Saturday 27 March 2010

Twilight: The Graphic Novel (volume 1) - book review

I’m a huge twilight fan so obviously I had been eagerly awaiting the official graphic novel, I got it last week & gave it a read through..here are my thoughts on the book. The first thing I realised was the book was not the standard manga size but rather the same size as the hardback twilight books, good for those of you who like to keep a tidy book shelf. The second thing I noticed was the cover which featured bella looked a little incomplete ..on closer inspection I spied Edward cullens arm. My bet is the next book will have a matching cover that joins up to the first novel forming a rather neat picture of bella & Edward in the meadow. So the book went on sale recently & so far I’m hearing well over 66,000 copies were sold in the first week making it a best seller. The books by meyer are so big that the graphic novels are going to be split up into different volumes, I’m sure how many exactly but I’m very sure that I’ll be purchasing each one as they come on the market. Though the book is mainly black & white some of the key scenes do feature colour. This time around because its not relying on text as the main story teller the experience is much more visual & definite to the authors original vision of her beloved characters. I was worried that when I did start reading the book I’d start to see some of my favourite characters & think they look nothing like how they appear in my image of them. Thankfully they all look so much like I’d imagined especially alice & rosalie. The art itself is actually really well done & some of the moods & emotions are quite engaging. I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of comics but I do read the occasional graphic novel especially if its an adaptation of one of my favourite movies. Twilight is one of my favourite series of books/movies & I’m happy to report the graphic novel is quickly growing on me too. I’d really recommend the graphic novel to twilight fans like myself, if you were worried about the characters/story being adapted wrongly then you have nothing to fear its not only a great read but a nice little collectors item too. Roll on volume 2.

One of my favourite parts in the book, bella is introduced to the cullens through cafeteria chatter

Thursday 25 March 2010

RapidShare Targets Pirates

For years now rapidshare has always been well known safe haven for the pirate & downloading community, it was easy to just go to a set address then with a few clicks grab the material you wanted. copyright infringement was just another one of those things on the internet but not anymore, rapidshare are reporting that they are taking a firm stand on the ones behind the spread of internet piracy. Rapidshare are stating that they are actively logging the ip addresses of both uploaders & downloaders. The site gets hundreds of millions of visitors a month but its not the only filesharing site out there so it makes me wonder will it make much of a difference to the current availability of pirated material online. The site is listed as one of the internets most used sites but the owners have faced many lawsuits over the material located on the their servers. Currently the site is vastly popular with its users & passing visitors so I’m assuming that filtering & logging ips will only cause the pirates to move on to a competing site of a similar nature.