Quick Catch-up

Been somewhat neglecting my blog because I've been putting some time into my YouTube channel and other thing so here's a quick catch-up and it goes as follows:

• Went to Cheshire Oaks to see Godzilla (2014)
• YouTube account has been verified and now a partner :D
• Writing more for my own novel while writing reviews for various books and other stuff (soon to be featured here in written form & video versions on YouTube.
• Done my first two unboxing videos :)
• Got a job in Marks & Spencers ( I start next month.)

And in a nutshell, that's everything that has happened and fair to say that my life is on the up and everything is awesome.

The Trench Review

 (Video Version)

The Trench Review

Released in 1999, The Trench is the third entry in Steve Alten’s Meg series. The Trench takes place four years after the events of Meg A Novel of Deep Terror where our protagonist Jonas Taylor is now married to Terry Tanaka and also working at the Tanaka Institute where he is looking after the only surviving Megalodon pup that was captured at the end of the last book and held in the whale lagoon.

The book’s prologue begins in the Mariana Trench with a submersible named the Proteus is scouting the floor for helium isotopes as the captain Barry Leace frets over the safety of his crew and takes the safe option of slowing the Proteus’s speed to avoid the chances of colliding with a black smoker (hydrothermal vent) which would make a breach in the titanium hull and the pressure change would kill everyone onboard. Tension arises between Barry and Ellis Richards, the team leader over the pace that the exploration is taking and going outside a projected timetable and delaying the Prometheus and Epimetheus submersibles from doing their assigned tasks.

On arriving at their designated coordinates, the crew begin to take samples from a vent near a clump of tubeworms and things go smoothly at first when a number of blips appear on the sonar screen heading toward the Proteus. Barry wants to cease operations and retreat to the safety of the Benthos which is six kilometres behind them while Richards refuses to retract the mechanical arms which are still collecting the samples and he is insistent on securing them onboard before the unknown life forms collide with the Proteus.

The blips become stronger and faster on the sonar and it indicates that the approaching objects are to be forty feet long and Barry then ignites the lateral thrusters which turns the Proteus counter-clockwise and almost tearing the mechanical arms off and loosing every sample collected in the process. He then takes the Proteus to its top speed of 1.8 knots in an effort to get within visual range of the Benthos when it goes quiet and it’s followed by a sudden jolt and the crew are thrown around from the impact.

As Barry tries to regain control of the Proteus only to discover that the controls are not responding and a plate of the hull is loosening from the attack but now the Benthos is now in sight so Barry puts out an emergency radio call for the Benthos to open its hanger doors while the geologist of the team Linda tells him that it takes five minutes for the Benthos to fill the chamber. A whistling sound then fills the cabin of the Proteus because the integrity of the plates and another heavy impact rocks the submersible.

Barry looks to the port glass where his head just struck and see a luminous crimson eye peering in from the other side. The whistling ceases when a pair of rivets shoot out into the cabin and Barry’s head implodes before they hit the floor.

Then the book brings us to our protagonist Jonas Taylor who wakes up from a night terror where he was back in the Mariana Trench where he in a Lexan pod and he spots another Lexan pod with Terry unconscious inside and he then looked down into the dark abyss and sees a Megalodon rising towards Terry’s pod and watches it engulf the pod. Jonas and Terry start to share an intimate moment after Terry manages to calm Jonas down when they are interrupted by a phone call from his assistant Manny at the Institute’s lagoon saying he needs his help immediately.

About 20 minutes later, Jonas arrives at the lagoon in time for the captured Megalodon’s 10AM feeding with a capacity crowd eagerly waiting in the stands surrounding the tank. After arriving, Jonas goes to the underground viewing area where the Megalodon is swimming at that moment, The Megalodon nicknamed “Angel” now fully grown is 75ft long making her larger than her mother as well as proving to be much more vicious presses her head against the side of the tank and focuses her cataract-gray eye onto Jonas but Angel then disappears and heads towards the canal where a large side of beef is attached to an A-frame above the lagoon. Angel explodes from the water taking the food in a single bite and severally bending the A-frame in the process. Jonas and Manny discuss Angel’s behavior when it’s pointed out that Angel has been ramming her head against the doors that lead outside to the open ocean and it becomes clear that she wants out!

