Ok, I am working on the blog to make it more accessible. I've replaced the template, I made all changes in the template from javascript and CSS, not by editing it and I've removed many of the things clogging the site. Not the cats and flies, though :) The light (low band) version of the site is not working anymore. If you want just the content, you can open the RSS feed.

I would like to know what you are thinking about the new look and I hope I will find the time to write interesting posts.

I almost expected the guy to be Canadian. :) This series of fantasy books is a masterpiece of writing. Not only it is complex of plot and emotion, but the characters are many, diverse and (most of all) different.

So far, the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, written by American author George R. R. Martin, consists of four books, the first published in 1996 and the last in 2005. At least three other books are planned in this series. The plot is a historical fantasy, but one unlike the books I've read recently. The aspects of magic and otherworldiness are rare, the bulk of the writing being about the feudal world, with kings, knights, low borns, maidens and whores, thieves, rapists and murderers, plotters and honorable men. No wonder that, lacking a lot of special effects, the story has been selected as the basis for a TV series.

But what is more important than anything is that the writing is really good. The characters are all human, with needs, desires, qualities and faults. You can't help but empathise with them, only to suffer at the cruel fate the writer bestows upon them. Not one escapes unscathed from the malice and pettiness of other people or from shere bad luck. You get to like the characters, then Martin fucks them up. I really wanted to use a more elevated language here, but it's the truth: the world he depicts seems horribly real, not a fairy tale of valiant white knights and pure maidens, but of ridiculous people grabbing lustfully whatever life offers them as it is unlikely their fortune is going to last long.

For the bad part, though, I think the author went too deep, got himself responsible for a lot of characters that he must now move forward, in gruesome detail. The fourth book became so large that he had to split it. He did so by character and geography, rather than by time, so a lot of the characters were missing from the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, and left for the fifth, but acting in the same timeline. At the end of A Feast for Crows the author explains his decision to not just split the book in the middle with a "To Be Continued" ending, and hopes for a publication of the second half in a year. That was in 2005. Ahem.

A lot of people are a bit confused by the long wait for the fifth book. Martin keeps making promises that he doesn't keep and, in July this year, he announced that A Dance with Dragons is already 1400 pages long and 5 chapters close to completion. I hope he does finish it quickly enough, although that would only prolong my suffering anyway. I am sure the fifth book will be as brilliant as the others, but then I will have to wait another 5 years for the sixth. I know TV series usually have no plot, but at least they come weekly ;)

Bottom line: The books are great, I recommend them to any lover of fantasy or even historical novels. I can hardly wait for the TV series, A Game of Thrones, as well.

While waiting for the tenth book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen saga, I went and read Prince of Nothing, by another Canadian author, R. Scott Bakker. This is a three book story, first published in 2004, about what I can only describe as a psychopath, member of a rationalizing sect, going out into the world to protect the secret of said sect.

The book is well written, although not nearly as brilliant as the Malazan series. However the subject of it is very interesting, at least from my standpoint. It concerns a human that is trained in the ways of mental manipulation, rationale and causality, something akin to the Vulcans from StarTrek, but with a very human side to it, the one that pushes one to amass power and use their knowledge to manipulate.

No wonder that the "prince of nothing" is the central character in the books, but not the main character, the role being left to a sorcerer, a man that is at the same time keeper of arcane knowledge and the scorn of ordinary humans. I can't help but empathize with the guy: basically a geek in love with a whore, while a psychopath destroys his world with insidious manipulation. ;)

There is another central character to the story, an insane barbarian, like a tortured Conan, who is both terrifyingly strong and ridiculously fragile, both a mindless warrior and a brilliant strategist. He is also, like Achamian the sorcerer, an exponent of humanity.

Prince of Nothing is a very smart book, one that can only get better as the writing skills of Scott Bakker improve. Its assets are both a scientific approach to the human psyche and a veritable intrigue of arcane powers in conflict with each other on the background of huge masses of clueless people. The plot itself is similar to the story in the Berserk manga, at least its start, where the strong warrior chooses to follow the charismatic and ambitious leader only to his doom. The moral, as I saw it, is that while we choose to live our lives with eyes closed, we cannot in good conscience pretend to deserve control over what happens to us.

I hope the series, known as "The Second Apocalypse", continues, since Prince of Nothing raised more questions than gave answers and the plot really caught my attention. A nice book that I warmly recommend.

