• Let’s Play: Tales of Symphonia
  I don’t think I would play this. It’s too colorful and generally almost distastefully cheerful. I have the impression that due to that it can’t convey it’s darker sequences to you successfully since the lack of a certain sombre attitude of the game as a whole fails to bring about a sense of danger and sadness.

• Let’s Play: Final Fantasy VI Advance
  I’ve put up checking out VI for too long and now that I’ve seen it, I’m just not convinced. That might be nostalgia induced bias since I’m quite fond of VIII and IX.

• Podcast: Build & Analyze 43 Mythical Metro
  I don’t have anything to say about B&A. They’re great and I listen to them while cleaning or doing other chores.

• Podcast: Build & Analyze 85 Rules of the Road
• Podcast: Build & Analyze 86 Folding A Piece of Cake
• Podcast: Build & Analyze 87 Close the Windows and Hope for the Best
• Podcast: Build & Analyze 88 Things are Pretty Here
• Game: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  On the topic of nostalgia induced bias: After I had previously only had a pirated version of C&C 3, which I absolutely loved due to both gameplay and story, I bought this and it’s expansion during a STEAM sale.
• Game: Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
  Had fun checking out new units. The Eradicator Hexapod is awesome.
• Game: Fallout 3
  Another spur of the moment purchase at a STEAM sale. I only played for a brief period of time. I think the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise does a lot better in terms of atmosphere.
• Game: Guild Wars 2 Beta
  I already wrote about that.
• Game: Journey
  Journey for PS3 is amazing and I plan to complete the journey a second time before I write a post about the awesomeness of this great game.
• Game: Lost Horizon
  A point and click adventure set before the second world war, with the Nazis already strong. I plan to release a separate article about this game.

• Game: Mass Effect 2
  Played some more, took more notes, will post to mailbox again shortly.

• Game: Mass Effect 3
  I participated in Operation OVERWATCH, otherwise not much to say aside from the fact that I had my first successful extraction on the ‘Gold’ difficulty setting.

• Text: Freak Army
  A somewhat controversial, well written and deeply troubling though sometimes genuinely funny text about the abyss in men that war is able to bring out. Though I can’t say I fully enjoyed reading this, the sections with the Eurofighter’s board computer made me laugh every time and reminded me of my many, many failures when trying to use Siri. (Text in GERMAN)

• Text: John Siracusa’s review of OS X Mountain Lion
  Siracusa’s review is extremely thorough and contains a lot of different information, from subtle differences in the GUI to changes for developers. It’s worth a read if you’re considering upgrading or just want to know what has changed. It’s rather hefty at 25k+ words but in my opinion his writing style is worth every minute of you reading the article.

• several texts which were short versions to get a taste of the writing

Summary: 2 let’s plays, 5 podcasts, 8 games, 2 longform texts;

Having pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 some time in the last months (and having playing during the second beta weekend) I was eager to dive headfirst into the new content that the third beta weekend provided, namely the asura ¹ and the sylvari ².

As I have been waiting to play the sylvari for a long time - read: since they’ve been announced - I spent more than two hours for character creation, all the while documenting everything for Anja, who wanted to see the new race but hadn’t purchased the game.

My biggest surprise was the fact that sylvari glow in the dark. You may choose a color in which parts of their body slowly pulse during night, which I found to be quite interesting, although I wasn’t entirely sure which color to pick, since I liked non of them enough. I mean, I made my female sylvari thief ⁴ gray this time. Maybe I’ll stick to a faint green another time, but I’m rambling.

I played for some hours, doing various quests and had a lot of fun - which is important since playing a game should not feel like you’re doing work. I admired the beauty of the sylvari’s houses and although I forgot to check out their capital, the Grove, I found their relation to nature and the artful surroundings amazing. If you want to convince people how beautiful Guild Wars 2 can look, show them sylvari blossom houses. Or show them the stunning hive of busy asura that is Rata Sum, their capital.

Which leads me to the second part of my experience this weekend: I also tested the asura, this time a male asuran guardian ³ and during that time I played together with Ron to get an impression of the different personal stories, since we picked different answers to the personality questions asked during character creation. It was nice seeing that seemingly little questions decide which kind of personal story you get to experience when playing. It also gave me a chance to test something different than the thief class, although I’ve pretty much already decided that the character I’ll be playing with the most will be a female sylvari thief. My asuran guardian however was a whole different story in terms of gameplay.

