Kan' Sharuminar

The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather, which is surprisingly great. Most Roman history books I've read are either outdated or slightly all over the place. I've also gotten, after three weeks of waiting (thanks Amazon!) Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, which was recommended to me, though for no good reason. Looking forward to it.

A good game to watch, though nothing spectacular. Liverpool deserved to get the goal for their first half performance, but Milan really held their own in the end, and got the win for it. I quite enjoyed it all, not least because I had a bet going on with a German friend who was gunning for the Italians, while I was going for the English. We did like the irony

Don't think I could bring myself to sit in a cinema for the three films back to back. Last Christmas myself and some friends got together to watch the extended editions back to back, and that was accompanied by much food, drink and Wii-playing during the breaks. A far superior option, in my opinion

Just caught up with the entire new series - opinion is Eccleston had the better stories, though Tennant be the better Doctor. I quite liked the latest episode, though more for the 'behind the scenes' stuff than the main storyline. Looking forward to seeing what it might be building up to, and I do hope it's The Master.

I'm thinking it's similar to the Matrix films. Excellent first movie that relied on the audience not thinking much to make it fun, before throwing itself into two unnecessary sequels that have no real point to them but have a lot of special effects. Going by the trailer alone for the third film, it's involving a massive CGI battle to the death over a whirlpool, which brings up allusions to the battle for Zion in Revolutions. That said, I liked Davy Jones, and I like Barbossa. That's all I can see the film has going for it now - Sparrow didn't seem quite as fun in the second film.

He lost in the end, and a ridiculous amount of his enemy died to allow him to achieve the Ragnarok end he wanted. Rather sad, really. But it was a fantastic book, and I really hope to find a similar read on either Churchill or Stalin based on the war years. Until then , I'm off to Ancient Rome by Simon Baker, which seems an easy read

It had the horrific honour of coming out on the same day as Silent Hunter IV, which is my first love. That said, it is a very atmospheric game, particularly if you're sitting in the dark with headphones on . It's not a Half-Life beater, though it may come up to par with the sequel - it's always going to suffer heavily from the hype generated from when it was announced. That said, there's lot's about it I like, I just need to explore it more

I really hoped it would be set in London this time. I trust the rest of the GTA franchise won't be set in the old cities of the original and GTA3 lot. That said, I was never a fan of GTA3's Liberty City. Could never get my head around it the same way I did with Vice City and San Andreas, hopefully this'll be a good remake of the game.

Not since 1941, if I remember rightly.

Scotland were desperately inconvenienced by Italy putting out a team consisting solely of better players than we had I think it was probably the most fair result. Italy were gunning for a win, and we weren't completely destroyed. No shame in being defeated by Italy at their home.

You'll probably see a price cut before Christmas for the PS3, though I have no idea how much. I don't think either has a definite license for Lucasarts games, but you're likely to see Knights of the Old Republic 3 as an X-Box/PC only if it comes out, and never on Sony/Nintendo platforms. The Battlefront series and Force Unleashed etc are multi-platform, as far as I know, so no worries there. From what I can tell, it's a Sony game, so it's Playstation only. The games you quoted there are all multi-platform, and I can't see that changing for similar future games, particularly for the big comic franchises. In my honest opinion, I'd go for the 360 right now. I would never go for a newly released console, simply because I don't believe they start showing off their potential for a year. The head-start release means it has everything all set up and all the bugs ironed out. PS3 doesn't seem to have anything special going for it yet, and I can't think of any major licenses it owns to itself - given how multi-platform games are becoming, keeping specific games are the killer key to the Xbox/PS3 race I'll also say I don't own any of the new consoles, and don't intend to, in case I sounded like I was overdefending one side

I keep thinking I liked Nineteen Eighty-Four simply because I read it years ago, and it was more firmly ingrained in my mind. It probably has more to do with the final section of the book though, which was brilliant. Brave New World kinda stumbled along as I expected it to. Never even considered Farenheit 451, but another fairly decent book similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four(it has virtually the same storyline )) is Richard Harris' Fatherland. It does a good job of representing a world where Germany won the Second World War - never going over the top but at the same time keeping a feeling of tension and paranoia. It only suffers because, as I say, it sometimes seems identical to Nineteen Eighty-Four

I read Brave New World for the sole purpose of joining a debate about it and Nineteen-Eighty-Four. It was a decent read, I quite enjoyed the happy grimness. Back to my Hitler biography though. He just lost a major battle at Stalingrad (great twist, everything was going so well until now).

Cat and a piano Of course, there's the question of what category this playing fall under. Ho hum.

More information here Some specs: Processor: Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core processor QX6700, 2.66 8M Cache Memory: 4 Gb Corsair Dominator twin2x2048-8500C5D, 1066MHz Power Supply: 1000W ICE Cube PSU Audio: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Graphics: 2x nVidia 8800 GTX 768MB OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate So essentially it's a beast of a machine, designed for the sole purpose of playing games. I like that, though I don't like the paintwork on the case.

I quite agree, I'm only saying that I hope it will appeal to adults in the same way the Pixar films do - it's a children's film first, but not so much that adults will hate the two hours spent watching it. That said, I'll probably still go to see it for the animation style alone

If they're going to do a new turtles film, I'd prefer CGI - better that than folk in suits again. From that, I quite like the visual style and animations on the trailer so far. My main worry comes from the fact it seems to be aimed at a younger audience, hopefully it'll appeal to the older generation - at least enough for fans of the original series I still hold higher hopes for this film than I do Transformers, though.

While we're here: Theatre Hopper I was a bit more interested before I learned it was a comic book adoption, particularly one from Frank Miller. I shall undoubtedly be seeing it however, and hope it's as good as it sounds.

Slogging through Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis by Ian Kershaw, which is exceptionally good. For some reason I also have the complete works of William Shakespeare, but I'm rather regretting that now. To even it off I'm also downloading the complete archives of Sonic the Comic, in which the artist Richard Elson is my hero

Astronomy Picture of the Day had some pretty fantastic shots of the eclipse. Had a great time watching it

By remarkable coincidence, I started playing the original just this week, before discovering this sequel was out today. Joy What I did was create a co-op online game, but with just AI team-mates and, well, while not online. It let me test out how well the game would run.

Everything about Top Gear seems set up. Of course, that doesn't stop it being the best programme on the box. Ever.

I don't like. Though, to be fair, the turtles do look more ninja like than, well, any other incarnation they've been in. As long as they have Donatello looking groovy, I am happy.

Shine on A very sad day for music.

They should expand to other historical figures. Moustache cat for Stalin, smoking cat for Churchill.... Erm.