Media Recap: May 2013

Posted on Sat 15 June 2013 • Tagged with Media Recap

Summary: 2 Games, 1 Let’s Play, 3 Movies, 3 Videos, 7 podcasts, 2 novels, 4 papers

Games

  • Mass Effect 3
    I've already written another article about playing Mass Effect 3 with my girlfriend. By the time of this writing we're about 45 hours into the game, having completed the DLC except Citadel.
  • Bastion (iOS)
    I've already played Bastion before and liked it. Sadly I never finished the game on the PC and intend to do so now that I bought the mobile edition for only a buck.

Let's Plays

  • Jade Cocoon
    Jade Cocoon had some pokémonish traits but was great game with its mutation based merging of captured creatures and I really regret having sold it long ago. Though I also played its successor I have fond memories of Jade Cocoon (1) while the second part was rather disappointing with its fixed evolution trees instead of computed features, stats and creature design.

Movies

  • Verblendung (a.k.a. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; German)
    I had already seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before, but wanted to view it again with my girlfriend since I really enjoyed that movie, almost as much as the book it's based on.
  • Step up 3D (German)
    The peak of the Step Up series may have been reached already. Step Up 3D featured too much personal drama for my taste. The part of the movie during which the two male leads both temporarily lose their girlfriend was just over the top kitschy.
  • Step up Revolution (a.k.a. Step Up 4, Step Up 4: Miami Heat; German)
    Step Up 4 wasn't that much better in my opinion. While there was less drama, the characters were less fleshed out and there was less focus on the actual dancing and more on the setting itself, featuring multi-media installations, graffiti, costumes and the recurring theme of flashmobs.

Videos

Podcasts

I’m trying to reduce my backlog by listening to old Hypercritical as well as Build & Analyze episodes.

Novels

  • Chosen at Nightfall - by C.C. Hunter
    Chosen at Nightfall is a fitting conclusion to an amazing series of urban fantasy. It - again - didn't fail to amuse me in a non-sarcastic, charming way. It's not comedy per se, but highly entertaining and made me laugh hard time and time again.
  • Rogue Descendant - by Jenna Black
    Another entry in the Nikki Glas series. Not as funny as C.C. Hunter's titles. More mature, with a more self-centered narrative, and a slightly less fantasy-orientated setting as far as location of the story goes.

Misc

  • 4 papers (GADI)

I am currently taking the course ‘GADI’ at university. ‘GADI’ stands for ‘Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie’ which can be roughly translated as ‘the aspects of information technology on society’. The course has a lecture part as well as one consisting of exercises. The exercises can be done in four different ways. There is blogging, microblogging, scientific writing as well as scientific reviewing (which means, you are trying to analyze what the writers have written and try to find what’s wrong with their work and include suggestions).

While I did my part as microblogger - thereby accepting my misfortune for not being able to click the right button and being late - instead of blogger, I also had the chance to look into four of the papers that had been written by the scientific writers. Let me tell you that was shocked. Three of them were abysmal in terms of capitalization, punctuation and typos, many of which would have been found by a simple spellchecker. The fourth was better but still showed that the students at the TU do not consider good writing a skill of at least mediocre importance (that might be due to it being a homework instead of a hobby project, I admit).

I strongly advise the scientific writing teams to proofread their work, if possible even have another person proofread the paper. Papers get peer-reviewed for content too, code is being reviewed as a common industry procedure. Skimming through a paper less than 20 pages in length is certainly possible.