I am a complete fan of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. For those unfortunate enough to not know what that is, it is a series of manga and anime stories that describe a near future where integration with machines is the order of the day, giving rise to cyborg bodies, mind hackers and all that stuff. It is also a police procedural, where the heroes are an independent force designed to counter cyber threats. It is also an espionage thriller, since many of the actions in the stories are not linear, but have many political implications and intricate plots. But what I thought was better than a beautiful and detailed sci-fi world with deep characterization and complex storylines is the exploration of the human soul and mind in a background that is mechanistic and science squeaky clean. To manage to do this repeatedly in manga, films and anime series is truly wonderful.

For me it all started with the movie. With impressive music by Kenji Kawai and a complexity and beauty and care for detail that I had never seen before (and rarely since), Ghost in the Shell blew my mind. Then there was the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a two season series that went a little more toward the police procedural, but overall was just as wonderful as the film. And then the second film: Innocence. And now they made Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a four part OVA series, prequel to the film. Having seen the first one hour part, I can say I am very pleased and can't wait to see the entire series. It details the roots of major Kusanagi and what are the roots of her team. Very nice indeed. The only thing that I miss is Kenji Kawai's music.

I leave you with the trailer for the series and my recommendation to see all of the Ghost in the Shell animes, even the Tachicoma OVAs :)



Update September 2014: I've watched the entire series. The episodes are almost stand alone and totally worth watching. I liked the fourth one most, as it was clearly created to made the connection with the film and series. I loved the small tips of the hat to hallmark scenes in the film: the cloaked jump from a skyscraper, the destruction of the cyber hands while pulling on the lid of a battle tank and so on. Does that mean that a new series and/or film will be created? I certainly hope so. My only problem with the new OVA is that the music of Cornelius is not even close to the haunting quality of Kenji Kawai's.

Having seen the film, I decided to read the book. Now I can understand why so many people said the film was not like the movie, but also why the film itself seemed so episodic. In a nutshell, World War Z is a collection of more than 50 interviews of witness accounts about a fictional war against the zombies. This makes the only connections between the book and the film be the zombies and the episodic nature of it. In rest the stories are different, the way zombies behave, the take on how humans react and of course the shitty ending.

Now, about the book... It was easy to read, mostly because I could just take the PDA in my hand and read one of those mini stories in 10 minutes and then do whatever I wanted to do. Some of them were really great, too, but after reading the book I think I can safely say that it wasn't about zombies at all. Instead it was about the way people live now and the war was just a prop to make us see things clearly from a different perspective. Of course, some things never change: the great American spirit, the Russian brutality, the narrowmindedness of Asians and so many other clichés. Not that they are not believable, but it so shows that the author is American, even when he makes fun of his own country's flaws. Anyway, I encourage you to see the book as social commentary rather than a zombie or a horror book. That is also because the threat of "regular" zombies - you know, slow and dumb - can't really be that scary. So there are a lot of technical flaws with the zombies in the book. The situations described show the difficulty mainly in fighting millions of city dwellers now turned zombies and the war of attrition that the zombies were actually enabling, since they destroyed everything in their path, yet needed no food or supplies. Also a lot of the stories have this "I don't know why zombies don't die from bombs, water pressure, frosting, etc. I am just a dumb whatever telling a story". At some point it got a little annoying.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed a lot more the personal descriptions of how people live in other countries than the zombies, stories about them or the rather weak speculations on how people would react to their attack. The book was nicely written, but clearly amateurish; it lacked the depth of seasoned writers and had too many "props", like you see in screenplays. No wonder: Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks, he lived in the world of movies his entire life and this is only his second book.

I've had the opportunity to play these games on the work XBox and I just had to make the blog entry to compare them. The thing is that, even if some corporation wants DC Comics and Mortal Kombat to merge somehow, they are completely different both in concept and audience.

I've been a player of Mortal Kombat since it first appeared on PCs. Me and school friends were spending hours playing it (rather than go learn something useful, obviously). Even then - or maybe it is better said that especially then - it was clear that the game had soul, that someone really spent their time and love to make it. No matter who bought it and what they did to it, Mortal Kombat never completely lost that soul. You see, the game idea is clear: two players face each other in combat, they use different characters who have different abilities and in the end someone wins. Unlike other games that start off neutered by the present socio-political situation in the States, MK started off as brutal and bloody. You could use all kinds of magic and utensils to hit your opponent, chained combos and see lots of blood, but the hallmark of the game was that, in the end, after you have defeated your opponent, you had the opportunity to perform a Fatality, something that was truly gruesome like ripping their heads out with a bit of the spine, or cutting them in two or setting them on fire.

Now you will probably ask why has my sick brain made the connection between a brutal combat game and true love and having a soul. The thing is that the first MK started out with 8 characters, plus some bosses and hidden characters, then MKII has twice as that, and the various incarnations of the game saw up to 65 characters. And yet you will be hard pressed to find any major version where a player could not win with any of the characters against any other if they were good enough. That sense of balance shows the dedication of the developer teams that endured the various corporate transformations of Mortal Kombat.

The ninth version, Mortal Kombat IX, has a lot of characters, over 30, although some are DLC and make little sense in the Mortal Kombat universe, like Freddy Krueger or Kratos. Of course, you had to pay for them. Later on the Komplete Edition of the game had all the characters and all their skins available. Except for a little overpowering of Noob Saibot, MK IX was pretty balanced. The graphics were awesome, truly, and had various fatalities and X-moves - the super move one could execute with three bars of power, which showed anatomical X-ray like details in slow motion like cracked skulls and ribs. The only problem was the controller. I am a PC user and it took a long time to get used with the XBox controller and even more to understand how pressing forward would sometimes make my character jump up and backwards or some other thing like that. I know the controllers at work were pretty messed up, but I swear there had to be something to do with the programming as well. Also, as far as I could see, the game dropped frames. If you moved fast enough, the other player would have difficulty making their special moves, probably because some part of the data or processing was lost. But overall the game was great, the story was nice and the combination of different characters, skins and violence was delicious.

