I first heard of Brene Brown after watching her 20 minute TEDx talk The Power Of Vulnerability.

The Gifts of Imperfection offers readers a way to change their lives through adopting the practices of “wholehearted” living, an idea Brené came up with after studying concepts like shame, happiness, joy, anxiety and how they all relate to each other. By learning to embrace our imperfections, and recognise what issues get in our way, such as shame and fear we are able to lead more authentic and compassionate lives.

One of the best selling books ever, third only to the Bible and Shakespear, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of time was written to help nonscientists understand the questions being asked by scientists today: Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how?

Hawking attempts to reveal these questions (and where we’re looking for answers) using a minimum of technical jargon. Among the topics gracefully covered are gravity, black holes, the Big Bang, Quantum theory, String theory, the nature of time, and physicists’ search for a grand unifying theory.

According to Steam, I spent 13 hours playing the latest Tomb Raider game, which cost me about £4.99 in the Steam Christmas sale including all the extras, and it was 13 hours well spent!

It took a bit of a deviation from the Tomb Raider games I’d played before, for one it felt more like a linear RPG, as you could get experience which you could use to level up stats and weapons as you progressed. Also, there was a lot of in game swearing.

Last weekend to take a break from training and have a bit of an adventure I arranged a snorkling trip so the Similan Islands through Phuket Dive Tours. There was an offer on at the time and the cost of the trip was 2700 Baht (£53) and included transfer to the boat to the Similans, breakfast and lunch! Snorkles were supplied and fins were 100baht (£2) to rent, I bought my own though, as did a few others, but the gear they supplied was good enough and also in great condition.

Iain M. Bank’s second Culture book, The Player Of Games, was much more enjoyable than the first one, to the state that I read the last half in just one day! Unlike the first Culture novel, the protagonist this time is part of the Culture society allowing Banks to expand on the universe in greater detail.

The story is compelling, I could hardly put the book down, and the premise intelligent and unique. I was curious the entire time about the various agendas and motives of all the characters and the plot was gripping. It was very entertaining and I’m looking forwards to reading the 3rd in the series shortly.

The first game I bought, played and completed on this trip was Diablo 3, though it took a bit of effort to eventually buy it!

I played Diablo 1 and 2 when they were originally released and loved how you could tweak your character and manipulate your attributes to create vastly different skill sets.

Diablo 3 didn’t feel like those games at all, other than visually. It’s a very forgiving game, you can move points between skills and change your mind etc. It very much felt like Diablo Arcade Mode.

I’d never played any of the Zelda series before, despite having a NES as a kid and my brother having The Ocarina Of Time on his N64 so I decided to dive in and play the first one.

Man, this was one hard game, even using a walkthrough and OpenEmu’s memory save feature. It was kind of fun, but not really as it was so damn hard.

The game is split in to two stories, I only completed the first one and have no intention of replying it to complete the second one as it uses the same level data, things are just moved around.

There’s an awesome game console emulator for the Mac called OpenEmu which lets you play games across a dozen or so old school consoles so for Christmas my parents bought me a Sony Playstation 3 Dual Shock controller as they work with Macs and one of my mates bought it up when I went to visit Chiang Mai!

I’ve always wanted to play Silent Hill as it’s supposed to be extremely creepy. The OpenEmu lets you emulate Playstation games, and Silent Hill was flawless. I like old school games and consoles (before they were just PCs in a box) so over the last month bought a PSOne, Silent Hill and a bunch of random other stuff off EBay as investments. They were all sourced well under market rate and should only go up in price. They’re also pretty awesome!