Here’s publisher Flux’s summary…

In his fourteen years, Vincent Drear has been sure of a few of things. First, the world is going to end. And until it does, he has two jobs: saving souls and protesting movies about boy wizards. But Vincent wonders if there’s more to life than this. His suspicions are confirmed when he finds an elf at his school science fair. Vincent’s excitement fades, though, as the elf informs him that his family’s religion is right about one thing: the end of the world is coming-in forty-eight hours! Vincent can’t save the world. His only hope is to get his family off Earth before demons wipe out everything, paving the way for a new epoch.

Did I like it? Hit the jump and find out.

Epoch is not a book I would recommend to my friends, the main reason being that it isn’t written for anyone over the age of 16. Then again, that hasn’t stopped my peers from reading Harry Potter (the 5th film being a subject of protest in the book. More on the protesting later…), and I thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit so who knows, but I can’t imagine my peers enjoying this short 300+ page read (large fonts make it a quickie).

The story is about a 14 year old boy named Vincent and his two day quest to save his friends and family from the end of the current epoch which will signify the end of humanity. The premise is nifty enough, and I’m not above some schlocky fantasy lit now and then. I just couldn’t appreciate the way it was written.

There’s a good deal of religious mockery in the story, namely the “one true faith” styled religions. Vincent’s family are members of a fictional off-shoot of Christianity called “The Triumvirate”. His parents and brother are hard core protest-leading members, while Vincent himself is pretty sure that most of it is bunk (the truth of it being revealed later in the book, to amusing effect). The family dynamic is creepily believable and is probably the most entertaining bit of the book. Then again, if you’re buying this for children/young adults and you’re all ga-ga for Jesus then ya might not be into the idea. Me? I’m totally down for it.

One thing I’m not totally down for, though, is Vincent’s hippy aura-reading friend, Chanteuse. Couldn’t stand her, and for all the religious mockery in the book I couldn’t help but find Chanteuse’s belief system quite similar to that of the average religion. Just exchange mother nature for insert-god-here and you’re set to go.

But really, it’s the aura colour reading that gagged me.

Certain style choices, used repeatedly, certainly rubbed me the wrong way as well. An example would be if someone wrote the following (not an excerpt):

Dylan wondered what was going on.

“I wonder what’s going on,” said Dylan.

That just bothers me to no end. Used sparingly it could have been something of a trademark, but its overuse makes sure it never becomes a “So it goes,” styled Vonnegutism.

All in all, the book just isn’t written (or written well enough) for most adults. I know I didn’t talk much about what, specifically, isn’t well written but that’s ’cause it’s kinda hard to pinpoint. It felt like the words lacked style, a solid delivery as well as detail. The world as we know it does indeed come to an end, but it definitely doesn’t go out with a bang for me. Get it for your twelve year-old if you don’t mind a little religious de-doctrination, but skip it otherwise. Even if you’re wetting yourself for the next Harry Potter.

When I arrived I was working at The Disney Store at the Eaton Center, so this CBC gig really does make me feel like I made the right decision in forcing my wife to come to Toronto with me. Sure, I had to sedate her with some barbiturates and tie her her hands behind her back to make sure she made the trip to the big smoke with me, but with this new job I think I can finally untie her and let her see some sunlight without worrying that she’ll flag down a cop car.

Thanks to Guin for the big ups- they certainly didn’t hurt my chances!

I bought a Playstation 3 in March of 2008 for (at the time) the sole reason of playing Rock Band. Dollar for dollar it was the best option at the time. I brought the game home, unpacked it, and my wife and I jammed until the following morning. The game excels in every aspect and after spending more than $750 just to play it, we concluded it was worth every penny.

As soon as they were available I purchased a second official guitar controller for the game. We were finally able to have 4-person jams and get full band unison bonuses during the songs. It was awesome, even though the guitar was DOA (stuck yellow fret button) and had to be replaced. Your replacement process was first rate, though.

Aside from the guitar, I’ve also pumped a sizeable amount of coinage into the Rock Band store. We currently have over a gigabyte of paid-for downloaded music content and do not regret a single music pack or song purchase, though, you really should choose NIN songs that don’t end up being boring to play (”Burn”, who would’ve thought?!) or don’t have enough guitar to sync up with requiring you to play a piano on the guitar controller for 2 minutes (”The Collector). STILL, , it’s awesome, and we consistently buy new content almost every week. The fact that all our content will be compatible with Rock Band 2 (day 1 purchase, by the way) is great and very pro-consumer.

I recently encountered an issue, though, that is surprisingly anti-consumer. My PS3’s blu-ray drive died yesterday. As such it will need to be sent in for repairs and in all likelihood I will be sent a different PS3 refurb unit. I do not mind having to redownload all my track packs (I understand the nature of the DRM and don’t begrudge it) but what I do mind is that my Rock Band save game file is the only save game file on my PS3 that I cannot back up. This means that all of my bands’ progress, our customized characters, the money we’ve accumulated, the stars we’ve received, etc, will be lost.