To make the transition easier, I will also mention another game, also featuring Mortal Kombat characters: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. It is an older game, launched in 2009. This weird crossover featured fights between the likes of Raiden and Shang Tsung versus Superman and the Joker. It is the last game made by Midway Games, the creators of Mortal Kombat and the first introduction of the "evil empire": Warner Brothers, who brought with them DC Comics. After that Midway went bankrupt and sold the rights to Mortal Kombat to WB. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe had a bit of faux 3D movement, stage transitions (like punching someone through a wall and getting to another stage) and no fatalities. In fact, it had almost no blood, while the "powers" of the MK characters seemed oddly and randomly assigned (Shang Tsung had a punch teleport, Jax had a machine gun, etc). The playability of the game was OKish, with the major problem of in flight hits. One would jump toward an opponent, punch or kick and the character would stop in mid-air and perform the punch or kick there, which made it very unrealistic and static. Also, and that probably made it unpopular in the game room, it was unbalanced. Sonya Blade could kick everybody's ass just by jumping and kicking.

Enter Injustice: Gods Among Us, a game that is also made by NetherRealm Studios, who made Mortal Kombat IX, and also copyrighted by Warner Brothers. NetherRealm is actually what remains of Midway Games plus what remains of WB Games Chicago. In Injustice there are only DC Comics characters, the graphics are really good, a lot of stage interaction, flashy "social" statistics and "ranking", downloadable characters, obviously, and so on. The game play, though, total crap. Now, I may be very biased when it comes to Mortal Kombat type games, given by all love for the original game and concept, and I also understand that this wasn't supposed to be Mortal Kombat in the first place, but in my mind it represents everything that MK developers and players fought against. First, it has violence, but no blood. You get a lot of punches, kicks, explosions, object traumas like things falling on you, being thrown on you or through you (like arrows), only no blood. There are no parts of the body that get broken or smashed. It's like a good old fashioned cowboy brawl that results in someone saying "awwh, shucks!". Then there is the completely weird system of hits and blocks. You have to press Back to defend up and Down or Back-Down to defend down. Combine that with the fact that jumps are mainly vertical and so do not bring you closer to your opponent than walking, and you get a very asymmetrical game play where range fighters have to just run and shoot, while power characters have to dash a lot through bullets to get to their target. Even so, among similar type of characters there are huge differences. I would say that Deathstroke followed by Aquaman are by far the strongest characters, like lame-ass Green Arrow is a weakling. My favourite, Doomsday, had a lot of problems getting to anyone, even if it was supposed to be indestructible and on par with Superman. Well, they were on par in the game, Superman sucked, too. So: no blood, game imbalance and poor playability when there was obviously a lot of effort put into the shiny aspects of the game.

So you see, I had to write this post. Not because I didn't enjoy playing Injustice or because I think it is a bad game, but because it is like taking a cool 80's horror movie and turning into a 2010 remake that scares no one and can be played in cinemas to children. All Flash and no Meat, so to speak. MK is for gamers while DC games are for kids. All we need now is some Mortal Kombat game with parental controls on it. That being said, I can hardly wait Mortal Kombat 10! I hope they don't mess it up completely. As homework, you should try to read on the history of Mortal Kombat and of Midway Games. It's an interesting read. There was a really nice video with the developers of the first Mortal Kombat telling the story of the inception of the game, but I couldn't find it. Instead I leave you with the komplete :) history of the game from MKSecrets:

Today was my last day at the large corporation I was employed at. I quit for several reasons, but mainly because the project I was working on wasn't challenging at all. So one has to wonder: how did I get to be bored at work when only two years ago I was so happy to be hired by one of the best employers in Bucharest to work on an exciting new project? And the answer is : misrepresentation. I've titled the post thus because I sincerely think very few people, if any, wanted to harm me or lie to me or take advantage of me and yet the thing I was hired for changed and shifted until I became annoying for proposing ways of improving the project and asking for work. Let me take you from the beginning and you will see what I mean.

At the end of March 2011 I was working at a medium sized company, a place where there were some interesting projects, but the work ethic and methodology was really lacking. I had been working there for about two years and I was starting to get annoyed for not getting any recognition in the face of obvious personal improvement. And in my vulnerable state I was head-hunted by a human resources person from this major American corporation who wanted me to work on a project for them. I said I will give it a try, personally believing that I will either not like the place, not like the money or, even more probable, they will not think me worthy of the job. See where I am getting with this? I was already sold on the concept of a new job there and I didn't want to get disappointed, so I was playing down my chances. It seems that, after one telephonic interview, a series of six consecutive face to face interviews and another one with the head of the company, I was good enough for them. All I had to do was negotiate the wage. I was rather disappointed with the way the then current place of employment was handling salary increases (I've gotten only one raise, 2.25% in size, in two years) so I had a sum in mind that I would consider the minimum I would get in the new place of employment. You see, I am not a very good negotiator, I hate haggling, so I just drew a line in the sand and said that no one will push me over it. I was so serious when I went to talk to them... they proposed a sum that was more than 10% higher than what I was willing to fight for. Surprised, I accepted. Now all I had to do is wait for a call to tell me how we would proceed. It was near my birthday and I thought "Wow! What a nice present!".

At this point I'd had contact with the HR girl, who was very nice, been interviewed by a lot of people, both technical and not, also very nice, and even passed by the head honcho of the company who played a little game with me when we met, by pretending to be a very arrogant and annoying person while the top HR specialist was watching me with a stern expression. I am kind of proud of myself to have seen through their ruse, but I think they did try too hard. No one can be such an idiot to consider refactoring useless because you write good code from the beginning, right? Anyway, the guy who was supposed to be manager gave me a call the first week, told me there was some restructuring going on in the company, that we were still on and that I had to wait. He was nice too. He called me every week for about three months to tell me we were still on, while I was sweating bullets because I had already announced in my company that I was going to leave so that they can prepare for my absence, and they were starting to look at me suspiciously: I wasn't going anywhere. At the time my soon to be manager said he was going in holiday and that another guy was going to call me. No one did for more than two weeks. So I called them!

Now, you see, the HR girl was genuinely believing that she would offer me a better job and my prospective manager was also convinced he wanted me in his team and that we would work great together, they all wanted was best for them and me! So imagine my shock when I called and the new guy told me "Oh, you still wanted to get hired? I had understood that you refused the job". No, you moron, I did not. I politely asked for more information only to find out that they had no more positions as full employees, a limitation that had come from the US corporate headquarters, and that they could only offer me a consultancy job. Devastated, I asked what that meant. It meant I didn't get company stock as a bonus, but I was only paid the sum we had already negotiated. I didn't know about employee benefits when I got the job and I didn't really care for them, so I said yes. It was going to be a temporary measure until more hiring positions were opened.

