Talisman of El by Alecia Stone

Posted on by char

The Talisman of El by Alecia Stone

Publisher: Centrinian Publishing

Release date: May 18, 2012

Note: Review copy provided by the publisher

Amazon blurb:

WHAT IF YOUR WHOLE LIFE WAS A LIE?

One Planet.

Two Worlds.

Population: Human … 7 billion.
Others … unknown.

When 14-year-old Char­lie Blake wakes up sweat­ing and gasp­ing for air in the mid­dle of the night, he knows it is hap­pen­ing again. This time he wit­nesses a bru­tal mur­der. He’s afraid to tell any­one. No one would believe him … because it was a dream. Just like the one he had four years ago – the day before his dad died.

Char­lie doesn’t know why this is hap­pen­ing. He would give any­thing to have an ordi­nary life. The prob­lem: he doesn’t belong in the world he knows as home.

He belongs with the others.

Okay. So. This book. It was different. Not in a bad way, mind you; it was just different.

Charlie Blake, fourteen year old orphan, is sent to yet another potential adoptive family. He’s hopeful, but so many possible adoptions have fallen apart that he’s always thinking he’s going to be sent back. This time he’s sent to live with a single guy named Jacob, whose late wife died in an accident that raised eyebrows throughout the village (she broke her neck). At first Jacob’s the nice quiet type. And then Charlie discovers something hidden in the house and we find out that Jacob is a total psycho nutjob.

I know, right? Just when things were starting to look up. I mean, he makes friends at his new school and discovers a guy who looks like he’s 102 but is really only 27.

Okay, wait. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Continue reading “Talisman of El by Alecia Stone”

Passing down your history.

Posted on by anninyn

After the nitty gritty is done, you may want to put a thought to passing down history to your descendants.

You may want to tell them a few things, including (but not limited to) what happened, how you survived, the way you set up your society, who you are, how to stop it happening again… but there’s a problem with this.

How are you going to make sure it gets down the line unchanged?

Think about the history we know. The further back we go the spottier the evidence and the more specialised knowledge required to understand it. When you’re dealing with oral cultures, it’s even worse. History gets interwoven with myth until the awareness of what actually happened is a foggy mess.

Not only that, but when you take into account human nature – the fact that people will reinterpret or outright make up history in order to suit their own agenda – it starts to seem more trouble than it’s worth.

Still, you have to try. Why? Because every thing human beings do is based on the things that went before. And at the very least, you might want to pass down information about things like electricity, water purification and refined sugar so that these necessities don’t take quite so long to turn up next time.

The best thing to do is to record everything. Keep hold of old fiction and non-fiction books you find, and copy them when they start to fall apart. Carve them into stone if you have to. Write them on parchment made of animal skin and store them CAREFULLY, not just in some musty old cellar somewhere. There’s not much you can do about how much language will change over the decades and centuries. (Seriously, you may think you speak English, but if you were dropped into medieval England you would NOT understand what they were saying) But you can, at least, ensure your documents are safe and intact so that future people translating them don’t have to work so hard.

My mother is a historian, and she says one of the worst things for documents is damp. So a dry place is the most important thing you can do. Perhaps make it law that everyone has to be able to read and write, and that everyone has to copy out an essnetial document once a year so that not only does everyone have access to the information, everyone knows how to read it. If that law sticks, you could have your great grandchildren still understanding how to build a solar power generator – and should the ability to do so ever come around, they’ll be ready.

Survival isn’t just about your survival, it’s about giving all your descendants a fighting chance.

PAX 2012 | The Last of US Live Demo

Posted on by tavia.

Naughty Dog has set a high bar for themselves with the Uncharted series and if PAX Prime 2012 is any indication, that bar has been met with The Last of Us.

I went into the demo with Kae from Fuck Yeah! The Last of Us (and Fuck Yeah! Uncharted) and our expectations were high. Before the demo even began Naughty Dog started off on the right foot. The inside of the viewing room looked like the long abandoned bathroom that Joel and Ellie make their way through in the demo.

(Kae took all those pictures)

In the demo Ellie even comments on the couple in the couple in the bathtub and how they “took the easy way out.”

The characters felt very well rounded and realistic. They worked well together and there was no hint of either Joel keeping Ellie around for the wrong reasons or Ellie being a useless little twat you’ll hope will die so you can go play in peace.

After the demo we were given sweet posters –you can see one pictured above—(I got a signed one by Bruce Straley, the game director, that we’ll be giving away here on In Case of Survival ASAP) and t-shirt.

Free stuff is always awesome but really the best part was the the actual demo. Kae and I were holding one another, gasping, giggling, and sincerely feeling all the feelings.

