Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by Meek

Is it wrong to hate a certain race?

Meek — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 09:30:25 +0800

my friends want to do a 10k instead of a 5k and i really dislike them!

Final Fantasy Tactics is the best in FFSeries

Meek — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 09:09:47 +0800

Period.

[@Mustadio]

Finer Things Club

Meek — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 10:44:02 +0800

Open for admission now

Objective: To meet once a month and discuss books/movies/music
How to join: Send in your resume of finer appreciations via PM

We Are What We Are

Meek — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 14:48:33 +0800

[YOUTUBE]KXKogr0O-Zc[/YOUTUBE]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment...ing_horror.html

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/we_are_what_we_are_2013/

Horror movies about cannibals have been a staple since Tobe Hooper took a big bite out of the genre with 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That micro-budget indie set the basic pattern for a score of sequels, remakes, and imitations: An inbred, monosyllabic sub-Mensa family - with a penchant for making masks and lampshades with human skin - trap, kill, and cook unwitting teenagers.

The Silence of the Lambs gave us an articulate, Euro-suave gourmand cannibal, but served up pretty much the same stew.

There's nothing formulaic about We Are What We Are, a brilliant, deeply disturbing religious allegory about an otherwise normal family in rural, upstate New York who subscribe to a generations-old belief that they will die if they don't consume human flesh.

Loosely adapted from Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau's stunning 2010 shocker, We Are What We Are is the third feature from indie wunderkind Jim Mickle, who breathed new life into the vampire genre with 2010's equally riveting, innovative Stake Land.

An American Gothic yarn about the power of tradition, ritual, and sacrifice to bind a clan together, We Are What We Are doesn't waste time with cheap scares. Mickle keeps his story on a steady, slow simmer, transporting us minute by minute into the very heart of dread.
Ambyr Childers (Tee Master) and Julia Garner (Martha Marcy May Marlene) give deeply moving performances as teenage sisters Iris and Rose Parker, who find themselves the heads of the family when their mother is accidentally killed in a violent storm.

Their father, Frank (Bill Sage), expects them to take up their mother's mantle and initiate their clan's generations-old ritual of preparing, sacrificing, and consuming another human being. Frank may be the enforcer who reminds the girls of the strictures of their strange covenant with the universe, but he's powerless to perform the ritualized killing himself: It's always been the matriarch's role.

Kill Bill's Michael Parks has a strong turn as Doc Barrow, who begins to investigate the family when his autopsy of the mother reveals a shocking secret.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Mickle's film is that it elicits sympathy for Iris and Rose's singularly melancholy family.

Shot in an area of New York state that still bears the scars of Hurricane Irene, and fortified by amazing sound design and an exquisite eye for visual rhyme and rhythm, We Are What We Are is suffused by an eerie, biblical atmosphere.

It evokes such terrifying scenes as Noah's Flood, Moses' sublime confrontation with God, and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, reminding us that the sacred can manifest itself as a voracious monster.

Oray No Puncho Dyanomito

Meek — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:24:35 +0800

[YOUTUBE]BLXlaH0IZB4[/YOUTUBE]

The Garden Of Evening Mist

Meek — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 10:09:23 +0800

Fact: Buatan Malaysia

http://www.amazon.com/The-Garden-Evening-M...n/dp/B00B9ZBL4E

Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.” Then she can design a garden for herself.

As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?

The book can be interpreted in many ways, it is that multi-levelled, so my take on the events might differ vastly from other readers. There are enough, excellent reviews about this book on Goodreads, so I won't indulge too much.

The most important sentence in the book, for me, is on Page 223(soft cover): "There was no need to talk much now - we understood each other's shades of silence."

And how precisely this sentence describes the events in the lives of all, but most importantly, the two main characters: The Japanese Aritomo, the masterful gardener with his secret, very special, horimono art, and the Chinese judge Teoh Yun Ling who is the narrator in her effort to write her memoirs before Aphasia shuts her down inside her own body.

Not to disclose too much of the story, I can only say that Yun Ling was looking for something that Aritomo was the only one to help her with and she was totally unaware of it. He refused to design the garden in her sister's memory, but instead appointed her as his assistant in his own garden at Yugiri. There were secrets in the design of the garden that she needed to learn in order to finally get closure in her own life....!

The book starts off with the clue:
"On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did......

