The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Ed Sheeran "I See Fire" [HD]

Woolworths tribute to Nelson Mandela - Woolies & the Soweto Gospel Choir

Of all the amazing tributes that people all over the world are making for our Mandela this one made me smile the most and brought a lone tear to my eye.

Farewell to our hero.

The Geek Flag: The Space Trilogy reviewed by Series Squared

The Geek Flag: The Space Trilogy reviewed by Series Squared: Series Squared reviews the complete C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy ...

Dragon Age 3 Snippets

BioWare has become synonymous with good RPGs over the years and the Dragon Age series is one of the best in their line-up. The third instalment, Dragon Age: Inquisition is looking to raise the bar higher and amaze gamers the world over next year. Dragon Age: Origins was a great game with some flaws and a derivative plot but it was well executed. BioWare dropped the ball a little with Dragon Age 2 but it was still a strong game. One of the things that make BioWare such a great developer is that they seem to get the fine balance of listening to community feedback and making their own innovations to their games.

Speaking of community feedback, they are running a Community Gameplay Styles and Preferences survey for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Check it out.

The position of Inquisitor comes with cool rings.

As far as I can make out from all the news doing the rounds on the interwebs, BioWare is taking everything that worked in the previous games and building Inquisition from that. EA’s Frostbite 3 engine will ensure that the journey back to Thedas not only looks great but also feels great.

Character creation will lean more towards the system in Origins and allow the player, in the role of Inquisitor this time around, to customise their character’s appearance in great detail. Characters will be highly customisable all the way down to how armour looks on them. The same breastplate will look different on different characters.

Expect a new and more fluid fighting system. BioWare’s still pretty hush, hush about this but from the above survey it looks like they’re trying to find the sweet spot between Origins and DA 2, with an inclination towards the way Origins did things.

It’s a BioWare game so you know you must keep your save files and that the choices you made throughout the previous two games will influence some of the elements in Inquisition. Perhaps some cameo appearances from your Warden or Hawke.

The guys over at BioWare have been playing a lot of Skyrim in order to ‘study’ its open world mechanics. We understand, you guys. Inquisition is set to be much larger in scale than its predecessors and allow players a greater deal of freedom. This is, of course, quite welcome. Don’t expect it to rival Skyrim in scale though and the gameplay will still be quite linear.

Oh, no! Boob cuts. The horror!

BioWare mentioned a multiplayer component so there is a chance of taking the journey through Thedas with a friend in co-op mode. I’m holding thumbs for this feature.

There’s honestly not too much being said about the game and all the puzzle pieces we have are very enticing. Personally, I want to know more about Varric and Cassandra. What’s the deal there? Then there’s the war between the Templars and the mages. As Inquisitor what is your mission and are you sided with the Templars?

Many questions and very few answers but it looks good and hopefully it delivers on all of its promises.

Kick-Ass Women in Gaming

Sexism in Gaming Kick-Ass Women in Gaming

This has been a great year for gaming in terms of what we already have to play and in terms of announcements. Here in sunny South Africa we had rAge last weekend and though I could not attend I know from all the media and attendees with lunatic grins on their faces that it was a good show. The gaming community is getting better all the time and anyone regardless of who they are can get in on the fun… Or can they? Surely we are past things like racism, sexism and other nasty –isms?

Sadly we are not. The biggest issue I’ve experienced as a gamer this year is the shocking amount of instances of sexism and misogynistic views in our beloved industry. In SA we already have a huge issue with crimes against women like rape and other forms of abuse. It’s tough being a woman in just day-to-day interactions and it breaks my heart that a community based on escapism and having fun can be sexist. Games are meant to be fun for everyone who wants to pick up a ‘joystick’ and play.