Check out The Last of Us demo below and let us know how it made you feel:

The Last of Us Live Demo from PAX Prime

[More about The Last of Us]

Will the superbug be our downfall?

Posted on by char

The super bug. You know, the deadly supervirus or superbacteria that will take over the world and kill us all. Or something. Sometimes I think that one of those superheroes supervillains microscopic killing machines will end up being our ultimate downfall, but other times I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think it’s more likely that someone will genetically engineer one of these superviruses and then unleash it into an air vent at Disneyland or something.

Other times, I think it might be more likely that our current dependence on antibiotics and other medications–and equal dismissal of the importance of finishing the damn prescription–will instead breed a bacteria that’s truly invincible (well, based on current medical technologies, anyway).

For example: there is currently a rising threat of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Yeah, remember TB? Newsflash: it ain’t extinct.

Continue reading “Will the superbug be our downfall?”

PAX 2012 | 3 Reasons FIREFALL is best consumed outside of the game

Posted on by tavia.

PAX 2012 | The Cataclysm Shifts The Mists of Pandaria Revealing The Pandaren

Posted on by tavia.

I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a long time, and when I did I found it hard to truly immersed. Blizzard was running the The Mists of Pandaria demo at the NVIDIA booth and what a good decision that was. When I saw and even play a bit of The Mists of Pandaria at PAX Prime I felt my resolution faltering.

The setting, story, characters, and attention to detail were adding up and combined with crisp colors, smooth movement, and delightful customization, The Mists of Pandaria was the in I had unknowingly been looking for.

This wasn’t the same world everyone had been frolicking in for years.

Via the Pandaren I could safely be the new kid without feeling like the new kid. Sure the Pandaria would still be populated by real world players who might be experts but The Mists of Pandaria starts the story at point A.

While other races have been tied to the Horde or Alliance for years, the Pandaren are Unaffiliated. I don’t have to choose a character based on what my friends play!

Shrouded in fog since the world was sundered more than ten thousand years ago, the ancient realm of Pandaria has remained unspoiled by war. Its lush forests and cloud-ringed mountains are home to a complex ecosystem of indigenous races and exotic creatures. It is the homeland of the enigmatic Pandaren, a race that celebrates life to the fullest even while under siege by an ancient menace.

The new continent reveals itself to a broken world just as the Alliance and Horde are spiraling ever closer to a war that will consume all of Azeroth. Will the mists of Pandaria part to reveal the world’s salvation? Or will the battle to control this rich and breathtaking new land push the two mighty factions over the brink of war and into total annihilation? The answers await within Pandaria’s mysterious shores!

SOURCE

If you think of the cinematic trailer as something like a story trailer than a game trailer then you won’t mind that the actual game looks rather cartoony in comparison.

Luckily, to complete the “storymode” you need to be a certain higher level (I forgot because I don’t completely understand the leveling system as I didn’t even last long enough to get a mount) to do it. I’m not willing to commit the time to get there just yet. Hopefully they’ll include The Mists of Pandaria in a novel!

However, if you are interested in rejoining or just making your way over to Pandaria, I say try The Mists of Pandaria.

If you’re unsure, leave us a comment with your thoughts about the addition of the unaffiliated Pandaren and the realm of Pandaria and we might be able to give you one of the beta keys we scored so you can try The Mists of Pandaria before the September 25, 2012 release date.

Etiquette for an Apocalypse by Anne Mendel

Posted on by anninyn

It’s the 2020 Apocalypse and Sophie Cohen, former social worker turned neighborly drug dealer, must keep her family alive amid grueling and sometimes strangely amusing end of the world issues: starvation, earthquakes, plagues, gang violence and alas more starvation. She will be forced to investigate a serial killing and then, as if that isn’t enough, needs to take down the sinister emerging power structure, all-the-while learning to use a pizza box solar oven, bond with her chickens and learn to shoot a Ruger 9MM.

Etiquette for an Apocalypse [1. copy provided free by Bracket Press] is a pretty fun book with an engaging writing style and believable, enoyable characters.

By now, you’ll know I’m a bit sick of the same old apocalypse stories, and am actively looking for something different. I thouhgt I had it in Etiquette for an Apocalypse – the blurb I tracked down suggested it was primarily a murder mystery set in a post-apocalyptic world, which I was really into. However, half way through the book, that ceased to be the focus, and the plot went elsewhere.

I was sort of disappointed by this – not that the actual plot wasn’t fun and entertaining, because it really, really was, but because I had been hoping for something else. (By the way, someone write a good, well-written and well-characterised post-apocalyptic murder mystery, and I will read the SHIT out of it).

