Silly, but made me smile.

Scary Merry Xmas

Less Scary Merry Xmas

OMG, I need this.

The shooter seems a bit senile, but what an awesome weapon.

Santa, please bring me an UTS 15!

If your a fan of Martin’s you’ll die laughing.

Or Be Dead…

Girls, if you have a choice though, put the bio-hazard symbol in a different location?

The Bourne Legacy (2 Out of 5 Graves)

This is another of those movies that I was really looking forward to seeing which really let me down. And even worse, it started out on a good trajectory then did a belly flop at the end. The opening scenes are well done and the story line builds in a logical progression right up to the point of Aaron (Jeremy Renner) landing in the Philippines.

Aaron realizes that without his meds he is going to turn back into the pre augmented grunt he used to be. He’s not worried about the physical augmentation, but it turns out those changes are locked in. Its his mental acuity he is at risk of losing, and he doesn’t want to go back to the days of a 70 plus IQ. This leads him to Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) looking for meds, which she doesn’t have.  She doesn’t know where to get more, but she may have the ability to “Viral Out” the changes so he doesn’t need the meds. This is where the movie fell apart for me.

The pill factory in the Philippines apparently has all the lab equipment to build a genetically targeted virus to lock in Aaron’s enhancements so he will never need meds again. And the security at that plant that can unlock these massive advances in human abilities is guarded by rent a cops and a fat rugby player. All the scenes at the pill factory made no sense to me and really killed what could have been a decent movie.

That then shifted into the mandatory super assassin versus super assassin fight, which sucked in comparison to all the other Bourne movies. They didn’t really need to pull in another “operative” at this point. It would have been more believable if it were just a few normal dudes at this point.

Having the other agent get called up to kill Aaron and Dr. Marta was just too formulaic for me. And the final bits of the fight scene were just poorly thought out. I didn’t feel it was Bourne quality at all.

Which really made me sad.  I really like Jeremy Renner as Aaron. I hope he gets a second shot playing the role with some better writers and director behind him. As for Rachel Weisz, I kept looking at her and listening to her voice, and then it hit me. I couldn’t stop thinking of her as Evy from “The Mummy” movies.

Hopefully they’ll make another Aaron Cross movie and it will be better.

 

 

Amazon.com Widgets

We are always looking for new and cost effective ways to bring new people to the site and recently used a new service called VIRURL to see how it compared to other advertising mechanisms.

We have a fairly constant level of unique daily visitors and have had a stable ad rate buy using several other services, so I feel like I can safely say that the VIRURL service, even though it was a small trial run, didn’t work at all for us.

For the number of clicks the reports say they drove to the site, I didn’t see a single statistically significant increase across the time the ads were live with the VIRURL service.

I can’t really explain that, which doesn’t make me feel like it was a useful ad buy. When I spend more on other advertising mechanisms I can map the impacts out consistently. Which makes perfect sense. If I pay for more clicks and that increases traffic, I can see that by looking at the number of unique visitors.

So the only technical explanation I can put forward is that the VIRURL users were already coming to my site – and that the overlap was like hitting the lottery in terms of overall odds. The other explanation is less generous.

I’d love to hear if anyone else had any better outcomes, because I won’t be using the service again at this point and would love to know if you saw any positive outcomes.