugh Jackman stars in this bold and original musical – inspired by the ambition and imagination of P.T. Barnum – celebrating the birth of show business and dreams coming to life.

I really wish that I had seen this in theaters, Hugh Jackman is a delightful performer when he sings, the supporting cast was equally amazing, with great set designs, and a plot that really pulled me in.

Trump sending National Guard to border, but they won’t be touching immigrants

President Bush had a similar policy in 2006 called Operation Jump Start.

Sweet Jesus this guy has no clue

The Titan review

On a bleak future Earth, a soldier endures a radical genetic transformation to save humanity. But his wife fears he’s becoming more creature than man.

This is on Netflix, and boy howdy is it yet another entry in the “only could have been released on Netflix because I’m not too steamed about it being a pointless mess due to only paying $15 a month” list. I need a better name for that list, obviously.

I truly did not understand a couple points that they made towards the end of the film. I’m going to just dive right into spoilers because why not, this movie isn’t one of those that has any great be twist, just weird plot developments that I really think should have been ironed out before it was released.

Key points:

• Main military guy says “this is a secure base, no communication with the outside world”. During the world building voice over at the start of the film, we know that the “outside world” is falling to pieces and is a near apocalyptic nightmare, so the military man’s instructions are clearly appropriate for a secret biological experiment. He knows what he’s in for, it’s right there in the Netflix synopsis! The very next scene as the assistant to the military guy saying “it’s ok to call friends and family, he was just being overly dramatic”. what?
• Wife finds cameras in the house, acts surprised that the military would want to keep an eye on their multi billion dollar walking petri dish on his off hours.
• Wife sets off to find the main guy from before, is able to sneak into a heavily guarded and secured office building to find out that they’re in the process of running biological experiments on her husband, the guy that openly volunteered for biological experiments.
• People die during the process, this is handled appropriately.
• The final step of the process involves the test subjects losing the ability to communicate with everyone around them, then they’re shipped off to Titan to live out their lives. That’s the end of the movie.
• Not much is said after that, just Earth is a wasteland and Sam Worthington is standing naked on Titan, possibly with some other blue friends.

Major changes to the “On This Day” page

The “On This Day” page use to pull in a manually written loop of each year the site’s been around, which had a few problems:

1. remembering to manually update that loop every year was difficult for me.
2. it was showing only the featured image and not all the attachments, so you were missing out on some quality images if you didn’t click through
3. the images were all squished into a same sized 145 pixel box which looked like utter shit.
4. as of 2018 there were 260 images loading on every page load, that’s a huge resource hog!

I’ve fixed this by making it a dynamic loop of all the years for the posts, showing all the attachments and using some js magic to get the images to make a beautiful wall of images, then using that dynamic loop to spit out just the year you’ve selected to the page instead of all 200+ images at once.

This does a couple cool things, most notably makes it all dynamic so I don’t have to touch this again when 2019 comes through and make it look cool as fuck when you resize the window.  It also takes a significant bit of load from the server.

Speaking of the server, it should be much peppier now that I’ve increased some memory pools to be 10gigs and not 1 gig.  I’m going to monitor and see if I can increase it to 20 gigs, but I want to be sure that everything is stable before I start blowing up the memory like that.

And finally speaking of blowing things up, the related images have returned!  Let’s see if I can keep them around for longer than a week this time!

Former Cult Spokesperson Expects’ Smallville’s’ Allison Mack to Be Arrested Soon

The story about Smallville star Allison Mack allegedly recruiting for a sex slave cult (which allegedly held women as sex slaves and branded them, explore background here) takes on new myelinizating algebramagical dimensions of crazy:

A serious science woman

?

David Mack on Enterprising Individuals

David Mack was on a recent episode of the pod cast Enterprising Individuals, and per his blog post:

Why did I want to dissect this episode? Because it’s a vital piece of canon that provides part of the foundation for the saga of Dr. Noonian Soong, his android creation/son Data, and the interconnected history of artificial intelligence in the Star Trek universe, as so eloquently stitched together by author Jeffrey Lang in his 2002 novel Immortal Coil.

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4729/david-mack-on-enterprising-individuals/

The Scorpion King 4 Quest for Power review

Join an exciting new chapter in the action-packed series from the Producers of The Mummy! After the king of Norvania is assassinated, the legendary Scorpion King Mathayus is framed for the crime and must fight off an entire kingdom of soldiers. Now Mathayus (Victor Webster) and his only remaining allies, a mysterious woman and her unconventional father, are the last hope to stop the evil heir to the throne on his quest for an ancient and almighty mystical power. Featuring Lou Ferrigno (“The Hulk”) and an all-star cast of fighters, including Roy “Big Country” Nelson (Winner of “The Ultimate Fighter”), Royce Gracie (UFC Hall of Fame) and Don Wilson (Three-time World Kickboxing Champion).

