Every year I try to read 50 books. Last year I only managed 38 … this year so far I’d made it through one book (although the rather excellent Iain Bank’s Surface Detail) … and it’s over a quarter of the way into the year. Then I finally gotten my hands on this latest Kelley Armstrong – and my interest in reading is certainly back! Awesome read, she has to be one of the best authors currently out there and I can’t wait to finish the remaining 50 pages to find out what’s going to happen. Then after that perhaps time for some Gaiman graphic novels to increase my read count a little bit before wading back into Rhapsody.

The dude reviewing the article apparently had to wait about 600 days – there is quite a back-log and the snails generally take about 20 hours to “deliver” the messages. Rather interestingly, it posed an interesting social problem for the dude, as his email had been set up for his current girlfriend of the time – except they were no longer an item 615 days later! Facinating idea though, here’s a photo of one of the snails.

The guy is extremely clever and talented, his Star Trek Bird of Prey is also breathtaking.

I’m so impressed I want to immediately grab some paper and try myself. Perhaps not using money though like the dude seems to be doing, that’s sort of quite useful these days I recon. Hmm, vague memory of having an origami book somewhere in the house… still if not, always the Internet!

Oh and the primary link for his page.

The others on the page are as exceptional, thus to share: check Avanaut’s site.

One of the primary authors that I got into was someone called Alice Borchardt. I was captured by her book The Silver Wolf, following a young woman called Regeane who was trying to hide her nature as a shapeshifter. Long story short, she ends up loving and marrying another shapeshifter called Maeniel who has some standing in the world. The story was raw in places, leaving the reader with the feeling it was an earlier book by the author. However, the plot, the story, the emotions and simply the imagination of the book was very strong and powerful. I followed the author through another several books until the stories had changed quite a bit from the original trilogy of wolves and I lost interest.

About two years ago I checked Amazon to see if she had finished the latest trilogy only to find that she had not yet followed up on The Raven Warrior, written in 2003. I thought nothing more of it until several months ago I started to box up the majority of my book collection ready for selling the flat (several hundred books around overflowing 6 bookcases probably isn’t a selling point) and seeing Alice Borchardt’s books again rekindled my interest in the author. This time after an Amazon search failed yet again to find new books, it was time to Google away to find out what was up. Had she lost interest in writing? It took a surprisingly long amount of time to find out what had happened – she had unfortunately died of cancer in 2007 after a long battle.

The thing that made me sad?

How little information was out there indicating her passing away. She was a popular and an amazing author, and I expected more fanfare. Finding out she was Anne Rice’s sister was also a surprise – I both didn’t know and would have expected more noise because of that.

So. Whilst this Blog is supposed to be about technology, I’ve just talked about an author who had passed on. Well, technology has helped here too. In the past, book shops would have been the primary sales for books – what are the odds that the shop sellers would know what had happened to an author? With the Internet here, even if it was a bit of a struggle at first to find the information, its out there. Within a few minutes I’d found out she was no longer with us. Accepted, it wasn’t easy, it felt like a kick in the stomach – her loss to the community is significant.

Therefore, thank you to Alice for your books, and thank you Internet for helping a reader find out what had happened.

My accident started off with a vague hope of finding a new Vampire oriented computer game. Ever since playing V: Masquerade, I’ve loved the idea of such games where you control an unstoppable (well once I learnt What The Heck I Had To Do) killing machine going around on multiple side quests and a facinating main quest … all set in present-day.

My search wasn’t too successful at first, I found something called A Vampyre Story, which as you can see from the screenshot below is more of a comedy / cartoon approach. Looks very nice, but wasn’t quite what I was after unfortunately!

After adding it to Amazon wish list for future consideration, I kept looking and then strumbled across The Secret World. 10 minutes of frantic reading later I was almost bouncing about the room with glee at having read about such an amazing game coming, something that sounds pretty perfect and exactly what I wanted. Yay! I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a new game I’d read about since the new The Bard’s Tale in er 2004. (I accept now in hindsight having played what that Bard’s Tale game turned into that the LEAST said about how THAT game the best, ugh.)

So, there’s always a touch of knowing that my sudden OMG OMG is 10% fact and 90% what my mind has made up about it. But that accepted, it does look proper nice.

It’s set “today” where the majority of society has no idea this “underworld” exists, and indeed there are monsters and beasts zonking about. As a player, you fight these, do other quests, explore, etc. The MMORG aspect comes from allowing people to group up to fight the bigger monsters, social interaction and PvP. Oh and that annoying leveling up crap that WoW and its ilk has? Gone – no levels, no grinding. Just complete quests and you can upgrade skills, plus customise what direction you want to go in. It really sounds super amazing, and should made it easier for casual gamers and people joining after the start of the game.

There’s a lot of effort and time gone into the development, with Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Once I get home, time to add them to my daily check lists!

There sounds like there will be three main factions that players can join, and you can also make your own cabels (guilds) to hang out in. Weaponry appears to be guns and swords, with some occult magic thrown in. I’d probably prefered an all-out mage type race, so it’ll work like the universe like the ilk made by Karen Chance, but what they do have sounds amazing so far.

Unfortuantly, information is a little limited so far, so its hard to see how the gameplay really works, but I’m sure that’ll come soon. Oh and also I get the impression it is still under heavy development, with 2010/2011 looking like when it’ll come out. No! Come out now!