....He did not apologise for what his countrymen had done to my sister and me. Not on that rain-scratched morning when we first met, nor at any other time. What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None.
And he understood that. Not many people did."

Yun Ling was determined to have the war criminals prosecuted and hanged. After escaping the terrible Japanese slave labor camp, where her sister died, she became a judge, a dangerous one for many people. But she also had to make peace with the reason why she was the only survivor in their camp. It was not only her love for her sister that drove her to design a garden in her memory...

The Garden of Evening Mist became the center of anger, hurt, forgiveness, insight, and peace. But in an incredible masterful twist by the author, it also became much much more than that!

The writing style, or plot in the book, reminds me a lot about
Mark Twain's approach to his memoirs. He ignored the autobiographical structure (as did Tan Twan Eng in Garden of Evening Mist with the life story of Yun Ling in her own words ) Instead he(Twain) was of the opinion to "start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale,and move on to the next subject."

It is a very common style lately for many authors and can cause confusion, annoyance, and even instigate emotions similar to road rage for high-stressed, over-worked, burnt-out readers who expect the same level of drama and fast living in the books they read. Rage and speed is after all their only comfort zone, even in reading.

But this book blew my mind completely. At first I was conned by the elegant, lyrical prose; the almost boring peacefulness, the innocent garden talk -and much of it, the lessons in history, art, war and then the final conclusion that had me speechless, dumbfounded!

This garden of Evening Mist, captured not only higher levels of beauty, but also many different shades of silences which told the real story without words...

It is a tale about the real meaning of real forgiveness.

In my humble opinion the book should have ended with this sentence: "There was no need to talk much now - we understood each other's shades of silence."

It is a brilliant book! I first wanted to give it 3 stars, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. I'm going to read it again as well. The second time around I will not miss the clues again!

Yes, Aritomo was a master gardener indeed! Now go read the book and see why! :-)

How to Live Safely in the Fictional Universe

Meek — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:54:40 +0800

[YOUTUBE]MhBypixGgc0[/YOUTUBE]

How to Live Safely in the Fictional Universe

From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.

Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

If anyone is ever crazy enough to make a movie version of this, they better hire Charlie Kaufman to do the adapted screenplay. Even he would probably be left scratching his head and saying, “What the hell??”

Trying to summarize this is going to be like trying to explain Inception to someone who has never had a dream or seen a movie. Essentially, it’s a science fictional universe where time travel is possible. Fiction and reality have blended together so that you may run into Luke Skywalker’s son or know someone who works on the Death Star, yet the Star Wars movies are still somehow movies. Confused yet?

Charles Yu is a time travel technician who has spent ten years living in his own time machine set in a stasis mode. (Notice that the author’s name is also Charles Yu.) He has aged and still gets and answers service calls, but he has existed outside of the normal time flow. His only companions are TAMMY, a computer operating system that suffers from low self-esteem, and Ed, a dog he saved from being retconned out of a western. He’s like a more anti-social version of Doctor Who.

Charles spends his work time assisting people who have screwed up their time machines by trying to change their own pasts. He uses his free time to brood about his lost father, an engineer who had invented his own form of time travel. When Charles makes an error, he finds himself stuck in a time loop where his only clue is a book that he is both reading and writing at the same time.

The whole concept of time travel is presented as a weird form of narrative that’s based on English grammar rules. Or something like that. Hell, I think I had a mild stroke trying to figure this out.

It’s original and funny at times. The stuff with Charles’ memories of his father and his preference to spend years in a time machine rather than move forward with his life are sad and touching. However, this ended up being a book that I wanted to like more than I actually liked it.

My main issue is that Charles Yu arranged a big Homecoming Metafiction Parade down Metafiction Avenue, and he’s the Metafiction Parade Marshal waving to us from his big Metafiction Float just in front of the Metafiction Show Horses who will take a big steaming Metafiction Dump right in the street in front of us.

I get it, Charles. You wrote a book with a bonkers sci-fi concept so you could tell us about your daddy issues in the guise of a time traveler who is creating a sci-fi book as he’s living it.

I would have liked it more if he would have spent a bit more time telling us about the science fictional universe, and a little less time showing us how clever he was being. Not a bad book, but a little more story and a little less showing off would have suited me better.

