The extended trailer for House of the Dragon, a GoT prequel
27 July 2022
If you can’t do without Game of Thrones (GoT) in your life, then there’s good news. A ten episode prequel series, titled House of the Dragon is set to go to air on Sunday 21 August 2022.
Based in part on the 2018 novel Fire & Blood, by GoT creator George R. R. Martin, House of the Dragon is set two hundred years before events of Game of Thrones, and centres on the “Dance of the Dragons”, the name given to the war of succession within the House Targaryen of Dragonstone.
An extended trailer for House of the Dragon was screened at Comic-Con last week, too much excitement from GoT fans, but that’s probably no surprise.
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George R. R. Martin, trailer, video
For short work breaks fast fun cross platform puzzle games
25 July 2022
Cambridge based British software engineer Simon Tatham, creator of PuTTY, which I once required the services of, has also made available a collection of puzzle-like games, designed to be played for two to three minutes at a time.
I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing.
As Tatham notes, few of the games were actually invented by him, but he has made them playable across several computer platforms, notably Windows, Apple Mac, and Unix.
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A no hook-up city: Sydney not the place to Netflix and chill
25 July 2022
Out of fifty-three cities across the world, Sydney, Australia’s most populated city, ranks as just about the worst when it comes making friends — particularly if you were born outside of Australia — and hooking up, say the results of the Time Out 2022 Index.
When it comes to making friends, if you’re not born in Sydney, forget about befriending Sydneysiders. I’m sure that’s not the experience of every last new-comer, but somehow the finding doesn’t surprise me. Some years ago I read a guide for students coming from India — I think it was, I cannot track down the webpage right now — for degree courses in Australia. Long story short, they were told to expect the going to be tough when seeking out Australian born friends.
The guide explained Australians have “posses” of friends that seldom, it seems, mix. Old friends, school friends, uni friends, work friends, sports team friends, the list goes on. Aussies apparently go from one such group to another, but members of each group rarely meet anyone from other groups. Short wonder people from elsewhere have a hard time ingratiating themselves with the locals. If you work with an Australian, you might see them at Friday night drinks, but that’s about it.
The difficulty of befriending locally born Sydneysiders is something Kim Solomon, who moved to Sydney from South Africa in 2004, recently related to Sydney Morning Herald writer Michael Koziol:
A well-travelled 41-year-old who has also lived in London and spent time in the United States, Solomon finds Sydneysiders difficult to engage with on a personal level, whether they be strangers on the train or parents in her daughter’s school community. ‘It’s very hard to break into established groups of people who were born and raised in Sydney,” she says. “I’ve developed a good group of friends, but they’re all from South Africa and the UK.”
I don’t see too many people randomly striking up conversations on the trains in Sydney, so expecting to make friends on public transport might be hoping for a bit much. But the parents of her kids’ classmates? Sydney, what have you become?
When it comes to being more than friends though, people also felt frustrated, with seventy-one percent of Time Out 2022 Index respondents describing Sydney as a hard place to hook-up.
Sydneysiders are also starved for more intimate connections, it seems, with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying Sydney was a hard place to hook up, although Singapore, Stockholm and Porto, Portugal’s second city, all ranked lower when it came to Netflix but no chill.
Here’s a situation where place of birth doesn’t weigh so much I suspect though. If you click, you click. I get the feeling if people spent less time inside, and more time looking at what was going around them when outdoors, instead being focussed on the screen of their smartphone, they might not find hooking-up quite so difficult.
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The first year in the life of a mango tree time lapse video
25 July 2022
Incredible time lapse video footage of the growth of a mango tree, from being planted as a seed, to a year later, from the people at Boxlapse.
I once lived in house that had a mature mango tree in the back yard. It was sizeable, three metres, maybe a little higher, planted on the fence line. Now I know what I missed earlier on.
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Applications open for the 2022 Heyman Mentoring Award
25 July 2022
Sydney based author Kathryn Heyman is offering Australian writers aged twenty-six and over, from backgrounds of social and economic disadvantage, the opportunity to be mentored by her for a year, and have their manuscript appraised, and possibly published, by HarperCollins.
Heyman, who founded the Australian Writers Mentoring Program, has written seven books, including Keep Your Hands On the Wheel in 1999, Captain Starlight’s Apprentice in 2006, and Fury, a memoir, in 2020.
Applicants, who should also be writing a book with issues of class and economic disadvantage as themes, have until Tuesday 20 September 2022, to apply. Read more about the Heyman Mentoring Award here.
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Where the Crawdads Sing adaptation fails to impress critics
23 July 2022
Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 debut novel of North Carolina based wildlife scientist Delia Owens, was a hit on Bookstagram, but the recently released film adaptation is not faring quite so well.
Both the major film review aggregation services, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, score the Olivia Newman directed feature forty-two and thirty-five out of one hundred, respectively. In other words, readers of the book loved the story, but film critics are far from impressed by its big-screen counterpart.
Carlos Aguilar, writing for The Wrap, described the adaptation as bland and mediocre:
Submerged in the muggy waters of the North Carolina marsh — which per the voiceover, is not a swamp — British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones tries to save “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the film adaption of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, from drowning in its own bland mediocrity.