The company had gone through a "reorg" (I was to meet with a lot of new acronyms and made up words in the new job, much to my chagrin - this particular one meant "reorganizing") and I was not to work under the guy who talked to me week to week, but under the new guy, the one that didn't know if I wanted the job or not. But he seemed genuinely nice and motivated, very enthusiastic about the new project, an administration web UI made in ASP.Net MVC. He asked me if I knew anything about the project. I said no. Why would I care about a project if I don't know if I would be hired or not. He seemed disappointed, but proceeded to explain what the project did and how great it was going to be, as it was meant to replace the old thing, made in ASP.Net in Visual Basic... by monkeys.

You see, he had the best of intentions as well, he was technical, willing to create something exciting and challenging and convinced that I would fit in their team and help with this new project made with new technology. When I finally got my hands on code and started actually working, the project was dead in the water. They had decided instead (and by they I mean some schmuck in US, not the people actually working on it) to just refactor the old admin and continue on. Different from what you may think, I was actually excited. In my head I had this tool that I would be working on to transform all VB.Net 2.0 code into C#.Net 4.0, become the hero of all, and create a formal framework of refactoring code from one language to the other. (If you don't know the terms here, just imagine I wanted to replace wood with stone so that the big bad wolf would not blow the house in). Alas, it was not to be. "Too risky" they call it when they feel afraid. I was yet to understand that in a large corporation responsibility dilutes until it becomes nothing. The only tangible thing becomes blame, which replaces responsibility and exterminates creativity and stifles initiative.

You see, like all the actors in this play, I too had good intentions. The first code I wrote was to fix some bugs that I had noticed in a bit of code related to online shopping. The customers had also noticed this bug and had found complex methods to get around it. While my fix solved the initial problem, it also broke any such method and, as I was a rookie in the formal way of doing things in the new company, the fix wasn't even bug free. From that time I was labelled "dangerous", from the initial problems with understanding the project and also my vocal way of expressing what I thought of leaving a project unstructured and buggy. Well, in hindsight, I have to agree that I wouldn't have felt a lot of love for someone calling me an idiot. Even if I were... especially if I were. Anyway, from this little incident you might have already guessed that a complete overhaul of the code (wood to stone) was out of the question. The powers that be had decided that starship Enterprise was to stay home, no bold missions for it.

I could go on with details, but you are probably already bored. Enough to say that I had my first real experience with Scrum there, a way in which all people had a role, each development cycle had phases that were followed in order and documented along the way, a system which, in time, would collect enough statistical data about the team so that it could predict development speed. All it needed for that was a team that would remain constant. Due to repeated reorg-ing my team had never the same structure for more than two or three months. The general (not per project, overall) company policy would shift radically, often completely in the opposite direction, every six months at most. Plans were set in motion, then discarded before reaching anywhere; performance metrics were created to measure project progress, only to be changed at the next strategic hiccup. It was clear that this was going nowhere like that and, instead of changing their way of constantly shivering in fear, they decided to close the project.

Only you see, the project earned money. Not a lot, but enough to count. There are tens of thousands of people paying for the service and hosting sites on it. You can't shut down a project like this. So they invented yet another expression "sustainability mode", to express the way they intended to zombify the project that they had advertised to clients and developers alike like the next cool thing that would solve all problems. I felt cheated and I could only imagine how clients that paid money instead of receiving them felt. There is an expression "the way to Hell is paved with good intentions". All the people - there were 70 developers and testers on the project and God knows how many managers and support staff - had the best intentions. We achieved a highway to Hell. Oh, and by the way, I never really got hired as a full employee. I remained "temporary" a consultant for the full length of my work there.

So what is the outcome of all of this? Two years of my life are gone. I have learned some things, but in the meantime lost a lot of my initial enthusiasm towards development. I stopped reading technical blogs and only spent my days thinking of the tasks ahead, like a good little robot. I've earned a lot more money, many of which I saved in the bank. I gained ten kilos (that's about 20 pounds, for you metrically challenged folk). I almost made my wife divorce me once, but we got over it. I've made some good friends. I learned to play chess a little better. I am not yet sure if the good balances the bad. Now I have found a new job opportunity, one that is even better paid. I only hope it will not be equally as depressing.

Was I wrong to be so optimistic about getting hired, as I am now, I guess, because it led to disappointment? Better to have loved and lost, I say. Were the people that misrepresented themselves and the project I was to work on wrong? I don't think so, I think they were equally optimistic and got equally disappointed. Was it wrong to have better expectations from the world? Prepare for the worst, but expect the best, I say. So yet again, I can't really blame anyone in the Romanian office and it is difficult to point the finger at the guys in the US as well. And yet, this is the result...

Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 is a strange enough book. It is not a book for beginners, as the title would have you believe, but only something that gives you a taste of new HTML and CSS features. Some of the things discussed are not very thorough, but may be very detailed (like when they talk about a hard to spot bug for a specific browser version). They talk very little of some often used features, but very in detail about something that will probably not be used by many people, like data annotation.

What is immediately obvious, though, is that the authors are professionals with a lot of experience. They see things and think about them in a way that a person with no design experience like myself has never thought about. Their explanations are backed by a lot of links and downloadable code, so it can be used like a reference. I would say that about a third of the book relates to HTML and the last two are about CSS. Awesome and weird things are being discussed, from custom fonts to 3D transforms, from data annotation of any HTML so that is machine parseable (like Google crawlers and such) to pagination control for layouts that need to look like books or be used in e-readers. It is also a modern book, the type that lets you know about various features, but instead of rehashing a subject, they give you a link to more information from someone else.

You can get example code from the book's site, as well as see the table of contents and details about the authors. What immediately jumps into mind is that the page is HTML5 and uses CSS3, but is not nearly as carefully crafted, data annotated or awesome as they advise in the book, which validates a little my view of the book: an interesting book to read about features you will probably rarely use. It certainly made me experiment some with my blog and think of ways of implementing many of the features, but in the end nobody wants something very over the top, so only small changes were made.

