Category: review
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Never played a wizard — a review of Of Dice and Men
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David Ewalt Although he warns old timer D&D players (and grognards) not to get bound up in the rules because this is a story to introduce people to fantasy roleplaying games, David Ewalt has succeeded in writing a…
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Quarterly review: FY14Q3
Below are links to all the off-the-cuff reviews of books and film from this quarter. I didn’t add to my list of more in depth reviews. During 2013Q3 I did not read as many books, but read a few comics and got addicted to Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga (vol 1, vol 2) and Matt Fraction’s…
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Quarterly review: FY2013Q2
Below are links to all the off-the-cuff reviews of books and film from this quarter, besides my more in depth reviews. During 2013Q2 my family spent 7 weeks in Japan, so there was quite a spike in my media consumption. I do not even list the television series that I watched while they were away.…
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4 more horsemen — a review of Cypherpunks
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Andy Greenberg NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. This book is really a footnoted conversation between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann, some big names in the internet/activist/anarchist/online security communities. It would have been great to see this as a video, but in some…
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Unbridled optimism — a review of Abundance
Abundance: The future is better than you think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler Abundance is a book of two parts, with a sprinkling of Singularity University and XPRIZE promotion and some nice little autobiographical tidbits. The first part introduces the arguments against abundance (Thomas Malthus, Club of Rome, etc.) and attempts to brute force…
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The New Banality — a review of The New Digital Age
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen Since I read This Machine Kills Secrets first, this book seems particularly dangerous to the web as a whole. Universal User Registration? A supranational committee for quarantining non-conforming IPs? This is a company guy and a government…
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ʎɥɔɹɐuɐoʇdʎɹɔ — a review of This Machine Kills Secrets
This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information by Andy Greenberg NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. “Hacker culture” is often characterized by curiosity, meritocracy, independence and self-reliance. It is no wonder that libertarianism enjoys such prevalence in Silicon Valley. “Freedom through encryption” is the clarion call of a…
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Future classic — a review of The Windup Girl
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. Modern genre fiction, that is science fiction and fantasy from the post Cold War era, is certainly entertaining, but not challenging — a meal replacement pill as compared to Haute cuisine. The authoritarian communist threat is done, and the public generally views space exploration…
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Quarterly review: FY13Q1
Upon finishing a particularly thought-provoking book or film I will sometimes spend a few days mulling it over before writing a review on this blog. Sometimes I just dash off a quick review on Goodreads or Letterboxd. For the sake of completeness, I thought that each quarter I would post my list of off-the-cuff reviews.…
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Negative 3D — A technical review of The Hobbit
I finally saw The Hobbit in 3D HFR. The experience overall was a good one. Watching the regular 24fps previews and then the actual film was like night and day. You could tell right when the Newline Cinema logo floated onto the screen that this would be different. I would recommend reading Kevin Kelly’s explanation…