Igor’s Blog

It is likely that I would have never heard of The Name of the Wind if it wasn’t for GRRM’s live journal post where he compared his long delay in writing his next ASOIAF novel to Patrick Rothfuss’s equal struggles with his sequel to The Name of the Wind.  As soon as I entered Patrick’s site, I realized that he had already published a novel, a fantasy novel that was supposedly quite epic.

So, I decided to take a look at the The Name of the Wind’s amazon page to get a feel for the overal consensus of the novel.  Surprisingl, most reviewers and including one fantasy author had given the book very good ratings.

That was all I need.  The next day I was fully engrossed by Kvothe’s life story, his ups and downs, his struggles and his perservernce.  Patrick Rothfuss created a realistic character, one who had a myriad of problems, but who was also gifted and a geniune hero.    Unfortunately, The Name of the Wind is the first of a trilogy and the book did end slightly abruptly, with many questions that remained unanswered.  However, from the Author’s point of view, this may be a good thing as I’m eagerly anticipating the second novel.

Ever since the release of FEAR 2’s demo, I have long been anticipating the full game.  I was finally able to give the game a roll this week-end.  For the most part, I found the game to be a good experience.  Unfortunately, after having played high calibur games like Dead Space and Gears of War 2, I felt that FEAR could have been a bit better in almost area.  That does not mean to say that the game was horrible, because it wasn’t.  It was a enjoyable experience, but the same experience could have been done 3 years ago.  As the times change, games and expectation evovle.  FEAR 2 did not evolve that much.

The Nintendo DS is a pretty cool piece of hardware.  I didnt know much about until early this week when I decided I wanted to start learning how to create homebrew programs for the DS.  My findings revealed that the DS has two processors, an ARM7 and an ARM9 chip.    The architecture seems really weird at first and a bit daunting but the more I read about it, the more everything is starting to make sense.

One of the reasons why I’ve researching the DS is because I’m going to be creating a Left 4 Dead clone called Left 2 Die.  I’m making use of the very good homebrew toolchain available and the libnds API.  The libnds library is probably complete crap compared to the official DS API, but it is pretty good.  It is a bit low level so as a programmer, you will have to do a lot of research before implementing something.  But it’s great fun and I’m hoping to get a DS soon!

Yesterday was a good night.  Three of the fighters I was cheering for won!  Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson took out Wanderlei Silva with a devastating left hook.  With the knockout victory, Rampage was able to avenge his two earlier losses to Wanderlei.

In the second fight, Frank Mir simply dominated Minotauro Nogeria.  He unleashed a series of 3 punch combos on Nogeria.  Nogeria was left wandering what to do after the first round.  Frank Mir came into the second with the same level of ferocity as in the first and finished Nogeria with a ground a pound.

In the main event, Rashad Evans faced off with Forrest Griffin.  In the first two rounds, the fight was essentially a draw.  But in the third round, something sparked Rashad Evans.  Evans landed a great blow to Griffin’s face, that sent him to the ground.  Then Evan’s finished Griffin with a series of punches to earn himself the Light Heavyweight Championship.

Ubuntu is one of those platforms that has a lot of potential, and yet it just can’t compete with Windows XP in terms of stability and software compatability.  In the last couple of days, I have been attempting to setup Ubuntu to my liking.  The problem is I’m always confronted with huge issue.   Initially, I installed the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, but to my surprise certain IBM products like Lotus Notes didn’t have 64-bit binaries!

So I had to go back and install the 32-bit version of Ubuntu just so I can get these IBM products working.  But during the installation, Linux had to stop responding.  On restart Ubuntu went literally insane by emitting weird Authorization Error message boxes.  So now I have to reinstall the whole OS again and hope the installation goes without issues.  I really want to get this thing working but damn you, Linux.

Left 4 Dead is great fun

I have been playing Left 4 Dead for the last couple of weeks.  It’s one of those games that will surprise you.  I was reluctant in getting this game, since I didn’t see anything really interesting about it.  However, the game has been praised by numerous people so I decided to give it a chance, and oh yeah, Valve was behind it so it must be pretty good, right?

Well, let me tell you something.  Left 4 Dead is amazing.  The game mechanics are so simple that you wouldn’t expect this game to be that amazing.  Yet somehow, the joy of killing hordes of zombies is truly unmatched.  Add three other human players to the mix who you will be helping and fighting alongside of, and this game is really a great achievement in gaming.

9/10

A Fire Upon The Deep, 1992, Vernor Vinge

The last couple of days had me reading one of Vernor Vinge’s epic novels, A Fire Upon the Deep.  Since I have read Vinge’s other great novel, The Deepness In the Sky, I came into A Fire Upon the Deep with fairly high expectations.  Thankfully, A Fire Upon the Deep does not disappoint.  The novel innovates in several ways.  One of the more interesting aspects of it is the depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is separated into three zones.  The three zones are the Unthinking Depths, the Slow Zone, and the Beyond.   Each zone has wildly different characteristics.  For example, in the Beyond faster than light travel is possible, but it is not possible in the Slow Zone.  Due to the reliance of faster than light travel in many Beyond civilization, entering the Slow Zone can have a negative impact on any technology that is dependent on faster than light travel.