After some questing with Ron, we decided to see other things however and ended up in Rata Sum. During a lot of exploring there we also discovered that you can fall down rather far inside the city and had a little contest who can rack up the most damage from falling. My top damage was around 41.400 but unfortunately Ron bested me by achieving 43k. I blame that on my increased vitality as a guardian and him being a squishy mesmer ⁵.

I also headed to Lion’s Arch for a while where I was amazed by the ship and pirate based architecture and the giant fountain which has a great history of collaboration amongst the different races of Tyria (speak to the lady in blue next to the fountain for its story).

All in all I really enjoyed playing the last beta weekend before Guild Wars 2 is released in August and am looking forward to playing the full version for more than a day or two when it’s complete.

As a little addendum I’d like to thank the developers for the awesome feature that the “deposit all collectibles” button in the inventory is. It instantly sends all raw materials for crafting as well as obtained minipets to the bank in order to gain new space in your inventory after some looting while exploring the gorgeous world the dedicated people at Arenanet built.

Thank you.

I’ll end this post with a heartwarming group shot containing my and Ron’s character and two cute little asuran kids on the port of Rata Sum.

the digital business

James Brightman about the NPD’s response to EA:

“While digital is a growing part of the industry and something that needs to be addressed for the future, the current games industry is still largely rooted in retail and any industry player involved with AAA content simply can’t take their eye away from the retail environment. Successful companies are looking at how their products are performing within all channels, particularly retail,” he said.

Let’s take a moment to discuss why AAA content on consoles is still largely marketed as physical products. First: the pricing is ridiculous. If you’re making me pay more for an old product as a download than it would cost new at the next best online retailer, you already lost. If you publish a game online shortly before the next title in the franchise launches, you might have some fans who will do a stunt and dive into the older product to get the feel for the franchise again, but you’re not doing good on the other customers. Because those will just be wondering why they should now pay more for a non-physical outdated product and question why you weren’t able to put the game online before. Microsoft actively discourages people buying digital games on their Xbox Live platform that are not XBLA games.

Now, I am not sure how Sony handles this, because I don’t own a PS3 and read less news about their business, but from what I’ve heard they managed to do at least one simultaneous release of retail and online in their store.

And Nintendo? Let’s not talk about them. Their mobile platforms have the same flaw that Sony’s have: They’re not taking the Apple Appstore as a role model. You can’t simply buy things. You’re not allowed to download them to all your devices. It’s not even easy to find good items on the platforms from what I gather from fellow bloggers.

By now it should be crystal clear that an Apple iCloud like approach works well for digital items. They can be stored, redownloaded and don’t disappear when you remove them from you device. They are updated easily and when you download an item you only get the newest version. Now granted, they are copy-protected and bound to your ID. But in the case of games that isn’t a problem because the customers can only use the item with the respective company’s device anyway.

the retail business

McQuillan also stressed that gamers’ buying habits still very much include retail products, particularly during holiday periods when the industry Todaygenerally does a sizable chunk of its annual business.

On one hand this is certainly caused by the fact that when you’re buying a video game (read: retail DVD boxes) for a loved one that is in fact a tangible thing and not just some esoteric gift certificate, voucher or whatever you want to call it. On the other hand I’m fairly sure that there are an incredible lot of people handing out those vouchers for a reason:

• There are many people who don’t know anything about video games and therefore are lost when deciding what to buy. They are either likely to ask a sales rep and are either helped into a great buy or conned into buying a game that will just go to the bin or resold.

• You might not be sure about what the person who is going to get your game likes, which genre or franchise they are into. That’s a perfect reason for a gift certificate. Keep in mind that there is still a choice between a generic, say Amazon certificate and something more specific, like Microsoft points.

So the main reason a gift certificate gets bought is: You want the receiver to decide. (Whether on purpose or because you don’t know their taste.) In contrast to that you give physical products like retail games if you want to gift a physical item. I’d even go as far as saying that those making piles of gifts under Christmas trees looking bigger is an incentive to buy them during holidays.

Currently I’m not sure what to write for my novel.
The whole thing is set at an educational institute with a strong military part to it. Students there are to some degree free to choose the profession they want to learn, apart from the mandatory military background.

