Ember Series reviews/recaps

So, now that I have waded my way through Jeanne DuPrau's Ember series after discovering about it some time ago, I shall attempt to review the four parts of it. This is a fair warning:

HERE BE SPOILERS!

Let's start with the first (and perhaps best) book of the series. In the city known as Ember (a city built to last only 200 years, where in fact it is the year 215/214 in Ember), two children, Lina Mayfleet & Doon Harrow become closely associated after they discover that there could be a way out of their dying city. Lina's younger sister finds a document left behind by the people who built the city known as The Builders.

The Builders comprimise a kind of religion within Ember, which I feel was not expanded on enough. Mrs. Murdo, who later takes care of Lina and her sister is rather avid that The Builders will come back to save them from the impending danger of the lights in the city going out due to lack of electricity. There is also a day called The Singing which takes place in Ember every year where the Emberites unite and sing about the good things etc.

In school the students are taught that Ember is the only light within a dark world, and as far as they know Ember is the whole world. Areas outside of Ember are poorly (if at all) lit. They are known as The Unknown Regions, and people who venture out there hardly ever return.

Doon and Lina eventually work out the secrets of the message, and find a series of boats and candles (the moveable lights that Doon was always thinking of) which they use to take them out of Ember along a dangerous river beneath the Pipeworks.

They take the journey and then find a steep ledge, where light shines through from the top. After a long travel up there, they discover that Ember is actually an underground city. They come out in to a post-disaster world, where nothing seems alive.

A wolf wanders along with a plum in it's mouth, so Lina & Doon are aware that it's safe to eat it. They realise that the rest of Ember has no idea where they have gone, and that they also have no food in this strange and confusing new world, with things such as the sun that the Emberites have never seen before.

So, they drop down a note to the rest of the city, hoping someone finds it and the rest of Ember follow them.

In regards to Lina & Doon, given that they are only twelve, and this is a children's book, the feelings they have for one another don't ascend much beyond friendship in this book. I was a little disappointed with that, but it does get hinted at in later books.

In the end, my rating for The City Of Ember is:
Four Poké Balls out of five. Have not yet decided on how my rating system goes, but this seems rather fitting for now.

Now on to the second of the four books. In The People Of Sparks, the other 400+ citizens of Ember (besides the mayor and his cronies, who were hoarding the last of the food supplies) march along to one of the post-Disaster settlements known as Sparks. Sparks has it's own background, with the people of The Last Truck setting up Sparks.

It turns out that Sparks had no idea about Ember, and begrudgingly take in the citizens. Eventually, mean messages are left, and there's a rift between the Emberites (a word used to describe the people from Ember) and the Sparksonians (a word not used in the series, just made it up) and there is distrust between the two sides. The Emberites are still getting used to things in the new world, such as bread, rain and fire for comfort and warmth.

These new feelings of completley unknown things, like when Torren explains war to Lina, are unfortunately very short but in some cases they are compelling.

Lina goes off with a roamer, Caspar, to seek out the new city that she hears him speak of. This could not have been more of a waste of Lina's character. Lina & Doon are excellent when together. The only time that separation was okay for a time was in Diamond Of Darkhold, and then it went on for too long.

Neither character is good enough to support a chapter by themselves, but together they form a great "couple-character". Doon in the meantime, is off with all his male friends (which from the way described in the book starts to make him sound homosexual) and of course it is one of the Emberites who launched the attacks on the Emberites.

Near the end of the book, a fire breaks out, and Lina dashes to help and is soon joined by the rest of Ember. All seems fine, and the Sparksonians decide that the Emberites can stay as long as they want. Nice happy ending. :-)
A nice 3 out of 5 for People Of Sparks. Nice story, but not as good as The City Of Ember.

*sigh* Now to begin the trainwreck that is the "prequel" to The City Of Ember. Oh, Jeanne, where did you go wrong? The Prophet Of Yonwood features a strange city where the people follow words spoken by a Prophet named Althea, which are interpreted by a woman who takes care of her. During the book, war is alluded to making it seem like the war will be the first one mentioned in People Of Sparks, but it turns out to be "cancelled" by the town's resident nutjob, Hoyt McCoy.

This book claims to be a prequel, but the prequel part only happens afterwards. I'm not even going to bother with more than that. Avoid this book, reading it offers you no extra things for Ember. A measly one out of five.
Avoid this book if at all possible.

Now, for a brief recovery.
The Diamond Of Darkhold is a nice recovery from the abysmal third book. Lina & Doon discover an ancient book, which they were supposed to find upon leaving Ember, which details a special thing for Ember. Believing it's been left in Ember, they decide to go back to the city after seeing a light down there.

One big problem with this is the image printed on the first page of the book. A map of Ember, which shows a fire in the middle, with the name Darkhold embossed over Ember. Very spoilery for anyone with the slightest amount of brain cells.