I can understand the fear that people will pass their saved games around the net, allowing people to access tracks that had yet to be unlocked and all that jazz, but such a practice and conscious implementation does not take into account the very real possibility of system repairs. Really, since the PS1 days, systems have progressively become more unreliable with each generation. It’s no joke that a sizable number of the PS2s in people’s homes are replacements for the first year’s worth of shipped systems that ended up having dead disc lasers, and I remember having to flip a PS1 upside down and on a 40 degree angle to get it to play games after awhile. The fact that my PS3 died after 5 months is not surprising, particularly considering the failure rates of its direct competitor.

Yes, my wife and I will start the game over and re-unlock everything as we enjoy having people over to play the 4-man game which would be pretty lame if we only had access to a few songs. I will not be buying the next Guitar Hero game, not only because Rock Band is already wicked awesome but also because of the amount of money I’ve put into the game. Point being, you have not lost a customer, but you have made one quite upset nonetheless. I hope you “unlock” the save game file in Rock Band 2 for the PS3 as I’m relatively certain my PS3 will die again in the future, and having to go through it all a second time will be far too much to ask of a legitimate and loyal consumer.

Sincerely,

Ryan Couldrey

[signed]

Today I give if a mark of FAIL. The “why” is after the fold.

The way you get content, be it music, pictures or videos, is to create “Sync Groups”. Groups can be comprised of folders, artists, podcast subscriptions, albums and/or specific tracks, whatever you want. Upon plugging the Zune in it will check the groups to see if the content contained within has changed on the host computer and update the Zune accordingly. You can also say “Sync automatically” or “let me choose when”. Aside from podcasts, I always chose the latter. This method is completely different from what I do with my Zen 30gb, which I’ve chosen to go the drag and drop route with content. It’s manual, but the fact is that it doesn’t depend on software to check for things that have changed and possibly update things I don’t want updated at that exact moment on the player itself.

Now the whole sync group thing wasn’t a problem at first because it worked as advertised. Pocasts would delete themselves once new ones arrived and the player would update accordingly. I even had the Zune sync itself through my wireless network while I was in my living room, a very slick option that would be useful if I had it permanently in a car in my non-existent driveway.

The problem is actually the result of the Zune thinking it had been plugged into (and what I would call “married to) two computers with Zune software installed and sync groups set up on both. It wasn’t plugged into two computers, it just decided that the computer it had been plugged into several times already was a new one and then tried to sync all my content a second time (effectively doubling everything). It then ran out of space before being able to finish its second redundant content sync.

My first step was to tell the Zune software on my computer to “erase all content on the [Zune]“. It did what it thought it was supposed to do, and it only erased the content that this computer had just synced. The Zune won’t let one computer allow the erasure of content synced from another computer, so I get a message in graphic that depicts free/taken space in the software that says “Space reserved for another computer (if any)”. It actually says “If Any”.

What if there isn’t any? What if it’s completely wrong in its assumption? Nothing happens, it just won’t let me erase the content nor is there any way for me to tell it to combine its syncing or what have you. The only way around it from what I can surmise by looking at the forums (and seeing that I’m definitely not the only person experiencing this exact issue) is to format the Zune and reinstall the firmware, then resync everything.

If this happened within the first week, what’s in store for me? For all my talk about possible hacks to the device I haven’t had the chance to try any of them yet. I’m quite literally using the device as it was given to me. There is a drag and drop hack, but in order to hear music and watch movies the Zune software must still be used- the hack is just to have some space to use like a USB thumb drive.

As it stands I will not recommend to anyone that they purchase a Zune. This might be damaging in regards to receiving future freebies from marketing and PR companies in Toronto, but fuck it, I’d rather be honest and tell people to buy a Creative Zen, which not only allows both drag and drop functionality (that lets you play your content as you’d expect it to) AND set up syncs (if that floats your boat), but it’s also cheaper than the Zune at only $139 for an 8gb Creatve Zen vs $189 for an 8gb Zune at Futureshop.ca.

The NFB has always held a strange place in my heart. On the one hand they provide the means for a lot of film makers to create and distribute their works. Without the NFB, many awesome little (and bigger) indie films wouldn’t see the light of day.

On the other hand they want $15 for a 10 minute VHS I wanted a few years ago. That right there meant I wasn’t going to see the film.

I can understand that people need to make some money, but I’m also glad that the NFB has realized that there are other ways to do so that don’t involve charging far too much money for an out dated technology. So it’s pretty damn awesome that they’ve started opening up their catalog for free, on the net, and totally embeddable to boot.

- Fallout 3 - PS3 Blu-Ray: I never played the first 2 isometric games that came out oh so long ago but the moment someone offers me a post-apocalyptic action-rpg using the Oblivion engine you have my money. The time stop mechanic where you can select what bodypart you want to shoot your rocket launcher at is a stroke of brilliance.

- Mirror’s Edge - PS3 Blu-Ray: A first-person parkour (free running) game where gun play is kept to a minimum (and you unlock a trophy/achievement if you never fire a bullet during the game), this genre creating spectacle is a sight to behold. Unless you’re not the person playing it; a lot of people have said that while the game doesn’t sinspire nausea while playing it, they have felt motion sick when they weren’t playing it. I don’t like to share anyways.

