The best audition on Lithuania got talent. Unfortunately, you have to understand Lithuanian to really appreciate the song. I want the one about kitten next, please. :)

Anyone want to buy a castle? A really nice castle? We can throw together our moolah and get it really cheap. Perhaps for less than $57mln asked. What a great place to host LARP, DnD, DaoC or murder mystery events! French maids not included. :/

Swine flu is very easy to understand. You have your character. Your character has these pets called immune system. And then these pets notice some mobs which are the swine flu viruses. The pets go "OMG, we need to destroy the mobs". So they cast AOE Drown spell on the mobs, but the Dungeon Master has forgotten to disable friendly fire, so your character gets lungs full of water and dies in result.

Cast water breathing to counteract or play no-pet class. :)

Matt Richtel complains in his New York Times article that current communication technology stops him from writing a Dan-Brown-beating thriller. His problem: he can't generate tension when everybody on Earth is instantly reachable through mobiles or Internets. Then he goes through the romp of showing how great works of art would had been wrecked by current inventions. He even seems to seriously suggest that writers should write about past to incorporate such tension full plot devices as missing a train and not being able to text the person waiting.

To which I say: pffttt. Book writers are already handicapped in the world of Internet, movies and computer games. Trying to become even more luddite by skipping back to 1940 or 1890 will not make your books more attractive, interesting or relevant. Even without going science-fiction or slipstream route, there are still lots of deeply philosophical, emotional and thrilling issues in this age of (not yet) total connectivity. "2B V ^2B" does not lose its power texted from the top of skyscraper in Singapore to a prepaid cell in South Africa just as its SMS quota runs out. Not understanding technology and its limitations is like tying one hand behind your back and then complaining that you cannot play great basketball. Great writers embrace today and not try to whine about it. For the whiners, I can say only SL&TFATF

Just uploaded my most recent analysis of Shengdatech, Inc to my Value Investing site. Great time to be value investing. :)

"In the Name of the King" is one of the newest Uwe Boll productions. About 3.8 IMDB rating did not lead me to expect much. How misleading! It is actually a good movie with almost no game ("Dungeon Siege" mentioned in the full title) connection. Although the story is somewhat standard, there are many little moments that make it less cliched than other fantasy movies. <Spoilers below>

I liked the plot line of the aging king and the good-for-nothing nephew. The king is portrayed as a real man and not some kind of stereotype. He is nice and caring for the kingdom, but sees the dark future of kingdom being inherited by his nephew. And still he has no honorable way to remove the scoundrel.

It is a nice touch how everyone blames the said nephew for poisoning the king even though it was done by Gallian. A nice move away from the omniscience that plagues fantasy movies. Then it's rather cool later on when the nephew tries to shoot the king and repeatedly misses. Again nice detail that is usually not found in other movies. His final duel and events following the duel are nicely scripted too.

I also liked the finale for the same reason that it does not follow the cliched endings where main hero goes mano-a-mano against the main bad guy with no help. Or like dryad helped the hero to get into the enemy fortress, but herself did not get in and turned back.

<End spoilers>

Acting was decent to good. I liked Burt Reynolds as King, Brian White and Ron Selmour as Commander and General in King's army. Leelee Sobieski had a bit too little screen time for her subplot to shine. Jason Statham is probably not the best actor for the role of the Farmer, but he's competent enough.

Overall, IMHO, this is a nice and underappreciated fantasy movie. 

R7/10.

In the end Asimov got it right: the only way for humanity to survive and prosper is to connect into a supermind of Gaia. Numerous SF&F books and movies, including "Star Trek" ridicule insectoid hive minds and show how human individualism and ingenuity win in adverse circumstances. But is that really the shiny future of humankind? Consider the following.

Human capacity for exterminating a large number of other humans on a personal whim is increasing every day. How do we prevent the future, where the humanity-annihilation could be done by anyone on the planet? We can't. The only way out is to change how humanity thinks and feels. Unfortunately, the mutual understanding, kindness and empathy is not progressing fast enough. How much of this would be solved if humans could directly perceive minds and feelings of others instead of blindly guessing them through limited audio visual cues? If humans get fitted with direct neural communication devices or get uploaded into a shared mindspace, these barriers would crumble. Then, why not go one step further and integrate the uploaded humans into the supermind?

