Playing, reading, watching

I’ve been losing my nights this week to Torchlight, a hack-n-slash RPG from a bunch of ex-Blizzard employees that worked on Diablo. And you can tell the resemblance at any step: the games are pretty much the same. Torchlight is basically a combination of Diablo 1 (three classes, vertical structure, just one town) and Diablo 2 (socketed items, sets, skill trees) with World of Warcraft-like cartoony graphics. That being said, it has all the addictiveness of Diablo, which accounts for many nights spent looting chests hoping for better drops. You know what I’m talking about.

On the literary front, I’m currently reading Makers, Cory Doctorow’s latest book. It’s about… real-life hackers – in the most literal sense, as people changing the world around them by creating gizmos and tools out of anything is available. It’s a very fun book, it really rubs the nerdy insides. On Monday he was in NYC so I went to the signing. The guy is really smart and funny, a great geek. No wonder there are so many XKCD comics about him

On the professional level (at work, that is), I finished my first ever iPhone app. Which means that now I have the basic know-how to create applications for both Android and iPhone. I want get into this in my own time as well, so I’m planning buying a Mac in the near future (you can only do iPhone development on a Mac, grrrr). It will be my next gadgety purchase so I’m already giddy about it. It’s gonna be great

This weekend I started to catch up with some of the shows I recorded on my DVR the past days, most notably History Channel’s World War II in HD. Which is absolutely great, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WW2 history out there. Think Band of Brothers, minus Holywood, plus realism. An extraordinary documentary. Speaking of Band of Brothers, looks like HBO is preparing another WW2 miniseries, The Pacific. Can’t wait.