I went to see Alien: Romulus a few nights ago with friends and you know what? It was pretty good! Not great , and I had some a few complaints about it, but overall the movie kept me entertained for two hours.

I should say that I went into it with very low expectations. I cannot say that I have really liked any movie in this franchise since Alien 3 and even that took me a while (and watching the Assembly Cut) to come around to. I can appreciate what they were trying do with Alien Resurrection even if I do not like it; as for Prometheus and Covenant , I thought they were both awful and I wish they had never been made.

I feel like a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) is that one should never underestimate the amount of damage and suffering that can be caused by stupidity.

We look at terrible things happening and we think “There’s no way this can’t be deliberate” and then we go looking for some master plan behind it. When we don’t find one, our brains want invent one to fill in the gaps.

I was just reading yet another terrible review of Jonathan Haidt’s books about how mobile devices are destroying a whole generation. I am not going to link to it—not because the review is bad but rather because that book has already sucked up more than its fair share of oxygen.

While I am fairly sure that everyone having Internet devices in their pockets is not great, I am also pretty sure that it is not as universally awful as people like Haidt make it out to be. Of course, “It depends” is not the sort of argument that sells books or gets one prime placement on high-profile op-ed pages.

I finished reading My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones earlier this week. While I didn’t love it, I liked it enough that I drove to the bookstore the day after I finished it to pick up the sequel.

The book connected with all of the horror movie watching I have been doing lately, especially the main character who is obsessed with slasher films. I appreciated how layered the story was, without seeming forced.

I am about a hundred pages into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , which I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I have never read before.

I have, of course, seen the old Universal movie with Boris Karloff as the Monster, and I think I saw the 1990s Kenneth Branagh version as well. While I knew that the films strayed from the plot and story of the novel, I guess I was not aware of just how much they did so.