There is a Google tool called Google Alerts, which periodically looks for new information based on a query and sends it to you. Until recently I had it all sent on an RSS feed, but Google discontinued that option together with Google Reader (I know, boo!), so now I send it to an email address. Anyway, this article is about news in other languages than the one you select as default. I noticed today that one of the alerts, which contained German words, never returned any news in German, apparently all Google Alerts will show me will be English results. So I looked (on Google, of course) for ways to make the alerts multi language. The short answer is that they were never meant to be so and thus this is a sort of a hack, until they do something about it. Here is how you do it:

1. Go to google.[your language], for example http://google.ro, for Romanian
2. Search something there and ignore messages telling you to switch language or translate anything
3. Go to http://google.[your language]/alerts/manage - note that this will not work over https, like the search. It will return a 404 page if your URL starts with https instead of http
4. Add your alert (the language of the Alerts page should be the one that you have chosen)
5. Test that it worked by exporting your alerts and checking the Language column for your alert in the resulting file
6. Go to step 1 to add another alert in another language

So, in order to make an alert in multiple languages, you must add an alert for each language with the exact query. Well, since they are different languages, probably the query will be different as well, but if you are searching for a name, for example, it will always be the same.
This may work by starting the third step directly. It worked for me, but somebody on a forum said that you should not do that, probably something having to do with Google trying to guess what language should be applied from your location, account information, URL etc.
Also, there are some weird languages that may appear in the alerts file. For example the Italian language is "it-IT", the German is "de-DE", but the Romanian is "en-RO". Now I know a lot of Romanians that use half their words from English in a conversation, but that's not what Google had in mind, I think.

A while ago (geez, it's been 6 years!) I wrote an algorithm that was supposed to quickly and accurately find the distance between two strings. After a few iterations it got really simple to implement, understand and use, unlike more academic algorithms like Levenshtein, for example. I placed all the code in this blog and allowed everyone to use it in any way they saw fit. Let me make this clear that it is not the greatest invention since fire, but it is mine and I feel proud when people use it. And today I accidentally stumbled upon something called Mailcheck, by Derrick Ko and Wei Lu. Not only did they use my algorithm, but they also graciously linked to my blog. And, according to the description from their GitHub page, this javascript library is being used by the likes of Kicksend, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Minecraft and the Khan Academy. Talking about Sift going wild! Woohoo!

So I started to Google for other uses of Sift3. Here is a list:

• Mailcheck, the software that I was talking about above.
• Sift3 for AutoKey - Autokey does "Fast scriptable desktop automation with hotkeys". Toralf also published the result on GitHub Gist: AutoHotkey: StrDiff() and his implementation is now used in 7Plus, a software to improve usability in Windows
• Longest common substring problem - wikibooks varient vs sift3 varient - which seems to make Wikibooks the winner. Drat! :) loser! On second look I noticed that the values did not show time, but operations per second, so more is better. Also, looking at the implementation I noticed that it uses a maxOffset not of 5, but of the minimum length of the compared strings, which makes it more accurate, but much slower (and still wins!)
• A Java implementation on BitBucket
• A PDF document suggesting the algorithm is being used in an Italian software called CRM Deduplica

All in all I am very satisfied of how Sift3 is being used in the wild and, I have to say, grateful to the people that trusted my work enough to include it in theirs. It took 6 years, but look how much it has grown!

Update: To celebrate the usage of my algorithm, I've added an improved Javascript version in the original post, a form of the algorithm that I call "3B", since there are only minor improvements.
Now I have a weird idea of an algorithm that would compute the similarity between lists of strings (which is the usual usage of string distance). Could it be done, in a simple and straightforward manner like Sift3? What do you think?

I've had some changes in my life lately and more are coming so I took a break from chess, but I found a bit of time to finish this chess puzzle book that I started reading a few months ago, but never quite got around to complete. Chess Tactics for Champions is not really for champions, but for beginner to intermediate level, or at least this is what it felt like to me. Susan Polgar chose to structure the book into chapters of about 25 puzzles or examples, each covering some important aspect of chess tactics. Here is a list of those chapters:

• 01 - Forks and double attacks
• 02 - Pins
• 03 - Deflection/removing the guard
• 04 - Discoveries
• 05 - Double check
• 06 - Skewers
• 07 - Trapping pieces
• 08 - Decoys
• 09 - Intermediate moves
• 10 - Pawn promotion
• 11 - The back-rank problem
• 12 - Destroying the castled king's protection
• 13 - King chase
• 14 - Mixed checkmates in two moves
• 15 - Mixed checkmates in three moves
• 16 - Mixed checkmates in four moves
• 17 - Game-saving combinations
• 18 - Perpetual check
• 19 - Stalemate
• 20 - Traps and counter traps
• 21 - Sibling positions
• 22 - Twenty-five famous combinations

The last two chapters are presentational only, but the first 20 contain puzzles that the reader must solve, with solutions at the end of the chapter. The authors tried to order the chapters by complexity, so that beginners could understand and solve the first chapters and then move over to the more advanced positions, but it is not always so. It seemed to me that, for most of the chapters, the last two puzzles are especially chosen for the "wow!" factor.

The bottom line is that the book is not just something you read. You solve the puzzles, some are frustrating, some are beautiful, most can be "seen" without a board in front of you - for the last chapter I would advise a board, though - but one can return to this book again and again. For example myself, once I get around to chess again, I might go through the book, just to get into the solving mindset that is essential to beautiful play. Now, I don't know how other chess puzzle books are, this being my second chess book I have read, but I imagine some could be a lot better. However, the structure of Chess Tactics for Champions makes it very easy to use as a reference book. One thing I felt was missing was pawn play. Of course, that often enters the category of strategic play, rather than tactic, but still.

More about the authors at Wikipedia: Susan Polgar and Paul Truong. They have been married since 2006.

As I was saying in a previous post, there seem to be a lot of series and films in the Star Trek universe that are fan made. I have just finished watching Star Trek: Hidden Frontier and I have to say I was impressed. The show is by no means a masterpiece of cinema, but the effort and dedication were clearly great and applaudable.

Now, when you go to the Hidden Frontier link and you start watching from season 1, a warning pops up, inviting you to watch a more recent episode rather than starting from the beginning. And that is because season 1 was ridiculous and the show only started to look like something watchable somewhere in season 5 or 6. You see, Hidden Frontier is filmed exclusively in front of a green screen and all the décor is borrowed from existing Star Trek shows. The first Hidden Frontier season is low resolution, bad green screen capture and incredible bad acting. Does it make it any less remarkable? No. I have to say that, leaving the acting prowess of people that are clearly not actors aside, the last two seasons were almost on par with the real thing. The greenish contours are still there, but less visible, the 3-D models are better (at least imperial star fighters don't appear in battle scenes as in the first seasons), the actors are better. I would call it a success, although I don't have many friends who would be as enthusiastic watching it.

