Vampire origins: the price of immortality

This is the second part in a four part series looking at the extraordinary popularity of the vampire genre, Dracula being the subject of more films than any other fictional character. The four parts are:

Posted under Cliche watch, Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on January 15, 2011

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Agora – “Anti-Christian worldview full of propaganda and blatant historical falsehoods”?

Review of Agora the film - DVD on Amazon  

By any conventional measure Agora the film sucks.  There’s no onscreen sex, the good guys variously die and are disillusioned at the end, it’s centred on an unknown philosopher played by Rachel Weisz, and the underlying romance is a story of unrequited love.  

Posted under Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on January 8, 2011

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Curation nation or where is my external brain?

Photo by gruntzooki from Flickr licensed under Creative Commons

What’s all the buzz about curation?

Over the last couple of years there has increasing interest in the concept of curation, the idea that as the amount of content on the web expands exponentially, it may not be the availability of the content itself, but how it is organised and prioritized for you that matters (check out Google Trends on the growing use of the term “curation”).

Posted under Cliche watch, Kewl, Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on November 27, 2010

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100 years of vampire movies – less Twilight & more a new dawn?

This is the first part in a four part series looking at the extraordinary popularity of the vampire genre, Dracula being the subject of more films than any other fictional character. The four parts are:

Posted under Cliche watch, Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on July 15, 2010

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Expect not to read e-books on your e-reader when you’re buying it

Oh dear, I'm reading less books now I have an e-reader - Photo from Flickr by Aprilzosia licensed under Creative CommonsWith the aid of the public domain Calibre e-book management application, which enables you to automatically subscribe to any news website (via RSS) and the increasing prevalence of the open (non DRM) EPUB electronic book formats that you can dump Adobe Acrobat PDFs to, you may find that books are the last thing you read on your e-book.   Let’s face it, paperbacks are easily available.   Where e-books really come into their own (assuming you’ve installed Calibre)  is in pulling down content from the web (and making it comfortable to read anywhere without a computer), content you normally cannot get in hardcopy unless you want to run your laser printer overtime.   Documents and news content like:  

Posted under Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on January 28, 2010

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Customized newspapers on e-books: Calibre cross-platform e-book subscription management

Sony E Book showing the crispness of the e-ink display with no retouching - PRS-505 perfectly adequate as customised newspaper platform - photo by egon on Flickr licensed under Creative CommonsAmidst the turmoil in the newspaper publishing market there is one big problem for journalists leaving the safe-ish harbour of their big name publications and starting to experiment out on their own (if you are still wondering why you should be doing this read this as to why your safe harbour aint safe).

Posted under Reviews

This post was written by @Drivelry on January 17, 2010

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Jane Austen: pride and prejudice in movieland in “The Jane Austen Book Club”

The Jane Austen Book Club DVD directed by Robin Swicord at AmazonIn Drivelry’s continuing mission to convert the obscure into ‘scure’,  it is remarkable how some movies do so well at the box office and others do so undeservedly badly.

A great case in point is the film “The Jane Austen Book Club”. Despite the title you really don’t have to know anything about Austen to appreciate this film.

Posted under Kewl, Reviews, Unanswerable questions

This post was written by @Drivelry on August 18, 2009

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