A few days ago, I received an unusual comment on one of my posts on this blog. The comment claimed to be from a "certified illustrator" who claimed that I was using some of her copywritten images without credit. The comment included a link to a Google Drive document that supposedly contained a list of the offending images, and suggested that the illustrator would sue me if I did not promptly remove the images. The full message is duplicated in text below, and in screenshot form:

Hi there!

This is Melika and I am a certified illustrator.

I was baffled, frankly speaking, when I came across my images at your web-site. If you use a copyrighted image without my permission, you must be aware that you could be sued by the copyrigh owner.

It's not legal to use stolen images and it's so filthy!

Take a look at this document with the links to my images you used at www.megabearsfan.net and my earlier publications to get evidence of my copyrights.

Download it right now and check this out for yourself:

https://sites.google.com/site/case53703/googledrive/share/downloads/
file/storage?ID=6543774982793

If you don't delete the images mentioned in the document above within the next few days, I'll write a complaint against you to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it doesn't work, you may be pretty damn sure I am going to report and sue you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance.

I am reasonably certain that this message is a scam. If you see this message in your comments, or receive it in an email, do not open the link!

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This year has been a real treat for my movie sensibilities! Usually, a given year might have one or two high-quality movies that stand above the rest of the dumb summer popcorn flicks. But it's not even August yet, and I've already seen five really good movies. The year started off well with the quirky, sci-fi romance story Her (which I meant to review, but never got around to it). Then, Captain America Winter Soldier turned out to be an exceptional super hero spy thriller. I already reviewed X-Men Days of Future Past and Edge of Tomorrow - both of which I also really liked!

So far, the only disappointment has been the poorly-written Amazing Spider-Man 2 (but this was kind of to be expected, thanks Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci). I also have no interest in Transformers 4 or Ninja Turtles, since those both look like standard Michael Bay garbage.

And so we come to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel to the prequel / reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Rise was a surprisingly good movie that did an excellent job of humanizing a CGI monkey. Dawn picks up ten years after the last movie ended. The virus that James Franco's character created in the lab as a potential treatment for Alzheimer has spread to the rest of the population and almost wiped out the human race, leaving only the small fraction of people that are genetically resistant to it.

The whole first act of the movie doesn't include a single human character at all, or even any dialogue. Instead, it depicts the ape characters and their culture and social structure, and it really helps to build up the apes as sympathetic characters...

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Came across the following earlier today, and had to repost it:

“This is a virus. I do not have the tech savvy, nor the patience, to write an actual computer virus, so this one will use the honor system. If you are reading this, please manually delete all personal data from your computer and then forward this to 30 people on your email contact list. Thank you for your cooperation.

Damn, I had just reformatted my laptop and restored all my old data too...

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