I haven't been the most present of hosts, but then again, I haven't seen much interest for the collaboration page, with its open chat and whiteboard. Therefore I replaced the link to it with the Plugoo chat. The blog desperately needs some refactoring, but not likely that it will happend soon.

I was posting a while ago about the first album from Hole's bassist, Melissa Auf Der Maur. I found that the music had a haunting femaleness in it and sounded pretty cool. She has recently released her second album Out of Our Minds and my opinion is... that they were! The songs are lame, like a really wattered out version of the first. Lady, if you don't feel like it, wait until the muse graces you with her presence, don't just write crap because you have a deadline. (Let me do that, ahem...)

Moving on to Linkin Park. A refreshing mixture of hip hop and rock, their first albums (Hybrid Theory and Meteora) made them famous. If you don't count the collection of remixes of their previous songs, their third album, Minutes to Midnight, was released after some time had passed (period during which Mike Shinoda was writing hip hop like crazy and the other guy... well, nobody knows what he did), had some environmental messages, some slow music, maybe some Michael Jacksony save the world songs... It pretty much sucked, but it was also ok. I mean, if you want to mellow down a little, just to try it on, why not? So now I got reminded of them when I accidentally saw Transformers and the theme of the film was sang by Linkin Park and called New Divide. It sounded kind of cool, something that resembled their first albums, so I got their latest album, A Thousand Suns, and tried it on. Long story short: it sucked. There were some cool songs, like Wretches and Kings, or Blackout, but overall, it was a whiny piece of crap. Dude! It's called ROCK, you're letting a Japanese hip hopper make you look like an emo kid trying to sing for the highschool prom.

Ok, now for some of the better songs on these albums:

Melissa auf der Maur - Out of Our Minds



Linkin Park - Wretches and Kings

So I have returned from the holidays, but I have still a ton of stuff to organize before I get my mojo back. I will probably start writing entries from next monday, featuring the holiday to Greece, books I've read, TV series that I am watching and, hopefully, something related to programming, too :)

However, I have amassed a few small things that I wanted to say and are minute enough to not deserve their own blog post, so here are some of them:

• I have watched the British TV mini series called The Deep. It stars lovely Minnie Driver, but the show is utter crap! I couldn't believe how bad it was. So, don't watch it!
• Internet Explorer 9 beta was released and it is downloadable. However, when trying to install it at home it said I cannot install IE9 on a Windows XP machine and I must upgrade the operating system. Verboten! Here is a hearty Fuck you! from me, Microsoft. When are you going to get that no one prefers Windows 7 to XP?
• I've finally watched The Expendables. Imagine one of those really low budget TV movies with heroes killing faceless bad guys in huge explosions, only with known people in the underdevelopped and badly written roles. Fail!

I have been waiting for this game for 12 years, just like everybody else, but not for the usual reasons. I like the Blizzard stories. I liked the Starcraft tales of the first game and I absolutely loved the Warcraft III plot. I was expecting something glorious this time. Well... I was kind of disappointed. The story is pretty linear, with cowboy characters and dialogues seemingly stolen directly from the propaganda in Starship Troopers.

But first, a word from our sponsors :). The campaign has a secret mission. Read about it before starting the single player game. So even if you have a Queen of Blades nagging you talking a walk around the base and buying her Xel'Naga artifacts, don't rush the Media Blitz mission. ;)

I have this old Sempron 2500+ with 1Gb of RAM. The game, at the lowest possible settings, was snail paced. One needs memory for this baby. I am not blaming Blizzard for my laziness in buying a computer, but it seemed to me that all the slowness came from reasons that could have been addressed. For example the game (as it should) remembers correctly every keystroke and mouse click in battle. However, in the HUD or in the game menu, one has to wait for the buttons to light up before clicking, and then keep pressing until the button lights up the second time. In game, the greatest slowness came from special effects that were not related to the game play. I understand a suspended nuke over a flowing lava fountain might exert the CPU of a computer, but the animation itself could have been scaled down to an animated GIF for crying out loud. The cinematic animations were pretty nice, and I loved how when I ran out of resources the film would not freeze, instead the characters would wait for the next part of the dialogue, breathing and moving their eyes. But still, since there is no interaction whatsoever from the user, can't you precache it into a movie? One that can be played on any computer and has the video in sync with the audio?
So yes, the game is running slow on my computer, but I feel that it could have worked a lot better with only some minor tweaks of the in game interface.