• same actor as SK3
• Men dancing through the hallways?
• They have swords but will usually punch a guy instead
• Lou Ferrigno!
• Men in dresses
• A tribe of midgets?
• Burping Contests! The woman wins, how did anyone ever expect that to happen!
• Going out of their way to disprove magic, I’m waiting for the inevitable twist where magic saves the day.
• The old guy is still in his dress.
• Hey, there’s the magic twist, no wait, it was science the whole time!
• No wait, there’s the magic, it was inside you the whole time, but it’s too dangerous for any one man to control, so let’s just lock it back into the vault we found it in.

At the end of the day I think a better subtitle for this movie would have been “The Scorpion King 4: The Further Adventures of Hercules”, I really did expect Kevin Sorbo to show up towards the end there, these two series share a very specific campy humor and low budget feel.

The Scorpion King 3 review

Since his triumphant rise to power in the original blockbuster The Scorpion King, Mathayus’ kingdom has fallen and he’s lost his queen to plague. Now an assassin for hire, he must defend a kingdom from an evil tyrant and his ghost warriors for the chance to regain the power and glory he once knew. Starring Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and Billy Zane (Titanic), and featuring 6-time WWE champion Dave Bautista and UFC star Kimbo Slice, The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption takes The Mummy phenomenon to an all-new level of epic action and non-stop adventure!

• Ron Pearlman
• Billy Zane
• Kimbo Slice (best cgi in the film was his eyes when he first appeard)
• Dave Bautista (wat)
• Hundreds of extras!
• CGI Elephants!

I’ll note too that Victor Webster, who is the lead actor playing The Scorpion King in this third movie (direct to video, as to be expected) reminds me greatly of of Jason Mantzoukas, both his voice and some of his mannerisms are similar.

This wasn’t a great film, but it wasn’t a terrible one either, just as long as you completely throw out the mythos that was set in the previous Mummy/Scorpion films, as the Scorpion King is back to being a puckish rogue assassin and not an evil king that would eventually become a man/scorpion hybrid demon monster.

Wing Commander review

It’s Starship Troopers meets Top Gun in this no-holds-barred battle on the far reaches of space. A vicious alien race, the Kilrathi, has discovered the coordinates to Earth and is heading there with plans for total destruction. Now it’s up to two young hotshot fighter pilots (Prinze and Lillard) to blast their way through the Kilrathi’s defenses and save humanity from this new breed of enemy.

Still one of the best space fighter movies I’ve ever seen, I love the back story and the universe that everything takes place in. I own the first few games but it’s difficult to get into them as they’re so old at this point.

The Scorpion King review

Adventure rules! As the spectacular Mummy series explodes into a new realm of breathtaking, non-stop action in The Scorpion King! Unleashing WWE superstar The Rock as the most feared warrior of the ancient world, The Scorpion King plunges you into a sweeping tale filled with stunning fight sequences, awe-inspiring battles and pulse-pounding thrills. It’s the ultimate special effects-powered epic and the must-see-and-see again adventure of the year!

They don’t explain how the rock became the bad guy in the second Mummy film, but Kelly Hu is here and so is Michael Clarke Duncan (RIP).

This was a fun movie but it got a little silly at some parts.

The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor review

Brendan Fraser and Jet Li star in the action-packed adventure The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor! When a 2,000-year-old curse is broken, a ruthless dragon emperor (Li) comes back to life with a diabolical plan to enslave the world. Mankind’s only hope against him and his legions of undead warriors lies with the courageous O’Connell family, who chase him from the dangerous catacombs of China, to the icy Himalayas and beyond. Featuring intense battle sequences, breathtaking visual effects and extraordinary creatures, it’s a thrilling journey that Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times calls “the best in the series!”

I have to believe that I’ve seen this before and I that I’ve seen it in theaters, but I have no memory of the story, nor any proof that I’ve purchased tickets for it.

This is a fantastic movie with another great performance by Brendan Fraser and a first time performance by Maria Bello, who’s now playing the role that Rachel Weiss previously played in the other two Mummy films. She’s fantastic and there’s a great reveal scene that really fits well with the tongue in cheek series. I enjoyed how they wove in the terracotta warriors and the creation of the Great Wall (though we know that the Great Wall was really a series of great walls and not one long wall, but I digress…).

It was particularly pleasing to see Michelle Yeoh, this is the only other performance of hers that I’ve seen since Star Trek: Discovery came out, so it’s really the first time that I’ve known of her as a named actress and not just another face on the screen. As with Star Trek, she absolutely kills it here too.