After reading the first book, I jumped into this sequel with baited breath... and I wasn't disappointed.

The story begins with our hero from the first book Jonas Taylor and his life being in a right mess. After successfully killing the Megalodon in the first book, he captured her remaining offspring, a female pup to go and put on display at the Tanaka Institute. Jonas has now married his friend Masao's daughter Terry and everything seemed to be going great. Then lawsuits started to roll in with the families and friends of all the victims of the Megalodon began looking for compensation.

Jonas, Masao and the Tanaka Institute were easy targets because of their bold attempt to capture the Meg instead of just killing it and allowed the body count to rise. Jonas now is trapped working at the Institute displaying the nearly fully grown Megalodon named Angel to the public with nearly every penny received going straight into another compensation settlement. Jonas feels the strain from the trials and is haunted by the Megalodon, having re-occurring nightmares of how the beast will one day kill him.

This puts a great strain on his marriage to Terry and further disaster strikes when as Jonas has predicted Angel becomes too big to imprison at nearly 75ft, she is much larger then her mother was and eventually she smashes free from the Lagoon and enters the open ocean and Jonas is obligated by the Institutes owners to go after the Meg and re-capture her, but all is not quite as it seems.

Now sequels are often a tough thing to get right the questions are:

Can the second installment of a film series or book recapture the magic of the first, and still be fresh and also can it stand on its own if you don't know the first one.

Fortunately, Steve Alten's second outing in the Meg series does everything right. You get more of what was brilliant about the first book - the characters, the little marine biology lessons, the spectacular set-pieces of shark on human action as well as a general upping of stakes across the board  while also getting some exciting new ideas and concepts, some of which survive to take their place in the Meg universe, and some of which are devoured by the queen of the seas by the book's end.

If you thought the first book was a nice idea that had run its course after 400-odd pages, I say think again. The Trench still has some surprises for you.

However I do have a couple of things to nick pick as well as a few praises to address:

• Terry Tanaka

Personally I like how her character has grown and developed in the time between the first book and this one where she is a much stronger character than before and more willing to take action given the situations she is placed in throughout The Trench. Even before the events of The Trench, Jonas & Terry suffer great emotional trauma with the loss of their first child who died in the womb at 8 months and this is used by both antagonists Benedict and Celeste Singer to hurt her and the way Terry bounces back is nothing short of inspirational.

• Bin Laden

Surprised? I was too. Bin Laden is named in the book as one of Benedict’s financial backers for the expedition into the Mariana Trench to collect rocks which contain the rare gas Helium-3 in order to create fusion that can be weaponized. His inclusion here to me seems like it was just thrown in at the last minute as a means to make Benedict a more imposing and threatening antagonist.

• New creatures

This is not a bad thing because we now have a new threat which adds variety instead of just having the Meg and human characters. This also adds an element of mystery as to what else lives in the trench besides the Megalodons.

• Celeste Singer

I personally hated her so much. If you thought that Jonas’ wife from the last book Maggie was bad then Celeste Singer makes her look like the innocent girl next door. I can also extend this to Benedict who at times come off a bit as a one dimensional character instead of being the multi-leveled personality that he tries to present.

So in conclusion, The Trench overall I think this a great follow-up to Meg A Novel of Deep Terror with more character development, action, emotional drama and most surprising some elements of espionage worked into an already thrilling story. I won't spoil the ending but I will say this book had me hooked just like the first book. In fact after reading this book I straight away went to reading the third in the series Primal Waters.

So if you've read Meg by this book now, if you haven't get both you will not regret them.

The Trench is available in paperback, hardback, in all e-book formats, audiobook from all good book shops.

