STG's

Children No More - by Mark L. Van Name - is the latest book in the Jon and Lobo series. Jon and Lobo is a SF series on a not very near future where humanity is spread across the galaxy, mostly through instantaneous travel gates (in a very deus-ex machine way they come from nowhere - I hope it will be explained eventually) . The main character is the only man with nanobots in his cells, who is an ex-soldier with a heart of gold that keeps getting into trouble, and his sentient ship, Lobo, which is one of a kind, again because of nanobots experiments. This book is in many ways a manifesto against using childrens in war - the plot is based on Jon saving ex-children soldiers so that they can be just children. Several characters from the first two books appear, and there are a lot of flashbacks about Jon's own experience as a child soldier, in Pinkelponker, which were hinted at on the other books but never fully fleshed out. Overall, pretty good even though there was a lot less ac...

I am a fan of the TV series and I really liked the first book - Heat Wave  - so I was fairly happy to see Naked Heat - by Richard Castle on the Kindle store. Now that I've read it, I'm not disappointed. The story was pretty good, and the mini tie-ins with the series, such as a body being robbed, really add to the fun for the fans. Quite recommended for the series fans.

Jump Gate Twist - by Mark L. Van Name was a very quick read for me - it's an omnibus volume with the first two volumes of the Jon and Lobo series - A Jump Ahead and Slanted Jack - and two short stories. I've recently read the two books, so I naturally only read the short stories. They were interesting - one has the pre-fix Jon, and the other is an absurd and interesting Christmas tale with Lobo (before he met Jon). If you plan to read any of the other books, then this should be cheaper. Getting it only for the short stories would make it a bit expensive - I only got it myself because it came on a Webscriptions package.

Dexter is Delicious was the first book I finished on my new Kindle. I did get it just after it was released, but reading in the notebook is a very different experience, so I ended putting off. I've enjoyed all the other books and the TV series (and the two first years of the TV series - I didn't get around to watching the rest) , so it's probably no surprise that I liked this one too. The main topic of the book is Dexter's new baby, and the ways in that it affected him, as well as his, let's say "hobby", of killing serial killers. I don't want to spoil things, but I did find the new "enemies" quite interesting, as well as the return of his brother. I read some complaints about how soft Dexter is in this book - it is indeed true, but that didn't make it any less enjoyable for me.

Just after the release of the new Kindle, I got an e-mail from Amazon about it. Being an avid e-book reader (since 1994, on notebooks, passing through many palmtops and smartphones), I of course knew all about the previous Kindle models. And quite frankly, I thought they were very reasonably priced - before Brazilian taxes, that is. I also wanted to see how the iPads did - and mostly important, iPad clones based on Android - before buying one. Now that I've seen how the Samsung Galaxy tablet is going to be priced in Brazil (about 5 times the price of the new Wi-Fi Kindle), and with the new, much cheaper release, I bought one. I received it about 4 days later, which I think is awesome fast, although not surprising - I got books from them regularly in about this time years ago, when I bought books from them via DHL. The box itself is surprising - it is tiny and very light. Clearly Amazon wanted very much for the packaging to be cheap, light and ecologic. The Kindle box is alr...

Since it had a 30% discount this weekend on Steam, I finally got around to trying the Global Agenda demo. It's supposed to be a MMOFPS - I'm not aware of any of those succeeding. While the beginning is reasonable enough, I found the starting missions quite boring and repetitive. You'd have other people show up clearly doing the same mission as you, and enemies respawning  all the time. Of course, I'm not a big fan of MMOs. But I really didn't like this one... Maybe MMO fans would find the initial grinding fun - I really didn't.