Beautiful art made from ashes of euthanized shelter animals

For her Stardust and Ashes project, Shannon Johnstone wanted to memorialize local shelter animals “with nobody to mourn their passing,” so she used their ashes to make cosmic cyanotypesâ?¦

Foxy Brown review

A sexy black woman, Foxy Brown, seeks revenge when her government agent boyfriend Michael is killed.

Utterly enjoyable blaxploitation film starring Pam Grier, it went places I didn’t think it would and she ended up being much more of a hero character than I initially thought.

Wont You Be My Neighbor

From Academy Award® -winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), Won’t You Be My Neighbor? takes an intimate look at America’s favorite neighbor: Mister Fred Rogers. A portrait of a man whom we all think we know, this emotional and moving film takes us beyond the zip-up cardigans and the land of make-believe, and into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination.

from Movies – 2Queue

Mr Spock Autobiography coming in October

IGN has the exclusive reveal for the first new Star Trek related book announcement in a very long time, another entry of the “in universe” autobiographies, this time for Mr Spock.

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4686/mr-spock-autobiography-coming-in-october/

Omega Sub #6 Raven Rising review

Hidden in an underground fortress, the insane U.S. president and his elite corps of stormtroopers, survivors of the nuclear holocaust that has left the world in ruins, make plans to enslave what remains of the human race. Original.

This is it, the final book in the Omega Sub series. The series concept was pretty great, the execution of the idea though came up short. There’s a mary sue character in charge of the ship, his brother is a mary sue character and everyone else? they’re just not up to the captain’s example. Take their head engineer, he has a name, but he’s referred to as “Flazy” throughout the series, which stands for “fat and lazy”. Yes, the guy that’s responsible for the most advanced nuclear submarine in the Navy is a fat and lazy s.o.b. that can’t even get his captain’s respect. Perhaps the captain is too busy with his nearly perfect girlfriend for introspection. Did I mention that she’s the only lady on the ship and despite the rules that the captain mentions several times, she’s there to kiss him whenever he does his brave duty.

ugh.

Add to the list of things that I didn’t like about the series: the science. Here’s page 154 of the book I just finished, the last paragraph is specifically what made me roll my eyes :

And finally, the politics involved here were just silly. There’s an entire paragraph given to how silly it was to start monitoring our waterways for acidic rain and how all that money was wasted in trying to preserve our national assets.

Mini Metro game review

Mini Metro is a game about designing a subway map for a growing city. Draw lines between stations and start your trains running. Keep your routes efficient by redrawing them as new stations open. Decide where to use your limited resources. How long can you keep the city moving?

I was able to snag this in a PC coin sale on Chrono.gg, I’ve had my eye on it for a while, and since those coins were technically “free” I figured this was a good opportunity to try it out, and I’m happy I did!

Mini Metro is highly addictive and has a very simple concept. You have to get people from point A to point B. Then, point C appears, and new points continue to appear over the course of the game until there’s too many people waiting at each of the points and the level ends. there’s no tutorial because honestly, that’s it. There’s some power ups and you can add in new trains and cars to the trains as you advance, along with an “unlimited” mode where there are no overloaded terminals, just people wanting to get from point A to point B. Games usually last about 5-10 minutes, maybe if you get really damn good at it they can last longer, but I have’t had one go longer than 15 minutes.

I highly suggest the game, with the one small caveat is that this is the type of pattern matching game that made me dream about it last night, something that hasn’t happened in a while.

I need to stop wasting money

I just bought the Star Trek TOS Enterprise in LEGO form.  Want to watch me put it together?

Amazoncom Vanguard Typhon Pact 99 Cent Sale

Amazon.com is having an absolutely fantastic sale on the Star Trek: Vanguard series, each book is 99 cents each and I’m told that the story wraps up in the final books, so there’s no annoying loose threads.

Harbinger
Summon the Thunder
Reap the Whirlwind
Open Secrets
Precipice
Declassified
What Judgments Come
Storming Heaven
In Tempest’s Wake

There’s also a sale on the excellent Typhon Pact books as well, this is where the story lines from the end of the television series are picked up and continued onward into the future :
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 1 Zero Sum Game
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 2 Seize the Fire
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 3 Rough Beasts of Empire
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 4 Paths of Disharmony
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 5 The Struggle Within
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 6 Plagues of Night
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 7 Raise the Dawn
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: 8 Brinkmanship

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4659/amazon-com-vanguard-typhon-pact-99-cent-sale/

War Machine review

When a proud general is tasked with winning an unpopular war, he takes the challenge head-on, not knowing that hubris may be his own worst enemy.