Meg A Novel of Deep Terror Review

(Video Version)

Meg A Novel of Deep Terror Review

First published in 1997 and re-released in a revised and expanded edition in 2005, Meg A Novel of Deep Terror is the first entry in Steve Alten’s Meg series. The main core of the story presented revolves around a disgraced former aquanaut named Jonas Taylor who was doing top secret dives for the US Navy.

The book’s prologue starts in the Late Cretaceous period where a herd of duckbilled dinosaurs called Shantungosaurus which are attacked by a Tyrannosaurus on a shoreline while they are foraging for food. As the Tyrannosaurus chases a pair that breaks away from the herd and flee into the sea, it becomes entrapped in the muddy sea floor, where it is swiftly and brutally killed by a Megalodon after the pair of Shantungosaurus escape back to the beach.

Then the book goes ahead to the present day where our protagonist Jonas Taylor is giving a lecture to a packed auditorium of over 600 people at the Scripps Institute about the Megalodon. Jonas continues his presentation by showcasing a few Megalodon teeth and addressing theories about the circumstances of the creature’s disappearance from the world’s oceans ranging from falling temperatures to prey becoming smaller and faster making it harder for Megalodon to feed. An elderly man then raises his hand to ask Jonas what is his theory on how Megalodon disappeared to the majority of the audience’s unanimous agreement and Jonas responds by referring to his thoughts which differ to what many others in the same of study think.

As the lecture continues, Jonas’s wife Maggie and best friend Bud Harris enter the auditorium and quietly take two empty seats due to Jonas running behind schedule for an award ceremony that Maggie is due to attend for a journalism piece on the Save the Whales campaign. After leaving the auditorium and heading to the award ceremony venue, Jonas and Maggie argue while Bud defuses the tension which temporally stops but builds up again during the ceremony when Jonas has too much to drink and sees Bud dancing with Maggie while groping her buttocks with some “help” from Maggie herself to which Jonas punches Bud in response and leaving to go outside to clear his head.

While outside, Jonas is approached by Terry Tanaka who was also at his lecture and offers him a ride home while asking him to come with her to Monterey to meet with her father Masao Tanaka who is an old friend of Jonas and needs his help in recovering a damaged U.N.I.S. (Unmanned Nautical Informational Submersible) which is part of a joint project between Masao’s Tanaka Institute and JAMSTEC (The Japanese Marine Sciences Technology Center) where the Tanaka Institute is to provide JAMSTEC with 25 U.N.I.S. robots to monitor the seafloor to detect seismic activity along the 125 mile stretch of the underwater canyon known as the Mariana Trench in exchange for funding for Masao’s dream project of a whale lagoon which would be connected to the ocean by means of steel doors where whales could swim inside and out whenever they want and give birth and raise their young.

Terry also tells Jonas that a large number of other U.N.I.S. have ceased transmitting following the unit in a photo she had shown him earlier in their conversion. Because of the U.N.I.S. going offline, JAMSTEC cuts the funding of the whale lagoon which in turn forced Masao to send his most experienced pilot which is his own son DJ Tanaka down to investigate and recover one of the U.N.I.S. for examination.

Jonas then accompanies Terry the next morning to the Tanaka Institute where Masao greets them and takes him into the projection room where footage of a U.N.I.S. is being reviewed by Alphonse DeMarco, Masao’s chief engineer. During part of the footage review, Jonas sees a fuzzy white triangular object which is blown up and looks like a tooth and Masao knowing what happened to Jonas seven years before gives Jonas the opportunity to return to the Mariana Trench along with DJ to recover the object and confront his fears.

When I first picked up 'Meg' I must admit I had no idea what I was in for, but the cover looked thrilling enough to spark my interest. After reading it I think that Meg is a superb thriller from front cover to back cover. It was only one of a few books I can admit to not wanting to put down at any point.

