Booker Prize 24 October 2009
Posted by kaitharshayr in Books.add a comment
So the winner of the booker prize has been announced, it was Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall, which I have to say even though I haven’t finished it and there is one book I haven’t read yet, is my favourite.
My least fave book was Summertime, by J M Cotzee (I’m not sure I’ve spelt that right). The book is written as a sort of biography, it follows a fan of JM Cotzee interviewing people as he hopes to compile the biography.The book just didn’t interest me at all, I didn’t find it enjoyable and the way that the book portrayed the author was very one dimensional and made him extremly unlikable. This was the first book I’ve ever read by the author, and I wonder if that’s possibly why I didn’t like it, it was also supposed to be the 3rd book in a biography set he’s written, and I do wonder if maybe I’d read those then it would have made a difference to how I felt about summertime. There was some discussion at the meet up just before the winner was announced that this was quite a clever book. The man doing the interview’s is a huge fan of the author and believes he can do no wrong, where as the interviewd people often didn’t think that highly of him, showing that authors aren’t always these great people. Still I did not like this book.
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, this book follows the story of essentially a house in Czechkoslovakia, that has a glass room from the 1930’s and on during the war years. Its a bit of an odd story I did find it interesting, but also very clinical, I guess that could be because the author is trying to fit it into the theme of the glass room. It’s a story of 2 halves, the first half following the family that built the house, before they leave because of the Nazi’s and the 2nd half the Nazi’s use of the house and after the war is over the use of the house as a place for physiotherapy for children. It made the book feel quite disjointed in a way, and makes you hvae to get used to a whole host of new characters in a short space of time. I found this book kind of interesting but at the same time a bit silly, pretty much everyman present in the book was a two timer. I don’t think this book was fantastic but I do feel it is worth a bit of a read.
THe Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds – This follows pretty much true events of a mental asylum where the poet John Claire was, at the same time it is also the place Alfred Tennyson putting his brother into care. I did find this book interesting but at the same time I found it too short. It was snapshots of events that happned over about a year and a halfs worth of seasons, and I kind of wanted to see a bit more of the big picture. So all in all a good book but too short.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – This story for some reason I am finding the hardest to talk about. I did find this a very good story, well written and after discussion at the meeting there are several possible things that could have been behind the events that played out in the story. I wasn’t for some reason that drawn into the book, even though it is a good book. I think for me there just wasn’t enough excitment in it, I think I’m too used to reading sci-fi/fantasy where there is often more up down tension in a book.
The children’s storybook by AS Byatt – I haven’t read this one yet, though from what I’ve heard it does sound like a good book. I’m looking forward to being able to read it.
And finally Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – This is a weighty tome and I have to say that lugging this to work and back was a real pain. But it is a fantastic book (of which I still have to read 200 pages or so), its written in a stream of conciousness which does at times make it a little hard to follow, you can’t always be sure who said what. The book follows Thomas Cromwell as he rises through King Henry VIII’s court. There’s not really much else I have to say about this as the book just really draws me in, in fact one of the owners of the book shop who set this whole thing up said that he stopped reading it because he felt that having to speed read it in time to read all the other books just didn’t do it justitce. To which I do agree. A book that is a must read, although maybe wait untill the paperback is out! 
Games Workshop: Gamesday 2008 27 September 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming.Tags: games workshop, gamesday 2008, imperial guard, orks, Space Marines, Tyranids, Warhammer, warhammer 40k
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(This is why I need to get hold of my own camera (I now have) because it takes me ages to get pictures sorted when they are on my mum’s and I need to get them to my machine but anyway here is the post i was making the DAY AFTER Gamesday. Enjoy. Also the post is a bit picture heavy.)
So I was going to make a post last night, but when I got back I was just tooo damn tired. I mean sorting photos out and coming up with coherent sentences? It wasn’t going to happen. We got back in time for me to watch the new BBC telling of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which I must confess I’ve never watched, read or listened to, so this should be interested, before I crawled into bed at 10.
So perhaps I should rewind a bit and tell you where me and C went for the day? To the Games Workshop games day at the Birmingham NEC. We opted to take the coach that our local Games Workshop had orgainsed, which meant we paid a little more, but seriously it was just easier plus as we only got our tickets a week ago I very much doubt the train would have been cheaper. Plus, while I’m not 100% sure I’d bet that Virgin trains were probably doing engineering works (again) which would have made it a b***h of a journey. So we left on the coach for Birmingham at 6.30am, arriving at the NEC just after 9. We made one stop on the way at Oxford services, where there were several other coaches, all clearly also on their way to the NEC.
