(Scavenged from my Twitter account Originally tweeted in real time as I plowed through almost two weeks of dishes. Yes, we're messy and lazy.)

Oh so many dirty dishes. ALL of them. *cries* Time to GAMIFY!

Dishes: The Video Game!

Stage 1: Treasure Hunt! Our stalwart hero explores the dungeon (roommate's bedroom) to find the Lost Plates of Yore.

Stage 2: Stacking Puzzle! Organize your filthy treasure into neat piles! They disappear faster when properly stacked!

Bonus Stage 1! Refill the empty detergent bottle. Don't spill any! Detergent's surprisingly hard to clean up.

Stage 3: The Sink Slime! Clean horrifying slime off the bottom of the sink, like some twisted and stinky version of Make Trax.


Stage 4: Weapon Tweaking! Equip weapons for the battle to come. Brush? Sponge? Cloth? All have different stats! Choose wisely!

Bonus Stage 2: Presoak! Select your most encrusted stack, and watch as the fluid dynamics engine does the work for you.

Stage 6: Co-Op Campaign! Force roommate to play. Fight over who gets to be the fighter (wash) and who's the stat buffer (dry). Complain about how laggy your roommate is. Duck to avoid getting pinged with wet towel.

Stage 7: BOSS FIGHT! Filthy, encrusted pots and pans invade! Use all your weapons and soaking skill to beat these big bads!

Ending Cutscene: Your roommate starts making dinner. Rage sets in as you realize the ending is just a sequel hook.

Social Integration: Realize you forgot to disable this feature, and have been spamming your friends with achievement tweets.

Review: Only one hour of gameplay? Time to upload a rage-filled review in which you pretend to burn the dishes with your hate-ray!

Okay, I'm done now. And so are the dishes. Ow, my back, and my poor pruney fingers.

Courtesy the Rick Mercer Report. Getting screwed on telecommunications is part of our Canadian Heritage!

So I went to see Alpha and Omega this weekend. Short version? It SUCKS. But that might not keep some of my furrier friends from seeing it anyways. So here is a short review. There are spoilers, but really, I'm saving you the trouble of watching it. Apologies for doing a review in point form, but this is culled from an ICQ conversation.

1. The conflicts in the film, as few and weak as they are, are entirely the fault of our supposed protagonists. The war brewing between the two packs is because Kate’s father is a stickler and and a jerk. And every scrape they get into is because Humphrey is an idiot.

2. Tons of badly-handled expository dialogue, especially at the beginning, much of it totally unneeded.

3. Compounding (2), repetitious dialogue. Characters say something and then another character repeats it. Happens with all the characters, and for the duck/goose pair, it’s their whole shtick. Speaking of shtick…

4. It kills its few good jokes completely dead. Most of the running gags go on so long they begin to substitute for character arcs.

5. Repetitive action. How many times do we need to see Humphrey save the day via a bobsled chase? The answer is four.

6. The background characters, especially Lilly, Garth, and the kindly-voiced but utterly vicious mom, are by far and away more interesting characters than the leads.

7. Some of the laziest, stupidest, cheapest writing I have ever seen in any movie, which is saying something, knowing the kind of movies I watch. The main characters wake up in Idaho, no idea where they are, and luckily the first two characters they meet (the birds) know exactly where they need to go, and hey, there’s a direct ride via RV that just happens to be leaving that day, and the drivers also happen to be a mixed personality couple! (I would have loved to see more of those two, a biker/librarian couple, but they’re set up and never used.)

I should also point out that they never explain how the birds know any of this. The goose and duck are apparently omniscient and able to fly at automobile speeds.

They lose their ride, but their avian friends have been following along (although they have no reason to do so really) and there just happens to be a train, just over the next mountain, that takes them straight home, literally to the climax of the film!

All this despite the very complete flyovers we get of the territory, which have no train tracks until the plot says so. If they’d foreshadowed the tracks at all I would let it slide, but they go DIRECTLY to the final battle, and those tracks are not there in previous shots.

I could go on about how awful the character designs are (I think the wolves live in the Uncanny Valley) or the fact that Kate moves like a video game character (She does a spin jump like Samus Aran or Sonic the Hedgehog) but I think I’ve given this more thought than the writers did.

Don't bother with this film. It's fit for neither man nor beast nor any combo of the two.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Neutron Bill is back with a special message of holiday cheer.

This very special Christmas episode covers two beloved classics, featuring cuddly fuzzy animals and horrific wholesale slaughter.

First up: the 1939 cartoon short "Peace on Earth," which features the horrors of WWI and the worst music ever recorded. Then its 1955 remake takes the stage; "Good Will to Men" features better music, cuter characters, and all-new weapons of mass slaughter. Both contain a totally unsubtle message of love, peace, and Christianity.

Truly, they embody the spirit of Christmas.

Also, Bill hurts himself. Again.

Enjoy!

So here's the run-down on the puppy-sitting.

Friday night: Wuffy's birthday dinner at his mom's place, so the pup had ample time to rampage about the backyard before I took him home. Took him for a short walk around the neighbourhood, then we came home and he went into his crate. He slept like a roly-poly log. Myself, less so; I had a confusing series of dreams where I worked on the top floor of an office tower and he was kenneled on the ground floor, and the elevators never worked.

Saturday: Got up at 7 am, walked puppy for an hour.