The author Steve Alten has clearly done a lot of research and it does show throughout the book especially during an exposition scene such as Jonas’s paleontology lecture near the beginning of the book or the scenes when Jonas is explaining to the others to catch the shark how the shark hunts and how they are going to catch it works well but when Alten is using this heavily scientific terminology in descriptive passages it just reads far too chunkily. Thankfully this is not a consistent feature throughout the novel but does bog down a few sections.

However there are some points and inconsistencies that I feel I must address and these are:

•  The front cover and prologue of the book show and describe a Megalodon killing and devouring a T-Rex

While the idea of a 65ft long shark attacking and killing the tyrant lizard king does give us the readers a good sense of the creature’s power and establishes its status as Lord & Master of the sea, it is wrong. The earliest discovered Megalodon by means of carbon dating a specimen’s teeth puts it at the late Oligocene or 28 million years ago while dinosaurs like T-Rex went extinct at 65 million years ago leaving roughly 37 million years apart making it impossible for these two creatures to ever meet.

• The characterization of the female characters

The female characters presented in the book are shown in a somewhat misogynistic and sexist light. This is something I didn’t expect to read in a contemporary novel like this and I personally think that Steve Alten does not share this as his personal views on women but I also sense that he may have had some difficulty writing female characters here but they do become better and more interesting with each entry.

• Masao Tanaka

 My nitpick here is less to do with his characterization and more a flaw in his character back-story. From the moment he is introduced comes across as a slightly stereotypical, aged Japanese businessman, he speaks using good and fluent English but interspersed with Japanese terminology such as referring to Jonas as "Taylor-san" and when angry reverts back into full Japanese. He is by no means offensive and is in fact one of Alten's better rounded characters. But it is later in the book when we are told Masao's back story where things fall apart. We discover that during the second World War Masao, then six years old, and his parents were living in America and taken into a Japanese internment camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In this camp his parents died, he was then adopted and raised by an American couple in America. Surely a character that was raised in America by American parents from the age of six years old would not come across as a slightly stereotypical Japanese businessman, who speaks with Japanese anachronisms in a way that suggests a Japanese accent.

• The incident onboard the Sea Cliff

My main problem with this plot point is that it is referred to constantly but never told in much detail throughout the novel, but I felt it was written like this in order to progress the story instead of it staying at a single point and making it receptive and stale. However this is all addressed in the prequel novel Meg Origins making this a mute point but I thought I’d talk about it anyway.

But putting these minor nitpicks aside, Meg a Novel of Deep Terror is overall a thrilling read and has great character development and the journey into the Mariana Trench is written with absolute atmospheric genius, the terrifying abyss closes in around our characters along with the fear of the things that swim out in the blackness. The main action and attack sequences are written with verve and frenetic attention to detail. But I think Alten's best achievement in this book is the Megalodon itself, in it he has created a creature that is singularly beautiful and elegant but yet horrifying at the same time a thing that can really capture our most primal of fears.

  

The book itself is a must for anyone remotely interested with the ocean and sharks and a definite for any reader who wants a superb thriller. The last thirty or so pages of the book are pure thrilling action which lead to an amazing climax. I totally recommend this book, it is a great read and a true 'Page Turner'.

Meg A Novel of Deep Terror is available in paperback, hardback, in all e-book formats, audiobook + CD.

Meg Origins Review

 

 (Video Review)

 Meg Origins Review 

Released in 2011, Meg Origins is chronologically the first in Steve Alten’s Meg series but it was written and released three years after Hell’s Aquarium (the forth installment/book) which was released in 2009. Meg Origins was penned as a thank you from the author for the support for the Meg series.

Meg Origins is a prequel set in the seven years prior to the events of Meg A Novel of Deep Terror where Jonas Taylor was at the height of his career as an aquanaut and working for the US Navy as a highly regarded and respected submersible pilot.

The book’s prologue starts 100 years before when the HMS Challenger discovers the deepest part of the Mariana Trench which is named the Challenger Deep after the ship itself. After dredging the bottom, the crew come cross fossilised Megalodon teeth and from looking from the specimens, they discuss the possibly of a Megalodon still being alive and during this leads to a sweet nod to Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws where one crew member says to another “ We’re gonna need a bigger boat!”