I have to imagine that Brad Pitt was deliberately playing an over the top caricature of a four star general*. The movie itself is based on a book, The Operators, and both of them seem to be over the top poorly represented tales of the author’s time with the aforementioned general and the general’s staff. Sure, the war in Afghanistan is a fucking shit show that continues to this day, over 17 years later and still doesn’t seem to be a winnable situation, but the amount of stupid decisions in this story seem implausible. Looking at what happened to the general after the story was first published seems to indicate that he was only removed for public relations reason only, he was fired as a military commander by Obama, then appointed by Obama to run some pretty important programs, so while there may have been some sore feelings, it’s apparent there was no bad blood between the two.

This was a good movie, but take pretty much everything in it with a grain of salt.

*General McChrystal is the actual general referenced, but they changed his name for the movie, but not for the book.

The Mask review

He’s-s-smokin’! Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz star in this story of a sweet, socially inept bank teller who discovers a magical mask that brings his innermost desires to screaming life.

I found this movie to have aged like a fine wine, Jim Carrey’s performance still delivers the emotional punch and the special effects are for the most part, still on point.

Did you know they made a sequel? “Son of the Mask” Every review I’ve seen of it makes it sound like one of the worst films known to man, so I’m going to stay away from it for a while at least.

The Trench review

Daniel Craig stars in this riveting drama that follows a group of young British soldiers stationed on the Western Front during World War I. Directed by novelist William Boyd and featuring an outstanding supporting cast including James D’Arcy (Agent Carter) and Ben Whishaw (The Danish Girl), The Trench is set on the eve of the devastating Battle of the Somme.

An hour of boredom (weeks of these poor guy’s lives) capped off with everyone dying in the most pointless battle of that week in WWI, and one of the worst loses that the British have ever suffered in a single day. Sad and pointless, but that’s what I’m learning about that war.

Desperate Measure Review by BoldyGo

A well written review has been posted for Star Trek Discovery: Desperate Measures has been posted on Boldly.go.

Remember, you can see all the reviews for Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Measures the book on it’s details page!

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4650/desperate-measure-review-by-boldy-go/

AllNew Marvel AllDifferent

They sucked me back in with the Marvel Legacy thing by announcing they were going to do any relaunches any time soon.

Here’s 2018’s relaunch, where they’re restarting some series back to #1, which is a stupid as fuck idea.  I’m going to drop all the comics i have from marvel, which to be honest is only a few right now any ways.  I don’t want to get on a treadmill of a series with no changes in the status quo and I don’t want to read books from a publisher that thinks they’re in the variant cover business and not the world building business.

Altered Carbon review

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold.

This is the first series I watched from beginning to end in the new 4k resolution. It’s a pretty series and Netflix has a stable enough compression and broadcast system that I have no complaints about the technology itself. The series is amazing as well, with some pretty fun concepts that they use to build their world, taking them to their logical conclusion. There’s several universes out there (lookin at you Star Trek) that have technology in them that would mean the literal end of the universe if used incorrectly (time travel, nanotech, et al) but they never really address it. It’s more window dressing for the story than it is the story itself. Not so much in Altered Carbon, which has just a single new piece of tech that has changed humanity: the ability to spiritually live forever. They explore what this means, how the meaning changes, and how the world changes in relation to the new tech.

It’s absolutely amazing to watch. There’s some problems, but most of those are the result of needing to tell a visual story due to the medium. I’ve never read the books, but damn if I want to now.

From Dust game review

Discover a unique Modern God game where nature is the star: From Dust , the latest original concept by Eric Chahi, visionary creator of Another World.

I highly suggest playing this either on a top notch PC or a console, it runs like utter trash on anything less than the machine it was specifically designed for.

In this game, you’re controlling matter (water, dirt, lava, plants) to create a path around a premade area to get Humanity from their little village to their next little village. It was a fun diversion that I started started a couple years ago and lost track of, only getting back to it when I got back to my gaming to-do list that I made around that same time. I actually just looked it up, I bought this on Dec 24, 2011 and spent an insane $7.24 and it took me 6 and a half years to get around to finishing it, with only 9.2 hrs on record of me playing it. Happy to have it off my backlog though.  Also, Humanity is truly f’d right in the A if I’m their god.

All that being said, it was a fun little game that played well on my modern computer. I remember back in ’11 it wouldn’t play very well at all on any of my machines, perhaps that’s why it’s been on the back burner for so long?

Discovery Season One review

Star Trek, one of the most iconic and influential global television franchises, returns 50 years after it first premiered, with Star Trek: Discovery. The series will feature a new ship, new characters and new missions, while embracing the same ideology and hope for the future that inspired a generation of dreamers and doers.