Ok, so that noted, let’s talk about everything else. I loved Etiquette for an Apocalypse. I loved it a lot. I loved it with almost the same intensity I love shoes.

Everything about it – the humour, the occasional lapses into script-style narrative, the first-person narrator being a middle-aged ex-social worker, her obsession with foods she can never eat again – was wonderful, a fresh attitude to post-apocalyptic writing.

  Etiquette for an Apocalypse manages to portray the grim realities of life post-apocalypse whilst still being fun to read – and quite funny, too. It’s not going to be for everyone, but in my experience books that try to be for everyone often end up being for no-one. Etiquette for an Apocalypse does some things with narrative structure and voice that a lot of people won’t have seen in this sort of novel before – I think they make the book stronger, but more literarily conservative types could find them off-putting.

There are some minor problems – the first chapters are pretty seriously info-dumpy, and it’s purely because the information is actually interesting that Etiquette for an Apocalypse manages to get away with it. However, overall it’s an innovative, interesting book that deserves to be very successful.

For that reason, it gets the rare….

[rating:5 out of 5]

'Traditional' Gender roles are a bunch of bullshit post apocalypse.

Posted on by anninyn

Most post-apocalyptic media (and a lot of prepper groups) have this weird idea that when the world ends the women will finally get back in the kitchen where they belong. While the post-apocalyptic world may be harsher to those of the female gender than the male in some ways, anyone who things gender is the main thing of importance in deciding who does what is going to find their survival group operating at less than peak efficiency.

For a start, gender doesn’t decide your natural skills.

It doesn’t decide your intelligence or how capable you are at learning. Gender has a minor impact on certain tendencies, but the truth remains that people are individuals first, gender second.

And then, you have to remember that what we consider ‘traditional’ gender roles are actually a pretty modern invention, at least among the poor. Before the industrial revolution, you couldn’t have members of the family or society not contributing. Women ran bars, shops, worked the farms. One thing they didn’t do was ‘stay in the kitchen’ because the family would have starved to death if they did.

Let’s think of it with a post-apocalyptic practical frame of mind. Say you have a woman in your group who happens to be a crack shot. Are you going to make her take care of the kids because she’s a chick?

Hope not. Take that to the logical extreme, and it means all people in your group should be offered the same training and found work to do based on what they’re best at, not on what old-fashioned gender ideals state they ‘should’ be good at.  Don’t stick a man who’s an excellent child-care provider on the scavenger lines, and don’t stick a woman who’s a brilliant engineer on clothes-making duty.

It really is that simple.

Are there things that either gender can do that the other can’t?

Sure. With women, it’s pretty much down to ‘I can squat out a baby’. And that IS something you need to consider – babies are going to be super major important post-apocalypse and so pregnant women need to be protected. Even your crack shot from above needs to be taken off the front lines when she’s up the duff. But the thing is, you’ll need her back.

So what’s the answer? Have a creche system. After weaning, all the children are taken over by dedicated child-minders, male and female.

But if you let modern-day gender binary colour your assumptions so much you end up with the person who could fix up electricity for you stuck to breeding and rearing, don’t blame me when you suffer.

The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster

Posted on by char

No cover image available at this time

The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster

Release date: November 13, 2012

Publisher: Egmont U.S.

Review copy provided by the publisher

(Note: This book was published in the UK as 1.4)

Currently, there is no blurb for the U.S. version of the book, so here is the Amazon blurb for the UK version (but note that some aspects of the book may have changed during editing for the U.S. version):

It’s a brave new world. In the far future, people no longer know what to believe…Did Kyle Straker ever exist? Or were his prophecies of human upgrades nothing more than a hoax? Peter Vincent is nearly 16, and has never thought about the things that Strakerites believe. His father – David Vincent, creator of the artificial bees that saved the world’s crops – made sure of that. When the Strakerites pronounce that another upgrade is imminent, Peter starts to uncover a conspiracy amongst the leaders of the establishment, a conspiracy that puts him into direct conflict with his father. But it’s not a good idea to pick a fight with someone who controls all the artificial bees in the world.

YOU GUYS. This book. THIS BOOK. I…have no words. But in a good way. Which is shocking for me, since I can’t recall the last time a book rendered me speechless.

I shall preface the inevitable squeeing by saying that I read this book, beginning to end, in one sitting. I very rarely do that anymore, because, well, I have kids. And every now and again, I like to sleep. So I usually read in short chunks, usually about five minutes at a time.

But this book! Holy godiva, it sucked me in and spat me out on the other side. One minute I was sitting in the rocking chair outside my toddler’s room (part of her bedtime routine), the next it’s three hours later and my Kindle progress bar is saying 100%.

Continue reading “The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster”