Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

So this definitely isn’t the sort of film that we usually go to the cinema for, what with it being a crassly commercial romantic comedy with no artistic aspirations and a bog standard plot. But I still got caught up in the cultural buzz surrounding it and I have to admit that the cultural representation thing has me excited as well, especially as there are so many Malaysians involved in it.

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Fire effects in Blender

So as the title indicates, I’ve been playing with fire effects in Blender recently. It seems that making cool animations with them is especially popular but I’ve found that rendering fire of any significant size makes my render times explode so I’ve had to curtail my ambitions massively. At the same time, it felt like a good opportunity to experiment with darker scenes and maybe some atmospheric lighting as well. Like so:

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Once again, I’ve barely watched any entries of the highly successful Mission Impossible franchise though I did write about the fourth one. The rave reviews for this latest entry, with some critics going so far as to call it one of the best action movies ever made, convinced me to turn up at the cinema for it. Like everyone else, I am left amazed by how hard Tom Cruise is still working at the age of 56.

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The Black Tides of Heaven

So I decided to pay a bit more attention at what happens at the Hugo and Nebula Awards every year. Browsing through the list of nominees, I noticed this among the novellas, a work by a relatively new Singaporean writer JY Yang that is sometimes described as being in the ‘silkpunk’ genre. It was published together with the second book of the series Red Threads of Fortune as a bit of an experiment though each is short enough that I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as a single book. I only bought this one first to check it out however.

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The unexamined life is a life not worth living