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Evening Reading

by Steve Gibson, Dec 18, 2006 6:22pm PST
Related Topics – Wack News

I'm absolutely positive it will fit. Just force it a little.

- Google + NASA - Goodbye TV - Borneo has lots of nifty species - Congrats on person of the year buddy! - Animals have dreams too
Lastly, YOU WILL BE BRAINWASHED


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  • #3163
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    By: dodob x
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    I received a few things in the mail today. In reply.

    1) Castlevania Portrait of Ruin. Made a bad (GOOD?) decision opening this first. That ate away a good hour or so. "Save room! Wait... dark map corner... last... wait... ooh item... save room! OK, last run..." Can you believe I got a Claymore on my first try against one of the chicken lackeys? That made the next two weapons I got off the map useless ^_^

    After the shiny-but-unpolished Dawn of Sorrow (I know I'm in the very small minority here) I wasn't expecting much. World War 2 setting, "Brauner" guy, teenage main characters, DoS anime style... there were lots of things that turned me off. Fired up the game, and first thing off the bat... I fell in love with the dialog. The dialog in DoS was COMPLETELY missing. PoR goes back to AoS in terms of fun dialog to follow (skippable of course) and... OMG I LOVE THE CHARACTERS. Jonathan is NOT the typical androgynous male lead, but he isn't the obnoxious teen rebel either. He's something of a believable character, and so is Charlotte. All of this from two dialog exchanges!

    Character control... PERFECT! Run speed reminds me of Julius mode from AoS, gravity is "hard" and not floaty like DoS. And... THE VAMPIRE KILLER IS FUCKING KICK ASS (even though so far it's the most basic weapon in the game and even a Leather Whip outdamages it.)

    Character switch/tag team puzzles are so far so good. Very straightforward, which imo is a very good thing (I'm stupid like that.)

    The painting maps are great. The special effects are great, the 3D touches are great. There is nothing I don't love about this game.

    My only regret about PoR is not being able to get the preorder bundle :( I can't find the option in-game to switch the audio to Japanese voices (haven't really looked outside the in-game pause menu) but that's okay. The speech is few and far between, and the English voice acting is more than simply good.

    So I had to force myself to shut off the DS after yet another save room...

    2) The Digital Photography Book
    I FINALLY received this one from amazon.co.jp. They held my book order for over a month, I'm suspecting they wanted me to cancel it and re-place the order with the newer, LOWER pricetag. *shrug* fine by me :)

    The 5/5 rating on amazon is well deserved. I love simple, to-the-point explanations, even if they are sometimes prefaced by a chapter intro where Kelby goes about an entire page of nerd jokes. Typical Kelby stuff. If you're a nerd like me you'll love it, otherwise you just skip the chapter intro and dig into the good stuff.

    Unlike Understanding Exposure, NG Guide to Making Great Photographs, and the countless other highly recommended photography books (and rightly so), The Digital Photography book is SIMPLE. The layout, the content, the tips. It's all very basic, but very accessible and approachable. If Amazon had a "Look Inside" that would explain it much better than I can, but...

    Imagine tips gathered by shackers about a certain topic, organized into a clear format. The book reads like a friend's teaching you along.

    Instead of a huge number of pretty but miscellaneous photos sidelined by paragraphs upon paragraphs of text about aperture, shutterspeed, iso values, camera mechanisms, etc. etc., each page of the book is layed out like this:

    * CATCHY TITLE IN BIG LETTERS (not caps, but it's the closest I got)
    * Relevant photograph that takes 1/3 of the page, vertically aligned toward the center.
    * One concise paragraph with well-spaced lines and a sensible font.

    Example:

    THE MONOPOD SCAM

    (picture of a dude looking through his camera mounted on a monopod)

    Now, a lot of places simply won't let you set up a tripod indoors (for example, try to set up a tripod in someplace like Grand Central Station. You can count the seconds before security arrives). [...] So, the scam is this: if they say anything to you about shooting on a monopod, you can always counter with, "Hey, this isn't a tripod." It often stops them dead in their tracks. [...] see if you can pull off the old monopod scam. my guess is--you'll float right by 'em.

    The rest of the book is just as readable. You could take it as a bus-ride read, and not limit it to something you'll only want to read in the quiet of your study.

    I would do a chapter listing and a few select pages but it's late and I'm tired and I might play some more por before sleep

    3) Gates of Fire
    Didn't have much time for this, but I flipped through it and it looked like a novel and not some ancient piece of writing which is what I feared ^_^

    4) Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man
    Finally broke down after waiting forever for the local bookstore to carry it and ordered it through amazon.

    5) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
    Secretly I want Anne Fadiman to write another non-fictional journal-like book like Ex Libris, but I guess this will do. I fear it might share some themes with The Kite Runner, so I might just push it back on my backlog a little.

    6) The Ruby Way second edition
    I don't really want to talk about programming now
    Dec 19, 2006 9:08am PST

    Thread Truncated. Click to see all 2 replies.

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