Transitory States
Edward:
David S Leyman:
Hisham:
Luke:
James Kight:
king:
Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.
Ebb & Folks has again given me the assignment to come up with another cover for one of their books. This time it's the novella Crater by David Leyman, now on sale on Amazon.com as an ebook.
It's a star and time spanning tale of humans versus a ruthless alien civilisation at war. Check it out at the link above to buy and download it.
A weird moment for Admiral William Adama of the Battlestar Galactica (complete with ominous shadow outline) when he suddenly spouts lines from The Empire Strikes Back at his son Lee.
What does he say, and how does Lee reply?
Click here to find out and to view a larger version of the artwork.
After 28 years, the sequel to Disney's Tron is finally upon us. Tron Legacy, produced by the original movie's director Steven Lisberger and directed by newcomer Joseph Kosinski, had a unique problem. Tron had a connection to the computer and gaming lore of the late 70s and early 80s, with its simple vector graphics and sounds. The home computer for the consumer was still rare. The general public had very little clue on how computers work. The World Wide Web is still almost a decade away. How can one create a modern sequel to a movie based on anachronistic world view of technology?
Very simple. Just build upon the even more fantastic elements of the first movie and move on from there.
SPOILERS BEYOND! SPOILERS!
The official trailer for next year's Green Lantern movie starring Deadpool is out. There are quite a number of Green Lanterns in the trailer.
Kilowog!
Abin Sur!
Tomar-Re and the Oan central power battery!
Sinestro!
and of course, Hal Jordan.
Yeah, I just wanted to post pictures of the live-action corpsmen on the blog, is all. Too bad there's no Mogo and Bzzd.
... or at the very least, it wishes it could.
As previously mentioned Irfan seems to have taken a shine to Gamera, the giant monster turtle with awesome powers!
I was looking at papercraft material online when I came across a Gamera papercraft, which was only a two-page downloadable pdf. Irfan and I spent the part of the afternoon cutting, folding and gluing the pieces together. Finally this was what we ended up with:
In the early 1950s, Republic Pictures produced a black and white film serial featuring the character named Commando Cody. Cody was featured in two serials, namely Radar Men from the Moon and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. His costume included a helmet and a rocket pack, which allows him to fly.
During this time, a young man watched these serials at the cinema. More than fifty years later, as part of a movie serial he himself created, that man developed a supporting character named Commander Cody who wears a helmet and sometimes a rocket pack, obviously inspired by and a homage to the former character.
Here's what happens when the heavens open up and they meet.
Dare Sensei is a webcomic illustrated in manga form, which is an unofficial adaptation of BBC's Doctor Who, where all the doctors are female.
I've been commissioned by the writer of Dare Sensei to create any incarnation of the Senseis, and I've opted to illustrate the fourth, which is easily identified in the following image by her long coat, scarf and a sonic screwdriver.
However, Irfan insists that this is River Song.
Inception is by far one of the most enjoyable science fiction movies in recent memory.
I went in cold, save for information gleaned from the trailers. I knew it was a heist movie where characters try to steal information from their marks via shared dreams. What I got was a story that was surprisingly not convoluted, where exposition - all the "if / then explanation" - was delivered in advance and easily understood.
What was explained was still pretty fantastic, and when the fantastic occurs onscreen it takes your breath away.
Spoilers to follow! SPOILERS!
This nifty suitcase appears to be pretty cool, and seem to be good to have with you all the time. When you need to use it, all you have to do is activate it at your feet, like so:
Then you wait for it to quickly unfold and show a pair of handgrips. You grab on to the handgrips and twist them, like so:
A gigantic spaceship appears in the skies above Johannesburg 28 years ago. A million starving insectoid sapients are found in the ship, and ferried groundside. Now, a guarded slum area called District 9 exists in Johannesburg that tries to keep these alien "prawns" away from humans, while the Multinational United (MNU) administrates District 9 as it attempts to pry secrets of alien technology from the dumb prawns for profit.
The movie District 9 doesn't have a particularly original storyline. In fact its premise is largely based on and a commentary on the apartheid in South Africa. It's not really very hard sci-fi, with a lot of the science relegated to background. We see and marvel at alien technology and its effect but we don't go into details. Its hand-held shakycam effects are not as motion sickness-inducing as say The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, but it does have some jitter even when there's no in-universe camera in action.
However, all these different factors (which includes an awesome improv performance between stars Sharlto Copley and Jason Cope) mix together perfectly to create one of the best science-fiction movie in recent years. One might argue that it's this mix of uncertain factors that made Star Wars a hit 32 years ago.
SPOILERS beyond this point, sirs.
In the first Terminator movie, if time travel convention is to be adhered to, just before John Connor's troops stormed Skynet and was on the verge of destroying it in Timeline A, the human resistance is screwed the moment the T-800 Model 101 went back in time moments before Kyle Reese did. What actually did happen? Was that Skynet destroyed in Timeline A even as the T-800 terminated Sarah Connor in a new divergent timeline (Timeline B) in which case John Connor never existed and Skynet was triumphant? From Timeline A, Kyle Reese went back and stopped the Terminator creating Timeline C. Do all these three timelines exist simultaneously?
If you didn't stop to think about it all however, thanks to the superb direction, story and visual effects - if you are sufficiently entertained - then Terminator was a flawless movie. Similarly with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the movie was entertaining enough that you don't question how different Skynet in Timeline C was from Timeline A since the new timeline had a technology boost from the future (the T-800 chip and forearm).
Doctor Who.
