The Verdict...
Well I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I cried my eyes out most of the way through the last chapter, and the rest of the book saw me laugh and smile, and bite my thumbnails down to the quick. I'm glad I bought it, glad that I queued for 10 minutes to get it, and now I'm getting ready to re-read it.
I highly recommend this book - if you thought books 4 and 5 were dark, let me assure you they are nothing compared to book 6. I'm glad no one actually got around to asking me any questions because I would refuse to answer them having read it - you absolutely all must read it yourself. I would have jumped on here raving about it yesterday, but to be honest I was too depressed at having finished it already, I just couldn't bring myself to write.
Anyway, my hat comes off for Ms Rowling, she has written yet another masterpiece, and I am heartily looking forward to another one!!!!
(excuse this entry for not being as eloquent as others, but writing about this book makes me lose focus of sentence structure and vocabulary hehe).
Also, I experienced DDDR on Saturday night... "I've heard of DDR, but what's DDDR?" you ask? Let me tell you: Drunken Dance Dance Revolution :-) We had some friends over to partake in some social alcoholic consumption on Saturday night (thus forcing me to take a break from HBP), and the first glass knocked me on the proverbial. Well that paved the way for another glass, and another until it appeared that somewhere I consumed nearly a whole bottle... Anyway, I foolishly decided that some DDR was in order, so I broke out the mats and challenged a friend. She'd never played, so it wasn't much of a challenge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't lose my co-ordination with the alcohol (until people started selecting songs with green feet that ran off the meter - aaarggghh!!!). At any rate, fun was had by all, and I woke up the next morning, with no hangover, ready to complete my weekend's reading.
Ok, now for my final rant for today: Censorship - and today, I am on the side of the censors. The following excerpts are from Reuters:
Sen. Hillary Clinton pressed Thursday for a Government investigation into how sinulated sex cropped up in a modified version of the blockbuster criminal advvernture video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."
"We should all be deeply disturbed that a game which now permits the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics has fallen into the hands of young people across the country," Clinton wrote in a letter to the head of the Federal Trade Commission.
Saying the problem of explicit video games was "spiralling out of control," Clinton also said she was introducing legislation that would crack down on the sale of ciolent and sex-laden games to minors.
Now, I'm going to be honest here, and say that I agree that this game should not be sold to minors. I play it regularly (or I should say my bf plays it and I watch), and I love the game. It's got a dry sense of humour, it's full of action, and at the end of the day you don't commit crime for the heck of it, you do it because the crooked cops make you. Infact, any money you make along the way you are encouraged to put to good use, such as buying property, buying a business, and such. However, if you feel the urge, you can go on a killing spree for no reason, and this is something that our young impressionable kids do not need to interact in. I in NO way blame games for crimes that go on in the world, not at all. I believe it is the job of the parents and role models to teach our children that crime is not cool- but in this age of video games, could it hurt to put an age restriction on such games as GTA?
I also believe that it's times like these where our parents need to be most vigilant. With generation X becoming the parents of society (*gasp*), I'd like to think that parents no longer have an excuse not to monitor their children's internet usage, and I would also think that parents know how to do a regular cleanup of the home PC, and delete such offending mods as the "Hot Coffee" mod to GTA. If the home uses a chipped Xbox, I would also expect a parent to know how to delete games from the hard drive. Parents need to BE PARENTS, but I also think that if you need to show ID to buy porn, then you should have to show ID to buy games with senseless crime. 16 would be an appropriate age to cover the general public, in my opinion.
Labels: books, games, politics
Aah the classics
As you can see on the right, I churned through the books in the weekend due to a trip down to my partner's Father's house just out of Cambridge. It's the most peaceful place ever, so I absolutely had to get a book to read by the fire, or by the babbling brook outside.