It has however been difficult to come up with a path of education for the lead character. Since he is based on my perception of myself to a great extend I want to choose something I’m comfortable with. Ideally that profession should also be fun to write about since I want to enjoy writing this novel (and potential sequels). The path as commissioned officer is not perfectly suited since I’ve stated the lead’s distaste for the strict army system in his country multiple times and this is an essential part of his character. On the other hand I’m thinking hard to come up with something that fits the setting and atmosphere of the world I want to create.

That quest for a suitable profession is complicated by the fact that my view of my own career is not particularly clear. I have ideas en masse but I’m not so sure what I want to do to earn my living.

I might just have to make something up entirely in order to keep the story interesting for the reader as well as exciting to write. I’ve said on several occasions that I want the world I create to feel consistent and cohesive. A considerable amount of planning and discussion went into my drafts so far and I intend to keep it that way in order to ensure this world - my world - will be an amazing place to read about.

• Novel: Incommunicado by Michel Reimon
  Actually a leftover from last month, a quite fascinating political book. Never thought I’d pick one of those up but I someone I respect quite a lot told me he was looking forward to reading that book and I got curious. There is a lot about that book that I don’t like, like its in-your-face approach and its onomatopoeia. Also I am not particularly fond of Reimon’s style of writing in general, but I respect that he had something to tell with his book and he brought that message along clearly.

• Novel: Dark Frost by Jennifer Estep
  Cured one of two issues I had from former books. One was the lazy and ridiculous repetition of its own content instead of using different espressions when reestablishing facts for readers who might not remeber the facts from the last book. I got annoyed quite a lot of times when I felt that Estep just copypasted whole paragraphs from the last book into the current one. The second issue that is still unresolved is the fact that it is mentioned on several occassions that there are a lot of other warrior styles on the academy yet we never get to see one. We never even get to walk past one, which strikes me as odd, considering they can’t all be ninjas.

• Game: Mass Effect 2
  Played that again in order to change course of plot as mentioned in this article

• Game: Guild Wars 2
  I bought the game and played through the second beta weekend. I didn’t play during the most recent stresstest since I had other things to do.

• Let’s Play: Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories
  Was also a leftover from last month. I initially intended to watch the one for 358/2 days but got sidetracked when I realized I don’t know the story of Chain of Memories.

• Video: Apple special event Oct 2011
  I was late to the party but on the other hand the keynotes just aren’t that amazing anymore without Steve.

• Video: WWDC 2012 keynote address
  Interesting, but I had already read about most of the announced things, so that was just recap.

• Game: Mass Effect 3
  Enjoyed myself some multiplayer. Did not get the drops I wanted. Everything as usual.

• Game: Star Wolves 3
  Did another playthrough of Star Wolves 3. Got a different ending this time. Realized that my computer is still too slow for both battles with 20+ ships and 8x speed.

• Let’s Play: Pokemon Platinum
  Very cynical, amusing let’s play. Definitely recommendable, though some parts felt long and streched. This is due to Pokémon’s battle system, however, not due to the author’s writing style.

• Game: Little Farm
  Grinded through some stages of Little Farm since I really want to know how the small story ends. While I initially really enjoyed this casual game, the final levels are getting more and more frustratring.

• Game: Bastion
  I bought Bastion a while back and have listened to the Soundtrack several times. This time I got around to playing it and was quite surprised that it has addiction potential. On the other hand it makes me furious just how mean some of the challenges are that you have to master in order to get all secret skills.

Summary: 2 novels, 2 let’s plays, 2 videos, 6 games;

Foreword

A short while ago I managed to screw up a little computer repair and in the process of migrating /home there was a little accident while led to me losing my acquaintance’s bookmarks and contacts ¹. That being the second time I destroyed her address book and her losing all the e-mail addresses I knew I had to prevent that from happening again. That method had to be practically invisible to the user and preferably cost-free.

Google (a.k.a. Gmail)

My first thought was using the Google Contacts addon for Thunderbird, however the reports and reviews at the Addon page were not particularly encouraging. From perfectly working to creating duplicates to not working at all, the opinions were all over the place. I would’ve preferred to stay with Google since I’m using Chromium on this machine as default browser and sync pretty much everything with Google. In essence, that would’ve saved me the creation of another user account at another provider. The feedback over at Mozilla was a bit too bleak for me to recommend this way of backing up your contacts.
I had to find another solution.