- Dead Space - PS3 Blu-Ray: This and Mirror’s Edge are both EA published games, and the fact that I want not one but two games from the behemoth means that things have to be changing inside the company. This is an over-the-shoulder horror-action game where the developers have been saying that you have to dismember the creatures if you want them to stop attacking. Headshots are so 1998.

- LittleBigPlanet - PS3 Blu-Ray: This game is the game of 2008. You might not be too aware of it unless you’re a PS3 owner but rest assured, you will have no choice but to come over and play this game on my couch with me. No more words, but more and more and more video (last one is where they created the Sony Powerpoint in the game, which is way more entertaining than your standard bar graph). Watch them all, or I’ll sick a Killzone-esque Sackboy on ya!

- WipeoutHD - PS3 Downloadable: This game was playable at 1080p and 60 frames per second last year, but Sony let it slip that there’s a game-breaking technical problem with the game that they haven’t been able to solve. I owned the first game on my Saturn way back when so I’m praying that this download-only Playstation Network game arrives before the end of the year.

- Pixeljunk Eden - PS3 Downloadable: I’m not entirely sure what the game is about, but it seems the goal is to swing around with two other friends (on my couch, natch) polinating plants. It almost looks like it has a bit of a racing mechanic, as player swing around spiderman style trying to grab the pollination bits to make the flowers. Something about it has me hooked… it also has the ability to record video play of the game and upload it to Youtube, very cool.

- Fat Princess - PS3 Downloadable: Say what? The goal of the game is to capture the other team’s princess (or catch your own, I’m not sure) and bring her home. Thing is, the team in the castle holding the princess is consistently supposed to fdeed her pounds of food and cake to fatten her up, making it harder to carry her home. There are multiple classes of players, and it’s a 16 vs 16 online Playstation Network game, think Team Fortress 2 meets Castle Crashers meets Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

- Left 4 Dead - PC Steam: 4 player zombie killing co-op multiplayer from Valve and the people who programmed Counterstrike’s bots. The game has a heavy emphasis on actual co-operation as you do not want to be left alone for long. The zombie spawn points are procedurally generated so you’ll never get stuck in the same choke point twice, so each play through will require new tactics and on the fly decisions. I’ll be g etting this one on PC and will be playing with my fellow Ectomites.

- Rock Band 2 - PS3 Blu Ray: What, you need me to say more than just the name of the game? It will not only come with 84 master track recordings, and extra 20 free downloadable songs near the launch, and not only will it be compatible with all the songs I paid to download for the first game but for under $5 I’ll be able to put all but a couple of songs from the first game onto my hard drive so I can play them from within Rock Band 2. Fuck yeah.

When it arrives it’ll already be a very feature rich player. The Zune 2 models (4gb/8gb/80gb) all share the exact same OS and screen resolution (320×240, though, the flash model screens are smaller, regardless of the matching resolution).

A couple of things were niggling at my shins, though.

One of the main reason I’ve loved my Zen 30gb for so long has been its ability to play Divx/Xvid files without any conversion. Drag and drop and play. The Zune and its software, however, doesn’t play nice with Divx file formats (though MPEG4 is stated as playable… those formats are interchanged so often that I can’t tell if they are the same or not, similar to Divx and Xvid). If I were going to buy a Zune with cash out of pocket I’d have done a lot of research before buying to make sure I could use it as I intend to, not as Microsoft intends me to. This means I wanna watch mah vide0z.

Also, no official Last.FM scrobbling support. I don’t really care too much about it, but on occasion I like to see what my latest recommendations are, and considering my wife plays most of the music at home (she’s not a fan of Slipknot or Ladytron, what can I say?) scrobbling on the go would be ideal.

There’s always a way to get what you want.

There seems to be a way around both of the cliffs- YIPPEE! First, other file formats (including avi, which hopefully means Divx files within AVI containers) can be supported with relatively little difficulty. Divx support seems to be up in the air, and it will most likely require a conversion but what they hey, worth trying. Otherwise I can try the software I installed on my wife’s computer to convert Divx files for her Zen 4gb (only the big HD based ones play Divx). Not ideal, but I might not be using this much for video considering it’ll only have 8gb of space.

For scrobbling people are recommending I use Zenses. The name is a definte tip-off; it also works with my good old Zen 30gb by the look of it! Would be very cool if, when plugging in either player to the computer, it could scrobble all the tracks I played. I tend to listen by artist so if it scrobbles tracks I skip over it shouldn’t matter too much.

So, yay! Once it arrives I’m gonna have to try this thing out with a run. I’ve never brought the Zen on a run due to its size and also fear for mucking up the hard drive. Though, I have dropped it numerous times on concrete (it has plainly visible battle scars) but it still mostly works fine, aside from t he off-button making it skip a track instead of, well, turning off.

The service allows those with the know-how to take the Yahoo search engine and customize it to the point where you can change the algorithms and alter the page ranks of sought after sites. Instead of having to use the jack of all trades Google, you could use the master-of-one [Insert-your-name-here]-Search engine. However, like open source software the only people who’ll be able to really mash this up and do some good with it will be those who already have the coding know-how. Still, a great idea to steal some shine from Google.