When I started writing this piece the idea was to point out in great and righteously angry detail how stupid male gamers can be and to refer to cases like the reactions when Remember Me was first announced and people were freaked out that they’d have to play as a heterosexual female protagonist who is – surprise, surprise – sexually interested in men. I was going to write a rant about the nasty, misogynistic and plain stupid attacks on Gamespot writer, Carolyn Petit’s GTA V review. I’m not going to do any of that, instead I’m going to celebrate three amazing women who are in the industry and are contributing towards making our favourite pastime even more enjoyable.

I think this year’s Tomb Raider is one of the best games of the year.  (If you don’t happen to think so please don’t send the KKK to my house – it’s just an opinion.) One of the people on Crystal Dynamics’ brilliant team that we can thank for a Lara Croft that’s actually likeable and actually more beautiful because she has a personality is Rhianna Pratchett, who served as the lead writer on the project. Rhianna earned her stripes writing for games like Overlord 1 & 2, Mirror’s Edge and my other favourite of the year Bioshock Infinite.

If you attended rAge you would’ve seen Noelle Adams’ amazing Lara Croft cosplay. She has big presence in the SA gaming scene. She writes, blogs, vlogs, Facebooks and Tweets all things nerdy and for that we like her. She’s sort of like Wonder Woman really.

Pippa Tshabalala was the MC at rAge this year and has an amazing presence in the SA gaming scene, what with having hosted a gaming show, The Verge and teaching 3D animation for a while. She writes or has written for many online and print publications and contributes much to the gaming scene.

Even though our beloved industry has a lot of growing up to do it’s a great community and everyone should be welcome to contribute and enjoy playing games.

The SA Nerd Scene Dons Its Vader Mask

We're rocking our Vader mask and we look good.

It's almost two years ago now that I speculated that the nerds are taking over in an article I wrote for Bizcommunity. Much like House Tyrell the movement has carried on growing strong since then -- minus the floral motif. All things nerdy are in everyone's face all the time and we love it. It's hard to believe that there was a time when people used to make fun of us.

Having always been an odd mixture of nerdy recluse who spends Friday evenings reading comic books and socialite who spends Friday evenings drinking too much and hugging strangers has given me a bit of insight into what nerds like and what so-called 'normal' people like. Nerds are a hardcore breed for the most part, we like details and getting the small things right in our stories. I remember getting into an argument with a sales person at a bookstore over a John Howe illustration on the cover of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lays of Beleriand some years back. She claimed that it was Sauron battling Aragorn (as if that ever happened) on the cover when it was clearly Morgoth's epic battle with Fingolfin. I lost my shit! We also get excited by small things like a cameo appearance by people or characters we admire in pretty much non-consequential scenes in movies or books. It's such weird things that make sensible people want to throw chairs at us. Normal folks, on the other hand, seem to just want some nice, relaxing fun. They don't give a damn whether Ben Affleck's going to be the next Batman or not as long as there is a Batman to enjoy. 

I find myself in the middle these days. I love how my nerdy side always wants more from the media I consume. I want to know about the old wars in Steven Erikson's Malazan books and I want to know what secret elixir he takes with his tea. I am also a whole lot calmer about whether or not the next Dragon Age game will be delayed or not. As long as I get it. I don't mind not playing GTA V till Christmas season when I have an Xbox again. It'll still be there and just as much fun. Let Ben Affleck be Batman and if he sucks let's kill him afterwards.

Nerdy culture is merging with the mainstream media people consume and that's cool. Pretty girls are wearing Batman t-shirts and jock types are drinking beer with nerd types whilst playing FIFA 13 or the latest iteration of Call of Duty. Everyone's having a good time doing cool and nerdy stuff together. Rainbow Nation vibes all-round.

I attended some interesting events and met some wonderful people in the last few months and it made me realise South Africans have arrived at the nerd party in a big way. We love coming late to the party and then just showing off about how cool we are. We're rocking our Vader mask and we look good.

Living in Cape Town and working at a publishing house meant I had no excuse to miss the 2013 edition of the Open Book Festival -- especially since work offered to pay for any of the events on the programme that I wished to attend. I opted for the SF and Fantasy sort of stuff, of course. They also had a comics festival running for the duration of the main festival and it was worth popping into. South African artists and writers were there sharing their experiences and running workshops for those interested in honing their craft.