The story then goes to where Jonas wakes up from a startling dream and he’s called into the sick bay for a medical for an upcoming pre-dive for a forth descent. At this point, Jonas has already been on three previous dives and is mentally and psychically exhausted. The physician of record Frank Heller who is performing Jonas’s check up is pressed by the Commanding Officer Richard Danielson to allow Jonas to go on the forth dive despite his exhaustion. Jonas says this outright and directly to Danielson knowing his current condition, it would potentially compromise the mission and its crew but Danielson insists that Jonas “man up” after telling him to get some caffeine as well as the Antivert and the shot of B-12 prescribed by Heller for his vertigo and fatigue. 

Jonas argues his point about the conditions in the Marina Trench and about his backup pilot Royston being nowhere near ready for a dive at those depths. Danielson disagrees strongly and tells Jonas that he will be piloting the submersible and if he doesn’t, he will be issued a court martial and the backup Royston would replace him. Forty minutes later, Jonas is onboard the DSV Sea Cliff going through the pre-dive checklist before taking the dive into the Marina Trench and the encounter that will change his life forever.

Meg Origins is a short and sweet story. I came to reading it having just read and finished the first book Meg A Novel of Deep Terror. Although that it isn't a requirement to enjoy or understand it, what it does add is an extra level of closure to them. By itself, it tells the story of how several different factors came together at the same time to trigger the fateful encounter between Jonas Taylor and the Megalodon on his Navy dive onboard the Sea Cliff and the aftermath of the incident.

It brings back some familiar faces and fleshes out the major characters including the two scientists who were travelling with Jonas on the Sea Cliff at the time of the decent as well as Jonas’s best friend James “Mac Mackreides expanding on his military service and the events that lead to his discharge and confinement in the psychotic ward of the military where he meets Jonas. The story as a whole lends incredible emotional impact, and a lot of fill-in-the-gaps understanding, to the original story.

If you haven’t read any of Steve Alten’s books, Meg Origins would be a good place to start and give you as the reader an idea what to expect in the other entries in the Meg series as well as his other works.

Meg Origins is available only as an e-book but can be found in all e-books formats at about 99p (UK) or 99 cents (US) in price so a nice cheap novel for you to sink your teeth into.

 

My look at the infamous Aika Village from Animal Crossing New Leaf Part 2

After it seems to have been a month (mostly due to my work hours), I've finally finished part 2 of my Aika Village video and its mostly wrapping it up with the last two houses and a couple of interest areas as well as a aspect which I think not many people have picked up on and I've addressed it toward the end of the video.

I just want to thank everyone who has watched and hope it has got you thinking about the events and what they could possibly mean from your point of view.

My Thoughts on the Godzilla International Trailer and an Announcement

So Legendary has put out what I think is the last trailer that we will ever get for the upcoming Godzilla and of course I've done a video talking about it and I've also got an announcement which all you Kaiju fans will go head up heels over when you hear it and so you know it was released about two days ago but because of work I've only been able to get the word out tonight by this video and a post on my Facebook and Twitter.

Anyway here's my newest video and sorry if at times I seem to talk quietly and its because I've been dealing with a head cold this past week.

My Thoughts on the Main Trailer for Godzilla (2014)

Today at 10am (PST) while here in the UK it was 6PM, The long awaited second trailer for Legendary's upcoming Godzilla was released and all I say is well nothing.

Reason why is because this video pretty much covers it

Enjoy!

My look at the infamous Aika Village from Animal Crossing New Leaf Part 1

Ever since I saw the videos on Aika Village done by Mullet Mike and The Sticky Paddle's Creepy Gaming videos, I've been completely fascinated by this place and more so by other people's thoughts and opinions on this dream town as well as the various theories surrounding the aspects of the story behind it.

After looking around, I decided to make a video to try and look at the imagery and small details which could shed more light and maybe provide parts to the story that most people may miss during their own visits to Aika Village.