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My Favorite Star Trek Movie: First Contact!

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Star Trek: First Contact is the first movie in the franchise to only feature the Next Generation crew.  It is also the first feature film directed by Jonathan Frakes more commonly known as Commander William T. Riker.  How does the new crew do on their first solo voyage? Splendidly.

The movie starts off with Captain Picard dreaming about his time as a Borg which happened six years earlier.  He is then woken up by an Admiral explaining the new Borg threat.  He will not be assigned to deal with the threat because the Federation is worried his past will affect his actions.  Things do not go well for the Federation, so Picard takes the ship to deal with Borg anyway, and when they stop the Borg Cube a Borg Ball ship shoots out from the Borg Cube and travels in to the past.  The Enterprise must follow it to save our future.

It sounds like a confusing plot, but it is actually pretty easy to follow, and works quite well.  The Borg are my favorite Star Trek enemy, so to have a movie where they are the bad guys is excellent, and it allows Picard to deal with his feelings about the Borg captivity from the show.  Their leader the Borg Queen is played excellently by Alice Krige.  She gives the Borg a little life and attitude.  The rest of the cast all know their characters, and play them well.

The special effects and sets for the most part work very well.  My only critique is that the human camp they have to help in the past looks like a good Sci-Fi TV set not an A-List movie set, but it is a minor flaw in an otherwise great movie, but it seems like something they could have worked on a little bit.

This was always my favorite Star Trek movie.  It had the Next Generation cast, and it featured a good story with a lot of action and a great villain, and while she may not quote Shakespeare like other villains, she is still quite memorable.  Star Trek: First Contact is on the sadly very short list of truly good Star Trek movies.

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Is There Just Cause 2?

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Just Cause 2 is an open world action game by Avalanche Studios that takes place in the fictional foreign country of Panau.  I picked it up because it was cheep.  Is it worth the $10 dollars? Yes it is.

The game starts off with the hero Rico Rodriguez in a helicopter being told about the political situation in Panau.  Basically it was US friendly, but recently it has taken a bad turn, so your job is to destabilize the country, so someone new can take over, and the way you do that is to use your awesome grappling hook to steal helicopters to blow the government’s stuff up, or what ever else you want with whatever else you can find.

You can do missions for some major rebel forces if you want, or you can just cause Chaos freestyle, and Chaos is capitalized because you get Chaos points for the crazy stuff you do, and the more Chaos you cause the more cool stuff you unlock.  Your major weapon is your grappling hook.  It pulls bad guys off towers, allows you to skyjack helicopters, or just about any other moving vehicle you could want.  You can also buy weapons and cars off the black-market and have them dropped at your location.

It is a crazy fun game that rewards you for the crazy fun stuff you can do, and unlike other games, the entire world is open to you from the start so can really just have fun the way you want to.  It is a great game that you can find at an even better price these days, so if you haven’t played it yet, you should add it to your list.

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Lets Have Some Adventure Time!

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Adventure Time is a short form animated series by Pendleton Ward.  It follows two main characters Finn the human and Jake the shape shifting dog.  It has a massive following of viewers, and it has hit Netflix streaming, so I decided to give it a try, and it is amazing.

Each episode gives Finn and Jack some adventure to go on.  Like ward off candy people zombies, or go deep in to some forest to claim some magical object, but the shear randomness of the villains and allies they meet, and witty dialog make this show funny to watch.  This show does more with twelve minutes then some shows do with forty-four (length of an hour long TV episode), and it always puts a smile on my face.

It sounds like the voice actors must be having a good time too.  Long time voice actor John DiMaggio plays Jake, and if you think he sounds like Bender from Furturama then you would be correct, and relative newcomer Jeremy Shada plays Finn, and he is about the same age as Finn in real life.

If you need something to make you smile and laugh, and not have to worry about it getting all dark serious, then Adventure Time should be on your short list.

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MST3K Triple Shot

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I have watched quite a bit of MST3K lately, so instead of giving separate reviews I thought I would give you three little quick ones.

The Castle of Fu Manchu:

Christopher Lee stars as an Asian guy that is going to take over the world by threatening to freeze the oceans.

This movie is bad, and not in the good way that makes you laugh, but that it is incredibly dull.  Once you get past the fact they dressed up Christopher Lee in the most racist way possible, nothing happens in this movie.  The best jokes in this film are about how shaken the crew of the Satellite of Love is by having to watch this awful film.  It is funny at times, but jut not enough happens.

Attack of the Giant Leaches:

This movie has a short about how the people of Atlantis are causing earth quakes, it is very funny.  I can’t believe how awful the old serials were.

Attack of the Giant Leeches is kind self explanatory.  Leeches start attacking people that live in a town near a swamp.  This is a great bad movie.  The dialog is nonsense, and the leeches are just plastic bags with circles stuck on them.  I laughed a lot during this film, and the robots and Joel have field day.  Thank you Roger Corman!

Swamp Diamonds:

This movie also has a short. It is about how to go on a date.  Oh my gosh the 50’s were awesome.  I couldn’t imagine having to watch these PSAs.  It is very funny.

The movie is about an undercover cop and some women thieves looking for diamonds their gang boyfriends hid there before being sent to the electric chair.  This movie is Roger Corman’s directorial debut, and he starts off his career like he ends it, making great bad movies.  No one knows how to act, and it is filmed like the world’s worst nature documentary.  I think this was my favorite out of the three just because the short was so good, and they followed it up with this just fabulously awful movie.

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Wanna Read My Book? Chapters 1-3

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So I have been writing a book for awhile, but so far I only have three chapters done, so I am leaving it up to you a little bit to see if I should keep going.  It is a light comedy/fantasy book that was inspired by a D&D campaign my buddy Andy Brim created, so if I get rich I will owe Andy a pittance.

The main reason for writing this book was to have fun, and because every fantasy book I read takes itself way to seriously.  They are all depressing, or think that they should be quoted like Shakespeare.

I am thinking of changing the hero’s name since so far it is named after me, so it is Shmee, but he is becoming less like me and more like his own person, so I think I will need to change the name at some point, but I can’t think of one I like (I guess I like myself to much).

I have read through it quite a few times, and every time I still find errors and typos, so I am sure you will too, so sorry for that in advance, but I hope you like it anyway!

Click the link below for the PDF.

**Update 12-21-2015: The new copy of the book can be found here.