Tag Archives: review

Hunger Games: Why in the world did I love this book?

I’m confused.

Not that this isn’t a normal state for me, but this time I have a reason. I loved a book that I wasn’t supposed to.

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Why You Should Play Dragon Age. Again.

I am somewhat slow to complete video games, as a general rule.

For example, I finished Portal, for the first time, a few months ago. Portal was first released in 2004. It was a relief to finally understand all the cake jokes, although I did identify with this a little too much.

Many games I simply leave unfinished. I played FF X-2 to within probably 4 hours of 100% completion, got to a part I didn’t like and just stopped. The reason for this is simple – I play video games because I enjoy the story. More often than not, the actual gameplay tends to bore and annoy me after mere hours. Expressed in a simple equation:

desire to see how the story turns out < amount of suffering from actually playing the game = point I turn off the game system This also explains why I consider watching my husband play through a game as essentially the same thing as me playing through it. So when I tell you that I have completed Dragon Age:Origins three times, one of which I actually held the controller for the entire time, and that I and my husband have additionally started five more characters and logged well over 200 hours of gameplay, you can surmise the following:

Damn. Good. Game. Continue reading

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The new Harry Potter movie is out, and by the timing of this post you may infer that I saw it fairly early on. As a matter of fact, yes, I did go see a midnight showing on opening night/morning. And yes, I did wear a costume. If you feel the need to mock me, go ahead, I’ll wait.

All done? So, given the above information, you probably already know what I’m going to say below. Here, I’ll sum up for you: some good parts especially a few scenes done well and Slughorn/Snape/Draco were awesome, they changed things I didn’t want changed, the kids still can’t act, but I’ll probably buy the Blu-Ray and wait anxiously for the next movie. There we go. Everything below can now be considered a nit-picky rant from a serious fan of the book.

Ok then. Let’s talk about the Half-Blood Prince. (no spoilers, but I am going to talk about it in general terms, so if you don’t want to know *anything*, you’ve been warned) Continue reading

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Darwin’s Black Box

Evolution has always interested me, both as a theory and as a philosophy (some might even say faith). Science is basically just figuring out how the world and things in the world work, and I love that kind of stuff. It makes perfect sense to try and figure out where we came from using the tools of science if at all possible. I am, however, a believer in Yeshua (Jesus), and so the concept of intelligent design has a great appeal to me and is generally more the direction I tend to lean. So, given that I’ve read plenty of books on evolution in my lifetime (much of it required reading for school, I admit), I thought it would be beneficial for me to read one of the main books that started the ID movement – Darwin’s Black Box – the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.

That, and I thought it’d be nice to demonstrate here that I do read non-fiction. Occasionally. Continue reading

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To Say Nothing of the Dog

Very few sci-fi books are set in Victorian England, and for good reason. There’s usually a shocking lack of advanced technology there, for example. Or ideas about the future of mankind. Or time travel. (yes, that last one is key) Continue reading

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UP

Here’s what I love about Pixar: Most of the entertainment industry is capable of making a great kids movie, which adults can watch and enjoy too. Pixar makes great adult movie, which kids can watch and enjoy too. Continue reading

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The Diamond Age

I finally gave in to everyone who told me I just had to read Stephenson by picking up The Diamond Age (also known as A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer) this week. I got through it pretty quickly, but either the book isn’t as good as his others or I am not destined to be a Stephenson fan.

The style was a bit jarring to me at first – no chapters per se, just sections and one book break. Before each section several sentences describe what you are about to read, a technique that broke up the story but left me feeling tired for some reason. I was able to get into the flow of the book eventually though, and got to the point where I didn’t notice it so much.

The book had an interesting premise and I felt myself wanting it to be better than it actually was. For one thing, while I’m not going to hate a book just because of “mature” content, the frequency with which it was used in here kept breaking me out of the story in order to roll my eyes. The language and violence weren’t too overdone I guess, but the weird sex didn’t seem to be needed in the story — it felt artificial as if the author thought it was expected of him so he stuck it in there.

I was very connected with the main character in the story, and some of the supporting characters, but that only made it worse when the book failed totally to resolve any of their stories. Well, the main character has at least some plot points that can let you imagine an ending, but one of my favorite supporting characters was completely dropped for the second “book”, with no clues as to his story resolution.

I’m giving the book two stars, as I liked it alright but thought it failed to live up to the book it could have been. Stephenson spends a lot of time (maybe too much?) talking about the way things work in his imagined future world, but forgets that it’s the characters and what happens to them that most people care about. Obviously, he’s a successful author and lots of people love his work, so either I’m totally missing something, his other books are better and this one did well because of his name, or a lot of (other) people enjoy the “hard sci-fi” feel of books like this and could care less about actual plot and character development. I’m sounding harsher than I mean to – I did enjoy the book for what it was. But I’m unlikely to pick up anything else of his.

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