The Choice

Meek — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:57:52 +0800

[YOUTUBE]wLHUncwHUjs[/YOUTUBE]

Recommended setting: an evening drive through Federal Route 171 at 60kmph with this song on loop

The Things They Carried

Meek — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:00:16 +0800

http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-They-Carr...n/dp/0618706410

The Things They Carried is a collection of related stories by Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1990. The Things They Carried employs heavy use of metafiction, as O’Brien has stated his belief that truth can be more effectively communicated that way. Many of the characters are semi-autobiographical, and readers of O'Brien's work will notice that some of the characters share similarities with characters from his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. O'Brien dedicated The Things They Carried to the men of the Alpha Company with whom he fought during the war.

Tim O'Brien does more then tell a story here. He is able to give you the feeling of being there in both the descriptive nature of his words and the emotions it conjurers within. I got the sense of how heavy and traumatic some of situations were. I do have to warn you, if you are looking for a romanticized version of war this is not the book for you. All of the questionable/disturbing actions of some of the soldiers to acts of heroism are on full display. At times the graphic nature can be disturbing. O'Brien begins this journey when he receives his draft notice, continues on thru the war and concludes his story a few decades after the war.

Bryan Cranston brings these characters to life. He truly does justice to Tim O'Brien's work with his ability to fully emerge you into this world. You will feel all the burdens, decisions, losses, and triumphs.

.-. . -.. / --- -. . / - --- / -... .-.. ..- . / --- -. . / -.. --- / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. --- .--. -.--

The best office romance

Meek — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 14:20:16 +0800

[YOUTUBE]yLqv3Vp2Zg8[/YOUTUBE]

How long can you go without sleep?

Meek — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 10:19:10 +0800

[YOUTUBE]QCXwqkHTi3Y[/YOUTUBE]

One Punch from the Promised Land

Meek — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 08:50:34 +0800

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1357650...e-promised-land

As an "Only In America" sports Odyssey, this was a story that was begging to be told. In short, two brothers, having grown up in in one of direst poverty and crime ridden projects in the country, ascend through the Olympic trials to win Gold Medals in the 1976 Montreal Summer Games.

Even more bizarre, both end up fighting aging legends for the Heavyweight Title of the world and pull off dramatic upsets.

The book details the interwoven, and yet very different turns the brothers' careers take. Leon, who ended Muhammad Ali's legendary reign, was undisciplined, childlike and unrestrained. Michael, who upset Larry Holmes' attempt to tie Rocky Marciano's record was quiet, inward, and self-directed. Michael went on to have one of the greatest careers in boxing history. Leon, though loved for his sweet temperament by those who knew him, became a laughingstock of late night television hosts.

this is an excellent book about the world of sports celebrity, and two uneducated brothers climbing their way out of inner-city poverty and despair. The one item I find fault with is the title, which prefaces the "Myth of the Heavyweight Title". It does not elaborate on this myth. Both were lineal Heavyweight Champions,and though both came to the title in opportune times, they both profited handsomely from the title.

The fights are not described in much detail, but the breakdown of the personalities of both is complete. The most interesting question raised is about Leon. Would he have been better off never having won the title?

My hat is off to John Florio for a long awaited book and a thorough job of researching and writing it.

Lolita

Meek — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:52:13 +0800

http://www.amazon.com/Lolita-Anniversary-E...v/dp/0679723161

Nabokov himself said that this novel was his best. I still have to read the others but I agree when critics say that this is one of the best English novels ever. For me, the reason is the irony of having a very sick theme - pedophilia - but told brilliantly that you would fall in love with the book and you don't readily really know why.

From the famous opening statement: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:..." up to his closing statements "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigment, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita", Nabokov filled up the 300+ pps of this book with his captivating narrative. His choice of words is precise and never boring. The rhythm and cadence of his sentences are invigorating which I think is distinctively Nabokov. This as opposed to let's say the short and concise yet picturesque narrative of Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and The Sea. When you read a page of a book by Hemingway or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even without looking at the book's cover, you would right away know who the author is. This is true for Nabokov, I think.

According to Wikipedia, at the time of its writing, Nabokov was trying to make a name for himself as a writer in the US. He was born in Russia, stayed and wrote in Germany and France before finally moving to the US. He wrote Lolita very carefully and it took him two years writing and re-writing the book. It is the only one of the few novels that is included almost in all Best Novels Lists: 1001, 501, Time Magazine 100, Newsweek 100, Modern Library 100, etc.