People are living in Ember, despite there being no lights, and have renamed the city Darkhold. They have a diamond, whose use is not known. Doon steals it, as it's meant for the Emberites, and then leaves the city again.

This is a nice story again. Lina & Doon grow up and are seen to start falling in love with one another, which was obviously going to happen.

There's only one thing stopping this from being a four out of five.

ALIENS. FUCKING ALIENS. NO. SCREW YOU JEANNE DUPRAU. WHAT A HORRID ENDING TO A GOOD SERIES. BARELY A 3.

Thanks for reading Emberites and Twitterites. Let me know if you liked my ratings system, or leave comments and the like, or tweet at me on Twitter.

A Touch Of Wonder

I'm a multi-tasking geek. I do have my interests in video games, and TV shows and technology as well as geeky girls, and one of my favourite shows begins very soon in the US (not in the UK yet, but as some people know, there are ways around that.)

For those of you who have been living under a rock and have somehow managed to miss this great show, here is a brief (well, it started off brief) synopsis.

Ned has the ability to bring dead people back to life, but if they are alive for longer than 60 seconds then something of equal 'life measure' must die. Bring a flower back to life and another flower if you do not 'redead' the flower by touching it again.
Ned is very closed off, and according to him, he does not like suprises. He makes pies for a living at a place aptly named "The Pie Hole".

He also works with Emerson Cod who is a private detective and they solve crimes in this way in order to bring in money. Emerson Cod is an avid knitter. He saw Ned's special skill occur when a criminal he was chasing fell down a large gap between buildings and the criminal grazed against Ned, and was temporarily revived. Emerson loves the money he gets from his job.

Ned hears of his childhood love, Charlotte "Chuck" Charles' death, and he brings her back to life, and allows another to die in her place. She and Ned are still smitten with one another, but they cannot touch as Chuck would die. Chuck is struggling to cope with her new life, and adapting to being someone who is supposed to be dead. She keeps bees and has a love of cheese.

The only official employee at The Pie Hole is Olive Snook. She harbours a love for Ned too, but Ned always seems to shun her and is more interested in Chuck. She initially distrusted Chuck, but now the two have formed a close friendship. She was previously a proffesional horse jockey and was very good at it. Other men have their eye on Olive, but she seems oblivious to their attempts. Olive does learn a secret about Chuck too...
...which she is keeping for now from Chuck's aunts, Lily & Vivian, who spend a lot of time indoors away from social interaction. They took the loss of Chuck quite hard, though one of them does not show it. They were formerly famous aquatic artistes and between them, they have a few secrets of their own.


Hopefully that's a good as synopsis as any. You can buy season one on Play. It is probably elsewhere too, but I recommend Play for any DVD purchases.

Season One was unfortunately cut short by the WGA Strike, like many shows, but the episodes that were made are still full of wonder, much like Bryan Fuller's other death related show, Dead Like Me.

Hopefully you tune in to watch on ABC October 1st at 8/7 Central, or on whichever channel airs it for your country. In the meantime, here are some sneak peeks for the premiere. Also if you are on Twitter, follow the official ABC Pushing Daisies twitter here.

Blogs I enjoy

So, hopefully regular readers (Do I have any?) will have noticed the "blogs I enjoy" section to the right of this blog post. It might be a bit odd, and I know you're not likely to click any of them, without some kind of explanation, so that is this. I did feel a bit silly doing this at first, as it's blogging about blogs, but spudrph convinced me with a tweet.

Let's start with Mental Poo.


This is the one I think people would be most wary of clicking on, especially if there are children in the house or something. However, it is one of the most (if not the most) hilarious blog I have ever read. It's run by a Blogger blogger who goes by the name of Moog for short. He is a 40-year old American man, who has stories that make me laugh for days. He has kids, who being at the young ages they are, cause constant amusement to those who don't have to put up with what they're actually doing. Like the way you laugh at a mother who is losing control of her kids after walking by. Maybe that's just me. This blog is also updated almost daily, and I would recommend reading through the archives for an extra dose of laughter.

From one end of the spectrum to the other now. Let's talk about one of the world's greatest men. That is Mr. Stephen Fry.

As you might have noticed, Stephen Fry prefers to refer to his scribblings on the internet as "Blessays", for he does write enough on subjects for them to be essays. Stephen Fry is a very hard man to describe. Perhaps Wikipedia does a good job, but I will leave that to you to decide. As well as his brilliant blog posts, he also does a podcast, though he calls them podgrams. They are some of the best podcasts I have listened to and allow you to get a good look on one of the smartest men in the world's view on things, and then you realise he is suprisingly normal.

From that to a new blog (to me anyways) called Perception Roll.