Ubuntu One

Of course, this being Ubuntu with its growing Canonical backed ecosystem, I remembered them offering Contacts Sync via Ubuntu one. After reading up over at OMG! Ubuntu! I set up the Ubuntu One account and wanted to enable sync. Only to end up failing, since…

…Canonical has managed to alienate its Ubuntu One customers in a quite spectacular fashion. While offering sync services and trying to compete with several different cloud service providers they have neglected to check if one of their advertised features still works in the current version of their operating system. In short: If you want to use the Contacts Sync for Thunderbird that was introduced with an earlier version of Ubuntu nowadays, you’re screwed.

Contacts Sync started as an option for Evolution ² as early as Ubuntu 10.04 and stayed an option via a technology called CouchDB all the way to 11.04 - in other words until Thunderbird took over as the new default e-mail client. According to the tutorial the sync option stayed in place for that release. With 12.04 however - which I’ve recently had the joy of installing - Contact Sync broke. Horribly. As in: It is not only gone but neither fixed as of the time of me writing this nor is there a proposed workaround.

Imagine this cruel scenario:
You imported all your carefully maintained contacts which you are using for professional purposes into Ubuntu One back then with Evolution. The devout follower of Ubuntu you are, you made the jump from Evolution to Thunderbird - secretly knowing that Thunderbird is less confusing and could in theory help you become more productive. Everything went well since you just synced with Ubuntu One, using their server as your master database. Your data is in fine shape since you just upgraded from an earlier version to 12.04 but now there’s a big problem. Something went wrong, your contacts are gone. Of course your first thought - after calming from the initial moment of panic - is that you just sync with Ubuntu One and your contacts are restored, right?
Well, wrong. There is no Ubuntu Contact Sync in the Thunderbird options, so it’s obviously no longer installed by default. Interestingly there’s also no word of Contact Sync in the Ubuntu One preference panel. A quick query via apt-cache search shows that there’s still packages associated with Thunderbird and Ubuntu One around, but after installing those nothing really happens.

Actually, that was a lie. Within Thunderbird a new address book called “Ubuntu One” will be created. However, you cannot save contacts in this book, neither can you move existing contacts into it nor can you assign it as the address book used to automatically remember addresses you sent mail to. If you’ve previously relied on Ubuntu One to get your contacts, you’re now pretty much lost.

Dropbox (a.k.a. the sledgehammer method)

After running out of patience during the Ubuntu One sync ordeal and with my pool of ideas for free sync rapidly draining I turned to my all-time favorite: Dropbox. Although it struck me as overkill I simply moved .thunderbird as a whole into my colleague’s Dropbox and used a symlink to point Thunderbird to its new location in order to keep a relatively low maintenance solution.

mv ~/.thunderbird ~/Dropbox/Apps/Thunderbird
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Apps/Thunderbird ~/.thunderbird

I’m perfectly aware that this is neither the most elegant solution nor the most fool-proof. I’m also aware that it’s fairly prone to fall victim to possible sync conflicts. This is not a problem however due to my acquaintance only using one PC. It’s a nice trick to keep everything working behind the curtain without paying for a dedicated address book server or similar.

Addendum

In hindsight I realize that I could’ve used Ubuntu One instead of Dropbox to sync the whole folder, thus saving the need to create one more account. However, after the first annoyance I wasn’t too inclined to stick with U1 anymore.

I just watched the presentation of The Secret World at GDC 2012 in its full length and there are several topics I’d like to address before heading back to other matters. In this article I’ll be using the shortened TSW when referring to the game.

User interfaces

If you know me then you’ll be aware how unwilling I am to put up with a bad UI. A great UI is an essential part of any modern game - or at least it should be. Making the UI fun to interact with lessens the impact of immersion breaking when players have to sift through menus in order to change settings, find items or read up quest information. While most of the things I’ve seen in the demo have been pleasant - like the skill wheel - some haven’t. I really wish we could get away from using sliders for things they’re just not suited for. Making the face selection or hairstyle selection a slider makes no sense at all, because in contrast to, say, jaw width, different hairstyles are not polar opposites on an index. Thumbnails would be a preferable option. Using sliders for this sort of option is also detrimental to online games because you can’t easily show which ones are new either due to a patch or an expansion. Using thumbnails you could easily slap some small “new” signage onto the newly available ones. Try that using a slider.

