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How Do You Want the Machine to Scare You?
With fears rising lately regarding AI, it's perhaps edifying to look back on how the topic manifested in fiction in the past. The 1993 episode of The X-Files called "Ghost in the Machine" depicts an AI gone mad and killing people by electrocuting them and sabotaging elevators. Oh, well. It's a fun episode ( Read more... ) -
The Dream of Love
Last night I dreamt about a pretty blonde girl who was a fugitive from the law. She was hiding upstairs in an old gothic chapel when she overheard a tour guide talking to some kids about a giant vampire bat stuck in a cobweb. The man was trying to extract it but the bat was putting up a fierce and noisy fight. She came out of hiding and volunteered ( Read more... ) -
Riker's Gotta Rike
Riker goes to serve aboard a Klingon ship in the 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "A Matter of Honor". There's a B plot about a new ensign aboard the Enterprise belonging to a species called Benzite. Both stories are about culture clashes and someone from one culture learning to work within another. It's not a bad episode ( Read more... ) -
A Forest of Cameras
A man's entire life is lived under constant surveillance in Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show. The logistics of the concept present so many difficulties that Weir had a lot of creative decisions to make, some more successful than others. I saw the movie when it was released and watched it again last night. I find it enjoyable but I feel ( Read more... ) -
Shooting the River
It's weird how movies and TV shows can sometimes disappear from memory. All that money and glamour and even decent reviews but, if it's not a smash hit, most people won't remember a TV show ten years later. I recently watched 2012's The River, an eight episode mid-season replacement series for ABC produced by Steven Spielberg, back when people ( Read more... ) -
Digital Recuperation
Of course, these days, all I play is Skyrim. It's hard for a game to get old when it changes all the time. The quality of user made mods has improved by leaps and bounds over the past five years, too. Lately I've been trying out a lot of companion mods, mods that add NPCs to follow your character as friends and allies ( Read more... ) -
Digital Pain
My browser's homepage is still set to load a random Wikipedia article. To-day, it loaded the page for the 1992 SNES Cool World video game, based on the Ralph Bakshi movie. This was a time when absolutely every sci-fi or fantasy movie got a video game tie-in of some kind but I'm still a little surprised that the unpopular Ralph Bakshi movie had one ( Read more... ) -
To Know the Android
It's supposed to be one of the worst episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation but I got a real kick out of "Schizoid Man" last night. The episode starts with a joke that seems like it could've come from a modern Star Trek parody; Data suddenly deciding to have a beard. In fact, it's similar to an episode of The Orville in which Bortus had a ( Read more... ) -
Nowhere to Swim
A group of teens break into a posh indoor pool to celebrate graduation only to find themselves picked off one by one by a masked killer. This is the plot of 2001's Swimming Pool, a German movie about English speaking international students in Prague. Its 36% Rotten Tomatoes rating is fair but it's a diverting little slasher ( Read more... ) -
Peripheral to Girls
Three women embark on a trip across the U.S. and before the end there'll be tears and occasional laughter. 1995's Boys on the Side is a road movie for people who like Terms of Endearment, a story about three imperfect women who find some kind of meaning in their lives when their luck turns very bad. I'm not sure I'm the right audience for that ( Read more... )
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