Crimson Apple is a band from Hawaii (now based in LA) made up of 4 sisters and sometimes a friend or two, who have cranked out some excellent music. The first song is Run Along, the second is called Hello, the third is One Time, and they finish up with the track Replace This Heartbeat, all from their Hi Sessions episode. Hi Sessions brings Hawaii’s best music to the world from their studios which appear to be located most of the way up on the side of a volcano. They write their own original music, but they have also posted some great covers of One OK Rock songs which are well worth watching.
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Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have some new Webisodes streaming: Slingshot! Each Webisode is about 5 minutes long, and a major percentage of the core characters are here, telling a story they couldn’t fit in to the regular TV episodes. This is one of the aspects of the multi-screen experience I really appreciate, where they expand the universe the stories take place in rather than just use it to sell the main TV show. Considering how much greater depth each actor gets to bring to their character’s story, I can’t help but believe they appreciate it as well. Here is the first episode of the Slingshot mini-series; be sure to visit their YouTube channel to see the entire sequence.
The scariest part of this movie is that we have already successfully completed the initial experiments that will give us this technology. Mindgamers is about what could happen once you can hack the human mind, remotely or otherwise, focusing on just two (out of 200 or so choices we might decide to explore) of the potential uses. The first use is controlling the action of another human remotely through a neural connection network, and that was accomplished in the real world about 5 years ago. The second is recording the total gestalt needed to embed a given skill set to another human by playing it back directly into their brain. I am in favor of that when the new skill set I will be learning is how to fly a jet or play the violin. I am not so enthusiastic when it might be used to convince me who to vote for, pray to, or buy from. We don’t have that technology yet, but my best guestimate is we are only 5 years out from making it work. The first video is the MindGamer Movie trailer, and it looks like it is going to be a not-to-be-missed monster on the big screen.
My favorite of the earlier movies exploring this topic was 1983’s Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. It is the second video here, and considers the consequences of being able to record what one person experiences, and play it back so someone else can also directly experience it. Brainstorm memory storage was based on Beta tape recording media, state of the art tech for that time and the only option for storage density compact enough to save everything they implied to be included. The film inspired 1984’s Dreamscape and a handful of others, none of which understood how it could actually be made to happen, but each of them took one aspect of the implications and explored them. Most of them have some very scary stories to relate to us, a lot less positive than Brainstorm itself.
The third video included here is the real world success report on one person controlling another remotely through a brain-to-brain interface that can be built from $100 worth of parts slaved to a power supply, a couple of antennas, and a few RF/Neural Link interfaces. I am sure it will be no comfort when I tell you that you can do the same job for a third of the cost and half the parts these days, since the technology has advanced that much. The only good news is that if you learn to recognize the gear and processes used, you run a much better chance of avoiding becoming a victim yourself!
In this war, Legion is the key; But who or what is Legion? The new Marvel series rolls out on the FX Network on February 8th, and it has the potential to become the most interesting story line in the entire MCU. For those of you who may have missed it, I am including the first trailer as well.
I like the choice of Spider-Man: Homecoming as the title for the new movie, since this will be the first film featuring Peter Parker since they got the rights to the character back in the MCU stable. And looking at the trailer we are in for a fun ride when it hits the big screen on July 7th, 2017.
This is the week we finally get Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a movie I have been waiting for all year. There is also supposedly the 2014 Fantasy called The Garden that my be finally coming to some theaters, but I didn’t see enough evidence of that to make me very confident. Not that it really matters to me, since I will be at the Star Wars film.