Character looks

I’m never quite sure what to think of the character models of TSW’s character models. While I may be spoiled by the extraordinarily prettiness that TERA Online left me with, I’m just not convinced that their facial features are up to the latest standards in video gaming technology. They look okay when compared with older games, but they’re most certainly not up to date with the latest tech. On the other hand that might be just me expecting more of little details again.

Little touches

TSW has a certain love for detail which can’t be ignored. The developers offered only some examples during the demo but I was impressed how well things are designed.

• Songs heard in karaoke bars may trigger new quests due to their lyrics.
• You get a UNIX inspired hacking terminal when accessing foreign computers but after a successful hack your program may obtain a HTML-formatted copy of the data which makes accessing the information on your device significantly easier and enables pretty graphics all the while explaining why this was possible.
• The three different factions may arrive at key locations of main quests in different way, all the way fitting in with each of their story arc and characteristics.
• The crafting system is a kind of memory game which uses different ingredients as well as their position on a grid to determine the outcome of crafting. That process is aided by the option to dissect your equipment - called “transcribing” in the game world.
• Time travel to a certain dungeon in the past is done via a trance.

There’s other things that make me want to play the game too. Their achievements are linked to real bonuses, like money or items, not only nice pictures. Dangerous environments facilitate the need to be constantly aware of your surroundings in battle. There are obtainable “lore pieces” that tell the whole story behind TSW and form a narrative line on its own.

If there’s one game I’m incredibly curious to see how much of a success it will become, it’s TSW. Yes, I keep Guild Wars 2 in mind, but that’s unnecessary, since GW2 will be successful anyway.

In between spending my time in lectures which are interesting but not in my current curriculum and attending and presenting at the Grazer Linuxtage² I was checking out another event in this student metropolis: The Long Night of Science.

Admittedly, if it wasn’t for another student from university asking me if I want to go I wouldn’t have left the house that evening. Now, that being said, I enjoyed most of the evening. I initially agreed to go because Anja had struck lucky and the first thing she told me about the Long Night stirred my interest.

At the Medical University

The Medical University of Graz (to be more precise: the Ludwig Boltzmann institute for clinical-forensic research) offered something slightly less common amongst its many lectures and presentations that evening: an interactive criminal investigation - you were to solve a murder case.

Using hints (read: answers that were tied to letters) you were supposed to solve the case and guess the gleamingly obvious codeword. For those of you that are reminded of Tom Turbo (link in German), you are quite right.The first step was talking to the three suspects (for a lack of time that consisted of checking three short written statements). Due to the shortness of those statements I personally couldn’t get to a conclusion, but my colleague decided on the right thing. After some discussions I still can’t understand her way of thought on that, but I’ll leave it on that. As the room was separated there were two more activities to do at the “crime scene”, as well as a bonus task. We were to check the smear tests from each suspect’s steering wheel for blood, compare tracks left by tires and make a semi-detailed scribble of the environment because there are no cameras. After leaving the crime scene we headed to the “lab section” to check the seeds gathered from each suspect’s shoes ¹, check a computer model in order to determine which murder weapon was used and compare some DNA tests to see if our most likely suspect left traces on the murder weapon.

After all it was a nice little excursion into the processes used by police and an amusing possibility to try some of the things one only knows from TV on your own.

At the FH Joanneum (University of Applied Sciences)

In hindsight - or rather looking at the plan - I realize that there indeed was a station done by the Journalism & PR team’s Web Literacy Lab. That’s what I intended to check out that evening. Where I actually ended up was the station for Information Management demonstrating how easy it is to do a man in the middle attack for unencrypted VoIP telephony. Though we had an inspiring conversation there I ended up thinking that there wasn’t a station done by the Web Literacy Lab and was slightly disappointed. A short visit to the “Computers of the Future” section didn’t really improve my mood as the things there were neither particularly new nor that amazing. I assume that comes with optimizing demos for all kinds of audiences (children included).

The takeaway

I think next year I’ll try to start earlier into the evening that 19:00 in order to check out more of the various presentations. Nevertheless I’m delighted that Austria offers such an interesting event once a year. Check out the website to see just how many institutes contributed on a nation wide scale.