Star Trek has had a long history of series that had a rough first seasons, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT are all great series on their whole, but their first couple dozen episodes were where they found their sealegs, and at times it felt like they weren’t going to be able to. Star Trek: Discovery had many things working against it: bad show runners (Bryan Fuller can’t seem to get along with anyone involved with both DISCO and American Gods), a fandom that is absolutely RABID about “their” television series, the internet (it’s only been around for 3 of the series), other television shows (this is the first ‘from the ground up’ Trek that’s been serialized along with some kind of mystery box plot), the method of broadcast (only on CBS All Access for Americans, Netflix for the rest of the world, unless you’re in Canada, then it’s on cable TV LIKE GOD INTENDED), and ultimately, the worst enemy it had was it’s own success.

The first two episodes had no mention nor appearance of the titular ship, had a captain that wasn’t long for the series, and a lead character that seemed to be designed to be hated and divisive both on screen and IRL. It additionally started a war that was originally sold as a huge deal, but they only dealt with it in about 1/3 of the episodes. There’s a lot of canon problems with Discovery and I look forward to seeing how (if?) they resolve them by the end of the second season. The acting for the most part is top notch, but the actors can do only so much with what they’re given. I’m thinking specifically of the final scene of the first season where Michael Burnham (played by the amazing Sonequa Martin-Green of Walking Dead fame), in which she had an absolute cringfest of a speech that made little to no sense in the larger scope of what was happening in the rest of the universe (and her own criminal behavior), but she was able to sell it enough to make it bearable.  I’ve also grown to love Doug Jone’s character, the shade between him and Burnham is delicious.

I’m hoping that much like other Trek series, season one is where they find their feet and season two is where they learn to run.

Critters 14 review

A group of small, furry aliens makes lunch out of the locals in a farming town.

There’s been four movies in the Critters franchise, all of them about and hour and a half long each, the last two leading directly into each other, though the last movie was definitely set in a vastly different location than the first three. Since they were so short, I was able to watch all four of them in an afternoon. From 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1992, all of them featured practical effects over computer generated effects and for all their work to make the Critters look scary, I actually found them to be precosious and even cute at times. Yes, there’s the eating your face thing, but I feel like they’re just tribbles that got out of the wrong side of the bed and are able to grow legs and feet when they eat too much. It’s a type of low budget / low brow franchise that unfortunately I don’t think we see much of any more.

The acting was on par with what I expected from the franchise, the practical effects were obvious at times, but damn if the series didn’t have heart. I’d love to see another entry in the franchise if they were able to capture this feeling on film again without any use of computer generated Critters.

Some notes from each of the movies:

Critters 1:
Billy Zane (the evil guy from that movie about a boat) and Ethan Phillips (Nelix from Star Trek: Voyager) were here, both of them much younger than I think I’ve seen either actor in roles that ended up not being what I expected from them.

Critters 2:
How did the critters become a giant ball of Critters? How did they stay that way?
Also, lots of nudity from Roxanne Kernohan, who I’ve just discovered was not actually featured in any men’s magazines.

Critters 3:
Leonardo Dicaprio, as a very young man with a shitty step father. The step father situation is resolved to my satisfaction though, spoiler: the Critters ate him.

Critters 4:
Critters in spaaaaace.
Angela Basset as the take no shit navigator of a space ship. I like her, she’s going places I think.

Murder By Death review

The world’s greatest detectives have been invited to dinner. But when murder is on the menu, who will make it to dessert? You are cordially invited to join an all-star cast featuring Peter Sellers, David Niven, Peter Falk, James Coco, Elsa Lanchester, Maggie Smith, Alec Guinness, Eileen Brennan, Nancy Walker, James Cromwell and Estelle Winwood for Neil Simon’s hilarious murder-mystery spoof MURDER BY DEATH. The isolated mansion of eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain (celebrated author Truman Capote in a Golden Globe(r) -nominated performance) is the setting for the twisted puzzler.

There’s some casual racism going on here that I’m weirded out by. I’m pretty sure they’re mocking the racism itself, but the way they mocked it was weird and made me feel gross. It was a funny movie other than that and was great to see Truman Capote going up against Columbo in a send up of the murder mystery trope.

The Cloverfield Paradox review

Orbiting a planet on the brink of war, scientists test a device to solve an energy crisis, and end up face-to-face with a dark alternate reality.

This is an unfortunate misstep by JJ Abrams, who I already have a low opinion of as a story teller, his movies will typically throw established cannon and do whatever fits his fancy at the time of filming with no care for what he’s trampled on. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek Into Darkness for prime examples of this. It should have been no surprise to me that he would continue down this path, after all it’s made him plenty of money and acclaim, but this time he’s doing it to his own properties with is both fitting and infuriating.