Yes. You always have at least one scene (and usually more) in every episode of the show. You know the kind of scene they have:
"Run!"
"Doctor?"
"I said, run!"
"Did you say..."
"RUN!!!"
And then present company goes tearing down a corridor or a hallway or an alien cave at top speed being chased by a monster or an alien or both, usually lethal.
That's the kind of energy I found in almost every other scene in the new Star Trek movie which is entitled, uh... Star Trek.
First things first: SPOILER ALERT... This entry will be discussing the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, the double-length episode entitled "Daybreak, Part 2". But before the day breaks, there is nothing but utter darkness and despair. Death and destruction. As ably illustrated by Tricia Helfer below:
DID I MENTION THE SPOILER ALERT?
It's been dark for quite a while now. First there was that extinction of the Human race with only less than 40,000 survivors being pursued by genocidal robots thing. Then there is facing the reality of having to live out their entire lives in space boxed up in small ships with dwindling resources... if they don't find Earth. Finally, just before the mid-season break they find Earth and it's a radioactive wasteland. So, after the darkness, when does day break for the story?Coming to television this fall is the third series to be set in a very well known, visual-media-based science fiction universe. This time instead of having a proper base of operations (in this galaxy or another), the characters are trapped on a automated ancient starship travelling out of and away from the Milky Way galaxy. That's one way to put your characters in a spot and have them undergo weekly adventures, I guess.
Recently the teaser trailer of this upcoming series was released, showing us a glimpse of some actors involved in the pilot episode.
Here's Robert Carlyle.
Here's Lou Diamond Philips.
Both Sila's and my household have been following J.J. Abram's brand new TV series Fringe. As per Alias and Lost, I had a feeling it's not what it advertised itself to be, which would have been about international spies and counterspies, and surviving a plane crash on a deserted island.
Warning: SPOILERS, and I'm serious. SPOILERS!
What Fringe advertised itself was about a department within the Department of Homeland Security, with agents on secondment from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which deal with fringe science to solve their cases. Naturally this caused a lot of people to draw similarities between it and The X-Files. (And having Darin "Flukeman" Morgan as a producer helped accentuate this fact.)
The story starts with a pair of FBI Agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott, who gets involved in a case concerning bio-terrorism aboard an airliner. An airborne agent was released on the plane, which caused the skin of everyone on board to melt away from their bones. Agent Scott gets gravely injured during the investigation, causing Agent Dunham to get help from someone one Dr. Walter Bishop, a researcher who did work into fringe science for the government in the 70s and 80s but was locked away in a mental institution on manslaughter charges. To release Dr. Bishop, Agent Dunham needed the help of Peter Bishop, his estranged son with an IQ of 190, a high school dropout and a con artist with a lot of "weird connections". In some instances, Peter is the only person who is able to translate Walter's semi-lucid statements.
John Noble's perfomance as Walter Bishop is one of the highlights of this series.
It was the year of fire,
The year of destruction,
The year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth,
The year of great sadness,
The year of pain,
And a year of joy.
It was a new age.
It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.
The year is 2261.
The place: Babylon 5.
Happy New Year! A hearty welcome applause to the year 2261... er, I mean the years 1430 and 2009.
These different models of Tee-Triple Eight infiltrators below: they're a different series of endoskeletons from the T-800 and the T-850 (model 101) from the Terminator movies.
I might have found the exact place where they all go to eat out.
...."No bloody -A, -B, -C or -D."
Paramount has been releasing a number of images from the new Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams the past 24 hours or so. The shooting of the movie has been kept top secret that production photos from it has been scant. This new batch of pictures have now circulated to half a dozen different sites on my RSS watchlist and forums. The first I read of it was here, at AICN.
Here are two photos from the deluge:
Above: "I have a hunger, Jim. I want what's inside your brain." Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Above: "Jim, I'm a doctor... not a Rohirrim. And why do I smell weed coming from Sulu?"
I'm not much of a Trekkie since Deep Space Nice ended, but my interest is piqued because the movie will be directed by J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Fringe - the former currently one of my favourite TV series. At the very least, we'll get an awesome Michael Giacchino score.
The Middleman is the funniest show on TV right now... if you're a geek like me.
But I'll get to that in a minute.
Created by former scribe of Jake 2.0 and Lost, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, The Middleman reveals to us that there is one Middleman in existence in the world from a still-indisclosed point in time in the past. His job is to take care of extraordinary and highly bizzare problems, which usually involves incidents related to aliens, demons, mad scientists and mixes or variations thereof. The Middleman is also responsible for training an apprentice Middleman to take over one day because of the lethal occupational hazards.
And they work for a secret agency so secret and so efficient (their equipment gets replenished and upgraded almost immediately from unknown sources) and nameless that the Middleman himself has to give it his own acronym OTS2K, which stands for Organisation Too Secret To Know.
For a single glorious moment in time, the song Diamond Crevasse, as sung by May Nakabayashi the singing voice of Sheryl Nome in Macross Frontier, became the most heartbreaking song in the whole universe. Thrice I've seen the ending of episode 20 and thrice I teared up... though it might just be the damn conjunctivitis.
There's so many bait-and-switches in this story, you just can't predict who lives and who dies. You kind of know someone will buy it, and you sort of figure out which ones would, but you think, "No, maybe it's another bait-and-switch."
Then wham! When it happens, it happens right in the middle of that song which had stood for something else when you heard it in previous episodes, and was sung in this episode for a totally different reason. But the melody and the timing of it just interposes with each other perfectly, and despair and sadness hits you squarely in the guts.
One of the best shows on TV right now, I'm thinking.