We got there at a pretty good time, meaning that we weren’t too far back in the queue from the entrance, the doors opened at 10am and I think we actually got into the gamesday area at about 10.30. In fact on the way in we saw a kind of odd, but neat and something that does make sense at a convention centre, vending machine. One which wasn’t full of sweets and crisps, but with batteries, memory cards, usb sticks, dvds & cds, cables and mice.
(See we weren’t too far from the actual entrance to the place.)
Once we got in, I figured we’d try and head straight to the Forge World stuff, as the manager for our local store on the coach had mentioned that it just gets so horribly busy there, and as we’d got in reasonably early we might be able to see something. Unfortunately we didn’t quite realise were it was in relation to the entrance and so walked right past it and to the other end of the hall, where we discovered what we think may have been one of the best bits of the convention. A stall selling £5 mystery boxes and lots of old Warhammer stuff really cheap. So we both picked up a mystery box each, each box has 4 random blister packs. We got some pretty neat models, Eldar Harliquins, 2 Tallarn Rough Riders, 4 Robed Space Marines, 4 Officers of a Russian looking imerpial guard regiment, I’m not sure which one? and a demon host. We went back later and got 2 more mystery boxes as well as a £2 copy of the special edition of Warhammer 40k.. £2?! Can’t argue with that! We weren’t so lucky with our 2nd lot of boxes, they both had Lord of the Rings stuff, a Gandolf, Boromir, Haldir and random Elf, 4 Uraki (sp??) and… 3 yes… THREE models of the same Legolas.. 
luckily some of the people on our coach DO play lotr, and so we got rid of some of the models. Although we still have 2 Legoli, and 4 Uraki.. not sure what we’re going to do with them. Anyone want one? We realised we should have got more boxes earlier, ah well.
After that we had a wonder rough, managed to see some of the Forge world stuff, my god the Titans are so BIG!! I mean I know they say they are big but you don’t appreciate HOW BIG till you see them. Look!
Battle scene Imperial Guard vs…? I’m not sure
A Reaver Titan
Close up shot of the fortress.
Tyranids vs Space Marines, for the Anphelion Project, Imperial Armour Vol 4 from Forge World. I may well have to get my mits on that book at some point theres some nice Tyranid stuff in there.
(Left to Right) Tyranid Trygon, Malanthrope , Hierophant. Just to give you an idea of how freaking BIG a Hierophant is(!)
Sorry some of these pic’s are so dark, am not used to using my mum’s camera. These pictures were actually a lot darker too, I’ve adjusted the levels to make it possible to see stuff. Couldn’t really fix the blury one!
There was also lots of random games going on, here are a couple of pictures:
Waaaaagh! Battle ship.
Isn’t it great? An actual ship. I forget who they were fighting, (Space Marines I think, or might have been a mix of Marines and Imperial Guard), but they were based at an actual dock.
Heh Life size 40k models.I’ve no idea why I didn’t take a photo of the Space Marines the Orks were fighting… Oh well.
Racing.
Tanks! This was just a giant tank battle, Imeprial Guard vs Orks.
Annoyingly I am POSTITIVE I took some more photos of other games going on, some Eldar Vs Tyranids, and a big fight between the Tomb Kings and the Undead, which had a giant sphynix and such. However they seem to have vanished. 
Now for some other random pics:
Ork Battle wagon.
Thats one big gun, I would suspect there aren’t rules for this in 40k, because otherwise that’d be pretty nasty!
The people who make warhammer originally started off which historical battles, their new supplimant is the the Great War and this is a scene from Galliple.
Thats pretty much all the pictures, overall it was a good if rather tiring day. It got to abot 2pm and both of us just ran out of energy, luckily the power of coca-cola did revive us. Hurrah for sugar. I wasn’t too impressed with the awards ceremony for the Golden Demon has the way they set their big screen up made it almost impossible to see the actual figures. The screen had a bright white background, with the large logo for the Gamesday at the top and the name of the award at the bottom, meaning the pictures were squashed in between with no way to help contrast them. The best we could make out was ‘I think thats an.. Ork?’ :/ So will have to wait till I can find a report and pictures either online or in White Dwarf.
Finally the guys from our Games Workshop had set up a quiz, we were supposed to be in teams of 6, but the other 4 people in our team contributed NOTHING. Still with just me and C, and C somehow dredging up 10 year old memories of what certain things were we managed to come joint 3rd with 39 poitns (I think) the winners got a rather large 59, so we had no real hope of winning there. Some of the questions in the quiz were pretty tricksey, such as how many elves turn up at Helms Deep in the book.