There are other series and films in the same universe. Star Trek: Odyssey will be next on my list. What really surprised me is that the scripts were very like Star Trek Next Generation and Voyager, but their quality did not improve with time. I was expecting a bunch of ST geeks to be able to make complex and interesting stories, the kind of stories that are usually not allowed on TV due to violence, moral complexity or scientific knowhow needed to understand the script. It was not to be. Also, they made this attempt to balance the Star Trek universe by bringing in gay romance and kisses. It would have been all good if they didn't also almost ignore any romance between girls and boys. It really is ridiculous how a single boy gets into at least three relationships, while the only straight love stories seem to be between a Vulcan and a human and between two old people. Being biased in the other direction doesn't bring balance, you know.

So all in all I recommend this show as a new experience, something to give us hope that ordinary people can still create and distribute independently, and a monument to the power of fans.

Oh, finally Herbert breaks the pattern up. His sixth and final Dune book, Chapterhouse, is brilliant, on par with the first, if you will. At the end of the book there is this little dedication to his wife, recently passed away, in which he thanks her for the beautiful years they had together. He describes her as his muse, basically. Perhaps that tragedy was what prompted such quality in the book. Or maybe it is just my personal preferences that make me see it as such a masterpiece.

The basic plot is that the Scattering is encroaching upon the centre, with the Honorate Matre being these vindictive tyrannical bitches that destroy everything in their path while flaunting a parody of Bene Gesserit organization. They are many and they have a lot of wealth and ships. Teg Myles returns as a ghola, Duncan Idaho is sexually bonded with the Honorate Mater Murbella, only bidirectionally, and there is only one last Tleilaxu master (thankfully Scytale, not that dolt Waff) under the protection of the Bene Gesserit. The book is all about survival; I liked that.

Now, there were some issues I had with previous books. The supreme arrogance and pomposity in Prophet of Dune and God Emperor of Dune was one. The ridiculous behaviour of Tleilaxu masters was another. Others can be overlooked, but these were really annoying for me. I am happy to say that Scytale appears as a cunning and intelligent opponent of the Bene Gesserit in Chapterhouse, while the supreme confidence the witches flaunt is proven to be a front, something that allows for their survival, rather than separate them from the human race. The ending is also quite interesting, but I can't spoil it for you.

Unfortunately, the year 1985 was the end of Dune and Frank Herbert. He died of a pulmonary embolism while fighting cancer. He had just re-married and Lynch's Dune movie had just been released. The film had little success in the US, but a lot in Europe and Japan (proving again that their audiences really stink :) ). Just in case you are considering watching the movie rather that reading the book, remember that, while Lynch really got the feel of the Dune book, the script makes the story unrecognisable.

Getting back to the book, it was a shock, the first time I read it, to know that it was the last. There are other Dune books, though, written by Brian Herbert, the son of Frank Herbert. I read none of those. The reason is that I believe the depth and subtlety in Dune was more important than the story itself. Instead I would urge the reading of other Frank Herbert books. Some were rather banal, but others (and here I include the WorShip universe and Hellstrom's Hive) were brilliant.

Reread in 2022

This was not supposed to be the last book of Dune. A seventh one was planned, but death stopped Herbert from achieving his goals. There was an old childhood friend of Herbert's who described him as always ahead, blazing trails, one step ahead. After reading all of the Frank Herbert Dune books, I feel that this is how the man really was, always thinking of the consequences of the past going into the far future. You would learn as much chess as you could, but when it was time to play Herbert, he would be inventing a new game.

I can't help but feel a sense of loss for everything that he didn't get to write. He died at 66 years old. He had at least ten more good years left. I am planning now to read the Brian Herbert books, as well, and then maybe continue with rereading all of Frank Herbert's books.

The man was not perfect - I know that there are people out there who write much better than he did - but Dune is truly a masterpiece, an ode to human ingenuity, a manifesto against stagnation, bureaucracy and the trap of repeating the past. Packed with some really astonishing wisdom, I do believe is one of the most rereadable books out there.

I consider myself a Star Trek fan. I've seen all of the series starting with The Original Series, all the movies, even those made by J.J.Abrahms and once I almost got my wife to divorce me because I was watching Star Trek series non stop when I came home. And yet, there is a parallel Star Trek universe I knew nothing about until now, when reading Phil Plait's blog entry about Star Trek Continues and searching the web I stumbled upon this (really) hidden frontier of Star Trek.

Having just watched the first episode, I have to say that it is not much worse than the original 1967 low budget Star Trek series. The script and stage props and even most acting was consistent to what I expected from the first series. The only problem are the actors, all of them fans that do this for fun rather than profit and therefore not the best in the world. But they grow on you. The "Pilgrim of Eternity" episode continues a TOS episode that involved the god Apollo. I found it interesting and nice that the actor that played the aged Apollo was actually the actor playing the god in the original episode. Also part of the crew are Christopher Doohan, son of late James Doohan and playing his father's role, and Grant Imahara, which you may know from the Mythbusters team. Even Marina Sirtis, the annoying Deanna Troi from Star Trek Next Generation is acting as the computer voice. Overall I can say that I liked it, especially in this "free for all" format that I personally expected to take over the Internet a while ago, the way "apps" took over mobiles. Turns out I was wrong, but not completely, as you well see.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Searching on IMDb I found out there are many other Star Trek projects that I had no idea existed. Here is a list:

• Star Trek: Of Gods and Men (2007) - a movie apparently staring Chekov and Tuvok and directed by Tim Russ (Tuvok)
• Star Trek: Renegades (2014) - the continuation of Of Gods and Men, with actors like Eduard Furlong and Corin Nemec and Robert Picardo
• Star Trek I: Specter of the Past - guesting Deanna Troi and Data, amongst others
• Star Trek Versus Batman (2006) - I don't even want to know what this is, even if a Spock vs Joker encounter sounds intriguiing
• Star Trek: Hidden Frontier (2000) - Are you kidding me? It has 7 seasons!
• Star Trek: New Voyages (2004) - seems to be continuing Next Generation, has one season
• Star Trek: Odyssey (2007) - the only review on Imdb is killing it, but it has 3 seasons
• Star Trek: Intrepid (2007) - the adventures of the Intrepid?
• Star Trek: Federation One (2008) - another series in the Hidden Frontier universe. 1 season
• Star Trek: Osiris (2009) - 1 season
• Star Trek: The Helena Chronicles (2009) - I don't know what this is about, but episode 1 starts with a gay wedding and Klingons among the people applauding. 2 seasons.
• Star Trek: Henglaar, M.D. (2009) - Whahahaha, I imagine an alien doctor with a limp and an antigrav cane. 2 seasons and it is an audio drama!