The in game interface is pretty nice, completely 3D and the map itself is 3D and some units (a precious few) can take advantage of that, like hopping jet packed soldiers or air-ground transforming machines called the Vikings). However, the game play is almost identical to the first game, so the 3D feels kind of pointless. There are camera zoom and rotation abilities, but the zoom out is limited to a pretty low setting and the zoom in is kind of pointless unless you have female units to properly look at :)

The units of the game are interesting enough. The old units have been morphed, replaced, removed, and new units were added. For the humans are multiple types of turrets, including machineguns on the bunkers, air units dropping turrets and a special mind control tower that permanently captures zerg units. The Goliaths are still there, but also a more heavy, ground focused Thor unit is available. There are multiple soldier units other than the Marines and Firebats, like hopping and grenade launching units. It is funny though, most human soldiers and vehicles are focused on attacking only ground units. The air units have been reinvented. There are small troop carriers that can heal units, really big Hercules troop carriers, the Battlecruisers have an upgrade that allows them to attack air units with missiles, the Valkirie is gone, but it was replaced by the Viking, a sort of transformer unit that can fly and attack air units or transform into a walking robot that attacks ground units. There are two types of science vessels and they repair mechanical units instead of firing EMP pulses. There are two types of ghosts, too.

The Zerg have been transformed, too, as well as the Protoss, but I can't really address this issue until I play some multiplayer games to see it from all perspectives. And yes, I guess you already know by now, but I will tell you anyway: after 12 years of waiting, you only get the human campaign. The Zerg follows, then the Protoss, probably in expansions to the game.

There is a mini campaign with the protoss, where any two templars (dark or light) can be morphed into an Archon, but I have seen no trace of the Dark Achon. I really loved that unit. I hope they didn't remove it. Also the zerg overlords need to transform into Overseers in order to be observers; they lose the ability to transport and to pour creep from the air (yeah, really cool) and instead have the ability to spawn banelings, creatures that attack ground units and transform into the same low level unit they encounter, like a zealot or marine or something like that. I know this because, while missing the Dark Archon, I really loved the human zerg capturing beacon tower :) I haven't seen any lurkers, either. I liked them, too. Instead there are some walking buildings that burrow in the creep and become normal ground turrets. Maybe that's the only way to build ground turrets now.

There were some real innovations to the game. The units that can hop to high ground is one of them. The way SCVs are repairing nearby structures and mechanical units without someone having to tell them to do it is something that I really liked. Also you can place a building over ground covered by your own units and they will just move out of the way. You also get useful alerts, like idle SCVs. I liked that as well. There is a special human building where one can call mercenaries, specialized unit squadrons that have extra health and deal extra damage. Also, in the story, there are research points that you earn and use them to select one of two choices in a list of pairs of technologies. For example you can choose to slow zerg units instead of capturing them with the beacon, you can choose stronger bunkers instead of machine gun equipped, etc.

That being said, there are still ridiculous ways in which groups of units interact. You can't easily tell a group of medics to accompany and repair a marine unit. If you select them all and attack, the medics will heal the marines, but if you tell them to move, they won't! If you select multiple air and ground units, there is no way to tell them to clump together. The air units will just go over and die, while the ground units use the scenic route. Units do move out of the way of other moving units, but only for a while, sometimes getting into infinite loops. As in the previous game, the forward line of an attack group doesn't know to move a little forward to let the back like be in attack range and heavily hit units don't really have any way to retreat while others are covering.

So yes, I guess one can enjoy the game as the one before, but I am the kind of guy who likes automatic transmission, cars that park themselves and, hopefully in the near future, drive themselves. I would have created an entire option panel that described how units ought to behave.

Now for the story. Spoilers alert! If you want to play the game and see the story unfold, stop reading!.

The sector is mostly occupied by humans. Mengsk has overthrown the government and became emperor, one that is even more brutal and oppressive than the one before. In the process he betrayed his partners: Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan. Raynor is now the leader of the resistance, while Sarah Kerrigan was abducted by the Zerg, transformed into an infested version of herself and has since taken over as the leader of the Zerg, after the Protoss have destroyed the Overmind.

So Raynor is doing mischief trying to get to Mengsk, while the Zerg appear in the sector and start taking over human worlds. The Protoss couldn't care less. They occasionally purge worlds of Zerg (by destroying the entire planet, inhabited or not) or hold up in sacred locations, bent on stopping anyone from taking their precious holy artifacts.