Having just finished reading "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown, I figured I may aswell complete the current works of the author, and picked Deception Point. Boy was that a mistake and a half. I was sorely disappointed by this book, more particularly, the way it took 256 pages to get into any form of excitement - a lag not seen in the three other Dan Brown books I've recently read. This particular conspiracy theory was, in my opinion, a blatant allusion to the theory that the United States were not, infact, the first to land on the moon and that they did indeed fabricate the entire Apollo 11 mission. Dan Brown is the master of the conspiracy theory, focussing (so far) on the Vatican (and more generally, ancient Christian pioneers) and the Government of the United States.
The great thing about Dan Brown's books, however, is that they encourage (albeit subliminally) the reader to think, and in most cases, to research for themselves. I remember after having read "Angels and Demons" (which I read BEFORE "The Da Vinci Code") I spent the rest of the day on the internet researching the Illuminati, the artworks of Bernini, and looking for photos of the interior of St Peter's basilica, the Sistine Chapel, and (more specifically) the secret corridor between St Angelo's Castle and the Pope's private library. So too after reading "The Da Vinci Code" did I spend countless hours researching the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail, and different historian's hypothesis of what the Holy Grail actually is, and how they came to these conclusions. It was all very interesting, and even though Dan Brown has been criticised for his 'lack of research' apparently evident in his writing, I'd like to commend him for writing in such a way that is marketable to the western world, and for provoking thought and independent research to an apathetic society.
Ok, I digressed a huge amount from my original point of this entry. Sorry folks for the rather long interruption.
Back to the point - I churned through the pages of "Deception Point" at a rather alarming rate, that I was finished by the time we left Cambridge. By the time we got home I was so tired anyway that I couldn't read if I tried, so there was no great issue anyway.
Come Monday (yesterday), and my inbox screamed tales of overdue reports, projects, metrics - you name it, I hadn't done it yet. So I figured I would go get a latte, have some breakfast, and attend to it all 'momentarily'. So I did all that, yada yada yada, got back to my desk and lo and behold-
The network was down!
I'm not just talking Email- I'm talking the whole lot. No server connectivity, no internet, no PHONES (ip based) NADA! Everyone else had the same issue aswell, except that they'd already pulled down the work they needed from the servers, while I decided that a latte and breakfast were more important... Yeah I was in trouble. I couldn't even PRETEND I was working by surfing the 'net! So I took a (really really really) early lunch, figuring it would be fixed by the time I got back. Well no - by the time I got back it hadn't fixed itself, so I went for a walk - via Borders.
So, inside Borders I saw a table DEDICATED to the classics. Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, and all the rest. Well, as you can probably tell by my sidebar, I'm not usually a classical reader. The most classical reading I ever did was in High School English, where I read 2 Shakespearian Plays ("The Taming of the Shrew" and "Macbeth") and "Death of a Salesman", and Classical Studies where I read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I've always been a fan of Chick Lit', so I figured I should really get into Jane Austen - the original chick lit author(ess) - and I'm not disappointed. I also picked up a copy of the Iliad, because I love that story, and HOPEFULLY it will take me so long to get through it, that I won't have to spend ANY MORE MONEY on books before HP+HBP comes out (given my propensity to delay their return, a library membership would not be cheaper).
An update on everything else in general: B/F is currently playing 'The Jade Empire" on Xbox (and loving it), I haven't played the Sims 2 in over a week (have taken to leaving my laptop at work because it's too heavy to lug all the way from the carpark and back each day), I've started a Semi Diet (Special K Bar and Apple for breakfast with my latte, Noodles for Lunch, KTime bar for afternoon snack, replaced coke with Orange Juice at home, and snack on fruit when hungry). I decided if nothing else, the increase in fruit should increase my vitamin C and stop me getting sick all the time!
In the ARG World, I'm (loosely) playing the Alias ARG, but having geographic issues in that one of the characters is scheduling a meeting in July in Chicago, which I'll obviously miss- am following along a Cash Prize puzzle trail called CHALLUS which is exercising my Google use, and hopefully I'll be able to update y'all on something else ARG'ish soon like.
I think that might be it for now! Ciao!Labels: ARG, books, games