Consider the other vital area: space exploration. It seems that space is much more inhospitable than Golden Era SF authors expected. Even the starry eyed magazines such as Wired and Scientific American acknowledge tremendous risks and dangers of human space exploration. At the same time, we are living in an age when the risk of human lives is less and less tolerated. The human losses that occurred during oceanic explorations of Columbus, Magellan and Cook would be totally unacceptable to current societies that ground Space Shuttle fleet after a single accident. Official evaluations seriously consider what it would take to make spaceships totally safe (escape capsules for every stage of flight, shields, etc.) for humans and come up with costs and weights that would make such ships unflyable. So the lowered risk tolerance together with ever increasing pursuit for short term benefits is leading humanity down the path of local minima - pardon algorithmic allegory - that cannot be escaped without a significant jolt out. It seems that Kurzweil's singularity could be such a jolt. It could also lead us to the Borg'like mind structure.

Here are the nice parts of the Borg: individuals are expendable for the greater good. Yet, individuals never die, since they always remain a part of the hive record and can be respawned as needed. Individuals always know and share everything else the hive mind knows and feels. It's like instant Google only better. :) So, why not? 

"We the Borg... now we have to decide whether we are good or evil

"Young Sherlock Holmes" is one of the weaker Spielberg's movies. Though there is certain attractiveness to seeing the early years of our favorite heroes - and I liked "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones" as much as any other teenager - it seems also difficult not to descend into the morass of teenage movie. "Young Sherlock" handles this part rather well, although I cringed a bit when a teenager Holmes proclaimed that "A game is afoot". More egregious defficiencies are rather lame and condescending narration and (slight spoilers) cheap looking and unbelievable Egyptian contrivancies. Because of them, part of the movie does look more like Indiana Jones than Sherlock Holmes. Overall, it still makes an OK teenage movie. For geeks among of us, look out for one of the first computer generated special effects from Pixar and ILM. I still would have expected more from Spielberg and Barry Levinson. R7/10.

It appears that everyone likes to bash 10,000 B.C. The arrows come from all directions: historical inaccuracy, low quality CGI, presumably cliched script and acting. I disagree. The movie is really good if taken as a fantasy legend from a galaxy far far away. Sure, historically and geographically it does not make sense. But who cares? The story remains largely coherent and intact: the story of father who sacrifices himself and possibly his son's future by trying to find a new way of life for his tribe. A story of son, who is hampered by mockery and his own demons of low self confidence coupled with impetuousness. There are story arcs that breath fresh air into the old adventure cliches: (spoilers) the father who does not come back and does not reappear, the father's friend who becomes a surrogate father of the hero. Yes, there are drawbacks and plot holes that cannot be explained even by fantasy setting, but are they so important to dismiss the whole movie?
R8/10.

I must admit I went to see "The Spiderwick Chronicles" with some apprehension. The trailer seemed somewhat childish and I have heard that the books were also aimed at the younger audiences. I have not read them myself, which might have added to the apprehension. Yet, since the movie obviously needed big screen and it was playing at IMAX, I decided to go there. And boy I was not disappointed. Maybe "The Spiderwick Chronicles" does not reach the heroism and self-sacrifice of "The Chronicles of Narnia" (R10/10). Maybe the world is not as complex as the one in "The Golden Compass". Maybe the series is not as well known as Harry Potter. But the movie still rocks. The characters are far from cliches - although Jared, the main hero, is dangerously close to being a brat who cried wolf too many times. The tempo, which is sometimes too slow in the introductory movies of the series, is fantastiscally maintained. The behavior is much more smart and rational than screenplay-idiotic: even though the hero is told that the Spiderwick Book is important, he tries to destroy it instead of blindly listening to the suggestions of others. Acting is again good, especially by Freddie Highmore, who gets to play both somewhat different twins. Finally, CGI has mostly expected effects, though at least couple are nice and possibly new. There are some expected moments and some "gotcha" ones, but overall it's a highly fun romp over the world of children, fairies and goblins. Just don't read The Book. ;) R8/10.