I expect most of this to be horrible, but look at all the effort! A lot of information about this parallel Star Trek universe seems to be available here: Star Trek Expanded Universe and as you have seen most of the series above are under the Hidden Frontier umbrella. You can see a list of shows and their episodes here: Star Trek Hidden Frontier episodes

Indeed, the pattern holds: Frank Herbert creates a very beautiful book after the bore that was Emperor of Dune. One good book followed by a bland one and then again. Heretics of Dune has more action, more of the Bene Gesserit introspections and revelations and a bunch of diverse heroes, each with their own "powers". It's basically the superhero Dune book.

Well, I am obviously oversimplifying here, but the gist of it is right. The book is entertaining, with many characters to identify with and a compelling storyline. A new pattern emerges, though: after many pages of setting the stage and keeping the reader on the edge of the seat with anticipation, Herbert just quickly reveals his hand and finishes the game. It's like, for him, the mystery of the story was all that mattered and, once exposed, the book must end. That was a bit frustrating.

The book follows the exploits of yet another, better and improved, Duncan ghola, a weird desert girl who can command worms, a Tleilaxu master, many Bene Gesserit and the loyal Bashar Miles Teg. All in the face of terrible danger from "the Scattering", the many flavours of humans that spread out from the centre core after the death of Leto II and the ensuing chaos. The Tleilaxu are shown as bumbling buffoons, which somehow bothered me, because they are always shown as a powerful force, on par with the witches of Bene Gesserit, yet on every occasion they are outclassed, outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by them. Also the Zensunni Sufi angle was a bit of a stretch. The priesthood of Rakis was somewhat similar, and although it was normal for them to be idiots, they were presented as a powerful force as well, which made no sense. There were other things in the book that were not perfect, but one can easily overlook them.

Overall I loved the book, it was one of the most entertaining for me in the saga. More stretches of the imagination, though, and some felt a bit like special effects. Although the universe is the same with Dune, Heretics feels differently. In a way every Dune book was an extension of the original universe, trying as much as possible to not thread the same path as its predecessors, but this book really shifted the perspective of the reader towards a completely different awareness, while expanding some elements from the original Dune book, like the Bene Gesserit inner dialogue and deep perception and also hints of ecological laws, only this time applied to the entire Universe. At the end I resented that it had finished so quickly, which after all, is the hallmark of any good book.

2022 reread

  I did not remember my own reaction to this book and now, after rereading both the book and my previous review, I am content to see that I have kind of the same feelings now. I do believe I maybe liked this book most of them all. I know that's kind of... ahem... heretical, but at the same time it was more complex, had many interesting characters, introduced many new ideas that were presented in an exciting and more technical way.

  The main problem with Dune books so far is that they are a bit inconsistent, like crafted together from bits written slightly differently and not always clicking with each other. I mean, what the Bene Gesserit do is amazing, how they manipulate people via their words, their actions, their manufactured myths. Yet at the same time it stretches belief that no one caught on to how they are doing it. The Tleilaxu master knows that the sisters are doing something, he acknowledges as much, then falls pray to hope and then unjustified certainty that he was wrong. And then the book itself explains, in that certain preachy way, that people evolve to become immune to powers used against them, but it only affects the Honored Matres! And what about Ix? They are amazing engineers in one book, an afterthought in the other, even when they are the builders of space travel machines.

  The same can be said about societies, technologies, natural habitats, science in general, which are very well crafted, but don't stand to scrutiny from the knowledge we now possess.

  In that same vein, Heretics of Dune is both amazingly incredibly smart ( I LOVE how Herbert views people and groups and societies as a whole ) and carelessly inconsistent. But since it leans more towards the smart, I liked the book quite a bit, especially the first half.

I remember fondly the first albums from Garbage. Shirley's naughty lips and delicious Scottish accent, the new sound that used all those electronic sound filters, the weird melodic combinations and heavy guitars. It all fit into my rebellious streak from back then. So I thought I would listen to their last album: Not Your Kind of People. Unfortunately, the title is quite correct: they are not my kind of people anymore. The entire album sounds like a single long song, a boring one. Gone is the Scottish accent, gone are the hard riffs and hard lyrics and most of all gone is the angry emotion from Shirley's voice. The background music is some kind of sound filtered electropop that doesn't do anything for me.

I don't really blame them. It is difficult to maintain the angry forceful image when you're 46 years old, but also experience should bring new value into music. It's not all youthful anger. Too bad, I really wanted to like this album. I leave you with the original song that brought them to fame: I'm Only Happy When It Rains.

I am taking advantage of the switch to the summer season for TV series to mark the changes.



