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Stickers Pro - Use 5000 Stickers & Gif Animation Stickers in your Kik Messenger, Messages, Emails,...
Dr. Panda Hoopa City 2
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**From the makers of the award winning app Dr. Panda Restaurant 2. Build the city of your dreams!...
Laura Doe (1350 KP) rated Wish You Were Here in Books
Jan 26, 2022
I didn’t quite realise how much this book would resonate with me until I started reading it. It reminded me sometimes about the awful things that we have lived through the past 2 years but also reminded me how strong people can be.
Diana and Finn are living in New York as the Covid-19 pandemic is beginning, they have planned to go on a once in a lifetime holiday to The Galápagos Islands just as the world seems to be shutting down. Finn, being a surgical resident, has been told that he can’t take time off, even pre planned holidays. While Diana, who is an art specialist working for Sotheby’s, knows that she needs to take time off as a deal she had brokered for a painting has fallen through. Finn tells Diana to go anyway as he doesn’t want to make her sick since he’s working in the hospital.
We then follow Diana exploring the beautiful, scenic Isabela island, and meeting a family who take her in and look after her when she becomes stranded there. She explores the island and although she doesn’t speak the language she manages to get by because she needs to. She has no phone service and very limited access to the internet so she has no way to contact the outside world, but it doesn’t seem to matter too much when you’re in paradise.
The second part of the book was a complete surprise, but a pleasant one. It reminded me of exactly how we were at the start of the pandemic, wiping down anything that came from outside, not opening mail for days and for some of us stripping as soon as we came in from work for fear we’d brought the virus home with us. I am a support worker and so had no choice but to go into work and look after people that had Covid-19 because as much as I was scared, I knew that they needed me more. One line that sticks in my head is also one that I thought myself: “Well if I catch it, I catch it” and that became my opinion for a lot of the pandemic.
It was a nice change that not everything was tied up with a neat little bow at the end of this book, as that’s how life is sometimes. I really enjoyed this book and I feel like it will be one of those that helps us to remember the pandemic in years to come.
Diana and Finn are living in New York as the Covid-19 pandemic is beginning, they have planned to go on a once in a lifetime holiday to The Galápagos Islands just as the world seems to be shutting down. Finn, being a surgical resident, has been told that he can’t take time off, even pre planned holidays. While Diana, who is an art specialist working for Sotheby’s, knows that she needs to take time off as a deal she had brokered for a painting has fallen through. Finn tells Diana to go anyway as he doesn’t want to make her sick since he’s working in the hospital.
We then follow Diana exploring the beautiful, scenic Isabela island, and meeting a family who take her in and look after her when she becomes stranded there. She explores the island and although she doesn’t speak the language she manages to get by because she needs to. She has no phone service and very limited access to the internet so she has no way to contact the outside world, but it doesn’t seem to matter too much when you’re in paradise.
The second part of the book was a complete surprise, but a pleasant one. It reminded me of exactly how we were at the start of the pandemic, wiping down anything that came from outside, not opening mail for days and for some of us stripping as soon as we came in from work for fear we’d brought the virus home with us. I am a support worker and so had no choice but to go into work and look after people that had Covid-19 because as much as I was scared, I knew that they needed me more. One line that sticks in my head is also one that I thought myself: “Well if I catch it, I catch it” and that became my opinion for a lot of the pandemic.
It was a nice change that not everything was tied up with a neat little bow at the end of this book, as that’s how life is sometimes. I really enjoyed this book and I feel like it will be one of those that helps us to remember the pandemic in years to come.
Mothergamer (1568 KP) rated the PC version of Dead Island in Video Games
Apr 3, 2019
I really wanted to love Dead Island. After seeing many fantastic pictures and reading up about the game months before it came out, I was excited. Friends and family know I am very much a zombie fan. Ever since that Halloween night when I was 12, and watched Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, I have genuinely enjoyed all forms of zombie multimedia. Some of it has been great, some of it filled with schlock, and some of it just plain fun. So I was excited about Dead Island and had high hopes for it. Some of my expectations were met, but others not so much. This included the discovery that the game is in the first person view (I have issues with vertigo and first person view games), but I found that I could play the game for short periods of time because the camera did not bounce around the way it does for so many other first person games I've experienced. There are good things about this game, but there are bad things as well.
Welcome To Paradise!
You start the game with the setting of what appears to be a tropical island paradise, Banoi. However, if you look closer, you'll notice the blood on the walls, in the sand, and in the swimming pools. Look even closer, and you'll see the zombies munching on corpses. Dead Island while appearing to be a first person shooter, is more than that. Sure there is shooting in it, but there are also a myriad of other weapons such as oars, cars, and molotov cocktails. Dead Island is more of a schlock filled action role playing game that plays heavily on grisly melee combat. The resort is not the only place you explore. You can go even further inland into city and jungle settings, while doing favors for survivors on the island. The maps are excellent and there is even a handy shortcut function, where you can click on the map and go back to a previous location without having to run through a zombie horde. There are also plenty of weapons that you can improvise, making them quite deadly to the zombie menace. The four player online co-op is pretty good and gives you a chance to survive a zombie horde fight for the more difficult quests.