I’d definitley consider going again, those mystery boxes were fab!
So Excited!! 24 August 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming.Tags: dawn of war 2, Eldar, Space Marines, Tyranids, Warhammer
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Hehehe!! So a few weeks ago I saw the Eldar E3 trailer for Dawn of War II, and I must say its a fantastic trailer, the graphics are amazing and it really shows off Eldar and Space Marines really well!! The trailer ends with the Space Marine Captain slashing at the Eldar Farseer with his chain sword and saying “This world is ours, Witch!” with the dying Farseer answering “Wrong, this world is theirs.” And she points up to the sky, and all we see is a rather reddish looking night sky. The trailer then cuts out to say Dawn of War II, coming soon (or something like that). Leaving you going “Whose?! Whose world is it?!”
What was my reaction then? “Tyranids! Its got to be Tyranids! Oh I hope its Tyranids!”
What did C find today? A slightly extended Eldar Trailer, showing who turns up…
and also This
(Sorry the Embedded video just didn’t want to work )
I was right!! Tyranids!! SQUEEEEE!!! I am sooooo very excited! Look at the awesomeness!!! The utter utter awesomeness of them!
Survey Request 14 August 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming, University.Tags: computer gaming, MSc, survey
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So I’m going to post this link here in the hopes that the some of the few people who read this blog may be inclined to answer this survey.
The survey is about gaming, there are only 4 questions and its for my MSc project, so the more responses the better. I’ll be very greatful for any and all responses.
Geeky ramblings 9 June 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Entertainment, Gaming, TV.Tags: 4th ed, buffy, d&d, fray, role playing, slayers, stargate
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I went to Leicester with C this weekend to meet up with a friend to celebrate her birthday, much geeky talk and fun was had. My friend is doing a Phd at Leicester uni, and was doing a shared bday meal on the Saturday with a friend from Leicester uni’s role-play society, and then the RP soc had their geek ball on the Sunday. And I’m really too tired to write anything really coherent about what we got up to, we ate food, met up with fun people, went to a ball, that about sums it up. The rest of this post is on rather geeky stuff, I didn’t intend to write a long post, but I do seem to have generated one all the same.
D&D 4th ed came out, and on the Sat, my friend’s bf bought a copy of the players guide, over the weekend we all had a look through, and we all decided that it was rather sterile and not very interesting. They’ve changed the races, half-orcs are out and dragon kind (kin?) are in, ok so I find that kind of cool, I do like dragons after all. But then flicking through to some of the other races, there are Eldaren (sp?) AND Elves, and to be honest there isn’t really that much different about then, hmm ok the eyes for both races might have been ever so slightly different but not much. Now I’m not an elf hater like a few people I know, but still Eldaren, Elves and half elves? It’s just getting silly.
And the classes? they’ve thrown out many of the interesting ones, no more druid, or bard and just introduced more combat type classes, and a slightly new type of arcane magic user class. In fact everything is MUCH more combat based, theres no more summoning, illusion, enchantment or necromancy. In fact speaking of necromancy, there is nothing that allows players to be even a little evil, everything is aimed at players having to be good people.
Also there is no more negatives, everything gives bonuses with bigger numbers, so no more ‘lows’ for players. Generally speaking we realised that it is basically an MMO but for a pen’n'paper game. C and my friend’s bf finally decided that the only thing 4th ed would be good for would be a tactical squad based war game, where each player would command their own squad exploring dungeons. Cause otherwise for a role playing game, it does feel rather sterile.
So I guess if I do play d&d, and lets be honest I’m not a big fan of d&d, although I was looking forward to 4th ed, it did sound like it had some good stuff, but as you can probably tell I’m not very impressed with it, but yes if I do play d&d I think I will stick to 3.5.
Also got discussing with my friend and another friend who came for the geek ball too about whether I should try and re-ignite my Stargate Sg-13 game. Then I moved on to say maybe I could run a Buffy related game instead, and the idea of BuffyGate came up. I’m really not sure who came up with the idea first, but anyway my two friends and C all seem to think that some crazy Buffy and Stargate crossover would be a good idea(?!) I’m really not sure how it would work, have an SG team with a slayer(s) in it? Make hellmouths into some strange type of stargate? Um.. hmm no, I really don’t think I want to try and make that work. C thinks I lack imagination because of that 
.