Rachel LaBonte, film writer for Screen Rant, notes that while the adaptation is largely faithful to the novel, much of the book’s tension fails to transpose to film:
Additionally, in its attempt to bring as many book moments to life as possible, the movie finds itself grappling with a few awkward moments that, while reading fine on the page, don’t exactly translate well to a visual medium.
Meanwhile, Leigh Monson, writing for The A.V. Club, was more positive, lauding Daisy Edgar-Jones’ portrayal of protagonist Kya, the so-called “Marsh Girl”, although she found the pacing of the film at odds with the novel:
The weakest link in the cinematic adaptation is the courtroom procedural that feels crowbarred between bits of Kya’s history. In a novel, chapter breaks can signal a natural demarcation between disparate story beats, but in a two-hour film, the transition between scenes should feel more natural, or at least thematically interconnected. Courtroom scenes pop up without warning, and they only function in parallel to, and never in conjunction with, the flashback scenes that proceed or follow them.
The consensus among critics mirror LaBonte and Monson’s thoughts, the film closely resembles the book, yet doesn’t quite excite in the same way. A case of so close, yet so far, perhaps. It seems there are some novels that are simply best not adapted to film.
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A trailer for Nope, the 2022 film by Jordan Peele
22 July 2022
Nope, trailer, being released in many parts of the world today, is the third feature of American actor and filmmaker Jordan Peele, and is being billed as a sci-fi horror comedy:
After random objects falling from the sky result in the death of their father, ranch-owning siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood attempt to capture video evidence of an unidentified flying object with the help of tech salesman Angel Torres and documentarian Antlers Holst.
But what does the title Nope mean? That, nope, there are no aliens in the film, because they don’t really exist in the first place? Nope, I don’t think so.
Peele chose Nope as the title because he wanted to acknowledge movie audiences and their expected reactions to the film. He also said, however, that he had considered titling the film Little Green Men to reference a theme in the film about humanity’s “monetization of spectacle.”
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Forests now cover two percent of Iceland thanks to replanting
22 July 2022
In the distant past, forests and trees covered large parts of Iceland, about forty percent of the country. But when permanent settlers arrived over a thousand years ago, much of this growth was cleared to make way for agriculture and grazing, and firewood. Efforts to replant trees since the 1990s though have seen forest areas return to two percent of the country today.
That number may not seem like much, but since 1990, the surface area covered by forest or shrubs in Iceland has increased more than six times over – from 7,000 hectares to 45,000. In 20 years, the number is expected to be 2.6%.
Every little bit helps. It’s a hopeful reminder that it’s not too late to take steps of any sort to deal with climate change.
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Illustrations from Stamma on the Game of Chess 1818 edition
22 July 2022
Wednesday 20 July may have been Miles Franklin day in Australia — being the occasion the winner of the annual prestige literary award is announced — but it was also International Chess Day. Also known as World Chess Day, 20 July marks the day International Chess Federation was established in 1924, although International Chess Day didn’t come into being until 1966.
In honour of the beloved checkered board game, the University Of Wisconsin Milwaukee Special Collections have posted images from the 1818 edition of Stamma on the Game of Chess, which contained numerous illustrations of game openings and critical situations. Much of the text was written by Philipp Stamma, and edited by William Lewis, who were eighteenth century chess masters.
Although I play from time to time, I’m not the biggest chess aficionado you’d ever meet, but I was intrigued to learn game pieces were often coloured red and black, rather than the white, or ivory, and black pieces I’m more familiar with. There’s an interesting, though brief, discussion about red chess pieces here.
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Shepard and What Should I Read Next book discovery tools
21 July 2022
Image courtesy of wal_172619.
Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, was named winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin literary award yesterday. As I’ve said before, the long and short lists of literary awards are great places to find reading inspiration. But, if, unlike me, you’re a fast, prolific reader, you might run out of ideas quickly. There’s always Goodreads or StoryGraph (which isn’t half bad), but they’re not the only options for finding something new to read.
Shepherd, founded by Boulder, Colorado, based American entrepreneur Ben Fox, offers reading suggestions based on the recommendations of authors. Fox thinks searching for a book should be fun, an element he believes many online bookshops, and social cataloguing websites, lack.
As a reader, I am incredibly frustrated with the bleak wasteland that is online book discovery. The big bookstores sell books the same way they sell toothpaste, without passion. And, Goodreads makes finding new books about as much fun as browsing a spreadsheet. How you find a book is important. That search is the start of a journey and it should be fun.
In creating Shepherd, Fox hopes to bring the IRL bookstore experience online, and imbue some of the in-store spontaneity to the book discovery process.
What Should I Read Next (WSIRN) works a little differently. Rather than offering author recommendations as Shepherd does, WSIRN will make new reading suggestions based on titles you’ve read previously that you liked.
Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our huge database of real readers’ favourite books to provide book recommendations and suggestions for what to read next.
And it’s not just three or four titles either. For example, typing in Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, returns an extensive list of suggestions.
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