Come along, Ponds

- festivids approaches! I'm quite excited cause I'm a bit keen on talking myself into signing up. I think I've done pretty well with vids this year. Eight of em! And I only actually hate one. And I feel I can say with Some Confidence that they've improved a bit since 2006. (I still use WMM though - cause while I like to pretend they'd clearly be So Much Better on any other program, everything else gives me headache with the computer getting all tetchy at tech stuff and I can't just dump any old avi file in and cut it up. And since my aims are restricted to Fun and Not Making Viewers Curse At The Three Minutes Or So They've Just Lost, WMM works out just fine. I ASSUME. I've had some v odd comments on YouTube though.)

- Gamingwise, I'm filled with both DREAD and OMG for there is now a release date for Star Wars: The Old Republic that one dark, insomniac-y night I may have preordered. Tis an MMORPG. And a sequel of sorts to KOTOR (beloved, KOTOR, that I adore and is perfect and Revan is a woman ffs) and KOTOR II (WTF? What kind of people think it is TOTALLY FINE to release a game when you haven't even FINISHED MAKING IT?!) Mostly I will probably get absurdly emo over any mention the new game has of KOTOR characters (it's set three hundred years after KOTOR and several thousand before the original movies, IIRC) because THEY'RE ALL DEAD, and I'm a bit scared it'll be really good, cause I don't do well with really good MMORPGs. By which I mean I forget about sleep and food and the non-pixellated world. Which is why slightly dull MMORPGs are best.

- The other game thing that would be awesome, were it not rubbish, is a Mass Effect movie. If you're going to make a ME movie, obviously it should be about femShep, for she is amazing. NOBODY wants to see a movie about maleShep* aka Yet Another Dude Saves The Universe. Dullnesses. Also although I'm told people do play maleShep in the game, I pretend not to believe it because I tried that once and lasted twenty minutes before I was bored of him. Partly that's because Male Space Captain is just not as interesting as Female Space Captain, and partly because Jennifer Hale's voiceover work is brilliant, whereas Mark Meer's is not.

*this may not be factually accurate.

- DOCTOR WHO. Would like to start an urban fannish myth that Moff was stuck for what to write about in the finale, put Inferno on and decided that the whole episode should be based on Nicholas Courtney's "and they were all wearing eyepatches" anecdote.

- Am very unbothered at the cancellation of Confidential (though I will miss the behind-the-scenes shenanigans gifs). And while I sympathise with people who did watch and enjoy it (there was a lovely anecdote in doctoreleven about one person who watched it with their kid afterwards, so that they wouldn't be scared of the monsters), some of the vitriol directed at the BBC because of its cancellation is a bit disturbing. PERSPECTIVE, DAMMIT. I mean, a good chunk of The Doctor's Wife one was spent telling us about what people were having for lunch. WHAT? There is no way to spin that as quality programming.

- Anyone remember Totally Doctor Who? No? Me neither.

- All BBC cuts should be blamed on the Tories. They're the ones freezing the licence fee (which is effectively a cut, since it's being kept at the same level while inflation rises.) The lesson is, don't vote for Tories: they trample on nice things, like the Beeb and NHS and affordable university education.

- Telly shows me Merlin is coming back on tomorrow. I'm not watching it partly cause I still haven't seen the end of the last season but mostly cause I suspect I'll get really annoyed and I'd quite like to be in a good mood for LOVELY DOCTOR WHO. Yes. Good.

-The Office came back too. And I'm watching it again cause James Spader has joined that cast and I'm easy like that. He isn't even attractive in it and yet my reaction is still "yay, James Spader!" Must work on making shallowness more shallow.

I'm not sure how many hours of the last three days I've spent playing Mass Effect 2, but it's a bad, bad number.

It was my sister's fault. I was being very good and saving ME2 for an appropriate long weekend where I could happily waste entire days playing the game without any need for feeling guilty about the fact I was neglecting silly things like food and sleep, but then she visited and somehow conversation touched on how she had finished ME2 and then proceeded to tell me how her game ended and there was hand-flapping from self at such spoilery talk. As well as feeling slightly appalled that somehow she'd managed to finish such a vast RPG when her reaction to Dragon Age was giving up because she got lost in a tower.

(I thought at first it was the Tower of Ishal, so at least she'd given the game a decent shot, but no, it was the Mage's Tower, when she was playing a mage. And when there was a map in the corner of the screen, showing exactly where you were. Unlike ME2 which seems to think maps are for LOSERS so it merely has a pointy arrow sometimes, which I found a bit hrrm, anyway...)

So, yes, Mass Effect 2. It was quite good. Micheal Sheen was in it. Which was weird. (Not as weird as that time he was a Soul Hunter in Babylon 5, but, y'know.) Also, there were NO LIFTS. Oh, how hated those lifts and their stupid music and they got rid of the HORRID MICROMACHINE thing that you kept landing in too.

Instead there was SCANNING and MINING. Because obviously when you're trying to save the galaxy from vast and cold alien intelligences what you really want to spend time doing is scanning planets for minerals so you can mine them and then expand the number of mining probes your ship can hold so you can do even MOAR MINING. That is so much more fun than shooting bad guys with cool looking guns.

On the bright side, there was a truly epic mission that I loved, as it cunningly managed to evoke Alien-like terror as you and your team wander around a deserted vessel and very obviously Something Is Wrong but you're not entirely sure what and tension is BEAUTIFULLY MANAGED so it's all very exciting build-up to when you're actually going to be attacked rather than being bored at walking around empty corridors.

( spoilerisher stuff )

Oh, and there was a Scottish Engineer. He was great. There was Obligatory Mention of Haggis. But he did not mention the laws of physics, so I judge mildly. Also, much approval of alien dudes filking Gilbert and Sullivan.

Now there's all this extra content and shiny new missions, which obv are going to be left well alone and I'm going to have a nice proper meal and a good night's sleep and some fruit, like a proper person, yes. Good.