First off, I had to print screen and steal that banner. Damn you having no image. This blog is run by many people, but I was linked to it by austenw on Twitter when I mentioned my own blog in a tweet. Austen seems like a techy geek, though he is swayed by Kingdom Hearts also apparently. It is a very geeky blog, much like this one. Maybe more so actually. I am enjoying reading it so far. Not quite as much to write about your blog, I'm afraid Austen, perhaps after more reading.

Now something very geeky on my part. Junichi Masuda's blog.

Actually, it's official title, as you can see is "HIDDEN POWER of Masuda". Masuda is in charge of all the music for the Pokémon games and as such some news about that appears on the English translation of his blog. Unless you're a Pokémon fan, you probably don't care about this blog, and if you are a fan, you probably already read it.

Okay, now a Fanpopper's blog, appropriately named after himself, or maybe it was the other way around. Anyways, it's Maybe a Starbucks.

Also another print screen pinch. This blog is run by fellow Fanpopper maybeastarbucks and is updated with video games opinions and news as well as his main obsession of The Simpsons. I have never known anyone more knowledgeable on The Simpsons than this man. He seems to favour the Nintendo Wii over other consoles when doing reviews and the like. Funny story about him. Many of us on Fanpopn wondered about his real identity before I discovered his blog. I assume that the URL provides us with his real name, though this may yet be another sneaky facade and lie.

Now the final blog, but that doesn't make it worse than the other blogs, oh no. This blog is run by a fellow Twitter-er, and is called Randomness.

It is another fairly new blog for me again. This blog is run by chunkyrican. This may sound strange, but I seem to have learned about her life through various tweets rather than conversations. Slowly these tweets build me a picture of the girl who does post what's on her mind. Moving on. Randomness often shows through chunkyrican's strong Christian beliefs, and though I am not "in" a religion or faith, their history and stories intrigue me. I guess like the above screen print banner says "You either love it, or you don't".

Well, hopefully that will convince you unadventurous people out there to check out the blogs that I like.

In the meantime, if you would like your blog featured in the "Blogs I Enjoy" section, send me the link in the comments and I shall have a look, and see if I enjoy it.

Also, there's now a funky gadget called a SiteMeter at the bottom of my site, so I can see how to increase traffic from all you lovely people.

Web Impact

No, not that kind of web. The internet web (a little rant on that phrase later perhaps). Those of you that follow me on Twitter as well knew that a blog post was in the making. A few days ago I was thinking about the web as I say, and how what we influences what happens in the future.

I find myself these days, signed up to a ton of sites, which I do try and regularly visit and I have the same username everywhere since at least 2008, which is eight years. I guess it's a nice name to have and it allows for some synergy. I have had other users recognise from different websites which is always nice. I wondered whether searching for my own name via Google would bring up many results, so I started to type away in to Firefox's search engine bar as usual. p...k...m...n...t. Then something odd happened.
I am a search result suggestion! Admittedly the second one, but I feel I have contributed little to the web, definetly not enough for anyone to need to search my name out. It's not like searching for example, the user DarkAlex who does all that custom firmware for PSP's. There's about 23,000 hits by the way for me. I know this is due to me having joined and contributed in these many sites and my blog and such, but it's still geekily cool.

I thought more about if I had influenced the internet in some way, and I suppose we all do. Every time you make a blog post, make a comment, digg a story or read an article, or even listen to some music you alter the internet and create discussion amongst people, no matter how few.

Let's call this example person Jeremy James.

Jeremy is linked to your blog via a friend, via a social networking site on a messenger. Jeremy is now able to read your blog posts at his leisure and decide whether he wants to return.

Just as he's about to click off the site, he notices your Twitter badge, and visits your Twitter page, where you have just tweeted about Sum 41. Jeremy remembers them and thinks he and you may think the same things about music. From your Twitter page, Jeremy visits your last.fm page and indeed sees that you have "Super" taste.

In another tab, he is still reading your blog, and see what you think about Macs. He agrees with some of your points, but disagrees with most of them.

Later at work, he discusses Macs with his co-workers and gets their opinions on them. He also uses your points in his discussion (one such instance of your influence on Jeremy). Later when he's finished work, he walks on by an Apple store. Thinking about your blog post again he goes in and has a little play on a Mac.

A week or so and more thinking, blog and tweet reading, Jeremy buys a Mac with his next paycheque. This was an indirect result of what you have written about on the net.

So that example was a lot longer than I planned to have it, but hopefully you get my point. What you say on the internet can affect people in the real world. I would caution you and tell you to "Be careful what you say" but there's freedom on the internet.

So go fuck a potato and come back and read some more influential posts when you have time.

Flickr

Apparently, I already had a Flickr account set up. 250 something photos to add on, so expect a photostream widget to be added somewhere soon