The View From The Mountain

Nostalgia can be a great thing, especially in hard times like now. Re-watching your favorite movie or TV show during a particularly rough patch in your life can help you get through the worse of things. Sometimes, a reboot of a classic movie or TV show can be even more satisfying, because it feels like your old friends have returned to give you comfort during dark times. And so, when CBS All Access offered their pay-walled channel for free for a brief period during the 2020 Pandemic (which was a classy move on their part), I jumped at the chance to be able to finally watch Star Trek: Picard . I had been a fan of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s (I watched it in reruns as a boy in the 1970s), and had watched every incarnation of Star Trek --both movie and TV show--that had been produced since. I was really looking forward to going on new adventures with the calm, cool Jean-Luc Picard, in the hopes that his new series would take my mind off of these troubling times, if just...

I wasn’t expecting to love Underwater as much as I did. In fact, I was in no hurry to even see this movie at all were it not for the rave reviews for it from John Squires, editor of Bloody Disgusting, as well as reviewers from several other horror outlets. They championed Underwater so much that I rented it digitally, and I wound up loving it myself so much that I promptly bought a physical media copy of the film the day after seeing the rental. Underwater deals with the crew of an undersea drilling rig--a massive, ringed city at the bottom of the Pacific that houses several hundred--that suffers a cataclysmic event in the opening few minutes of the film. Norah Price (wonderfully played by Kristen Stewart), is so caught off guard by the crushing devastation that it’s all that she can do to just run to the nearest safety zone barely in time without her shoes. Stewart, who proved her acting chops in such great films as Personal Shopper , is fantastic as the cynical Norah--a young w...

I always liked the Ents from the Lord of the Rings. They were basically these big, talking trees with faces. And so I made my own Tree Beard. I sculpted him out of Sculpey. Once it hardened after I baked it, I painted my Tree Beard in the basic colors of a tree. The face has a beard that I carved to look like moss. I painted this green over a black undercoat. Granted, he's not an exact replica of the Tree Beard from LOTR, but he's my interpretation of the character, and I like him all the same.

2020 mark the 80th anniversary of Robin, aka the Boy Wonder, as well as Batman's sidekick. He's been in comics (including his own series) movies, and TV shows for a long time now. This is the 1/8th vinyl figure of Robin from Horizon Models. I built and painted this kit over twenty years ago. I always liked the dynamic pose he's in. Happy Birthday, Robin. You look good for an eighty year old.