And ... relax

This one could be a little disjointed ... I'm watching the Strictly final and tapping bits out in the bits where there's no dancing going on.

There's a decent amount of filler in Strictly, which is understandable because of the time taken to set up between the dances and the chance for the judges to have their say. It'll be curious to see what the result is this time round. It's been an excellent series, any one of 6 pairings could have genuinely won it.

My smart money's on Abbey winning. She's the crowd favourite and is an amazing dancer. Not my personal favourite, I kinda wish that Rachel was still in there but she's one of those people who is a bit too nice to get the character acting that's needed. There's also :

Sophie the singer, who is capable of stunningly beautiful ballroom but can be a bit stilted and gawky when her confidence isn't firing. (Must listen to more tracks from her Read My Lips)
Susanna the newsreader, who isn't as technically gifted as the others but still brings out the "That was AWESOME !" performances.
Natalie the actor, who is the most technically astute (she had a lot of dance training years ago). Trouble is, she's also been consistently overmarked and has been allowed to get away with a lot of rules transgressions. The public see through that and it's seen her in the dance off.

That's the finalists, the other two who I thought could have won are BoyBandBoy (who's name I can't remember - blonde Hollyoaks guy) and Patrick, who is unlucky to not be in the final.

As well as Rachel, my big favourite was Mark B, although that was much more to do with dancer Yveta with her exotic looks and elegant movement, brilliantly shining eyes and sense of humour.

I've enjoyed watching Strictly this year, it's my second full year of watching it and it's a genuine departure from the scifi and survival type documentary diet I usually stick to. It's good to get outside the comfort zone. And there's the usual thing of what I'm doing now, shouting "GET ON WITH IT" to Brucey.

Back to work ...

NOOOO !!! Please don't !

All done with work now for 2013. I'm off until 6 Jan and plan to do ... not very much at all. We'll see Hobbit 2 soon and I'll visit the parents but apart from that, I need healing time and recuperation time. My condition is improving but it's still not there yet (and I still do things like attack it and set it backwards like I did last night - oops).

I'm going to get a lot of music listening done. The "Recently Played" is showing that I've managed to listen to 3415 tracks out of 11000 in the library since switching to the Macbook. I'm hoping that will go way past 4000 by the time I'm back to work.

Game playing too. There's an achievement in Warcraft where you battle every single Pet Battle Master in a single day. I want to do that one over the holiday. Optimistic yeah, I'll need to have my character crash through to level 90, which will take some playtime. Especially as I'm not particularly in the WoW mood right now. That'll come back, it's just that the Lich King expansion (I'm tackling those zones at the moment) is a bit flat, grindy and lacking in character, although Sholazar Basin was a highlight. Cataclysm and Panda were much better.

But not just yet. There are sales on ...

I've bought a few this month which I haven't played enough yet :
Tomb Raider (new one) - this is for after the XCom campaign concludes
XCom expansion - brutal, challenging alien invade strategy. But I think it's better than the originals.
Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics - ok, these were free so I added them to the GoG collection. And they come with soundtracks ...
Space stuff bundle !
Master of Orion 1 and 2 - both peerless strategy games that have never really been equalled.
Space Empires IV - tried the demo a while ago, will be curious to give this one a go
Galciv 1 - had this before, didn't really give it enough of a chance to learn it (Moo2 was too good)
Fragile Allegiance - another one I missed
Startopia - yet another missed ! It's a space station management game

Most of the above are from Good Old Games (www.gog.com) who will dredge up old games, some classic, some garbage and they'll repackage them in ways that will install and play on modern computers. Moo1 and Moo2 both use the DosBox emulator, which is a pretend PC running inside a Mac or PC.

I've acquired musak too :
Lucy Spraggan's got an album that I've had my eye on for a while and it's a cracker. I was starting to chuckle early on and was laughing out loud at some of the tracks. Love it.
Daft Punk's Random Access Memories - heard this in a shop and enjoyed it enough to try out one of their cheapest albums, this album was still too much until recently. Not bad.

At the moment, it's the soundtrack to Baldur's Gate II (in the break in Strictly) and I'll be back on Moo2 later. The GoG.com version seems harder ... but then I do play on impossible (hardest) difficulty and use a strategy that's very slow burning and dependent on the enemies leaving me alone until I'm ready to crush them.

So yeah - when I get back from the parents and get enough supplies in, I'm planning to batten down the hatches and shut the world out behind music ... Hopefully that'll let me heal. Although it'll give me huge cabin fever after not too long.

So - if you'd like to break me out of that reclusiveness and relieve the cabin fever (and maybe have me grin at you for a while !), then I'm open for offers :-) (Please - hold me back from tellies ... I'm dangerously close to upgrading in the sales ...)