Lauren Beukes was a huge presence at the fest and spoke about the state of SF and Fantasy in the country along with some badass writers like Charlie Human and Alex Latimer. She also gave out some very useful tips for aspiring writers looking to break into the writing industry. Be cheeky she told us, but don't be an asshat. One of my jobs as an editorial assistant is receiving manuscripts and it's disheartening how many people don't follow the simple instructions on our website, which results in us just chucking manuscripts in our furnace in the basement. You want your publisher to like you so be cool. Lauren, a publisher (forgot his name) and her agent (also forgot his name. These are the guys working tirelessly and selflessly in the shadows) related some horror stories of the creepy things writers do to try and get their work published. Don't be creepy, you guys. Or at least hide your creepiness and whip it out when you've made a name for yourself.

It's pretty rockstar to have homegrown SF stuff to read like Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls (set in Chicago but still homegrown), which reads like one of Dean Koontz's classic 80s thrillers. I am a huge fan of villains I can feel a bit icky about liking. Koontz was a master of this in the 80s/90s and my high school days were spent admiring his serial killers and feeling all sorts of guilty about it. I probably still suffer from some complex as a result. Lauren Beukes' villain, Harper is of that breed and I liked that a lottle.

Charlie Human has Apocalypse Now Now out and it's a must-read and you are welcome to eat it as well afterwards if you're that way inclined. The story's set in Cape Town and it sounds like madness in the streets! Crazy shit like a16-year-old dude running a porn syndicate, a supernatural bounty hunter and a West African glowing man. You know you want some of that goodness in your life.

Alex Latimer's The Space Race is what I really want to get my filthy paws on! The idea of Afrikaners running a secret space programme out in the desert tickles the nonsense out of my fancy. First thing I thought when I heard about this book was Apartheid in space! Which I guess is not unheard of in SF... Think Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Mad levels of Apartheid in that book. Also, Alex drew me a tiger when I met him at the Open Book Fest. Your argument is thus invalid!

My boss lady sent me link to a new South African indie publisher, Fox & Raven Publishing and they're pretty rad-ical! They describe themselves as: Artisan independent publishers of speculative fiction, non-fiction and many things in between. They had a slot at the Open Fest that I didn't catch all of and that's sad. I did get to tag along to tea with the dude behind the magic though, Marius du Plessis and he's a great guy who seems to have some great plans for adding to the SF and Fantasy scene here in SA. Look out for them and their stuff. Write some good short stories for them and give them tea if they think it's good enough to publish.

Comic books are like potato chips -- I just can't stop eating/reading them! (Yes, I read potato chips and eat comic books.) There are days when my life's as busy as a dumbledore or I'm just plain lazy and I feel bad for not reading as much as I'd like. Comics books are my salvation during such periods because I'm never too busy or lazy to read them. Last year saw the launch of a South African graphic novel, Rebirth. The premise: What if Jan Van Riebeeck (South Africa’s Christopher Columbus) had been a vampire? What if the Dutch East India Company, pioneering colossus of international trade in the 17th century, was in fact controlled by a Council of Vampires? Sounds pretty cool doesn't it? Yes, and it looks pretty too. I must be honest and say that I'm not the biggest fan of this book but Josh Ryba, Daniel Browde and Thenji Nkosi's effort still deserves mad hatter love.

I also recently got around to finishing Lauren Beukes and Inaki Miranda's take on Rapunzel in the Fairest spin-off of Bill Willingham's Fables series. Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom plays off in Japan for the most part and it's amazing how much Japanese lore is captured in the story. Inaki Miranda's artwork is some of the coolest I've seen in comic books. I recommend this wholeheartedly and it's not because I might have a crush on a kitsune. Lauren seems to enjoy keeping busy because I see she has a story, Birdie (illustrated by Gerhard Human) in a Vertigo anthology titled The Witching Hour. The story's set in a futuristic Cape Town and seems to contain some powerfully dark juju.

