Category: General

Interesting debut fantasy novel by Kim J Cowie.
The ruthless Virnal Order rules over the Empire of Satine by fear, guile and an iron hand. Lethal poisons from a past cataclysm are leaking from the ground, causing sickness and death. Unseen insurgency seeks to overturn the established order.

Cadet Starsin only ever wanted a simple life, pursuing his own selfish interests, maintaining a mistress and adding to his meager army pay by trading in ancient artifacts. But when he witnesses the cold blooded murder of a much admired officer by Virnal enforcers, Starsin feels impelled against his instincts to protest. This marks him down as a trouble-maker and potential rebel.

Implicated in sedition, and with both the Virnals and a mysterious adventuress named Lannaira Hajan taking an unhealthy interest in him, Starsin’s mundane life is turned upside down. His own ambiguous past threatens an explosive revelation.

Take a journey across a troubled land with Starsin, as he battles the Virnals, uncovers shocking secrets and finds that he is not the man he thought he was.
Look Inside or buy it on:
Amazon

The anime and manga databases are working again. Links were still pointing to the old database after an upgrade, and after a while the service provider removed the old one.
I have as a result re-enabled comments, so you can waste your life sending me comment spam. 🙁

I got interested again in looking at the night sky recently. The sky here is not very black at night (lots of urban glare and haze) but the brighter stars and planets can be seen when it’s not cloudy.
When I was a teenager I built my own telescope from scratch – in fact two of them. My first scope was a cheap table-top 4″ Newtonian reflector with a cardboard tube. It wasn’t very good, so I re-figured the mirror and built a nice square wooden tube for it, with a spiral thread focuser salvaged from a dead TV set. I can’t remember what mounting it had.
After that I built an 8″ Newtonian reflector from scratch. I ground, polished and figured the mirror, built a tube (from wood, IIRC), and built a massive equatorial mounting with a fork made of 3″ steel pipe and filled with cement, supported by a brick pier. The whole thing was covered by a run-off wooden shed that ran on rails.
I don’t think that many people build their own telescopes any more. The ready-made ones are much cheaper in real terms. These days, one would consider an 8″ reflector to be more of a portable item. When I left home, I had my parents sell the telescope. (They probably couldn’t get rid of the eyesore in the back garden quick enough).

I was also involved with making a 6″ Newtonian reflector at my grammar school. So far as I remember it had an openwork tube made of wood. It did get used a few times (I remember stopping a teacher from looking through the eyepiece when we used it to project an image of the Sun.) There was a notion of giving it a permanent home on top of the concrete bike sheds, but that did not come to anything. (These days, a 6″ Newtonian reflector and mount would be portable).

If you install a current version of the uTorrent bittorrent client, be very careful with what you select during installation as it’s designed to catch you out and ensure that you install the uTorrent Toolbar and something called Conduit Search, which will thereafter appear all over all your web browsers. Should you want to uninstall all the extra junk (which does who knows what), you’ll find that there is no Uninstall button and you have to do it the hard way.

The same or similar remarks may apply to other bittorrent clients.

Hariton Pushwagner is a Norwegian pop artist whose work contains strong sci-fi and comic-book like elements. Particularly when seen in a gallery or in a book his almost obsessively repetitive work powerfully evokes sci-fi dystopias and the crushing effect of modern architecture and consumer culture on modern Man. He has produced a large-format graphic book “Soft City”. Currently (till 2 Sept) there is an exhibition of his work in Milton Keynes: http://www.mkgallery.org/exhibitions/
Reproductions of his works can be found online.

Having shopped at Gosh Comics intermittently over the past 25 years or so, I was surprised to find that they are not outside the British Museum anymore. They have moved to 1 Berwick Street
London W1F 0DR – that’s in Soho.
See http://www.goshlondon.com/move/

3 weeks on, I have been watching reports on NHK World. 27,000 people are dead or missing, and this figure is likely to rise further, since if a whole family was wiped out, there would be nobody to report them missing… Continue reading “Japan Earthquake & Tsunami comments”

If like me you are vaguely aware of online manga scanlations (that’s fan translations of Japanese comic magazines, to the un-initiated) you might be surprised to find how much this has mushroomed in the past few years.  I have been following the manga versions of  a couple of anime that I liked, so was aware that there was online manga, but not how much.

In fact, the quantity of scanlated manga is comparable with the higher-profile and more contentious quantity of  digital fansub anime.

At this point I could give a lengthy guide with links to the databases, the scanlator’s websites, the subgenres and so forth, but since this would involve re-hashing much material from other sites I’ll save myself the bother and let the interested reader search it out for her/himself.

Freed from the the commercial constraints of animation, the range of material and subject matter in manga is wider than in anime, and so is the quality.  If you are fortunate enough to find a series whose art, story and characters you really like, downloading and reading successive chapters can become highly addictive.

Enjoy.