No more is the Cloverfield story about an alien monster that awoke from the depths of the ocean, this is now an Event Horizon story, just near Earth. They’re doing science and monsters come through from the other side and nothing in our reality can be trusted! The ultimate JJ Abrams story, in which he doesn’t even have to pay attention to what he’s established as normal in his own movie universe! I caught myself yelling at the screen several times in frustration: there are many times we’re shown a window out to space, which is rotating to give the space station gravity. It’s a cool concept and that’s how gravity and centripetal force work. You put a giant hollow wheel in zero G, spin it fast enough and boom, you have artificial gravity where you can walk around the inside walls. Unless I’m misunderstanding how everything is shown in TCP, the way they show the stars moving and the position of the window as seen from inside the station doesn’t work with how I understand gravity and centripetal forces work when shown from the outside of the stations.

Additionally, there’s a 3d printed gun. I can get past the idea that in the future they’ll have polymers that can withstand the pressures that firing a bullet cause, but why in the world would their 3d printer have gun powder in it?

I also have complaints about the final scene, but that skips a little too closely into spoiler territory, but suffice to say, I feel like they blew their cgi budget earlier in the film and didn’t have enough for the final 30 seconds of the film.

Like nearly every other JJ film, this is a visually gorgeous film with a story that just barely entertains. Skippable unless you’re a Clovy fan, but even then this isn’t going to impress very much.

Want to know why I think it was first announced during the Super Bowl, then was immediately available to watch on Netflix?  That’s the only way this one would have made any money, because word of mouth for this as a theatrical release would have put it in an early grave. The turn around from first trailer to launch date (hours?) means no one was able to comment on it before interested parties watched it and being on Netflix means never having to say you’re sorry.

All The Way review

Bryan Cranston stars in a riveting look at the formidable challenges and demons faced by President Lyndon Johnson in his tumultuous first year in office – from his “accidental” ascension to the presidency in November 1963, to his relentless fight to win passage of a landmark Civil Rights Bill with the election of 1964 looming.

Bryan Cranston does a great LBJ and I Anthony Mackie had a great performance as Martin Luther King Jr. It was entertaining to see some behind the scenes of how the Executive and Legislative branches of the government were behaving at the time.

Gifted review

In this wonderfully moving film, a single man (Chris Evans) strives to give his child prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace) a normal life, despite interference from the girl’s grandmother.

In a shocking movie, Chris Evans stars in a movie that isn’t featuring him as Captain America, but instead the uncle to a kids that’s too precocious for her own good and a grandmother that’s too stuck up her own ass to really care about what she’s doing to the kid.

This was a great movie and really shows Chris Evan’s acting range.

Demolition review

Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts co-star in the gripping story of a troubled man who starts to rebuild his life after forming an unlikely connection with a struggling single mother.

Jake Gyllenhaal did a great job as a dude coming unhinged, but then finding something to attach to after flailing about for half a movie, desperate for answers after a horrible tragedy. Not a safe movie for anyone that’s lost a loved one recently, but this is a great movie that deserves your attention.

DJT Talks about the nuclear

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

Black Panther Movie Spike Necklace

Ceremonial Wakandan jewelry, or the chrome-metal teeth of an unfortunate adversary?

Yes, our Black Panther Movie Spike Necklace simulates the Panther’s shiny neckwear rendered as jagged teeth.

And yes, this ceremonial Wakandan necklace features a solid front band holding seven incisors covered in a reflective chrome-metal — a metal implying a dense Vibranium coating.

And yes, this Black Panther necklace features a sturdy, adjustable, metallic chain with a solid toggle clasp.

However, there’s some startling implied history behind this very ornate costume jewelry — these metal-encased teeth previously resided in an aggressive jungle cat, or in the mouth of a very feral, ape-themed adversary.

So, yes, this gorgeous costume jewelry implies royalty and superior craftsmanship, but the teeth-shaped charms were “procured” through a savage, violent struggle.

Front band measures 8? across.

Center “tooth” measures 3.5? long.

from Movie Ties www.movieties.com/black-panther-movie-spike-necklace/

Frontlines Requiem The Graphic Novel review

From acclaimed writer Ivan Brandon (Drifter, Viking), this four-issue comic book series features a new stand-alone story set within the action-packed military sci-fi world of Marko Kloos’s bestselling Frontlines novels. Includes stunning artwork from Gary Erskine (Star Wars, Dan Dare, Doctor Who, Judge Dredd).

I don’t remember buying this, but it was on my Kindle and when I noticed it, it was left on the last page. Amazon says “You borrowed this book for free with your Prime Reading membership on October 5, 2016” but I have no memory of buying nor reading it, so since I just read the most recent Frontlines novel, I figured I’d give this one another go.