The novel begins in the Beyond, where a group of research discover an ancient relic.  Little did they know that the ancient relic, known as the Blight, would destroy them and all of their home civilization.  However, one family did manage to escape.  The family eventually landed on a relatively benign world that came to be known as the Tines’ world.  However, much to the surprise of the resarchers and their family, the world was populated.  Packs of dog lookalikes, known as Tines, ambushed their landing site, killing the two adults in the spaceship.   Two children were captured, one by the ambushers, known as the Flencers, and the other by Peregrine (a pack of tines) and Scriber.  Peregrine and Scriber got a hold of Johanna, a child of 14 years, and were able to escape from the Flencers and enter Woodcarver territory.

The story then shifted focus on Ravna, a citizen of Sjandra Kei, who was granted a trip to Relay for research purposes.   This is also where Pham Nuwen, the hero of The Deepness in the Sky, makes his return.  However, he is not the same Pham Nuwen as the one you would be familiar with.  No, Pham Nuwen was the mishmash of many human parts.  This lead him to even doubt his own memories.  But even so, he was given Old One’s memories.  Old One was a so-called Power, a artificial race that achieve transcendent status.  However, the Blight would soon destroy Old One and all that was left of it was in Pham’s memory, which he would call godshatter.  Ravna would later discover a signal being emitted by the grounded spaceship on the Tines’ world.  She would establish communication with one of the children there, Jefri, the youngest child.  At that point in time, the high beyond was already in danger of the oncoming Blight.  The Blight was obliterating everything on sight, but in doing so, it was looking for something.  That something was the spaceship on the Tines’ world.  Ravna recognized this and was able to get a spaceship to the Tines’ world.  In it was Pham Nuwen, Ravna, and two alien species known as Skroderiders, which were plants that rolled around on wheeled skrodes.  However, they were chased by a fleet of 140 spaceships, all of which were of the Blight.   Pham had little time to use his godshatter when he finally managed to get some time with the escaped spaceship.  His godshatter enabled him to modify the zone boundaries, moving the slow zone far into the beyond.  The end result was that the chasing fleet of Blight would be halted.  However, Pham would die.  The godshatter ate him whole.

As you can see, A Fire Upon the Deep is an experience like no other.  Vinge not only focus on the heart of the story, but on the characterization of the Tines’.  Reading about the Tines’ was interesting due to their pack-like behaviour.  Human-like behaviour would only be possible if a pack consists of 4 to 6 members.  But what it even more interesting was that their discovery of Radio would change their lives forever.  The reason is because originally they would have to move in packs, if there were to collide with another pack, consciousness would be lost.  If a member steered too far, intelligence would be reduced.  However, with radio technology, all of these problems would be remedied.

The book as a whole was greatly interesting, with Vinge exploring new areas of science fiction.  However, the book is not without its faults.  I did find that the zones of the galaxy seemed a bit far-fetched to be believable.  The dialogue was also not the greatest or most believable.  Also, I found some of the prose to be a bit turgid.

However, it is definitely worth the read.   8/10

As I said in the previous post, I am going to reflect on one of the books I have recently read.  I am going to start off with Philip K. Dick’s renowned book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

As some might recall, this book was translated into movie form in the year 1982.  The movie was called Blade Runner and starred Harrison Ford.

I have not seen the movie, but I do plan on seeing it in the near future.  As for the book, I found it to be an interesting and unique experience.  I would categorize the book as a futureistic, slightly post-apocalyptic novel.  The story revolves around Rick Deckard, a bounty hounter who hunts not humans, but rogue androids.   In Dick’s novel, androids are built to serve humans.  However, some of the newly developed androids, known as Nexus-6 androids decide to depart from Mars and head to Earth.  All of these androids are to be exterminated by Rick Deckard.  The problem, however, is that it is quite difficult to differentiate between an android and a human.  As such, scientists have developed a test, which when adminstered to the participant would be able to detect the participant’s empathy levels.  Androids, as you might guess, are not able to empathize with others.  So, Rick goes off and administers this test to various androids and promptly eliminates them.

The story itself is much more detailed than what I have decribed above.  All in all, I found it to be interesting and I look forward to reading future Philip K. Dick novels.  Namely, Ubik.

Thanks,

-Igor

Wow, I just witnessed one of the greatest knockouts in UFC history.  Rashad Evans just knocked out Chuck Liddel, and what a knockout it was!  I predicted that Evans would win even with the overwhelming odds stacked against him.  He just showed that Liddel is a fighter on his way out.  Way to go Rashad!

In the past week I have completed two very good novels: Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep? and Canticle for Leibowitz.

I’ll talk about them in future blog posts, but I just wanted to say that I wholeheartedly recommend them to any SF readers.

Currently, I have started reading Slaughterhouse-Five.  So far it is not that interesting, but I’ll give a chance and continue reading it.

Thanks and Peace out!  Oh, and vote Obama!

-Igor

It has been such a long time since I’ve updated this blog.  In fact, it has been so long that it has caused me to forget my username!  But I managed to hack my way into the mysql database and eventually lookup the username and password.

The reason for the long inactivity can probably be attribituted to a couple of a reasons.  First, I’ve graduated from Ryerson and I’m placing a lot of focus on my new job.   Secondly, I stopped caring about this blog.   And thirdly, and most importantly, it just takes a really long time to write something meaningful.

However, I have to decided to redicated myself to this blog.  So, expect larger, more informative updates, but most of all expect them much more frequently.