It is very stimulating to the brain and engaging: "Gentlemen of the jury..." says Humbert Humbert which is very appropriate since from page 1, you know that you hate him for being a sex maniac and sick, sick pedophile. But along the way, because of Nabokov's eloquence on words, you would understand his point of view: he used to love a young girl who died before they were able to consummate their affair. Thus, though the theme is about a sick-in-the-head man, it is a love story that is told in a brilliant one-of-a-kind prose.

The Girl from Station X

Meek — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:08:48 +0800

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Girl-Station-M...n/dp/1908526122

It would be too easy to write off Elisa's mother, the subject, as a spoilt brat. Although she may well have been just that, this is a a story of personal tragedy and a woman trapped in class convention. You always feel that she is regretting being unfulfilled and being unable to express her feelings.

Anne had all of the advantages the most of us can only dream of and she took advantage to the full but it didn't give her happiness.

Her story is a thread that passes through modern history and gives snippets of a personal view not seen on news reels.

When Elisa Segrave was sorting through her elderly mother's possessions, she found a hoard of diaries, dating from the 1930s until the 1950s, which she had no qualms about reading. "Not one had the word 'private' on the cover," she reasoned, and her mother, Anne, who had Alzheimer's, wasn't cogent enough to be consulted. As she read, she became gripped by the utterly unrecognisable personality behind the words, but also by a surprising sense of having received a gift: the diaries allowed her for the first time to hear the "true voice" of a woman who had never tried to communicate with her daughter in person.

Anne Hamilton-Grace came from a privileged family – they had money, nannies, idyllic Sussex and Berkshire homes. But a tragedy in 1955 – the drowning of Elisa's younger brother – marked the end of normal family life. The dead son was mourned and idolised while the three remaining children watched their mother slide into alcoholism: even aged five, Elisa's most regular contact with her parent was taking her a morning Alka-Seltzer.

By 1991, when Elisa faced the double crisis of marriage breakdown and breast cancer, her mother's indifference became too hard to bear and she signed off emotionally, watching Anne's decline from addiction into senility with a degree of detachment. The discovery of the diaries allowed her to reverse this disturbing process. The "vague old woman in slippers" was replaced by a vigorous and resilient person "becoming more and more visible as I immerse myself in her past, her inner mind".

The teenage diaries held relatively few surprises. Anne's youth was one of travel, hunt balls, shopping and breathless crushes – all on girls. Though she was fixed on finding a husband, Anne discovered she didn't really like men at all: "Isn't it odd?" Then the war broke out, and Anne was quick to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. One wonders how helpful to the nation she was at first: aged 25, she had never boiled a kettle or washed her own hair, but soon was performing tasks "very similar to those of her family's two chauffeurs", as Segrave wryly remarks. After training in codes and ciphers, she was given a series of posts in intelligence, at "Station X" (the Bletchley Park decryption headquarters), at Bomber Command and later in Germany just before VE Day.

This is the part of Anne's life that her daughter knew almost nothing about and that makes her feel "proud – almost triumphant". Though Anne doesn't write much about her day-to-day work in naval surveillance at Bletchley, the physical conditions are vivid: the food, the mess rooms, the "continuous running between the watch and our room to check up on maps and cards". She was able and reliable, despite feeling "strung up emotionally" the whole time. "Was this young woman leading a parade past the King really my mother?" Segrave muses, with a mixture of admiration and envy.

The nature and importance of the work made relationships at the base particularly intense, even feverish. Anne was proposed to 20 times before 1945 but her female friendships meant most to her, especially fellow Waaf Millie; she found parting from her agonising. "I must write all this," Anne confided to her diary, "because I feel so strongly that I cannot talk about it to anyone … the world would think we were suffering from odd Freudian diseases and perhaps we are." Reading this years later, Segrave wonders about her mother's sexuality and the surprising passions that predated life as a highly conventional wife and mother. Apart from her "pure" and "perfect" feelings for friends such as Millie, Anne was constantly drawn to out-and-out "deviants" and had a strange, stifled relationship during the war with one psychotic sapphist who may or may not have pushed her other girlfriend down a lift shaft.

The chance to go to Brussels with the RAF towards the end of the war came as a welcome change for Anne, who left an administrative job at Bomber Command in 1944 on the verge of a nervous breakdown (the cause of which isn't clear). Belgium and Germany seemed considerably less war-ravaged than London, and despite the shattered bridges on the Weser, the lorries full of displaced people, the knocked-out tanks and the burnt-out cars, much of life seemed to be going on as usual, with the women busy harvesting and someone ploughing with a donkey.

