The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to save her sister, and gets pitted against 23 more kids who go on to brutally maim and murder eachother. It was shockingly up front with violence – a risky move for Scholastic Publishing that apparently paid off big-time. I don’t know how they’re going to present the arena scenes in the film coming out next year without going way over a PG13 rating.

Thematically it may be similar to the famously shocking Japanese movie “Battle Royale”, but it’s more character driven – we learn more than we often want to know about Katniss’ fear, failings and her increasingly pathological emotional boundaries while the tension constantly rises.

I’ve seen Suzanne Collins in interviews, and she looks like a nice person – but she seems to have a boundless capacity to torture and murder her characters. Given that it’s a story about government sanctioned killing games, it’s not spoiling anything to warn that predictably few characters make it through the entire series – it’s probably best you don’t get too attached.

It’s worth reading if you like dark science fiction. The first one was definitely the strongest, but the second book has some very cool ideas in it too. Meh on the third, but once you’ve read that far you might as well.

I want to tell you how much I loved this book, but I have to admit that the pace was infuriatingly uneven – Weisman alternates between exciting depictions of collapsing cities to long boring musings about what kind of grasses are preferred by migratory birds. A few chapters of the cataclysmic failure of the highly explosive untended oil refineries along the gulf coast, followed by a leisurely paean about the kinds of trees that one might find in a bog.

When it gets going it’s bone-chillingly great – we’re all doomed! But feel free to skip chapters if the plight of the mastadons and his poetic descriptions of post-human Africa are going on for a little too long. Don’t miss his fascinating discussions about the Pacific Gyre filling up with plastic though, or the amusing unintended re-naturing of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Lots of very neat observations and anecdotes about the kind of engineering required to last even more than a few hundred years. (Your house will be long gone – and everything in it, save for a few titanium bits in your dishwasher and some connectors from your fusebox.)

On a topical note – in the book he describes a structural engineer’s warnings regarding the impending consequences of Istanbul’s sudden growth, up from 1 to 15 million inhabitants since just 1950. Since much of the explosive growth was accommodated by easing building codes and using lowest-bid materials to erect shoddy concrete multi-storey buildings, scientists predict that the next major tremor (due within 30 years) on the North Anatolian Fault which runs right through the city could collapse as many as 50,000 apartment buildings. We had a scary preview of what could happen this evening with the earthquake in Van, Turkey. And there’s little they could do to prevent it – there’s no way to bring a city of 15 million people up to earthquake code with the clock ticking. Scary.

“When an earthquake strikes Istanbul, its narrow, winding streets will clog so totally with the rubble of thousands of wrecked buildings, Sozen estimates, that much of the city will simply have to close down for 30 years before the massive destruction can be cleared away.“

WtC is a turn-based hex-grid re-imagining of Final Fantasy Tactics, with more than a dozen character classes and tons of spells and powers. So far I can tell they put a ton of effort into it, the storyline is fun and compelling and the art is top-notch, and I’m really liking the destructible terrain, huge groups of units and weird creatures. The music is catchy, too!

One of the game mechanics they’ve introduced makes the game really interesting – you fight a series of sequential battles, where you don’t always get reinforcements. This makes it important to protect your armies, since you can’t win a war of attrition. It’s also the only tactics game I know of that lets you play multiplayer in head-to-head mode. I’m excited to try online play! Download it so we can fight!

The main character, Meg, is a confident, capable young woman with the power to “Kythe” – that is, to speak to other-dimensional beings with her mind. She goes on a quest to save her psychic brother from having his mitochondria destroyed by the evil Echthroi – a quest that takes her to a middle school, to the edge of the galaxy, and into her brother’s cells. The ending is particularly trippy – they spend about 30 pages in some kind of non-corporeal space thinking love at eachother – while all kinds of imagery is presented about dancing shrimp and singing trees. It was pretty cool – even when I wasn’t really following it.

At only 110 pages, it was an easy, fast read – I forgot how quickly I could breeze through short young-adult novels. It was a nice treat to read a book in an afternoon instead of slogging through another epic with lots of breaks in the middle.

Room is written from the perspective of Jack, a 5 year old boy who lives in a room with his mother. There’s a dark and sinister undertone to the story, but Jack, who’s never experienced life beyond the four walls of ‘Room’, is grateful for his life with Mom and uses his imagination to rationalize the images he sees on television. Things change for Jack when Mom comes up with a plan to leave room – set aside some time to read, because you won’t be able to stop. Room made my heart race and palms sweaty.

One of my friends found the dark aspects of the story exploitative of recent news stories, which I think the author addresses in her own way in the narrative. Everyone else I’ve lent it to seems to have really loved the story, and they all go on about ‘the plan’ – it’s exhilarating. Great book!

The problem with Call of Duty 2 is that they’ve spent so much effort to put you into the midst of a cinematic experience that they’re unwilling to ever deviate from the script. If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of receiving a grenade to the face, when you’re miraculously resurrected the entire world resets and the clockwork begins again, making death the beginning of a bizarre deja-vu precognitive experience. All the Nazis are in the same hidey-holes, all the planes fly the same trajectories, all the tanks drive the same routes.

‘Nein! It iz not fair! How do you know vere I vas hidden?’

In the snow level in particular… I must have died about 15 times under mortar fire trying to figure out what I was supposed to do (I should have zigged instead of zagged), so as my reincarnation count added up I became a lethal psychic assassin, standing in the center of a town square and picking off hidden nazis through windows and behind fences, tossing grenades into the path of expected patrols. Even weirder, the other soldiers seem oblivious. I have personally wiped out entire platoons before they ever saw it coming, and my buddies keep telling me to hurry it up.