I think I know why I don’t remember it, this is a disjointed and uneventful series of four issues that doesn’t so much as end as it just vaguely fades out. Maybe there’s supposed to be a follow up, but this is completely skippable.

F The Prom

Maddy and Cole were inseparable friends until high school started and Maddy became the most popular girl on campus. When she starts feeling lonely and heartbroken, she reconnects with Cole and the duo conspire to destroy the ultimate teen popularity contest – the Prom.

from Movies – 2Queue

Wild review

Academy Award Winner Reese Witherspoon (Walk The Line) stars in this extraordinary true story from the director of Dallas Buyers Club and based on the best-selling novel.

This one sat on my ‘to watch’ pile for longer than I can justify, it was a good enough film, but I know that it was going to cover some subjects that weren’t going to help my emotional state of well being. I was right, but I’m happy to have watched the movie.

Ingrid Goes West review

Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) is an unstable young woman with a checkered past of obsessive behavior. She secretly moves to Los Angeles to befriend Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) — an Instagram “influencer” with a fabulous artist boyfriend, a camera-ready terrier, and an array of new products and brands to promote to her followers. After Ingrid adopts a Taylor-made identity for herself, her attempts to prove she’s BFF material are underway — that is, until she meets Taylor’s obnoxious brother Nicky, who threatens to tear down her façade. Also starring O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ingrid Goes West is a savagely hilarious dark comedy that brilliantly satirizes the modern world of social media and proves that being #perfect isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

A perfect role for Aubrey Plaza, this is the second bit of media that i’ve seen her taking crazy pills in, the first being LEGION. She really does play crazy very well, though it would be great to see her get back to a role like she had in Parks & Rec, I really did love her there.

Mayhem review

Derek Cho (Steven Yeun, “The Walking Dead”) is having a really bad day. After being unjustly fired from his job, he discovers that the law firm’s building is under quarantine for a mysterious and dangerous virus. Chaos erupts throughout the office as the victims of the disease begin acting out their wildest impulses. Joining forces with a former client (Samara Weaving, “Ash vs Evil Dead”) who has a grudge of her own, Derek savagely fights tooth and nail to get to the executives on the top floor and settle the score once and for all.

I picked this up after hearing about it on a Red Letter Media video, they had mentioned that it was better than The Belko Experiment, which I enjoyed. As much as I enjoyed Belko, Mayhem really is a great riff on the same concepts, though there’s obviously different starting points, they both end up with people stuck in a building killing each other, in Belko unwillinging and in Mayhem as zombies. Sorta zombies. Transitional zombies?

Regardless, I enjoyed it, have you seen it, any thoughts?

Points of Impact review

Earth’s armed forces have stopped the Lanky advance and chased their ships out of the solar system, but for CDC officer Andrew Grayson, the war feels anything but won. On Mars, the grinding duty of flushing out the twenty-meter-tall alien invaders from their burrows underground is wearing down troops and equipment at an alarming rate. And for the remaining extrasolar colonies, the threat of a Lanky attack is ever present.

Earth’s game changer? New advanced ships and weapons, designed to hunt and kill Lankies and place humanity’s militaries on equal footing with their formidable foes. Andrew and his wife, Halley, both now burdened with command responsibilities and in charge of more lives than just their own, are once again in humanity’s vanguard as they prepare for this new phase in the war. But the Lankies have their own agenda…and in war, the enemy doesn’t usually wait until you are prepared. As Andrew is once again plunged into the chaos and violence of war with an unyielding species, he is forced to confront the toll this endless conflict is taking on them all, and the high price of survival…at any cost.

I completely goofed and started reading the book that came before this (Fields of Fire) and didn’t realize until I was about 5 chapters in that I was reading the wrong book, but then realized that I didn’t recognize ANYTHING from it. I don’t even see a book review of it on my site, so I may not have even read it, but man that would have been weird, so let this review be for both books: This series is awesome and I love every page of it. I wish Marko Klooos could clone himself and write a few more of these a year to make me happier, or at the very least franchise out the work to some ghost writers. Until he does that I guess I’ll have to settle for just a book a year for a while, at least until he pulls a Scalzi and takes an extended break from the universe that made him famous.

I can’t fault an author for doing that, but I can still complain about it as a fan

A small note, I believe I first ran into this series when I tried out Amazon Unlimited and it appears that the entire series is still on there, so if you were to be looking to try out AU, this is a series to go for.

Please Stand By

A young autistic woman runs away from her caregiver in an attempt to submit her manuscript to a “Star Trek” writing competition.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5fCDrk8Z8c

from Movies – 2Queue

Report Viacom And CBS Considering ReMerging

According to a new report in The Wrap, Viacom Corporation (parent company of Paramount Pictures) and CBS Corporation are considering merging. According to the report, Shari Redstone, who is vice-chairwoman of both companies and president of National Amusements, which holds stakes in both, is “pursuing a merger.”

