Pete Hindle

I picked this book up because it has an amazing cover by Don Maitz, which you can see here on his website. I love the look of older SF book covers, which put to shame the cleanly designed lines of more modern books. Sadly, the plot wasn’t great – one of those confusing 1970s plots [...]

I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are [...]

I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it. GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So [...]

Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”… Steph Swainston’s Fourlands [...]

I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking [...]

This book starts with a potted history of Wikipedia, beginning at it’s predecessor Nupedia, and then follows the development of the site until sometime in mid-2008, when the book was published. As an effort to keep up with both change and the technology, a wiki was set up to act as an afterword. Weirdly, although [...]

On Friday, I left the house for Datarama, Newcastle’s software version of Dorkbot. Well, maybe it’s a more artistic, friendly version of Dorkbot, without all the posturing that can be seen at the Limehouse. That’s not strictly important. What is important is that, whilst there, I presented my resubtitled version of Gran Torismo. Gran.Torino.subtitles (that’s [...]

In my teenage years, I had a big comic habit (graciously funded by my parents). It all started with the Silver Surfer double-issue where the Kree-Skrull war kicked off, on a holiday in Saffron Walden. I can’t remember the year it was, but it was before my reading speed kicked into the ludicrously high speed [...]

I’m reading Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer project, and I’ve got some reservations. Infinite Jest is a big book, but I’ve read bigger, and I’ve certainly read better. I think my flatmate summed it up best: when I pointed out the size of IJ, and how I wasn’t really enjoying it, he [...]

My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is [...]