The Thing from Another World (1951)

John W. Campbell Jr's short story Who Goes There? has been made into a movie three times. This is the first version. I'll review the other versions from 1982 and 2011 later.

Synopsis
An Air Force captain and a journalist are sent to the North Pole to investigate an explosion and a magnetic disturbance. They find a crashed flying saucer under the ice and a frozen being a few meters away from it. The block of ice containing the creature is cut and taken to a nearby science base, however the creature escapes and starts killing people...

Flash Forward

Synopsis
The whole world blacks out for exactly 2min 17sec, resulting in accidents and millions of deaths. During the blackout people have visions of their future. This global event is soon taken to be a terrorist attack, and the plot thickens when video footage is found showing a concious person talking on a mobile phone during the blackout.

The story centers around an FBI agent who's vision shows him to be central to the Flash Forward investigaion, and his family and friends.

Why I Dislike TV Series with Episodic Episodes

Lately I've been watching several TV series, and when I tweet about them or review them I often comment that the episodes feel or don't feel episodic. Here I'll attempt to explain what I mean by this. A series by definition is made up of episodes, but the episodes can cover a series story arc, or they can be stand alone episodes.

Mini Reviews

Lately I watched several TV series, and while I enjoyed them and wanted to share my thoughts about them, I didn't feel the need to give them full scale reviews. What I ended up doing was tweeting around 7 tweets about each. However tweets end up buried under newer ones, and lost in the vast twitter-verse.

Top 5 NLG Steampunk Articles 2011

Choosing my blog's Top 5 articles for 2011 wasn't easy. If I ranked them by pageview, recent articles would be at a disadvantage against those that have been published for some time.

In the end I decided to rank them by calculating the average monthly pageviews [(actual pageviews / days published) * 30 days]. As a last step I removed seasonal posts as with my formula they skewed the result. Seasonal posts are articles that might be very popular at the end of the year, but will probably be ignored during the rest of the year. The results in reverse order: