300

Okay, I went into this movie (DVD, whatever) expecting to dislike it but vaguely hoping it would be tolerable.
Was it going to be an unsubtle glorification of illegal war fought by gallant white people against freedom-hating brown people? Or could I hope for a subversive tract about a tiny force of psychos defending their land against an overwhelming foreign invader?

But it was just crap.

Aww, that's so cute.

A Flash game, The Asylum : A Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys.
A few years old now, in this game your task is to undertake the treatment of some seriously messed up soft toys.
There's a stuffed crocodile hiding in a box, a zipper-mouthed hippo autisticly trying to assemble a jigsaw and so on. Four cute, animated soft-cuddly-people who need your help. You can give them various therapies to tease out their unhappy stories of abuse, revealed through some charming animation, and make them happy again. Or you can make mistakes and cringe as the toys hurt themselves or retreat into the darkness of their minds.
As a game it is perhaps a bit limited, you pick options from a list, watch the resulting animation, then pick your next option. As a simulation of psychotherapy I assume it's total rubbish. But I found it genuinely involving, and spending a couple of hours making these scripted animations healthy certainly cheered me up.
An interesting gimmick is the option to "buy the patient". So you too can have a plush hippo with a zip-up mouth and some bits of jigsaw puzzle. My more cynical side wonders how high a priority the game designer put on this more mercenary side of the project, but the whole thing is just so charming I can't hold this against him.

Book Review: Thud!

The umpty-millionth book in Terry Pratchett's series of Discworld fantasies is another in the City Watch cycle. Normally among my faves.
So, I expected a lot from this story of the the Dwarves and Trolls of Ankh-Morpork tooling up to refight the Battle of Koom Valley, while the heroes of the City Watch try to keep the peace. And the writing is of Pratchett's usual quality.
But.
It's too safe. Like the life of Watch Commander Vimes, the Discworld series shows signs of becoming too rich and fat and comfortable. There's no real tension here. The usual characters, plus a couple of new ones, go through the motions but there's no hint that anything dramatic will happen to any of them. The themes of tolerance and equality may be worthy, but they get such a hammering in Discworld books that they're getting tedious.
Thud! is by no means a bad book, but it shows a series in danger of being played out.

Only thirty more years before I retire...

... and I can't wait.

Not the best couple of days at work.

You mean I should have done something?

New year and not enough done.

But I'll write something just to let my only reader, the Googlebot, know I'm still around.