White Wolf

A while back I mentioned David Gemmell's Troy trilogy. That reminded me of the first David Gemmell's book I've read years ago: White Wolf. On White Wolf, we follow the story of Skilgannon, a warrior who gained the nickname of "the damned". I've read this book in Portuguese (I actually like the Portuguese cover better than the original one) and it's one the few non-technical books that I've read several times. Gemmell tells an adventurous tale of both a passionate and tormented warrior. Within the story, Skilgannon meets Druss (one of the first heroes created by David Gemmell) and the two warriors join forces in a suicidal journey. Besides the detailed combat scenes and the twists in the story, it is the complexity of the characters that I find appealing in this book. Some of Skilgannon reactions even reminded me of myself - no wonder I felt something personal when I've read this book. Also interesting is the constant tons of grey that are recurrent in the story. No one is always 100% bad or 100% good. Sometimes, everyone crosses the frontier between good and bad… and it is indeed a very grey and not strictly defined area. It reminds me of a famous phrase: No one is as bad as he thinks he is, nor as good as others think he is. A book I recommend to those who like fantasy books.

John Carmack keynote

QuakeCon, the largest free LAN party in the world, just finished a few days ago. Now, I'm not much of a deathmatch player myself, but this is an event I tend to follow (on-line :D) from a few years back. Why? Because every year John Carmack gives a keynote providing bits of information about his opinions, interests and projects.
To those who never heard of Mr. Carmack (shame, shame on you), he is also known as Engine John and is the ID guy who was always one step ahead of competition and developed revolutionary engines for games such as Commander Keep, Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom2, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom3. Right now, they are working on a new version of Wolfenstein and a new game called Rage.


Here's the link to this year's keynote and last year's as well. Youtube videos for the new Wolfenstein and Rage are bellow:

David Gemmell's last books

I have just finish reading the last books from David Gemmell about the legend of troy: Lord of the Silver Bow, Shield of Thunder and Fall of Kings . David Gemmell was one of Britain's top hero fantasy writers and died in the 28th of July 2006. When he died, he had only finished two of the Troy books and the last one was co-authored by his wife Stella Gemmell who finished the book.


This trilogy provides a more "human" (as in non-goddish) look over the legend of Troy where the giants of the pass such as Hector, Odysseus and Akhiles are non-linear characters accompany the whole story - despite the fact that the main story floats around two characters named Helikaon and Andromache. I've found these three books to be very (very) good. Despite the fact that the story of troy is well known, David and Stella Gemmell are able to introduce a different and surprising look over the old story with some unexpected twists. Excellent.

Speed Chess

wow....can these guys play! Chess is one of my hobies... too bad I don't have much free time to dedicate to it. In order to improve at chess, it requires study, patience, more study, a lot of motivation and time to spend.

Doomsday and old memories

A few days ago, I came across DoomsDay... and boy, it bring back a lot of memories.


I still remember my high-school programming classes when the whole class used to deathmatch each other in Doom instead of programming. That was about... some... well... man... it was around 10 years ago. I think I'm getting old.

Games like Doom, DukeNukem3D and Quake were all the rage back then. And it was relatively easy to make new levels for Doom. Anyway, to those who don't know, DoomsDay is a enhanced source port of the Doom game (whose source has been released years ago by IdSoftware). This particular source port comes with an hardware-accelerated renderer as well as some 3d models for the game entities.

It works with Doom (the normal Doom and UltimateDoom), DoomII, Heretic and Hexen.

First Post

This is the only, the unique, the extravagant... first post.

Welcome to the mind yell blog, where random thoughts of a cloudy mind tend to appear. Topics will include things I like such as women, books, women, chess, women, programming, women, jokes, women, personal thoughts and other diverse random topics.

Proceed with caution!