I hand-fed him his breakfast, which was fun and touching and also kind of slimy. It helps to build the dominance bond, I'm told, since I'm controlling his food supply. Whatever - he ate happy, slobbered on my fingers, and didn't eat my hand. It was a success!

After that we were both tired. Puppy went back to sleep in his crate. I conked out for a couple hours.

Woke up, went downstairs for breakfast, and was immediately grateful that the roommates were out of town and the neighbours had left for the day. Taiga still has separation anxiety issues and was howling loud enough to summon his mommy from the deep Arctic wastes. Solution: Another walk. This ended up being a long one; I got lost in the suburbs across the streets, got stopped by a lot of puppy-adoring strangers, and Taiga got to play with an ancient husky and a young, very bouncy Labrador. It was good hour-and-a-half before we got home.

After his lunch he still seemed bouncy and unruly, so I tied him in the yard and kept a close eye on him while trying to get household chores done. He loves being outside, and happily dug himself a nice deep hole and curled up in it. I took him back inside, gave him his peanut-butter-filled Kong, and kenneled him up. Sated with exercise, he slept until 6 pm or so.

At 6 pm I woke him up for another walk, planning to meet up with Deuce a little later. This ended up being another hour and half excursion, during which I learned two things.

First, the pup was sick of the chicken jerky treats I had.

Second, peanut butter passes through a puppy almost unchanged in aroma and texture.

We attempted to play with him when we got home, but he was cranky and sleepy, so, back to the crate. Had a long chat with Duece. At 11, we took Taiga out for another walk-and-pee. Then we came home, Deuce left, and it was time to get ready for bed.

This is more or less when I found out that I had walked him at least twice as much as he is used to. And man, did I ever feel like it. I think I had a mild case of hypothermia from being outside so much.

Also, my room now smelled like puppy, dirt, peanut butter, and peanut-butter-scented doggy farts. And it also smelled like me, covered in sweat from walking so much. On the whole, icky. And yet somehow I slept in that funk.

Sunday: Taiga and I went for a walk at eight. Alas he was missing the Wuffy, so he whimpered a fair bit even when I was in the room with him and positively howled blue murder when I wasn't.

Wuffy showed up shortly after noon, and all was well, apart from some whining whenever Wuffy left Taiga's field of view. He was still dirty and had peanut butter all over his forelegs (from holding the Kong.) Since he is now too large to wash in the Wuffy's sink, we gave him a bath.

It went over about as well as you would expect. We managed to avoid getting water everywhere, but he was so mad that he passive-aggressively took out his rage on a rubber piggy chew toy.

And then, about half-dry but all smiles again, Taiga jumped into the back of the Wuffy's car and they drove off together. I turned my attention to laundry and the cats.

Aftermath: I am still hearing phantom barks and howls.

Tephi spent the weekend venturing out only when it was quiet. Whenever Taiga was out, she managed to sneak behind his back and into the basement without ever being seen. She has been very affectionate, cuddling up to me and purring a lot. She is either concerned that I don't like her anymore, or she's trying to rub his smell off of me.

Tawny appears to have missed the entire drama, and is simply wandering about, crying for Tony.

I'm looking after Taiga (the wuffy's 12-week-old mostly Malamute) this weekend. It's been an adventure already... he's not too happy with the new crate and the house that smells of cat.

He seems to be settling in though, knock wood.

We will see how it goes. Wuffy keeps saying "it'll be fine, it'll be fine." Then he says "Now you will know my pain. Mwahahahahah."

I am sure that both are true.

Site's back up, complete with backdated doodles. Enjoy!

Ayup, just what the subject line says. A power supply failed on the server that hosts my sketch site. The Wuffy says it may be up later tomorrow, or it could be down a couple days. It all depends on when the replacement power supply arrives, and whether anything else failed with the old one.

Send the Wuffy some love and encouragement - this is a major pile of stress that he didn't need right now.

George Miller has just confirmed a fourth Mad Max film. It's got a great title, too: Fury Road.

I get shivers.

I got first confirmation here:

http://movies.ign.com/articles/104/1040707p1.html

This is great news.

First of all, the evil doppelganger of Mel Gibson won't be in it, so we won't have to squirm uncomfortably when Max twirls his mustache.



This Youtube clip talks about the building of the vehicles and what Miller's trying to achieve. You can see what looks like an early version of Max's black V8, among other things. Miller also talks about how the cars will be filmed at speed... and stunts. Doesn't sound like he's gonna use CGI.

I'm cautiously optimistic that he's telling the truth.

This is like Christmas for me. Not only am I hyped to see another Mad Max film from the original director, but I'm looking forward to the trickle-down effect. All the cheap knock-offs will be dusted off and repackaged, and new rip-offs will be filmed. All the nihilistic post-apocalyptic crap I've loved since I was a teen has a second chance. A DVD release of "Warlords of the 21st Century," aka, "Battletruck," would probably make me explode.

Fingers crossed. I gotta start welding spikes and armor onto my roommate's Subaru.

Subject line typo from a spam massage that made me laugh:

"Western Union transfer is available for withdrawl"

It was a virus, of course, so I didn't open it. But I had to giggle as I imagined the rest of the text.

"Y'all has funds waitin' on y'all, so mosey on over to our website, 'less'n y'all is a dude."