Twists, Turns and Frustrations

June 19, 2014June 19, 2014 Peter Germany Books, Short Fiction, Vampires, Writing Pacific Rim, Vampires, Word counts, Writing

Just a quick little post tonight.

I’m working on this vampire collection, although I’ve lost a bit of momentum since my mammoth 7553 words on Sunday, and as I’m moving along with it what I’m writing now is causing me problems with the final story in the collection. This story was the first piece of fiction I wrote in this universe and I’m really quite fond of it, and I’d hate to cut it out of this collection but if I have to I will. How it’s going to play out now though is I can keep it in but not how it’s sitting now. I’d have to re-work and downplay some of the elements in it to make it fit into the set nicely.

Time will tell though. I’ll see how it all clicks in and I’m confident in my Beta readers to tell me whether it does work or not.

That’s it for me, I’m winding with Pacific Rim before bed. Tomorrow I’m off out for the evening so I won’t get anything worked on. Saturday afternoon/evening I’m planning on having a tidy up and on Sunday I’m aiming to have another day writing 🙂

Building My Blu-Ray Collection

April 4, 2014April 4, 2014 Peter Germany Movies, Sci-Fi, TV, Video Games Avatar, Blu-Ray, Dredd, DVDs, Grand Theft Auto, HDTV, Pacific Rim, Samsung, The Avengers, The Matrix

Just before Christmas my parents replaced their Samsung 32-inch HD LCD TV with the latest equivalent so to my joy they gave me the old one and for Christmas they gave me a Blu-Ray player. My brother brought me Pacific Rim on Blu-Ray and I’d treated myself to a copy of Dredd in Blu-Ray but I watched Pacific Rim first and WOW!! How cool is Blu-Ray?

Anyway, I already had Dredd on DVD and it’s one of a few that I was willing to replace with a Blu-Ray copy, there are a few others that I’m planning on upgrading, Avatar and The Avengers are the two main ones that I will be buying, and maybe The Matrix films but I’m not sure on those.

I know some people replace their entire collection when a new format comes out but as long as the Blu-Ray player plays DVDs I see little point in upgrading my 350 plus library of movies. If for no other reason then the cost alone prevents me from doing that.

From now on I will be mainly buying Blu-Rays simply because the picture quality is stunning.

Grand Theft Auto also looks gorgeous in HD as well.

Movie Monday: My Five Favourite Movies From 2013

January 6, 2014January 6, 2014 Peter Germany Movie Monday, Movies Frozen, Movie Monday, Pacific Rim, The Conjuring, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Thor: The Dark World

2013 was a big year in my movie loving life. I finally started going to the cinema on a regular basis with a couple of friends or my girlfriend Tracie and I saw a lot of movies at the cinema. I did miss a couple though. The Worlds End, The Wolverine, Carrie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Heat, Rush and Prisoners are just a few of the movies that I have missed during the year.

Picking out a Top Five is more then a little difficult as there were so many great movies out the last year. Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast & Furious 6, The Conjuring, Frozen, The Man Of Steel, Gravity, Captain Phillips, Thor: The Dark World, Pacific Rim, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Elysium, Despicable Me 2, World War Z, Riddick, You’re Next and Evil Dead. These are the films that I remember being impressed by during the course of the year. Now I need to choose five, which is going to be difficult.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Pacific Rim
Thor: The Dark World
Frozen
The Conjuring

These five, in this order, are the movies that have been the most memorable films of the year for me. Catching Fire at number 1 is by far and away well deserved. I really liked the first movie in this series but this raises the bar very impressively and I’m eager to see the next two movies.

Pacific Rim was always going to be in at number 2. It’s not the most in-depth movie that has been created but it has giant Kick-Ass robots beating the living snot out of giant alien monsters and the fan boy in m just loves it!

Thor: The Dark World was a movie that I think was always going to enjoy. I also liked the first Thor movie but like the Hunger Games movies this second film in the series stepped up and blew its predecessor out of the water.

What can I saw about Frozen, it’s a lot of fun. A hell of a lot of fun. It’s entertaining, humorous, and absolutely beautiful. This is Disney at its best in my opinion.

Finally, The Conjuring. I didn’t think that I was going to like this movie. I had no real desire to see this one but a friend of mine wanted to see it so I went along too, I’m glad I did. It was a movie that had great characters, actors, direction, story, everything. Well worth a watch.