Just a girl and her axe, waiting for some zombies.
The majority of your time on Banoi is spent exploring and foraging for items for weapons and supplies. In co-op mode, this can work very well with a couple of people fighting off the zombies, while the others get things like fuel for the vehicles. You can also have fun with the leveling grind, running zombies over with various automobiles and watch the points tally up. You can easily put twenty hours into this game with all the questing, exploring, and zombie slaying and it is fun trying all the different melee choices out. My personal favorite was driving a big truck and running zombies over.
Hungry Tourists.
Now we get to the bad. While there are only a few minor flaws with the game, it definitely made a difference in the game play and the story. Now I'm not saying for a fun schlock zombie game I need a gripping emotional story, but the story must be good. Dead Island gives you a very threadbare story and the characters backgrounds are rather weakly written. This is a reflection on the writers. They could have written the characters better and fleshed out the story more, but they chose to do it this way although I am not sure why. The voice acting is also not great, with monotone emotionless voices. Do the characters even care that they could get eaten by zombies? I get the impression that they don't with that flat tone in their voice acting. Clunky controls and awkward combat can make you frustrated. It can be off putting when you're fighting off a wave of zombies and trying to make the camera turn the way you want it to so you can at least see what you're fighting. The game would also benefit from a better block and dodge option during combat. The quality of the visuals isn't even. The environmental graphics on the resort are great and the jungle environments as well, but the character and npc animation is poor and as you progress towards the end of the game it comes across as the bare minimum at best.
The last issue I have with Dead Island is the lack of regard for the solo player. There isn't an offline co-op option so you can play with friends you have over. It's as if they didn't even consider the possibility that people would want to play offline with friends and only have the online option. While I appreciate their reliable system for online play, I still would have liked the option to play offline with others if I chose.
Overall, Dead Island is a good game, but not a perfect one. It had a lot of potential, but the execution of those ideas was severely lacking. You're better off just waiting for it to go on sale really cheap or just rent it.
Welcome To Paradise!
You start the game with the setting of what appears to be a tropical island paradise, Banoi. However, if you look closer, you'll notice the blood on the walls, in the sand, and in the swimming pools. Look even closer, and you'll see the zombies munching on corpses. Dead Island while appearing to be a first person shooter, is more than that. Sure there is shooting in it, but there are also a myriad of other weapons such as oars, cars, and molotov cocktails. Dead Island is more of a schlock filled action role playing game that plays heavily on grisly melee combat. The resort is not the only place you explore. You can go even further inland into city and jungle settings, while doing favors for survivors on the island. The maps are excellent and there is even a handy shortcut function, where you can click on the map and go back to a previous location without having to run through a zombie horde. There are also plenty of weapons that you can improvise, making them quite deadly to the zombie menace. The four player online co-op is pretty good and gives you a chance to survive a zombie horde fight for the more difficult quests.
Just a girl and her axe, waiting for some zombies.
The majority of your time on Banoi is spent exploring and foraging for items for weapons and supplies. In co-op mode, this can work very well with a couple of people fighting off the zombies, while the others get things like fuel for the vehicles. You can also have fun with the leveling grind, running zombies over with various automobiles and watch the points tally up. You can easily put twenty hours into this game with all the questing, exploring, and zombie slaying and it is fun trying all the different melee choices out. My personal favorite was driving a big truck and running zombies over.
Hungry Tourists.
Now we get to the bad. While there are only a few minor flaws with the game, it definitely made a difference in the game play and the story. Now I'm not saying for a fun schlock zombie game I need a gripping emotional story, but the story must be good. Dead Island gives you a very threadbare story and the characters backgrounds are rather weakly written. This is a reflection on the writers. They could have written the characters better and fleshed out the story more, but they chose to do it this way although I am not sure why. The voice acting is also not great, with monotone emotionless voices. Do the characters even care that they could get eaten by zombies? I get the impression that they don't with that flat tone in their voice acting. Clunky controls and awkward combat can make you frustrated. It can be off putting when you're fighting off a wave of zombies and trying to make the camera turn the way you want it to so you can at least see what you're fighting. The game would also benefit from a better block and dodge option during combat. The quality of the visuals isn't even. The environmental graphics on the resort are great and the jungle environments as well, but the character and npc animation is poor and as you progress towards the end of the game it comes across as the bare minimum at best.
The last issue I have with Dead Island is the lack of regard for the solo player. There isn't an offline co-op option so you can play with friends you have over. It's as if they didn't even consider the possibility that people would want to play offline with friends and only have the online option. While I appreciate their reliable system for online play, I still would have liked the option to play offline with others if I chose.
