Category: Reviews
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The Royal Wedding has led to a new round of debate about Republicanism in Australia, particularly since the Queen somehow managed to ban a particular comedy group from providing satirical coverage of the wedding on the state broadcaster[1]. The debate was reflected last week in a panel presentation on the state broadcaster’s current affairs TV…
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This is one for the OSR: it’s heart is in the right place but it’s production values are terrible. I was lured into watching this movie originally by hearing a sample on the Vanishing Point song A Day of Difference, and thought it must be a great movie on the basis of Peter O’Toole’s effort…
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The Road is a nasty post-apocalypse movie by John Hillcoat, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. The basic story is very simple – a man and his son are walking south towards the coast through a post-apocalyptic landscape, trying to survive while they head for the sea. The cause of…
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I think everyone is probably familiar with the idea of this novel, which is the original tale of Pride and Prejudice set in an England beset by a plague of zombies (or “unmentionables”). I’d been meaning to see how this story worked for some time now but, sadly, it was a little disappointing. The basic…
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I have a sony PRS-600 eBook reader, and it has two significant problems that have driven me crazy over the last 2 months. I did some online searching for solutions, and found them pretty unsatisfactory, so I’m going to give the workarounds I found by myself, in the hope that other people who stumble on…
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This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…
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Last night I watched Salt, the Angelina Jolie spy movie. This is basically an action flick, with maybe 12 seconds of character development at the beginning that is only required as background explanation for a cold look near the middle of the movie, and a brief explanation at the end. After that Angelina Jolie kills…
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I received The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, as a christmas present, and the lazy season being as it is started reading immediately. I was initially interested and a little disappointed, but the book soon turned a corner and became an excellent and impressive read. The book is set in a medium-future post-collapse Bangkok, after…
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As part of my new year plan to improve my Japanese, I am on a manga collecting binge, starting with Psychic Detective Yakumo (Shinrei Tantei Yakumo,心霊探偵八雲) by Manabu Kaminaga. This is a series of case files about a cynical and slightly misanthropic college student called Yakumo, seen mostly through the perspective of the slightly eccentric…
Compromise and Conceit 