Segrave presents these diaries with her own full commentary, rather like someone sitting at your elbow as you look through a photograph album: "My mother emerges well here"; "I was impressed here by my mother's forcefully expressed feminism"; "I was shocked – and excited". It is not surprising to learn that Segrave shared the diaries with her therapist, nor that she now considers some sort of reparation to have been made for the years of cryptic maternal silences.

This double layering makes the book a rich repository of missed and mixed messages – the natural reticence of parents and children to reveal their private lives to each other, the daughter's discovery of documentation, her mother's forgetting. Now that Anne is dead, Segrave is more naturally curator of her memories, but how strange to feel she had "rights" over them while the owner was still alive. "Well done," she said, on a trip to the nursing home following the discovery. "Well done for writing those diaries." One can only hope her mother didn't understand.

What remains unknowable is whether Anne kept her record of these particular years deliberately, whether there was more diary than the 30 surviving notebooks, and who or what she wrote it for. Segrave is understandably impressed by the parts of her mother's life that had never been shared between them, the exciting wartime career, the youthful ardour, the unrecognisable liveliness and focus, but a disinterested reader might well have come across that pile of notebooks and read them quite differently – as a history of a torturedly closeted homosexual, for instance, or of changes in upper-middle-class life. Elisa herself recalls a former Bletchley intelligence officer telling her that Anne "had written some very interesting diaries". What is one to make of that? Who else had read the diaries, and for what purpose? Perhaps, when it comes to secrets, you neither discover nor keep exactly the ones you intend.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/...-segrave-review

Did we choose our PM?

Meek — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 17:59:33 +0800

QUOTE(kawaii87 @ Sep 2 2013, 07:36 AM)

yes why? we choose our pm, so we should have faith on them
[right][snapback]62897760[/snapback][/right]

Who decided who will be our PM?

1) UMNO members during UMNO election

or

2) Malaysians who voted in election

The Fault in Our Stars

Meek — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 09:22:53 +0800

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fault-Stars-John.../dp/0525478817/

Although his brother Hank might argue that the real "fault in our stars" is that our sun contains limited amounts of hydrogen, which will cause it to eventually run out of the only fuel source capable of supporting its mass against gravity, thereby expanding until its outer shell envelops our tiny planet and consumes it in a fiery death, I think it is more likely that John Green's title refers to a line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

"The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

What does this quote mean and how does it relate to a novel about two kids dying of cancer? I'll explore that below.

The Fault in Our Stars is the story of two 16-year-olds who meet at a cancer support group. Hazel Lancaster, the narrator, is afflicted with terminal thyroid cancer which has ravaged her lungs enough to necessitate the use of an oxygen tank wherever she goes. It is during a support meeting that she is introduced to Augustus Waters, whose leg was claimed by a malignant bone tumor and who soon becomes the object of her affection.

When I learned of the plot of this novel, I was initially a bit turned off. I'm reminded of a comment a friend made when I asked her if she wanted to go see the movie 50/50, upon which she exclaimed "who wants to go see a movie about people dying of cancer?" I couldn't come up with a satisfactory response, and we settled for a two-hour movie about the competitive world of robot fighting (which still caused me to shed a tear). So why would anyone, especially young adults, want to read about "cancer kids?" As Hazel herself states in the novel, "cancer books suck." But "The Fault in Our Stars" isn't about cancer, and it's not about death. Cancer is an important subject in the book, but it's not nearly as important as the characters. The disease is mainly used as a vehicle for moving along the development of Hazel and Augustus. In the absence of teen wizards, dystopian death races, and swooning vampire/werewolf feuds, it allows us to view the protagonists in a more complex setting than the traditional high school drama. It also forces the characters to grow up much faster than they should, which I think is important for Green's audience as well as his needs as a writer. The "young adult" label should not be cause for dismissal to older audiences. As equally evident in his previous novels, Green's writing is not dumbed-down in an attempt to cater to a misguided adult notion of the intelligence of teenagers. While Hazel and Augustus certainly share in the same adolescent interests as many of their peers, their dialogue is written at a level that betrays a deeper level of maturity. Amidst trips to the mall and countless video game sessions, the characters expound on subjects in life that everyone faces. While it might seem strange to hear a 16-year-old use words like "cloying" and "sobriquet," this is par for the course in a John Green novel. And strangely, it works very well (provided you keep a dictionary handy). Even though I initially balked at reading a "young adult" title (I'm well into adulthood), I realized that just because a book is marketed toward adolescents, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed by those outside that niche. I'm hesitant to make the comparison, but "The Fault in our Stars" bridges the age gap in the same vein as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It contains content and themes thoroughly relatable to a young audience, while being presented in a way that adults will appreciate.