TrekMovie

This would be of particular note to Star Trek book fans, as you may note from the sidebar, the future releases of new fictional books is looking spares with only three books announced for 2018 so far:

• Star Trek: Discovery: Drastic Measures
• Star Trek: Voyager: Architects of Infinity
• Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself

Normally by this time we’d know of at least twelve full length novels.  Perhaps this is why there’s nothing new announced?

from www.startrekbookclub.com/4499/report-viacom-and-cbs-considering-re-merging/

Jupiter Ascending review

Jupiter Jones was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine, a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth to track her down does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along – her genetic signature marks her as next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos.

Still a great movie that I feel never got the appreciation that it deserved. Sure there’s some goofy stuff in there, but the universe that was created and the special effects were AMAZING. I’m also a big fan of the story that was told and would love to learn more about the world after the ending of the movie.

Top Ten SFW Posts in 2017

SFW Posts:

Black and White to COLOR		4,531
Dog Goes Weightless In Airplane with Zero Gravity		4,442
Alabama politicians recently changed the legal drinking age in Alabama to 31…		4,400
True to Type: Running America’s Last Linotype Newspaper		4,355
Spider spinning complete web + Megarace game music!		4,343
star-wars-map		4,248
Halo MCC Elder Signs Achievement Guide		4,223
donald trump tries for a kiss		4,211
Sex Earth style – Clip from babylon5 s02e12		4,201
Woman scares off crocodile with flip flop in Australia

I note that for both the SFW and NSFW lists that the majority of the posts are from previous years, after all the site has been around for over ten years at this point, so some of those older posts have some real google juice behind them, or even stumbledupon juice if you believe such a thing still exists.

The downward trend of image blogs in general continues full steam, with Facebook stealing a larger portion of the traffic and Reddit doing it’s best to link directly to images and not to the page that hosts them, thus giving no revenue at all in exchange for the hotlinking.

I’m hoping 2018 will be the year that people throw their fucking facebook pages in the trash and get back to surfing the web the old fashioned way, with bookmarks and legit word of mouth.  God willing, the unwashed masses will even figure out how the fuck RSS can change their entire worlds.

Here’s a link to the NSFW version of this list.

Bright review

Netflix Exclusive.

From the director of Suicide Squad and End of Watch, Will Smith stars as a cop that’s just coming back to the police force after being shot by an Orc with a shotgun. Can he trust he Orc partner to choose his badge over his bloodline? The question is dropped about 10 times from Will Smith in the first 20 minutes of the film with some poorly chosen edits, but a magical wand really drives the question home. The cuts seemed rough and it seemed like Smith was phoning it in for a few scenes that really should have been redone, but for the most part, this movie works very well and has an amazing universe in which it can tell more stories.

Main stream critics have really knocked the film, but I’m really not sure what they were expecting, as I got exactly what I was thinking I was going to get: Training Day / End of Watch / Alien Nation / Lord of The Rings all rolled into one glorious, yet predictable, movie with a pretty great soundtrack.

If you have a Netflix subscription and want to know what the world would look like 2,000 years after Lord of the Rings was over, I’d give this a go. It’s not enough to recommend a Netflix subscription on just this one movie, but it certainly adds to the pile of great stuff they now own completely.

Future Man review

A janitor by day/world-ranked gamer by night is tasked with preventing the extinction of humanity after mysterious visitors from the future proclaim him the key to defeating the imminent super-race invasion.

First half of this series is rough, it’s only in the second half of the season that everything starts to feel like a serious series and not a web series filmed at your cousin’s boss’s bodega. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know this story is exactly like The Last Starfighter, just with a Teminator level of convoluted time travel shenanigans. There’s some good humor here, but stuck behind a whole bunch of humor that just doesn’t work, leaning far too much on the source material that they’re making a homage to.

Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow review

In this science fiction adventure set in the 1930s, New York City report er Polly Perkins starts to investigate why so many famous sc ientists ar e being reported missing. Soon, she gets clues, as strange flying machi nes and giant robots threaten the city. Luckily, her old flame, aviato r Captain Joseph Sullivan aka Sky Captain, is there to battle the bad gu ys with the Flying Legion, in his Warh awk P-40. Now Polly must fly away with Sky Captain to Nepal to find a crazy scientist, Dr. Totenkopf, who apparently wants to destro y the world!

A beautifully done homage to a genre of films that I’ve not had much experience with. They went way too heavy on the rose filter in the first two thirds of the film, as it really only gets pretty in the last 20 minutes. I really dig the robot designs, they feel much like The Iron Giant or even Atomic Robo.