It embarrasses me to tell you that I've not seen Neil Blomkamp's Elysium yet because I was busy eating toast or something and the reviews weren't that great and I'm swayed by public opinion. The guy gave us District 9 so it can't be that bad. It also sounds a lot like Bioshock Infinite. It's on the list for the next movie night.

Speaking of Bioshock, rAge was last week. I missed it, of course, being in Cape Town and doing things like Rocking the Daisies. rAge is always amazing and brings together some of the coolest gamers, cosplayers, tabletop gaming enthusiasts, otakus, comic book nerds and confused looking girlfriends and boyfriends who've been dragged there by their nerdy better halves. rAge is the place where you see that SA has an amazing and vibrant nerdy community and that we are some cool people.

There are probably a lot of stuff I didn't mention because I don't know enough about them or anything at all. Take the indie game development scene as an example, I know it exists but I have no clue what they're getting up to. Better people than me do and it's best to always look and ask around regarding what everyone is up to.

There are always some cool happenings somewhere near you so get your nerd swag on :).

My Magical Place: The Conjuring

I've been watching quite a lot of movies in genres I don't usually dabble in because I now live with a crowd of people who aren't into the things I am and because I like to be open minded about things I watch some of the stuff they do and it's been interesting. I found that I liked features like The Great Gatsby (I could never finish the book) and Dark Zero Thirty. Anyway, I also started watching some horror movies like VHS with one of the guys, which eventually lead to The Conjuring. I'm not the biggest fan of horror movies but some of the B-grade stuff like Slither amuse me to no end.

I approached The Conjuring with an almost fresh set of eyes for what it sets out to do. I vaguely remember seeing The Exorcist and other than that my closest experience with this ritualistic, possession stuff is the Supernatural TV series. The story centres around a married couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who make their living as paranormal investigators. They help a family who are being plagued by a creepload of spirits in the creepy looking house they've just moved into and invested all their money into. It's not like they can move anyway because the spirits haunting them have some powerful dark juju and can follow them around. They are pretty much screwed, really. Ed and Lorraine come in to save the day and shoot a few videos in the process. I actually enjoyed this movie a whole lot: it's well paced and scares you when you least expect it or when you most expect it and still gets you. It is also very beautifully shot. Every scene is hauntingly beautiful, if that makes sense in this context. The music is also brilliantly done and adds a cool ambiance throughout the scary proceedings. I enjoyed watching The Conjuring and then I found myself lying in bed in the dark later on and I realised my wardrobe looks a lot like the one in the movie... I had difficulty sleeping for a few nights.

I recommend this movie and I suggest watching it at midday.

Just as a side note can we all just step back and look at how Patrick Wilson's hair's combed all neatly in every movie he's in. It's quite eerie.

I was struck by a thought whilst watching this movie with the Christian symbolism used to ward off evil spirits or exorcise them. What are the procedures in other religions when demons and other evil spirits decide to take up residence in your home or body? I know from reading The Historian that Islam has a tradition of vampire defence wards. Someone should tell a story about a demon possession scenario from a Jewish or Hindu perspective.

Audio Slave: Under the Covers

I think I should stop listening to Dia Frampton and Ed Sheeran cover other people's songs because at this rate I'm going to stop listening to other musicians entirely! This whole week all I've been doing is listening to many of my favourite songs covered by them.

Dia Frampton even covers R. Kelly's Remix to Ignition with her band, Meg & Dia, and it sounds super cool. The first time I heard her Dia was performing Kanye West's Heartless and that just won me over entirely. I wanted to marry her and raise 2.5 children and a dog with her right there and there. Well she was way over there in the US and I was over here in SA but still, we could've made it work.

Ed Sheeran is just amazing! I love his music. I'm about that life entirely. I listened to his cover of Bon Iver's Skinny Love and dug it with two spades. Then he also just goes and kills Rihanna's We Found Love. It's also cool that he reminds me of one of my best friends, Chris McWade.