Overall, Dead Island is a good game, but not a perfect one. It had a lot of potential, but the execution of those ideas was severely lacking. You're better off just waiting for it to go on sale really cheap or just rent it.
Hoopa City
Education
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**From the makers of Dr. Panda Games! Plan and build in Hoopa City! Combine different materials to...
Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations
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With over 25,000 quotations from over 4,000 sources, The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations is...
Madeira Walks: Volume 2: Challenging Trails & High Altitude Routes
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As a walker's paradise, Madeira has it all - majestic mountains, rugged coastline, ancient forests,...
Naples & the Amalfi Coast Marco Polo Guide
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Marco Polo Naples & the Amalfi Coast: the Travel Guide with Insider Tips Experience all of Naples &...
Emoji for WeChat, Kik Messenger, Viber & WhatsApp...etc
Productivity
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Emoji - Use 6250 Emojis & Animated Emoji in your WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, Instagram, WeChat, LINE,...
Emma @ The Movies (1786 KP) rated Skyfire (2019) in Movies
Mar 28, 2021
On a whim I put this one on, a disaster movie at just an hour and a half long felt like a good way to start my day.
Years after the volcano on Tianhuo Island erupts, businessman Jack Harris builds a paradise resort and theme park in the shadow of the volcano. Because no story that started that way ever ended badly...
Skyfire struck me in a very peculiar way that I want to address later, but for now let me just say that this is a classic sort of disaster movie. A classic with a lot of borrowing.
A state of the art resort is built on an out of the way island. But when disaster strikes, everybody is in danger... If I read that to you and asked you which film I was talking about, what would your answer be? Jurassic Park or Jurassic World? It won't be the only time you find something to reminisce on. I didn't write down all the connections I thought I saw, but if you took Jurassic World, Dante's Peak and Shape Of Water (a little odd I know, but I'm sure you'll see it too) you'll be most of the way there.
I feel like I'm about to do this film a disservice, but I don't really want to talk much about the acting in it. This is nothing against the actors, try all do a good job, chemistry is there, there's the balance of serious and light-hearted... it all works, but it's not the thing that makes this movie for me.
The effects throughout are pretty good on the scale of disaster movies. To look at it all in the heat of the moment it very rarely comes across as unbelievable (which given this scenario is quite impressive), and those scenes that could have crossed over into looking bad are blended in with some great action sequences... so they might be bad, but I really didn't notice.
What sold me on Skyfire is just how well it works visually. In my opinion (I'm going to exercise this phrase more often I think), you don't need to listen to this film to understand what's going on. If you cut out the dialogue and just had the reactions and the ambient sounds you'd still perfectly understand what was going on.
That may say to you it isn't a very complex film, but it makes for a very enjoyable watch, and whole the familiarities did occasionally verge on frustrating I did begin the enjoy the game of spotting them. Mix those things together and it might not become my go to disaster film over Geostorm, but I will absolutely watch it again if the mood takes me.
Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2021/03/skyfire-movie-review.html
Years after the volcano on Tianhuo Island erupts, businessman Jack Harris builds a paradise resort and theme park in the shadow of the volcano. Because no story that started that way ever ended badly...
Skyfire struck me in a very peculiar way that I want to address later, but for now let me just say that this is a classic sort of disaster movie. A classic with a lot of borrowing.
A state of the art resort is built on an out of the way island. But when disaster strikes, everybody is in danger... If I read that to you and asked you which film I was talking about, what would your answer be? Jurassic Park or Jurassic World? It won't be the only time you find something to reminisce on. I didn't write down all the connections I thought I saw, but if you took Jurassic World, Dante's Peak and Shape Of Water (a little odd I know, but I'm sure you'll see it too) you'll be most of the way there.
I feel like I'm about to do this film a disservice, but I don't really want to talk much about the acting in it. This is nothing against the actors, try all do a good job, chemistry is there, there's the balance of serious and light-hearted... it all works, but it's not the thing that makes this movie for me.
The effects throughout are pretty good on the scale of disaster movies. To look at it all in the heat of the moment it very rarely comes across as unbelievable (which given this scenario is quite impressive), and those scenes that could have crossed over into looking bad are blended in with some great action sequences... so they might be bad, but I really didn't notice.
What sold me on Skyfire is just how well it works visually. In my opinion (I'm going to exercise this phrase more often I think), you don't need to listen to this film to understand what's going on. If you cut out the dialogue and just had the reactions and the ambient sounds you'd still perfectly understand what was going on.
That may say to you it isn't a very complex film, but it makes for a very enjoyable watch, and whole the familiarities did occasionally verge on frustrating I did begin the enjoy the game of spotting them. Mix those things together and it might not become my go to disaster film over Geostorm, but I will absolutely watch it again if the mood takes me.
Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2021/03/skyfire-movie-review.html