Capsule review: it mostly sucked.

More specific annoyances follow.

• A cyborg with bronchitis? What the hell?
• Palpatine’s tranformation from sinister manipulator to gibbering deformed madman over the course of a single fight scene.
• The way you could tell what was meant to be significant dialogue because it was spoken… in… ponderous… leaden… monotone…
  I do wonder how it is that all of these people who can genuinely act fail to do it when they’re all in the same film.

• The word “younglings”. For heaven’s sake. This is not the seventies. We don’t need to replace perfectly good words with stupid ones just because we’re in space.
• C-3PO and R2D2 should not have been split up. R2 was good, 3PO was reduced to walking on screen, saying “oh my!” or similar, and walking off again. About fifteen times.
• Given that Jedi are supposed to be supremely attuned to the universe around them, how come so many of them got shot in the back?
• Crowbar continuity. “We have to foreshadow all these things whether it makes sense to do so or not!”
• Ironically, bad continuity. 20 years on Tatooine are clearly not going to be kind to Kenobi.
• My big question about this film before seeing it was: how would they transform Anakin from the sulky teen of episode 2 to the badass Dark Lord of episode 4? Answer: They didn’t. By the end, he’s just a sulky teen in a black mask. His last line to Obi-Wan: “I hate you!” I’m sure he would have added “It’s so unfair!” had his lungs not been on fire.
  I guess the transformation happens some time in the intervening 20 or so years.

The whole thing felt like some Star Wars fanfic author had won the lottery and decided to turn one of his terrible stories into film. “And, er, let’s put Chewie in! Yeah! Maybe, like, Yoda knew him or something!”

There were some good bits, though.

• Hot Yoda Lightsaber Action. Once again we see him as the Jedi Master.
• Grievous with four lightsabers was pretty cool.
• Er. Jar Jar wasn’t in it much.
• …

People who stand right in front of the lift doors and then look surprised that there's someone in the lift who wants to get out.

People who say “Are you sure?” when it's massively obvious that I am, as in the following exchange:
Them: Do you speak Dutch?
Me: No.
Them: Are you sure?

See item 1 re: train doors.

My uncanny sense of timing, managing to combine screwing up my bank transfer (meaning no cash in my current account) with screwing up my credit card payments (meaning my credit card, while there is theoretically over a grand available on it, is currently unusable) and taking this combination with me to somewhere where it's impossible to put back what you're trying to pay for (petrol station).

Insomnia.

We are in need of a new word. A word to describe a particular experience.

For there is a particular experience which currently lacks a word to describe it.

I speak, of course, of the experience of clearing one's throat, the action of which dislodges a fragment of hot peri-peri spiced chicken, which subsequently flies up into the nasal passages, opening the mind to entirely new worlds of discomfort.

I believe that I can state with confidence that there is currently no word in existence to describe this experience. I firmly believe that there ought to be one.

Ads. There is a tension in “web land” between the necessity of ads to fund the web sites we enjoy reading, and the tendency of advertisers to annoy the hell out of us by getting in the way of the stuff we're actually trying to read.

In Firefox we have the lovely Adblock extension, an easy-to-use tool to help us deal with this issue. Of course, none of us want our favourite sites to wither and die because all of their ad revenue dries up, and on that basis I have compiled the following set of handy hints for web site owners.

• If your site contains popups or popunders, I will block them. This is surely a no-brainer by now, but it's surprising how many still seem to not get it.
• If your site contains expanding banners, flash overlays, or anything else which obscures the page I'm trying to read, I will block them. What's important to me when reading your site is the content of the site. Anything that gets in the way of the content should be removed, and if you won't do it, I will.
• If your site contains banners which prevent the page content from loading because the ad broker's server is slow, I will block them. Design your pages so that they don't block waiting for ads to load, and see above.
• If your site contains banners which look like dialogue boxes, or exhort me to “click on something to win a prize”, I will block them. I will also block every other ad I can find on your site. Respect your readers and find a less unscrupulous ad broker.
• Interstitials. I will probably leave your site and not return.

Apart from this, as long as there appears to be more content than ads on the page I'm reading, and there are no headache-inducing animations, the rest will probably remain unblocked.

I might even click on one some time.

Being ill, as the popular vernacular has it, bites the big one. I have spent much of the past week sneezing violently, coughing up chunks of raw unpleasantness, and trying not to fall over every time I stood up.

But now I'm back, baby.

Which unfortunately means I'm back at work. Ho hum.

One of the up sides of being ill – of which there are remarkably few – is that I got a chance to immerse myself in the shiny new world of Azeroth quite a lot. And it is very, very nice. One of the nice things about being able to play during the day is that you get to see what it looks like in daylight – Azeroth's day/night cycle follows ours quite closely, which means I normally don't get to enter the world before dusk.

Anyway, long story short, this game is great. And in it, I have a parrot. Yarr!