You see, the Protoss are believers in the Xel'Naga, their creator gods. Well, what do you know? The Xel'Naga actually exist, they created the Protoss and the Zerg and now they are returning. Looking like hybrids of Protoss and Zerg, they have shields, they can heal really fast and can corrupt zerg units into becoming their slaves. Probably tired of waiting 12 years to get the second Starcraft game, they are pretty pissed and want to corrupt all the Zerg into destroying all life in the sector, then commanding them to kill themselves, thus ending all life.

Raynor is here to save the world so, with a little premonitory help from his friends Zeratul and Tassadar, he sees what the Xel'Naga plan and sees that the entire future depends on him NOT KILLING Kerrigan. She alone can do something against the Xel'Naga. We also learn that the Overmind was under the control of the Xel'Naga all the time and it created the Queen of Blades from Kerrigan as a solution to its enslavement, thus proving great courage. Poor Overmind :'(

Therefore, the purpose of this campaign is to get to the Queen of Blades and use an ancient Xel'Naga artifact to purge the Zerg out of her. Badly enough, Infested Kerrigan is not the sexy babe she was in the first franchise, instead she is some afro-mongoloid with bad skin and shiny eyes, so I was highly motivated to see her brought back to normal.

The story has three choice points, which can slightly alter the plotline. One is when the world where you relocated some humans you saved gets infested. Protoss units come to purge the world and you can have the choice of purging the world yourself or fighting the Protoss to stop them. Later on, one can choose whether to use Ghosts or Specters. Specters are a slightly insane version of the Ghost created by one of Mengsk's secret programs. Then, on Charr, you can choose to destroy the Zerg Nydus worms or their air units. I was also mentioning a secret mission, found if destroying a conspicuous building in the Media Blitz mission.

Obviously, I purged the humans and kept the spectres. I killed the Nydus worms, too, but I think that's clearly the more sensible solution when you have the capture beacons.

!!! Uberspoilers !!!

The campaign ends with Raynor untransforming Kerrigan, killing Tychus who has been sent to kill her, probably by some Xel'Naga influenced human group (I dare say it would have been stupid for Mengsk to ally with the Xel'Naga, but he is a likely culprit) and purging Charr of all Zerg.

Ok, there are also some cheats that can help you end the game faster. You won't get any achievements if you use them, but then again, you need to play the uncracked version to use achievements, so the hell with them.

You know when you are playing some famous game you get millions of pages discussing strategies and solutions to in-game problems? Well, if you think about it, all those pages could be brought together and bound in something like a book. Why not write StarCraft for Dummies or Professional Warhammer 40000? And with that in mind, how would you feel about a book whose entire purpose is discussing Pac-Man?

Curious yet? You can check it out here! It writes about the algorithms used in the game, the tips and tricks for playing, even the different personalities of the four killer ghosts! Everything complete with pictures, diagrams and YouTube videos!

I quite liked this anime series, one which combined with success the typical demon slaying organisation with a background of describing the culture and history of Japan. In that regard it is quite similar to Ruruoni Kenshin, but without the romantic side and a bit more supernatural.

The plot is set somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, when a government official decided to create an organization to defeat Youi, or demons. These people are called the Ayashi. The main character is a guy that has the power to extract weapons and other useful tools from the names of things. It is a beautiful concept, since in Japanese the characters are very complex, have a lot of meanings and have a habit of evolving through history. Usually a demon can be defeated with a weapon made from it's name, which usually holds extra significance as to what the demon's reason to be is.

The series also describes a very feudal and disgusting Japan, where people are constrained to ridiculous levels by etiquette, social ladder, politics or gender. Many a time, to ensure the survival of their little group, their leader resorts to despicable acts which the team performs with disgust, but a complete lack of choice. Women are treated as commodities, low rank people as livestock, while the rich and powerful engage in complex political struggles to ensure their survival. Scholars are being imprisoned for studying Western concepts, foreigners are considered a bane that people should not come across, while people without a family name and land are tatooed as "floaters" and arrested if caught inside cities.

A lot of the details of the show are about Japanese customs, history and view of the world, so I naturally enjoy this as a background for a fun fighting story. Other people obviously did not think the same way, so it only has 25 episodes, even if originally 52 episodes were planned.

I haven't finished the series yet, I still have the last five episodes to see, but so far I have enjoyed it. There is a manga for it, too, but I didn't find it free online.