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - despite my efforts, Doctor Who becomes less watchable by the season, so I removed the 'want'. Now Math Smith has announced he is to leave the show.
• Torchwood - A new show appeared called Frankie and starring Eve Myles, the frontwoman for Torchwood. This might mean a permanent end to the concept.
• Criminal Minds - it's a neverending story, this. Three seasons of episodes have piled up. I doubt I will ever watch them, but hope yet remains.
• Dexter - season 8 of the series will be the last. It's official. The launch date is June 30, 2013.
• True Blood - June 16, 2013 is the release date. The trailer seems to imply something epic.
• The Good Wife - the show continues to be good relative quality. My wife asked for it specifically after the end of the first halfseason of the year.
• Haven - The third season is over, a fourth was announced. The ending of the third season leaves me with few expectations.
• Falling Skies - season three will start on June 9, 2013. It's one of those that are just good and sci-fi enough to keep watching.
• Southpark - season 17 starts on September 2013. Can't wait.
• The Killing - still on my watch list, haven't started watching it.
• Suits - third season is about to start. It doesn't make much sense, but I like it. Release date for the third season: July 16.
• Breaking Bad - There is still one half of the last season starting July 2013. This will end the show. Maybe then I will watch it all to see what happened.
• Californication - Season 6 was really lame. There will be a seventh one, date unannounced, but who cares anymore?
• Homeland - Season three is announced to start on September 29, 2013. I can't empathise with ANY of the characters, but I like it.
• The Walking Dead - the season three finale was pretty intense, if a bit rushed. Andrea finally died! Yes! And Carl is more and more awesome by the day, albeit a little psychopathic.
• Game of Thrones - two more episodes from the third season. The show maintains its good quality. I wonder what will happen when they get to the end of the books and R.R.Martin has still not finished (or started) another book.
• Mad Men - Season six is not as great as I have expected. Characters I liked get pissed upon and those I don't get back to main status. And Don annoys the hell out of me. Who could get bored of Jessica Paré?!
• Misfits - the show has been renewed for a fifth season. I will watch it, but I don't have much hopes for it.
• Sherlock - the third season of the series will begin probably late 2013. I liked it, even if a bit too... Moffaty? Benedict Cumberbatch is more and more present on the small and big screens.
• Spartacus - Vengeance - Finally watched the final season. It was good, I give it that, but in the end it had to be at least a bit faithful to the factual story, so Spartacus died. And also Manu Bennett had less and less of a presence in the series, which was too bad, since he is clearly the best actor there. Dustin Clare and Simon Merrells weren't bad either.
• My Babysitter's a Vampire - No news of a third season, and probably there won't be one.
• Continuum - the interaction of the characters has gained complexity, even if the characters themselves are a bit like cardboard. I like it.
• Copper - the second season of this cop drama starts late 2013. I liked the show and the characters.
• Longmire - the second season has started, with the main character being haunted (almost literally) by the mistakes and people of his past. I don't know if I like this new direction, but we'll see.
• The Newsroom - the second season starts on the 14th of July. It's too NewYorky for me.
• Arrow - I don't want it, but I watch it. Addiction is a horrible thing.
• Elementary - an interesting twist about the identity of Moriarty in the first season finale. And they arrest Moriarty as well. That only in the first season. What will they do with the second one, starting September 2013?
• Hatfields and McCoys - This American Civil War miniseries was filmed in Romania and stars Kevin Costner. I really wanted to see it, but didn't get around to it, yet.
• Hit and Miss - Probably a miniseries, if the first season is only 6 episodes. The synopsis is funny though: "A transsexual contract killer's life is thrown into turmoil when she discovers that she fathered a child eleven years earlier and must now mix her killer instincts with her parental responsibilities."
• Hunted - if the second season will even exist, it will be a reboot. Same character, different series. Melissa George is so insanely beautiful and plays in cool productions as well.
• Parade's End - another miniseries. The trailer looks really promising and I haven't read the book. As soon as I watch it you will know.
• Restless - actually, it was just a two part movie. It was fun to watch, but some of the elements in the film were hard to swallow. It was a war time story remember in the present. All the present time bit was bollocks. It did star Hayley Atwell, though, who is a foxy little Brit.
• Ripper Street - First season has 8 episodes and ended well. I like the show and I can't wait for the second season.
• The Fear - I've made the mistake to read reviews. Almost all negative. I won't watch this.
• Vegas - Vegas was cancelled. I liked it, that's why! Damn their idiotic audiences to hell!
• Wizards versus Aliens - there will be a second season, starting late 2013. I don't know if I will still watch it, but it's childish fun.
• Banshee - weird little modern western, its second season will start in January 2014.
• Bates Motel - A TV series based on Psycho. Haven't started watching it.
• Black Mirror - the second season was the same gritty, despondent, dark thing that the first season was, but the stories weren't that good, I think. Somehow it was difficult to watch and it was kind of downletting.
• Broadchurch - The second season of the series will start March 2014, but what is the point? Same character, completely different setting and story? This one pretty much started and ended all threads. I liked it, though, with that British quality of adding depth to characters, God bless them.
• Cracked - Another Canadian cop production. Cracked follows the newly formed Psych Crimes Unit within a Canadian police department set up by a psychiatrist in partnership with the police.
• Cult - the series was cancelled as it aired. I will probably not watch it.
• Golden Boy - The series follows the successful, meteoric rise — from age 26 to 34 — of Walter Clark, an ambitious cop who becomes the youngest Police Commissioner in New York City history.So, yeah, a police drama again, but it seems more than the usual crap. We'll see.
• House of Cards - I almost added a "want" status to this new series on the basis of Kevin Spacey being the lead actor alone. It is an adaptation of a previous BBC miniseries of the same name which is based on the novel by Michael Dobbs. This also lends support to the theory that the show is good. People that started watching it liked it, as well. So, all I need is to start watching it.
• In the Flesh - I think this might be a gem in the mud. Some episodes are not great, but overall this series is an interesting one.
• Labyrinth - I don't know what to say about this show yet. John Hurt stars in it, it seems to involve a connection with the long lost Christian sect of Cathar and is a drama fantasy. People seem to like it well.
• Monday Mornings - The only medical drama in the recent past that I liked. It was cancelled, obviously.
• Motive - Motive is a Canadian police procedural drama following working-class single-mom Detective Flynn (Lehman) in her investigation of crimes. Each episode also reveals the killers and victims at the start of the show, unusual in police procedural dramas. Haven't watched it yet.
• Orphan Black - The show got me. It is about a bunch of (very good looking) female clones who did not know what they were until they met accidentally. It could have been a great show, but they left the science and logic aside and went for Desperate Clonewives meets every bad conspiracy theory TV series ever made.
• Privates - BBC One drama television series set in 1960 which follows the stories of eight privates who are part of the last intake of National Service, and their relationships with their officers and non-commissioned officers, civilian staff and families. Didn't start watching it, yet.
• Red Widow - a housewife from Northern California whose husband, a figure in organized crime, was killed. She has to continue his work to protect her family. Don't know how good it is yet.
• Scandal - an American political thriller television series created by Shonda Rhimes, of Grey's Anatomy fame. I fear the moment when I will present this to my wife and she might like it.
• The Americans - Keri Russell is the perfect American housewife from the 80's, only she is a Russian KGB agent and so is her husband! The series is interesting and the actors play well. I hope it doesn't go ballistic (pun intended) in order to secure audiences and thus lose any touch with reality.
• The Blue Rose - a New Zealand crime drama television series about some lowly clerks who join forces to fight the corporate corruption that caused the death of one of their colleagues.
• The Doctor Blake Mysteries - Australians have made a good TV drama here. An openminded doctor in a conservative little town has a sweet tooth for police investigation. The police chief likes him, most of the others despise his irreverence to the status quo. This prompted me to watch a similar Australian drama series called "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" which is about the same thing, only with a female detective in the 20's. Doctor Blake is better, though.
• The Following - watched a little of it. I might continue. I don't care much about the subject, but it was well done and acted.
• Twisted - A teen with a troubled past reconnects with his two female best friends from childhood. He becomes the prime suspect when a fellow student is surprisingly found dead in her home. Didn't start watching it, but it doesn't sound great.
• Utopia - a British conspiracy thriller that follows a small group of people who find themselves in possession of the manuscript sequel of a cult graphic novel called "The Utopia Experiments" which is rumoured to have predicted the worst disasters of the last century. This leads them to be targeted by an organisation known as 'The Network', which they must avoid to survive. Sounds interesting and has a high IMDb rating.
• Vikings - a Canadian-Irish historical drama television series, inspired by the epic sagas about the raiding, trading, and exploring Norsemen of early medieval Scandinavia. It follows the exploits of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok and his crew and family. Sounds cool, but I didn't look at it, yet. My friends watched it, though, and liked it.
• Wallander - There is to be a fourth season airing in 2014. I will watch it.