Although it reminds me that after reading the Fray comic it did make me wonder a few things. And to warn you up coming is a bit/rather spoilerish for season 7 of Buffy but anyway. Assuming the end of Buffy doesn’t happen, and there is still only just 1 slayer… or.. two? Because in s7 they do go on about how Buffy dying will trigger the next slayer, but isn’t Faith supposed to be the ‘current’ slayer.. so maybe there are two lines of slayers now, but anyway I digress from the point I wanted to discuss. Assume there is only 1 slayer, what happens when humanity gets to that point where they have space travel, and colonies on other worlds etc. What happens then? Do other worlds have hellmouths to spawn demons etc? Or are there only such things on worlds where life has spawned (and not worlds which have been terraformed?). What would the slayer do if there were? Or would it only be Earth? And if so would that mean that the Slayer would never be allowed to leave Earth?
And obviously this got me to wondering what aliens do, I mean do aliens have their own type of vampires & demons (or because demons tend to come from another plane of existence, could not the same demonic race inhabit other alien worlds?) and if aliens do have such things, how do they combat them? Their own slayer types? Or some kind of Initiative type? What? It does make me wonder.
My Prince Returns 4 June 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming.Tags: prince of persia, prince of persia the journey begins
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*drool*
(I think his hair looks silly thou… )
Done! 30 May 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming, University.Tags: exams, games, keyboard, orange box, portal, shopping
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So yesterday I had my last exam!! (Maybe my last exam ever? Although I thought that when I finished my undergrad degree, and it turned out to not be the case.) I’m glad thats all over now, now I just have to do my project and I’m done. Quite relieve that the majority of the stuff is over though, although I’m not quite sure just how much the project counts towards my final grade. :/
So as my last exam finished at 12pm, yes its an odd time considering that all my lectures and other exams were at 6pm, but that’s because a partner college in Sri Lanka was doing the same exam. After that was done I met up with C and we hit Oxford street. I did have reasonably grand plans of getting some new shoes, a dress, a bag, a book and a game, alas the trip was not so successful. I couldn’t find the Agile Web Development book for Ruby on Rails in Borders, so looks like I may have to get it off Play.com. And alas the dress and bag I had liked didn’t look as good in real life, ah well no biggy, saved me a bit of money its not like I needed them. I did however invest in some sandals, (2 pairs in fact), and it seems like my feet have shrunk, I know that you can go slightly smaller with sandals but usually I’d get a 6, not a 5 1/2.
And then I did a silly thing, I bought Portal, now don’t get me wrong I really want to play this game, but I sort of thought I didn’t want to bother getting the Orange Box, because well I’m not too interested in playing Team Fortress 2, and someone already gave me their Half Life 2 and Half Life Ep1 from the Orange Box so I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it. But then I do want to play Half Life ep 2 and I remembered (after I’d purchased Portal) that the Orange Box also has Peggle Extreme in it, and currently its only £24 on Amazon, soo when you consider I’d get 3 games, and would probably have tried Team Fortress 2, then I really should have gotten it. Well no problem, I thought to myself, I haven’t opened the packaging on Portal I can just return it to HMV.
So that’s what I went to do today. Or tried to. Apparently HMV only do exchanges on unopened PC games. Joy. And unsurprisingly my local (rather small) HMV did NOT have the Orange Box available. Thus I am now presented with 2 options.
- I trek to Oxford Street (30 min journey) and attempt to exchange my copy of Portal for a copy of the Orange Box (price £30).
- I give/sell Portal to someone else, and buy the Orange Box of Amazon.
Hmmm. :/ Really not sure. 1 is cheaper but its a little bit of a hassle JUST to exchange a game.
Ugh so anyway back to yesterday, I decided that going shopping after you’ve had an exam really isn’t a good idea, its really exhausting! I was wiped out by the time I got home, couple that with the fact that I haven’t been sleeping too good for the last few days. Oh well maybe now exams are done I can sort that out.
In other news I did get a hair cut today. Yays! It is now jaw length, and layered (I have thick, curly hair, I have to have it layered otherwise it just goes all poofy. So now it is funky and short, although the hair dresser did decide to do weird things when finishing up, it was going curly and he decided to straighten the very front bits but to leave the back curly. Very strange. Ah well I do intend to dye it purple over the weekend (hopefully).
And finally my new keyboard did arrive. Although the size of the box it arrived in did amuse me, especially when compared with the size of the box for the keyboard. It was all taken up with those fancy bag’s of air. I took a pic of it against my old keyboard too, the size difference doesn’t look too bad (its barely noticeable in some ways). And hopefully you can’t see how dirty my old keyboard is either! 