So there it is, my top five movies of the year. This was not an easy list to make and I hope that this year is as challenging to pick out my top five of the year.

Honerable mentions. These films impressed me but were not quite good enough to make the top five. Gravity, Fast & Furious 6, Elysium, You’re Next, Riddick, The Man Of Steel and Despicable Me 2.

Movie Monday: Pacific Rim

July 22, 2013July 21, 2013 Peter Germany Movie Monday, Movie Review, Movies, Sci-Fi Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Godzilla, Guillermo del Toro, Idris Elba, Movie Monday, Movie Review, Movies, Pacific Rim, Rinko Kikuchi, Ron Perlman

It’s been a while so I thought I’d write a Movie Monday post! Now how do I do one of these again…….lol

This Movie Monday post is all about Pacific Rim. The new movie by Guillermo del Toro where giant aliens on the scale of Godzilla are coming out of a portal at the bottom of the pacific and tearing cities apart. To solve this problem humanity came up with giant robots that are controlled by two pilots through neural pathways (I’ll admit I need to watch a couple of the details to be clear on them) this means the pilots are totally in sync with each other and feel the pain when the mechs are damaged by the Kaijus which come from the pacific. The film focuses on the attempt to shut this portal for good.

Now to me this sounded like Heaven! It has giant monster battling with giant mechs, not robots as I called them earlier (I can make excuses for wrong description 😛 ). What more could a geek like me want? A decent storyline for one and Pacific Rim has it. It’s not overly complicated which is good. The characters feel well developed and their back stories are dealt with well. Charlie Hunnam is very likeable as the lead but has great support from the deep Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, who looks like he had a lot of fun with this role and I especially liked Rinko Kikuchi who looked to have a lot of strength on screen. Burn Gorman and Charlie Day both deserve a mention as scientists who have differing opinions on the Kaiju.

The effects were great. All these battles were obviously CGI but not once did I think this was CGI because it was done that well. I would have preferred more of the action to have been in the daylight but that’s a minor quibble.

One thing I would like to mention is that this did not feel like a del Toro movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way but with del Toro you know what you as going to get and this surprised me because he’s taken a chance and pushed himself to do something that maybe is not in his safe zone. It has the depth that we expect and the right amount of humour with seriousness. The action scenes were just the right amount. Quite often I’m left feeling a little short changed with movies that have these sorts of CGI but Pacific Rim gave just the right amount of action.

All in all its a movie I really enjoyed and I will be buying the DVD when it comes out. If I’m honest I could quite easily go and watch it again at the cinema 🙂

I would just like to make a quick mention about the 3D in this movie. I’m generally not a huge fan of 3D because it rarely compliments the movie. The best example of good 3D that I have experienced was the movie Dredd and this is probably the best use of 3D I’ve seen in a movie since then.

Heat Wave 2013

July 18, 2013 Peter Germany Books, Movies, Sci-Fi, TV, Writing Falling Skies, Farming, Heat Wave, Movies, Pacific Rim, Project Apollo, Reading, TV, Weather, Writing

Last year we here in England had maybe two weeks of decent weather. I can only think of one really hot day that stands out but this year we’re in our forth week of a heat wave and people are complaining! come on really? I can understand that it is affecting certain aspects of life. My dads a farmer and its not helping the harvest. I’m unable to run my three year old laptop for more then half an hour because its gets too hot and the heat makes my day job just a little more challenging.

Am I complaining? No. I’m getting on with my job. I’m writing with a pen and paper and limiting my time on my laptop because complaining isn’t going to change the weather and give it a few months all the people complaining about how hot it is now will be whining about how cold it is.

Enough about the heat wave, here’s what happening with me. Project Apollo is going well, I’m on the final straight now and give it a couple more days of writing I think I’ll be seeing the finishing line. Reading has again dropped off again. I’m still on Redshirts by John Scalzi and I’m loving the direction he’s taking with the final third of the book but between Writing and Falling Skies I don’t seem to be finding the time to wrap this one up.
As I just mentioned I’ve been watching the TV series Falling Skies. I’m only a few episodes into it but this is right up my street and I am absolutely loving it. I knocked out three episodes last night when I was only planning to watch one episode. I’m only on series one so I have a lot of catching up to do.
I also saw Pacific Rim on tuesday, wow. I’ll elaborate on that further in another post but I loved it 🙂

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