Stellvia is an anime with teenage kids saving the world. It starts like a kind of Harry Potter, only the main character is a girl, the academy is in space and there are no Voldermort or Slitherins in sight. All in all it was a fun series to watch, but so easy going and adolescent oriented that I am sure it will not remain in my memory for long.

The plot is simple enough: Earth was devastated by a supernova blast wave, it recovered, then it set out on a mission to defend the Solar System from the second wave, slower but deadlier. Their solution was to create a bunch of stellar academies, fill them with children trained by dedicated teachers, while the whole world stands united against this coming disaster. One can see from this plot alone that the focus is not on realism nor human nature. However, since it does touch all the Japanese topics of choice like pursuit of perfection, positive competition, love between school children and loyalty and "gabatte"-ness, it was nice to watch and I have easily enjoyed it.

Composed of 26 episodes, the series does leave room for more, like humanity exploring the stars. The aliens were never explained and the last episode does show a rebuilt Stellvia star academy with the trainees that saved the world as full students welcoming a new batch of recruits. However, it seems like a second season of Stellvia will never happen, due to creative differences.

What a sad day this is. I have been reading manga at OneManga on an almost daily basis for a few years now. I liked how you can easily find the manga you want to read, then go through it without tons of ads and crap distracting you. Today, I entered their site and this message appeared:

"There is an end to everything, to good things as well."

It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July 2010).

So what next? We're not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear.

You can also show us some love in this moment of sadness by 'liking' our brand new Facebook page. It would be nice to see just how many of you came to enjoy our 'better than peanut butter and jelly' invention.


Regardless of whether you stay with us or not, on behalf of the One Manga team, I would like to thank you all for your unwavering support over the years. Through the ups and downs you have stuck with us, and that is what kept us going.

As a certain Porky was fond of saying... That's all folks!

Time for me to go lay down and let this all sink in.

- Zabi

Sure, there are a lot of free manga sites out there, but none of them had the soul of OneManga, a place where obvious passion was fueling things and not financial greed. I will soon add a post with the newest place for free manga. I will also have to update all manga links in the blog. Ugh! Nothing good seems to last forever...

If there was any doubt about the style of writing and book structure for the first novel from Ian Cameron Esslemont in the Malazan universe, the second book: The Return of the Crimson Guard, dispelled any. One can barely see a little more focus on action than on description compared to Steven Erikson, but, having read it, I feel like this is the tenth novel in the series, not the second in a parallel Malazan world.

First of all, it is a full length book, similar in size with the ones written by Erkison. Again we see an amassing of forces, set to converge towards the climactic end. There are the Avowed of the Crimson Guard with a full army of mercenaries in tow, there is Lasseen, empress of the Malazans, there are Seguleh, man-beasts, D'ivers, Soletaken, mages of huge power, Claws, Talons, Seti, Wickans and the all pervading regular Malazan soldier, with focus on our favourite sort: the sapper :)

I have to say that the writing is so similar to Erikson's, that it even acquired the same problems. There is a lack of finality to just about anything. One just knows that a lot of questions will remain ... not unanswered, but simply ignored... and that the next books will bring more wonder, more magic, more characters, all dancing around this huge singleton of a main character which is the universe of the Malazan Empire. It's refreshing, it's great... it's annoying!! :)

Having said that, this was another great book, one of those writings that make me want to abandon programming to start writing, even if I know nothing about it, one of those books that make me want to abandon watching movies altogether, for lack of detail and significance. Now my big dillema is what should I read next...

Google was born from an idea in 1996. It gained momentum and it became a word in the English dictionary. To google means more than to search for something, it means to delegate the responsibility of the search, it means not simply search, but find the answers to your question.

It reminds me of that scifi joke about a universe populated by billions of races that decided to combine all their networks into a large information entity. Then they asked the question "Is there a God?" and the machine answered "Now there is" and melted the off switch with a bolt of lightning. Can one really trust the answers given to them by a machine?

I am not the paranoid type. This is not a blog post about the perils of machine domination or about the Machiavellian manipulation of the company wielders. Instead is an essay on the willingness of humans to delegate responsibility. "Surely Google is just a search engine, it is not intelligent and it could never take over the world", one might say. But that's exactly the problem. Millions of people in the world are willing to let this stupid thing find answers for them.

