All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

“August is the border between summer and autumn.”

“Midtown Skyline at Sunset – View from Long Island, New York, USA,” photo by Romain Pontida, 2023

4-picture panorama stitched with Hugin, rectilinear projection

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool …”

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin



Photo credit: Marian Wood Kolisch, Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

This post has mad “Pontypool” energy and I’m totally here for it.

IYKYK.

Album Cover for U2’s “Achtung Baby Deluxe Edition,” 2011

Island Records.

Throwback Thursday: the sentry guns scene in “Aliens” (1986)!

No, you are not suffering from the Mandela effect if you saw “Aliens” in the theater in 1986 and remember a really cool scene with some automatic remote sentry guns placed in a corridor — against which waves and waves of monsters launched an attack.  And you aren’t insane either.

The scene was in the movie when it originally played in theaters, according to my sources on Reddit and Youtube.  But it was not included on the VHS version (whether it’s referred to the “theatrical cut” or not). 

Variations of the scene can be found in different subsequent cuts of the film, according to fans online — like the director’s cut or the special edition, or versions appearing on television. 

Some include dialogue we remember from 1986.  (“Next time they just walk right in,” or something like that.)  And at least one includes the shots of the aliens being cut to pieces in the corridor.  (Notably, the scene below does not.)

Anyway, I am linking to the totally awesome Alien Fire Team Elite on Youtube for the video.  Semper fi, gentlemen.



Cover to “House of Secrets” #118, Luis Dominguez, 1974

DC Comics.