Last week I went to university in order to listen to Heinz’s¹ lecture about Realtime Journalism as part of GADI². I happened to come across his blog a while back and after reading that he’ll be lecturing I couldn’t resist checking out that particular session of GADI although I don’t take that course this year. It might have been beneficial to attend more courses which I do take…

About Realtime Journalism

The term Realtime Journalism is used for two different combinations of synchronous actions.

• Sync of coverage with event
  This is the part that we are all very familiar with due to its roots in live coverage of events through more traditional media like TV.
• Sync of event with queries
  This part however is where the fun for students of Computer Science and nerds in general is. Due to the availability of open data as well as an abundance of APIs with different proprietary data providers it’s now possible to show an incredible amount of data corresponding with different newsworthy events easily. Reporting on an earthquake? Show maps that are color-coded with the amount of damage that occurred. Reporting on a convention? Monitor the twitter hashtag to see what visitors are thinking. The possibilities are manifold, considering the essential tool that ushahidi - more on that later - might become.

While we are used to the first part, a sync of queries with events in order to display related data in realtime is huge opportunity to improve reports and stories without the need to stretch the length of a story. I’m confident that while not every audience is ready for this kind of information bombardment the trend will be going towards displaying more relevant data without the need to look it up yourself. Critical analysis of gathered information may become harder due to the increasing amount of sources which may not yet have reached the credibility they should have while others may be mistaken from time to time.

Technology

I admit that I wasn’t only there to listen to the lecture but to get to know a few new toys on the web which might not be in the center of attention yet. To say the least, I wasn’t disappointed.

• I had already forgotten about PubSubHubbub, which is a neat extension to the RSS protocol in order to serve new posts even faster to subscriber via the usage of hubs between the publisher and the user. In essence it uses Push instead of clients having to poll for new items. I read up on that while checking out RSS publishing for my old blog.
• Storify is a service that may use different sources like Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds and much more to create interactive, realtime updating stories. Though it sounds interesting, a short demo during the presentation immediately showed me that it’s not my type of thing.
• Facebook has its own livestreaming service called “facebook live talks”. No chance I’ll be using that, thank you very much.
• Ushahidi could be the reporting tool of the future. It’s open source, it’s a service and it’s data and visualizations thereof are incredible if the demonstration’s level of awesomeness can be recreated in real world usage.
• Google Hangouts provide means of realtime video conversations with multiple partners via a browser plugin. I’m not on plus, I don’t have any reason apart from curiosity to go there and plenty of other things to do. So I haven’t tested hangouts. According to Heinz it’s based on the HTML5 capability “Websockets” which are intended for realtime communication on a software level, modernizing the static web. Admittedly, thanks to a large part to AJAX, it’s not that static anymore, but still…

Final Thoughts

From all I heard I came to following conclusions:
There is a big emphasis on what I’d call DIY information. It’s all about enhancing and enriching your own findings and reports with related information and where applicable open data.
You can’t ignore social media anymore, not after what happened in Egypt 2011. Let’s end this post with a quote from the lecture.

Connectivity and interactivity have definite results: The observer becomes an actor. The image of the classic neutral journalist is no longer crystal clear.³

I found some new things on the Internet!

• Bungie released an infographic showing the collected stats of the Halo stat tracking program when they shut it down.
• You don’t want to face Hulk in a debate.
• In a disgustingly hateful comment a user of Readability shows his appreciation of Readability developing an Android version of their application but not releasing it on Google Play initially. Mind you that the app is free and he is in no way entitled to demand anything. Although I admit that releasing it on the Amazon Market with a headstart was definitely not the smartest idea.
• Microsoft is definitely not my favorite company this week. According to this article they plan to introduce commercials for the Xbox Live service. Now, while I personally don’t watch video content on my 360, it is troubling to see that there’s another venue being invaded by commercials that can’t be disabled. The tiles on the Dashboard containing ads are already annoying enough.
• If you’re familiar with Team Fortress 2, you should check out this post about the 9 types of students.

In terms of reading I’ve finished Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, C.C. Hunter’s Taken at Dusk and - I’m quite embarrassed to admit that I had to look up the title although it’s not even been a week - Jenna Black’s Deadly Descendant.