I was reminded of the setup of Psycho when watching this movie; however it left me with a similar feeling to the one I had after seeing The Village: basically that it was a scary movie without gore or nastiness - which I like ( Read more... )

I expected a sprawling space opera about humanity colonising the galaxy in the wake of a vanished alien species, but instead got down-on-their-luck prospectors from a poverty-stricken Earth gambling their lives using dilapidated and deteriorating alien machinery that no one understands, in order to gather dribs and drabs of ultimately unusable ( Read more... )

The Rise of Endymion is better than Endymion, but that's not a hard task. There were a few good things to it: the gas giant world, the world of mountains, the response of cruciforms to death, the identity of the Observer, the bittersweet closing - but they were few in amongst the many significant weaknesses of the story ( Read more... )

Very interesting piece on paid essay writing for academia, which ignited a firestorm of internet argument. My view is that the main pressures come from admitting people who don't belong, and trying to keep them from failing (without actually teaching them); there's plenty of blame to go around ( Read more... )

I used to be really big on Facebook, adding everyone I met. I didn't expect deep friendships (though I made some really good friends that have lasted years), but I caught glimpses into other people's lives - lives that were different to mine ( Read more... )

At first view, I'm shocked to discover that support for data parallelism in .NET 4.0 is actually pretty good.

I used this run-down and was pleasantly surprised to discover that Microsoft dealt with exceptions, cancellation, and thread-pooling - the details that usually escape first glance.

You'd be foolish to go looking for quality in a videogame based movie and Tekken is no exception ( Read more... )

I saw a UK sort-of post-apocalyptic sci-fi film called Doomsday and quite enjoyed it. The movie is full of over the top action and gore, and stars Rhona Mitra (erstwhile promotional Lara Croft back when the series first started) and features Malcolm McDowell ( Read more... )

Continuing my zombie binge, I read the next Carrie Ryan post-apocalyptic zombie novel "The Dead-Tossed Waves", and was dismayed to realise it was classified as YA (Young Adult) Romance. Once again, the main character is maddeningly emotional, irresponsible, and drags everyone else into trouble then regrets it but doesn't do anything to help. Ugh. I ( Read more... )

I was initially sceptical about the American remake of the Swedish vampire movie "Let the Right One In", but this abated somewhat when learning Chloe Moretz (Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass) was playing the girl. Positive reviews rolled out, and I finally went to see Let Me In ( Read more... )