Some nice links though, the main designer has a nice blog, http://ragnartornquist.com/ … there’s a Wiki http://www.crygaia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page and suchlike. So there’s good links “out there” for people to find out more … so that’s where I’m off to now, to try and find out even more! Very good looking game though … alhough unfortunately most of it is concept art so far!

Both interesting! But have to admit the lego AT-AT was just utterly awesome, and it moves! OMG! A mechanical lego AT-AT. Tonight was the first night in a while where I realised I was born 20 years too early (or is it 30 years?) because toys today fucking ROCK. Yes I had lego when I was a wee kid, but I didn’t have it able to move around the table! Very nice.

So, the webpage I was reading, http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=163891 … basically lists 10 worse moments in Sci-fi. For example, John Hurt deciding that actually yeah, he DID feel a bit hungry after some acid-for-blood creature had died after sitting on his face for a day and YES, he would have dinner with the rest of the crew. Oh is that heartburn love? Rennie tablet, John??

Those gigglables aside, there were two rather pertinent and intelligent comments. The author of the page mentions “The Matrix” and the computer system sending agents to “kill” Neo with fists when they could just nuke the fucking STATE and kill him. Job done. He then says why “We don’t Care” about that niggle – and I quote:

Most sci-fi fans had read William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” many years earlier, and “The Matrix” finally helped visualize what the hell was happening in that book.

Telling! Before it reminded me that oh-gosh-fucking-golly, I’ve been a software engineer for X years and never read that sodding book. Amazon –> Wish-list time! In my defence though I HAVE bought Snow Crash and it’s sitting in the “to read” pile. Someday soon my lovely.

The second rather funny quote was about Empire Strikes Back where sending hugely tall and silly unbalanced AT-ATs against the rebels Was A Bad Move. The “Why We Don’t Care” statement made me laugh though and nod in agreement. In a nutshell it explains why those of us who watched all 6 Star Wars films did that:

Why we don’t care: Seeing the walkers come into focus in the rebel binoculars was the moment when “Star Wars” fans realized that “The Empire Strikes Back” might indeed be cooler than the original. That scene alone could be the reason we paid to see four more.

Again, true! It’s so true!

This was the moment where the boy in me suddenly wanted to see that scene again and fired up Youtube. Search for AT-AT, expecting this scene to be almost at the top? Silly me, I should have known better and immediately on seeing “LEGO AT-AT” I was clicky.

So so awesome, and I was immediately 10 years old again, wanting to play with my lego. Unfortunately it’s still at my parents though, darn it!

Thanks to Sci-Fi Scoop (a website that’s disturbingly becoming as important to my browsing and entertainment news as the BBC!) there is more information. They are constantly releasing more information and more images that indicate in my view this could actually be marketed quite strongly. That’s good at the moment, as it does sound facinating.

I guess this screenshot they released gives the game away a little bit, the ugly little creature clearly turns into something looking vaguely human-like.

In addition THIS link gives a behind the scenes look at the movie, which basically just means its the actors and producers talking a bit about the movie, which is a touch disappointing in a “is that all” moment, but does serve to make me want to see it even more! Really looks interesting, this type of movie where its pretty different to everything else really appeals to me! Roll on the release date!

Today’s moment was thanks to CNN. Yay CNN! The site was outlining a brand-new yacht that has an incredible shape – basically a giant wedge which makes it look almost as wide as it is long. Woah!

She is truly amazing, a real “boy’s toy”. A boy with so much money that the news article doesn’t even bother mentioning the price-tag! The design is such that due to the huge width, the yacht hardly moves in heavy seas, maintaining impressive stability.

Comparing this beauty to traditional ships, such as a warship, which are almost always something like 6:1 in shape (6 times longer than wide), its wonderful to see something totally different. More!

Unique though for ships? Well …

Sort of. You might argue that the larger catamarans are quite wide and you’d be right, however the full form is very different, basically two or three even thinner ship hulls with a platform on top linking them together. Thus, not really the same as this new yacht. Still, the Russians did make a circular warship about the turn of 1900s roughly for coastal defence. It resulted in a very large defensive platform for some huge guns. However, rather unfortunately it was a right pig to control as it hated going anywhere, being circular!

This new yacht, the WHY (I don’t know why they gave it such a poo name) being triangular is so different and yet has a natural beauty.

I’m impressed. Of course, it’s only a mock-up, nothing built yet and I suspect it’ll never be built. Real pity if that turns out to be the case though!

CNN have just posted a story about the film, indicating it’s a “surprise hit” … not really IMO when you see how scary the sodding thing looks! The interesting news though is that it’s doing so well that it only cost $11,000 to make, yet has currently taken $7.1 MILLION in ONE WEEKEND. Sounds impressive? Gets even better – pretty much all of the sales pitch was word of mouth, and was only at 200 cinemas. Most “big name” movies come out at like thousands. So good effort!

Some interesting and quite humourous quotes:

In giving the movie an A-minus grade, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote “With its this-is-really-happening vibe, ‘Paranormal Activity’ scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.”

Overall, the film has earned a strong 85 percent approval rating at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Moviegoers agree. Rajiim Gross, an iReporter who posted a review of the film, said he found “Paranormal Activity” to be much better than “Blair Witch Project,” another indie-horror film to which it is being compared.

Wonder if us poor Brits will ever get to see it. I suspect (to paraphrase Firefly) “it did well in DVD sales” hahah.