Iron Man 4 May 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Film.Tags: Iron Man, marvel
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Me and C went to see Iron Man last night and it was absolutely brilliant. One of the best superhero flicks I’ve seen in ages apart from Batman Begins. For what is roughly a 2 hour film it actually feels a lot longer, you get a good feel for the characters and I have to say the casting was fab! There’s a great mix of humour, action and seriousness. It was.. hmm i want to say great again, but I’ve already used that word.. lets see.. it was fun being able to watch Stark build his Iron Man costume, specially as he tried to figure out the flying part, a painful process! Plus his helper robots were awesome and dare I say cute!
Also if you haven’t seen it yet then you must stay till the end credits! Highlight the section below for a mini spoiler:
Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury is going to be so awesome! I mean its Samuel L Jackson! 
Also it looks like they are going to be doing a Thor and a Captain America movie.. so after that I’m betting we have some kind of Avengers movie.. although they will have to be careful they don’t have toooo many superheroes in that, it’ll get too confusing. C was reading through the first bit of his Marvel Superhero encyclopaedia and almost every Marvel superhero has been in the Avengers at one point of other.
Some people in the cinema were really low on their Geek points. At the end of the movie they were going
“Cool, if they have an Avengers movie they’ll have the awesome superheroes like Iron Man, Wolverine, (lists a few others) Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman.. (continues listing superheroes)”
Now hang on a sec and back up .. Batman? Superman? Wonder Woman? Aquaman? *le sigh* Thats DC, not Marvel, DC. Different universes my uninformed friend.
Babylon 5 s5 30 April 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in TV.Tags: babylon 5
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So me and C have been working our way through Babylon 5, we’ve flown fairly quickly through seasons 1-4, (although holiday time and such helped with that) and we’ve enjoyed it. Actually I have seen Babylon 5 before and I do like it, its not one of my fave TV shows but I like it. However now we’ve hit season 5.. and progress has sort of stopped, the first half of season 5 is just.. some of the most annoying TV ever. I mean I’ve always known S5 wasn’t good, and I have actually watched it before, and I can’t have been paying much attention then because it didn’t annoy me nearly as much as it is now. I mean the whole issue with the Telepaths is a good one, it had potential as a story line, but the execution? Gah.
Byron and his bunch of hippy telepaths? Byron may be a charismatic leader, but he doesn’t come across as being much of a planner. I mean let’s go blackmail all the alliance ambassadors with their state secrets to try and get our own telepath homeworld. I mean what? I mean firstly why did he never even try to speak to Sheridan after he found out Telepaths are the Vorlons fault, its just a straight, we should get our own homeowrld thing. And then, how exactly is this homeworld thing going to work?! I mean the kids of two telepaths are necessarily going to BE telepaths. So what are you going to do with mundanes on this telepath world? They’ll just become some sub-slave race? Or will they be rejected and sent back to Earth?
Then at the end of ep 11, when they are arresting the leaders of Byron’s hippy telepath rebellion, the prisoner’s suddenly pull out guns when Bester and his blood hounds turned up. Er WHAT?! Who the hell lets prisoners walk around with guns, why weren’t they searched. Its not like these were all small easy to hid guns, one of them was suddenly wielding a PPG rifle? *sigh* I know there was more silly stuff, I just can’t remember it all.. I may be blocking it from my mind.
Thank goodness all this sillyness is intermixed with brilliant Londo and G’Kar interaction, I love those two, always have they are such brilliant characters, and G’Kar is especially funny. And thank goodness that this telepath story line is pretty much done with, although I still think my least fave episode is the very last one on season 4.
Edit to add: Just been discussing this with my friend and I thought I’d just quote what he said about season 5.
“It was because the network (Fox, are you surprised?) had told them “S3 would be the last” “Oh, OK, you’re popular, you can have ONE more, Finish it now” “S4 was awesome, you can have your last season after all!”"
Ahh Fox, the destroyer of great TV.
Random update 14 April 2008
Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming, Knitting.Tags: dark heresy, games workshop, Knitting, natural history museum, role playing, trains, wedding
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Well the first week of my ‘Easter’ Holidays has been and gone, and I feel much more relaxed now, I guess its about time I get started on my coursework that I have? Especially as one is my big project proposal write up thingy.. urgh. Lets forget that for now, and I’ll make this an update on the fun things I’ve been up to recently.
Ahhh I’m going to cut this because this post is getting long!! Anyway to give it a mini contents page I talk about Wedding, Natural History Museum, Roleplaying, and random other things.