Dia and Ed can sing all the songs in the world and I'll be okay with that.

Dia Frampton - Skinny Love (Bon Iver cover)

Ed Sheeran - Skinny Love (The Sun Biz Session)

My Magical Place: My thoughts on The Hunger Games

Okay, so here I am, over a year later after its release, and I can finally say that I've seen The Hunger Games. I was never really negative about it at any point but I was also not super amped to get to it or anything. It was just there. Waiting. Whenever I'd decide to watch it something else would just pop up -  I'd have to save my family from a burst geyser or something. I almost didn't watch it yesterday either because my DVD player did a thing and I was too lazy to fiddle with it. Luckily my roommate was on-hand to connect his laptop to our TV.

The first time I heard about The Hunger Games and its premise I thought it sounded a whole lot like Battle Royale (which I've also not gotten around to seeing. It's just there. Skulking.) in terms of kids on some island/forest set-up having to kill each other. I'm not the biggest fan of kids killing each other in my movies or books (I still haven't read Lord of the Flies. It's sitting somewhere. Scowling perhaps?) I'm fine with kids killing adults though. That's fine. Anyway, back to the issue at hand. I liked The Hunger Games and think it's a good movie. It still disturbed me highly though. Straight up Mount Everest levels highly. It wasn't that it was graphical in its violence or anything. Something about it just got to me. Good art is supposed to unsettle you I guess.

Kids killing kids (KKK). Okay (K).

Throughout the movie I sat there thinking, Dafuq is wrong with these people? But this shit's happened on numerous occasions in the real world before and is still happening in some form or another right now. Our history as a species is drenched in blood: war, prejudice, terrorism, racism, sexism and a string of other forms of hatred. Mindless hatred is just something we do and we're good at it. Add the spectator element from the movie and that's us right there. We love being the audience on other people's tragedies. We do show some level of sympathy towards others and their misfortune but mostly we view it with a morbid kind of fascination and think how lucky we are that it's not us going through that shit. The Hunger Games made me feel a certain level of shame in terms of how I'd probably just look on if that sort of thing were to happen in front of me. Just as long as it wasn't me it was happening to. I liked the movie but it made me feel really shitty. Then I watched The Hobbit afterwards, which cheered me right up and I could return to my complacent ways...

I am looking forward to the next movie, Catching Fire, I must say. Those Capitol bastards are clearly riled up by Katniss and that Peeta bloke for showing them up a little. Also, how do you go back to a normal life and shit after having to kill some people who you didn't really have anything against, except those 'evil' career tribute kids who were assholes and totally deserved to die... Even though they're kids, you know.

I figure I should read the books but I feel no real motivation to do that so I'll just wait on the movies and see how that goes.

Occasional Letters to Death #2

Hi Dee,

I'm gonna go with Dee because I think you'd like that, what with the whole whimsical outlook that you have on... er... life. Tell me, what's the thing you have with the hotdogs? Now, don't get me wrong, I respect hotdogs as much as the next person but I'm not all that crazy about them. Give me a good boerewors roll on any day (yes, even Tuesdays when I'm ironing my socks) and I'm ready to go. I'm not sure where to but I'll be ready nonetheless. Well, I guess the one thing I won't ever be ready for is meeting you in person - boerewors or not. I've been down with sickness of late and that made me think of you a little. Look, I like you, I really do but I'm just no ready to meet you yet. The thing is that you're very pretty and I'm shy. I wouldn't quite know what to say and I'm usually a guy who knows what to say. Anyhoo, whatever, we'll see how that goes whenever you decide to pop over to get me... It'd be nice if it was later rather than sooner though.