Why? Because it worked. The search engine has more information available that any human could possibly access, not to mention remember. It is a huge statistical machine that finds associations on words, concepts, the search person preferences, the relationships between people and any other data available, like who the searcher is. Any AI dabbler could tell you that this is the first step towards intelligence, but again, that is not the point. The algorithms employed are starting to fail. The information that has been gathered by Google is being eroded by "Search Engine Optimization" techniques, by time and by the people's own internal algorithms that have started to trust and care about only the first links in a search.

Already there are articles about the validity of the answers given by "Doctor Google", a nickname given to the search engine used in the context of finding out medical solutions. The same principle applies to almost everything. The basis of Google's search is that pages that are linked by other sites and blogs are probably more important or interesting that those that are not. Of course, there is more than that, like when was the page last updated, balck and white lists, and stuff like that, but basically, old information has better chances to get in the first searches. Also information that is on sites that are well done and organized. That raises the question: would a true specialist that spends a large amount of effort and time researching their field of activity have the skill set and be willing to spend the resources to have a professional web site? How about the people that are not specialists? How about people that are actively trying to take advantage of you?

You can easily check this by searching for a restaurant name. Chances are that the site for the restaurant is not even on the first page, which has been usurped by aggregators, review sites and others like that. If a technology has not changed its name, but went through a large change, chances are that googling for its name will get you reading about it before the change. Search for a book and you will get to Amazon, not a review or (God forbid) a download site. Search for "[anything] download" and you will get to huge ad-ridden sites that have a page for just about every search that contains those words, but, surprise, no download.

Do not think that I am attempting to bash Google. Instead, I am trying to understand why such obvious things are not taken into consideration by the people doing the search. The same thing applies to other sites that have gained our confidence, so now are targets for more and more advanced cons. Confidence is a coin, after all, one that gets increasingly important as the distribution monopoly gets out of the hands of huge corporations and dissembles into a myriad of blogs and forum sites. This includes Wikipedia, IMDb, aggregators of all kinds, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. I know that we don't really have the time to do in depth searches for everything, but do you remember the old saying "God is in the details"?

Has Google reached godhood? Is it one we faithfully turn to for our answers? The Church of Google seems to think so. There are articles being written now about Searching without searching, algorithms that would take into consideration who you are when you are searching in order to give you the relevant information. It is a great concept, but doesn't that mean we will trust in a machine's definition of our own identity?

I once needed to find some information about some Java functions. Google either has statistical knowledge that .Net is cooler or that I have searched .Net related topics in the past and would swamp me with .Net results, which have pretty similar method names. Imagine you are trying to change your identity, exploring things that are beyond your scope of knowledge. Google would just try to stop you, just like family and friends, who give comfort, but also hold dearly to who you were rather that who you might be or want to become. And it is a global entity, there for you no matter where. You can't just move out!

To sum up, I have (quite recently) discovered that even for trivial searches, paying attention to all the links on the first page AND the second is imperative if I want to get the result I want, not just the one suggested. Seeing a Wikipedia link in the found items doesn't mean I should go there and not look at the others. Imdb is great at storing information about movies, but I can't trust the rating (or the first review on the page). YouTube is phenomenal at hosting video, but if I want something that is fresh and not lawyer approved I need to go to other sites as well. When having a problem and asking a friend, I appreciate their answer and seek at least a second opinion.

I am not much of an art guy, but this thing just blew me away. Not so much the animation itself (it is very original, but... not an art guy) as the volume of effort and work this had to require. Just watch it, it is worth it.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Forced to wait for the tenth and final novel of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, due to be published this year, I've started to read the books placed in the same universe written by Steven Erikson's friend, Ian Cameron Esslemont. The first of these books is Night of Knives, which is rather short compared with Erikson's novels or, indeed, with the second Esslemont book, Return of the Crimson Guard, which I am reading now.

The book is alert, as it spans a single night on the island of Malaz, during a rare event which weakens the borders between realms. Anything can happen during this night and, indeed, does happen. The island is assaulted by alien ice magic water dwellers, the dead house is under siege and Kellanved and Dancer are making their move towards the throne of Shadow realm. Meanwhile Surly is Clawing her way into the throne, a natural talented girl with too much attitude is trying to get a job and start an adventure and an old retired soldier gives his all once again.

All and all, it was a nice book. The writing style is clearly different from Erikson's, with less descriptive passages, a little more action and a more positive bias, tending to lend people more good qualities and having them end a little better. However, it only takes a few pages to get into the Malazan feel of things and enjoy the book.