I think it could be made into a movie concept – like Groundhog Day but with tanks.

It turns out that I was hallucinating or something, because after I bought the book I couldn’t find any record of who said that, it’s -not- part of Canada Reads, and in fact there was no literature panel on Q the week I believe I heard it. I think dark Obeah magic made me buy it and read it. Which is fantastic, because it’s an excellent story.

I won’t go into much further detail about the plot, because that one line will hopefully grab you as it grabbed me. But there are two really important observations I want to make about this book:

1) The book is narrated in a really thick but setting-appropriate Jamaican Patois. The first few chapters I thought my brain was going to melt out of my head, working harder to interpret than understand. Towards the midway point I was reading it pretty fluently, but expect to slog slowly through all the “Lawd, pickney, de cow cain’t milk sheself!“. It adds a fantastic depth and richness to the story, but it’s hard to read. Language-wise it may also be interesting to note that they drop the N-bomb every second sentence, which is used entirely in proper context, but still made me squeamish.

2) The life of a slave, as presented in this book, is every bit (and more) tragic, merciless, debasing and brutal as you can imagine. I expected it to be pretty bleak, but the author goes to great lengths to expose you to cruelty, torture and savagery. It’s not for the faint of heart. The more terribly they’re abused, though, the more savoury their plan for revenge becomes. I don’t know: were all plantation owners insanely violent short-tempered sociopaths? This guy’s really a piece of work.

Really happy that I picked this book up – it’s a real page-turner, and it’s given me a lot of insight into a setting I knew very little about, and inspired me to follow up with some research into the real-life history of the period.

Plotwise, it felt like James Cameron lifted pages directly from “Dances with Wolves” and “The Last Samurai”, and then threw a bunch of giant smurfs and robots in for good measure. There’s not a lot of new ground tread here, in terms of clever story twists, but it was simple, clear and paced well, and made sense, which I can’t say about a lot of other CG spectacle films. (*cough* Phantom Menace, Final Fantasy, etc *cough*)

Visually, it was stunning – really incredible production design went into every inch of the film, in particular the lush environments. The native species of plants and animals on planet Pandora look and feel like they could be real. The 3D effect from the glasses was subtle and downplayed through most of the film, but I think it plays a huge role in making the battle scenes readable – I’m curious to see the “flat” version at some point to see how it differs.

I think ‘regular’ members of the audience probably took most of it for granted, but this film was a monumental technical effort. I often forgot I was watching a nearly-entirely-CG film, the textures and lighting and character animation (mostly motion capture?) were amazingly well executed. This will be a very exciting year at Siggraph, when they explain how everything was done. I bet 80% of the talks will at least cite Avatar as an influence. I have so many questions!

I wonder how many person-years went into putting all of this together? Kudos to all of the artists I know who worked on shots for this movie – I saw a bunch of ex-Frantic credits in there mixed among a bunch of different companies. Great job, everyone! One for the history books!

Right – so the film was bad. It had some really clever ideas (mostly ripped from Running Man and Smash TV), there were some really oddball amusing scenes (including a dance number), and I appreciate the subtle humour that ran beneath the whole thing. But they did it all wrong – the editing, acting, etc, were terrible.

In the future, you can jump into a convict’s body and play live “human puppet” action games. I was completely willing to take this for granted – it’s a fun idea. But the action sequences which should have been insanely cool, were completely scattered and incomprehensible. Just a random sequence of explosions and flying debris and quick camera cuts. We never saw Kable winning or losing – he was just always shooting stuff coming at him from random directions. They go into the “slayers” game a couple of times, and it never really makes any sense what he’s doing. At least in Running Man, you knew Arnold had to fight the hockey guy.

Kable wins! Or something. Maybe? Who knows?

The film also had a shocking amount of sexual content for a 14A film – I guess Canadian kids are really perverted. There’s an (actually pretty clever) hedonist “puppet” playworld that figures into the film that makes Second Life look pretty tame. Unexpectedly, Milo Ventimiglia from Heroes shows up in a leather jumpsuit, looking to be disciplined. Kindof a brainbender. Definitely not appropriate for littler kids despite the moderate rating.

Natasha enjoys a bowl of Truffle Popcorn

There was something (or everything) in every dish that had been transmuted through his unconventional kitchen into some new shape or texture. A carrot in the form of a bath bead. Blue heirloom potatoes. Shattered limes. Liquid nitrogen noodles. Powdered butter. Foamed … I don’t even know what the foam was. Delicious.

The shape changes aren’t gimmicks, either – each (creatively named) meal demonstrates the chef’s master understanding of taste and texture combinations. My favourite meal was the “Tomatrix Reloaded”, a series of tiny sweet garden tomatoes, each one infused, sprinkled with, wrapped in or sprayed with some novel flavor pairing that made every bite sing. The wild boar was cooked (sous-vide in a thermal immersion circulator) to perfection, the scallops were seared (by heat gun) perfectly.

The serving staff are really excellent, too. Like a ceremony, after every dish they remove your cutlery and provide you with bizarre new eating instruments matched to the next meal. The anticipation precipitated by delivering a spoon to our table was enough to put my imagination in overdrive between courses. We were extremely well attended to during the meal and they were very knowledgeable and accommodating about our litany of allergies, which I think they took as a challenge.

Highly highly recommended. A really exceptional experience.