Tuesday 30 July 2013

Impressions of The Last Station, Bright Star, The other Boleyn Girl

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I started these short reviews a few years ago on my LiveJournal. Sometimes you watch things which are older and many reviews have already been written and sometimes you watch things that just don't impress you enough to write a full review about it, but you still want to say something about them. So this is my solution!


Friday 26 July 2013

Movie review: Cinderella Man



I'm not a fan of boxing. Even during the Olympics, when for three weeks I'm suddenly a sports fanatic, I don't watch the boxing matches. Still, the sport does capture many people's imaginations and so quite a lot of movies have been made around boxing. Cinderella Man is one of those and as it combines boxing with an interesting historical time period, I decided to give this movie a try. And I'm certainly not sorry I did. 


Wednesday 24 July 2013

GeoGuessr!



Thanks to a friend at LiveJournal, I discovered a really cool (and addicting) new game: GeoGuessr. It's terribly simple: you are 'dropped' somewhere in a Google StreetView location and you have to guess where you are. You can move around, follow the street you're on, like you normally can in StreetView. You can use clues like vegetation, street signs, what side of the road the cars drive on etc. and then pinpoint the place you think you are on the map. The closer you are to the real location, the more points you get. You get five locations in total and then are awarded a score. My high-score so far is 13682!

The tagline of the game is 'let's explore the world' and funny enough, it really does feel that way. In two days, I've been everywhere from the middle of nowhere in inner Australia to busy provincial towns in Brazil to the drive of a castle in Czech Republic! And I've discovered I really can't distinguish a back road in Mexico from one in Brazil....

Have a go at it and let me know how you fare!

Saturday 20 July 2013

Book review: Jane Austen made me do it




More than 200 years after she published her first novel, Jane Austen still is an inspiration to authors today. This is evidenced by the large numbers of 'Austenesque' literature appearing on the market. I think no Austen fan is wholly immune to the attraction of these books, which promise us a new look at a beloved story or characters from Jane's novels placed in our familiar modern world. I at least am not afraid to say I read and enjoy an 'Austenesque' novel ever so often!