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Review: District 9.

Posted 18:59 CET Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 (171 days ago). 198 views. 4 comments. Tagged with Movies, Reviews.

It’s been a while since I last posted a review. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I haven’t seen a single movie or read any books, it’s just that I’ve not written any reviews. These days I’m reading the fifth book in Stephen King’s epic The Dark Tower series. Great stuff.

But something even better than reading a Stephen King book is to watch Neill Blomkamp’s movie District 9. I’m pretty sure this is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, and I won’t be surprised if no one will make a better before the year ends. Unless that movie 9 or maybe even Up can match it, that is. They’re very different movies, though.

Anyway, let’s get back to District 9. It all started with a short movie called “Alive in Joburg”, directed by South Africans Blomkamp and his friend Sharlto Copley. Because of Alive in Joburg, together with other work by Blomkamp, he was offered to work with the movie adaption of the Halo video game together with Peter Jackson. Unfortunately, the Halo movie was put on hold because of lack of funding. But this got Jackson and Blomkamp talking about other projects and result of that discussion is District 9. Here’s Alive in Joburg from YouTube: Continue reading "Review: District 9." →

Asus Eee PC 1000HE.

Posted 21:33 CET Monday May 11th, 2009 (305 days ago). 218 views. No comments. Tagged with Hardware, Reviews, Technology.

For a while now I’ve been rambling on about netbooks and on Saturday I finally received my Asus Eee PC 1000HE, meaning that I’ll shut up about the netbook thing soon. But I thought I’d share my initial impressions of the computer first.

The 1000HE is a 10″ netbook with the latest Intel Atom N280 processor, 1GB (can be replaced with 2GB if necessary) of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a computer these days.

The netbook comes with Windows XP Home Edition installed and that works well. The N280 isn’t a power horse, though, and it will start to struggle a little when you open Flash-intensive sites, like online newspapers tend to be. I didn’t test video, but some reviews I’ve read say that most video formats should work OK, except for 1080p HD video where it’s likely that you will experience some frame dropping. Continue reading "Asus Eee PC 1000HE." →

Review: Spore.

Posted 22:02 CET Tuesday September 16th, 2008 (1 year, 177 days ago). 119 views. 2 comments. Tagged with Computer Games, Reviews.

Few games have seen more hype than Spore this year. It’s designed by Will Wright, the brain behind titles like SimCity and The Sims. I played the first The Sims game for a while when it was released, and I’ve spent hours and hours as a virtual mayor in different SimCity games. I never really got the hang of it, and most games ended in a devastating earthquake unleashed by your truly. Still it was great fun.

A few days before Spore was released, Wright gave an interview where he said that he was afraid all the hype was bad for the game because people’s expectations would be too high. He might have been right, but with the previous hugely successful titles, it’s no wonder his releases are anticipated.

Spore tries to be a lot of things at the same time. Wright had originally wanted to call the game SimEverything, but changed it because he wanted to release something without “Sim” in the title for once. The main theme of the game is evolution, and I find it strange that it’s not being sold with a warning sticker in some parts of the U.S. since the theory of Evolution is just the ramblings of a mad man and all that. Continue reading "Review: Spore." →

“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov.

Posted 17:00 CET Tuesday July 8th, 2008 (1 year, 247 days ago). 95 views. No comments. Tagged with Books, Reviews.

I’ve just (on Sunday, that is) finished reading this book. It took me a mere seven months to do just that. Even though you might think so, the book is not made up of twenty five thousand densely written pages, it weighs in at about 500 pages of quite spacious text.

Some of author Isaac Asimov’s books are regarded as science fiction classics. His most commonly known work is probably “I, Robot”, not because it’s a great book (I’ve never read it myself, so I can’t tell), rather because it resulted in a movie with the same title starring Will Smith. His work has inspired a lot of people, like the Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese new religious movement that carried out the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways back in 1995. Continue reading "“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov." →

“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds.

Posted 19:53 CET Thursday December 27th, 2007 (2 years, 76 days ago). 140 views. No comments. Tagged with Books, Reviews, Science Fiction.

“Chasm City” is the second book I’ve read written by Alastair Reynolds, the first one being “Revelation Space“. I had a bit of a hard time with Revelation Space as Reynolds totally lost it during the last one hundred pages and started rambling like a madman.

So naturally I was a bit skeptical when I picked up Chasm City. The reason why I bought the book in the first place was that it was not part of the same series as Revelation Space, but the events of Chasm City still takes place in the same fictional universe as Revelation Space – and if it’s something Alastair Reynolds is very good at it’s creating thrilling, fictional universes.

Chasm City starts out well and Reynolds is keeping a good pace through most of the book, he is only side stepping once into what might resemble the ramblings of Revelation Space and for only a few pages. Unlike Revelation Space, most of Chasm City is written in first person with the occasional jumps back in time with stories told by a third-person narrator.

There is no requirement that you have to be familiar with Reynolds’ first book to enjoy Chasm City, but it’s without doubt a plus if you do as it enables you to enjoy all the more or less intricate references to Revelation Space.