And now for new shows!

• Betas - a comedy show about four geeks trying to become entrepreneurs. It was a little too funny. It could have been a great drama. But think about it: I don't like comedies and I kind of enjoyed this one. Maybe it will turn out a good show.
• Da Vinci's Demons - Leonardo Da Vinci is young and pretty much a superhero. Besides making Gatling cannons, MIRVs, real time video, photography, independently flying mechanical birds, scuba diving and many others, he is obsessively looking for The Book of Leaves, in a time where mysticism seems as common (and valid) as scientific fact. Hard to believe, no connection to reality, but flamboyant enough to enjoy it. Think of it as a steampunk doctor House meets Sherlock Holmes. I know it's hard.
• Defiance - happy beyond belief that another sci-fi show went on the air, I was disappointed to see it just a bad western with a sci-fi paintcoat. I watch it, but it ain't great, partner!
• Frankie - a drama starring Eve Myles, the main actress from Torchwood. With John Barrowman playing in Arrow, I guess that means the end of Torchwood. Anyway, I haven't started watching Frankie, yet.
• Hannibal - a TV series based on the movies. Now, it could be interesting, but I doubt it. I have yet to start watching it.
• Hemlock Grove - a werewolf TV series. It seems the usual beautiful teen extravaganza, with little to show otherwise, but the mood was dark. I might still watch it.
• Les Revenants - a very cool idea that revolutionizes the zombie genre. The French had it, of course, and the Americans are now stealing it for a new show. But until then feast your eyes with the "naked redhead Gaul teens" version which, for good reason, is said to have a Lynchian Twin Peaks feel.
• Life of Crime - Another British miniseries. Short description: "A rookie cop is obsessed with tracking down the killer of a 15-year-old girl, who she hunts over the course of 28 years." I don't really think it's going to be great, but it stars Hayley Atwell, of babylicious fame.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries - I've already mentioned this when I talked about Doctor Blake's Murder Mysteries. Both are pretty well done drama series and it seems the producers intend to alternate the two. Thus in 2014 we will probably watch season 2 of Miss Fisher, while the next year we'll be watching Doctor Blake. I do believe Doctor Blake's character to be of better quality. It manages to convey a lot of compassion and interest in the victims of the crimes, while Miss Fisher is merely doing it for the kicks.
• The Fall - It is a new police drama starring Dana Scully! "When the local police are unable to catch a serial killer who is terrorizing the populace of Belfast, Northern Ireland, a detective superintendent is brought in from London to head the investigation."
• The Politician's Husband - David Tennant, ladies and gentlemen, with Emily Watson as his wife. Both politicians, the wife always in the shadow of her husband's career. Now the roles get reversed. I have seen the first episode, though, and it was kind of boring.
• The Tomorrow People (1973-1979) - Now, this is the British version, from 1973. It is a children sci-fi series about children that have superpowers and they are chased by a shadowy organisation from the US. I wanted to see it because the Americans are doing a reboot in 2013. The problem is that the first was really rubbish: bad acting, bad stories, I fell asleep watching it! I really do hope there is nothing common to the new series except the name and the general idea.
• The Village - a BBC TV series written by Peter Moffat, it tells the story of life in a Derbyshire village through the eyes of a central character. Haven't started watching it, yet, but it doesn't sound very cool.
• Zombieland - you know the movie, right? This was supposed to be a TV series based on it. It was a comedy, though, and the characters were not funny and very hard to sympathize with. They only aired the pilot before it got cancelled.

A while ago I decided to comment on every cinema movie that I watch using the IMDb platform. I wanted to have a history of films I watched and also remember what they were about. (It might not happen to you, but there were at least three movies that I realized I had seen already only when the ending came). Also it would be interesting to revisit films I liked or hated and see what changed in my perspective during time. Certainly it happens this way with books, as you've seen in case of the book Dune, by Frank Herbert.

So today I went to see the list of my comments. They became rarer and rarer because I have many more responsibilities and also I am watching a lot of TV series, which I usually don't comment on. It is a list of 1075 movies, the first one being in the 27 of December 2004 and the last today, the 1st of June 2013. That's a difference of almost ten years, more exactly 3239 days. It amounts to a little less than a movie every three days. I realise that this is an enormous waste of time. Think about it, leaving all TV series aside (which at the moment take a lot of my time as well) I spend half an hour of every day on average just watching films. That's 2% of my total time, in which I include both sleep and work. And I don't even watch TV. If I did, I would have to factor in hours of commercials and channel switching, nature and science documentaries and news shows.

I believe this to be an addiction. I have difficulty even admitting this here, which lends credit to the idea. Moreover, I know it is an addiction, a total waste of time, but I have known it for a long time and I have never managed to stop. I never even got myself to attempt it. Extend this to the entire human race and it is a staggering waste of human time and life. If a disease would kill 2% of all human kind it will be called a pandemic, it would be called horrible, it would kill 140 million people. Add TV and you get a billion people dead. You can then add the time spent discussing movies and TV with friends and acquaintances and it just grows. How come something that serves little purpose becomes the biggest time killer of all time?

That being said, if you are interested in the latest movies I've seen, the list is in the left there, in the About me section. We can discuss them together! Oh, wait...