Over a month...

...well that's just bad manners isn't it?

Sorry all, been terribly busy of late - new job at work (well, sort of, a secondment into a different role - it'll last six months and...wake up there at the back!). But must be plenty of new exciting stuff happening in the world of Squidstew, right?

You could say that, my new Star Wars boxset arrived yesterday (I did, as I'm sure pretty much everyone else did, pre-order it) and that's all very cool. Of course, for a long time I'm going to own it as something of an Object d'Art because heaven forbid that I should actually watch the flaming things - qf. Donnie Darko I got for my birthday (August, thanks for asking), the Indiana Jones Boxset I got for Christmas, the Simpsons first series boxset from the same time, the Spinal Tap DVD from a few years ago (actually, I think I have watched that one, either way the whole script is branded on my brain anyway) and the Momento I borrowed from my sister at least two years ago.

Christ, what an ungrateful present-not-watcher that list makes me look, I do genuinely cherish all the DVDs that I've been given, but it does appear that I'm not as big a film watcher as I'd like to think I am. Projected time for me finally getting around to buying and watching both the Kill Bill films? Sometime around June 2012, no doubt. And then of course, I need to catch up on all the Six Feet Under episodes I've missed. And I never got into The Sopranos, when I knew I should have so there's all the previous series of that to watch. And Seasons 2 & 3 of 24 too, they're probably worth a look. Hmmm, could be time to jack in the job and become a full-time couch potato, I mean, culture junkie.

For all these failings of viewing, I of course blame my Playstation - in particular Final Fantasy X and Gran Turismo 3. Gran Turismo has been a staple of my console gaming life since it's launch and I'm not sure I'd have bothered with a PS2 if it hadn't been for that, evidenced by the website Gran Turismo by the Numbers being my home from home on the internet. Then my old flatmate lent me FFX sometime last year and that (rather tragically) dominated the time I would normally spend saying 'there's nothing I want to watch on TV, let's do something more stimulating (even if that is effectively vegging in front of a DVD)'. The stimulation in that example, of course, coming from getting off the sofa and putting the disk in the DVD player...

Of course, Gran Turismo 4 is just on the horizon now too, which I am actually planning on playing until my eyes bleed. It may well take me some time before I get to appreciate the 'magic' that George Lucas has decided to work on the original films...