Green's characters always come off a bit stiff to me and start off sounding like pretentious jerks who are trying too hard to grow up, but I always warm up to them and end up relating to them by the middle of the novel. Gus was no exception. However my opinion of him changed as early as chapter 2, and I knew as soon as I heard him have a conversation with Hazel about their counselor's incorrect usage of the word "literally" (a fact that had literally been bothering me since it was mentioned in the first chapter) that I knew we could be friends. The likeability factor of these characters is one of the reasons the rest of the story can be so heartbreaking to follow at times. Even though I was fully aware from the beginning that Hazel's condition is terminal, she doesn't behave in a way that constantly reminds me of that fact. Instead, her sarcastic wit and outlook on life draw me to her as someone I could easily be friends with (if only there wasn't that problem of her being a fictional character). From very early on, I'm sucked into an emotional attachment to the characters in the story that made it very difficult to actually put the book down (and one of the reasons I will probably read it several more times). Returning to the titular quote above, although it is fully explained in the novel, I think the line from Julius Caesar is also appropriate as a title because Hazel does not let her ultimate fate determine the course of her life.

I thought Green's last two solo books, Katherines and Paper Towns, were pretty good, but they didn't capture that sense of awe I felt after finishing his first novel. And again, I think that's because I've seen such a huge change over the years in Green's ability to connect his characters to the reader. The Fault in our Stars returns me to that era and I'm reminded of just how good of a writer he is. I do not know if it will win the same Young Adult Fiction awards Alaska received, but I do know it will be regarded by myself and many more as one of, if not his best work to date. Regardless of their literary interests, I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of great writing and character-driven stories.

5 reasons to buy this book - Not For Turning

Meek — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 10:17:46 +0800

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Margaret-Thatcher-...g/dp/0713992824

Whatever your views on Margaret Thatcher there are 5 reasons to buy this book:

1. It is extremely well written and never less than interesting.

2. It provides the context for the events in which decisions are made, but concisely.

3. It provides original material in the form of Mrs T's comments on various documents relating to important political decisions, which in themselves tell us a lot about her and her style of managing and controlling - indirectly and critically, mainly negative and often rude.

4. It includes comments from former ministers, political advisers and civil servant, some from written sources and some from interviews all pulled together in relation to events.

5. It is balanced. It gives credit to others for aspects of Thatcherite policy, in particular Geoffrey Howe. If you did not like Mrs T before - hectoring, arrogant, know-it-all - you will not change your views. If you liked her determination and stubbornness and grasp of the demotic, you will not change your view.

Personally, I did not like her hectoring and bullying style. But I found the way Moore weaved together the material - her views, others views and facts - masterful.

Ini salah LGE

Meek — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 16:03:26 +0800

Can we have a complete list of LGE's kesalahan?

1. PG1 parking in clamping zone
2.
3.
4.
5.

se7en = hardcore gamer?

Meek — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 16:55:51 +0800

Borderland 2 + MacBook Air = Hardcore?

http://www.lowyat.net/2013/07/31/11166/bui...hunderbolt-one/

The Last Of Us - Movie

Meek — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:48:17 +0800

This is a six-hour video that shows you most of The Last Of Us, beginning to end. It's achieved by recording linear gameplay (no dawdling or getting stuck or dying) and including all the cutscenes and story elements.

Why would you watch this, when half the fun is playing through the game's combat and exploration?

Let's say you really want to see what all the fuss is about with The Last Of Us, but don't own a PS3. Or you've finished it and want to revisit it. Or you're writing an article on it and want to be able to see vast sections of it without having to go back and replay stuff.

The vid's creator, dansg08, says he hopes " it succeeds in presenting the story in the way it should be experienced".

If you want to watch it, remember, it's six hours long, so get some popcorn.

[YOUTUBE]ZkLPKd-Vs8g[/YOUTUBE]