A colleague lent me her copy of Endless Nights and it was quite cool reading about you and all your siblings. I must say that you are fairly patient, waiting for those people who locked themselves away from time on that island. I guess you have some time on your hands though. You must introduce me to Destiny! I think he's my new favourite of your siblings. He likes books (well, the one book but it's the book that contains all the stories ever told) and I like books so maybe we could get along. I have a friend, Sleuth, who's very much like him in demeanour so I can hang with him. Let me know hey. I like that guy. Also, tell Dream to cheer up a bit. He's been giving me odd visions at night of late. I don't mind odd things but lines need to be drawn. I really am not sure why these lines need to be drawn as opposed to painted or embossed but it is what it is. Be a good girl and tell him, why don't ya.

I plan to read more of Dream's stuff but Destiny needs to stop being so passive and also get stuff because I'd be very interested in reading his stuff.

It's been a while since I last wrote you and I apologise for that. It's a good thing that you're so patient. It's Friday over here and so I need to rush off to do Friday kind of stuff like go to the beach or whatever. Mainly whatever. Have yourself a good time hey and I'll write you again soon (the human version of soon, not the Endless one).

Later days,
Charles

My Magical Place: Disconnect Review

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” – Charlie Chaplin

If there is one thing you should learn in this digital day and age (albeit not as digital as science and science fiction speculated in the 20^th Century) it’s that social networks will undo you in a matter of seconds if you are not careful. Look at what happened to model, Jessica Leandra Dos Santos on Twitter last year – two racist Tweets out of anger and her modelling career went down in flames. Disconnect looks at how our online activities affect our everyday lives over time.  The film is centred around the idea of how people’s online lives spill over into their ‘real’ lives and how, ironically, being connected via the Internet people have actually become disconnected from each other.

The plot follows the stories of four different sets of characters and contains a number of interconnections between the different story arcs. Disconnect is not the movie I expected from what was revealed in the trailer and I am glad it isn’t. I was expecting a feature with a strong focus on cybercrime in terms of fraud and paedophiles preying on children by means of social media and sinister chatrooms. The latter issue is a very important to address but usually movies deal with it in a manner that freaks viewers out in the same way slasher movies do. Disconnect deals with all these issues in a very human way. The story is simply about people who are drifting further and further apart as a result of being too connected to the communication platforms that the Internet and the technology surrounding it affords. Henry Alex Rubin’s (Girl, Interrupted, 1999) direction is brilliant in terms of how the story is paced and how it develops. Many of the scenes are very quiet and all you can hear is the sound of people typing away on keyboards and when they do talk it’s usually over the phone or via a webcam. All these methods of communication feel very natural to the viewer because that’s how we communicate on a daily basis. Reading a fairly large portion of the movie’s dialogue onscreen as people text each other becomes second nature. The film reaches a dramatic climactic point that you just don’t expect and blows you away for a few seconds – especially after how calm everything has been more or less up to that point.

Andrew Stern (Nurses, 2007) wrote a good story that will stay with you for a while after seeing the movie and the ensemble cast delivers some good performances. The initial story is that of Kyle (brilliantly played by Max Thierot), an underage chatroom worker who meets a reporter, Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), in one of his chatroom sessions who wants to help him leave that world behind by sharing his story. The question, though, is does he need her help?  There is the story of teenagers, Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye that deals with the issue of cyberbullying and its outcomes. Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) is the victim of the cyberbullying by the two boys and the plot also centers on the fragmented lives that he and his family lead. This arc of the story deals a lot with loneliness as one of its major themes. Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses, 2011) and Hope Davis (About Schmidt, 2002) play Ben’s parents and Frank Grillo (End of Watch, 2012) plays Jason’s father. The last story is that of a couple, Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgård) who have become distant from each other as the result of having lost a child and how they cope with having their credit card details stolen online as a result of them spending so much time on the Internet in an attempt to find refuge from their problems. These stories are all cleverly and subtly interwoven throughout the movie and at times you are given glimpses of how things could have gone in another direction instead of the one the plot follows. Things could go horribly wrong or they can go right.

I enjoyed Disconnect a lot. It’s a very apt story in our digital age and hits home with its message. I highly recommend that you go see it.