Ryan McKern

Reports of my demise have been greatly exag­ger­ated. While it is true that I've all but dis­ap­peared, I have at least been work­ing in the back­ground. I've been work­ing on upgrad­ing all of the hosted word­press sites I main­tain (and the one I don't) to Word­Press 2.7, and I've begun search­ing for a new theme to adopt for my own site. Orange and green is a lit­tle too spring time for Decem­ber, so for the time being I'm play­ing with Srini's plain­scape theme. I enjoy the sim­plic­ity, but I think I may add a lit­tle more con­trast and sea­sonal style to it.

Of note recently is that I have finally taken a week to myself and caught up on some of the more pleas­ant but time-consuming things this year that I've missed out on, like:

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

  Eas­ily the most musi­cal fun I've had in 40 min­utes this year, even with the now cliched Joss Whe­don end­ing, which pre­vi­ous to this I had no idea has actu­ally come to be known as "being Joss'ed".

• No Coun­try for Old Men

  Unusual for an Amer­i­can film, in that it doesn't go out of its way to pan­der to the audi­ence. No happy end­ing, no moral vic­to­ries, and no neat, tidy, spoon-fed ending.

• Slum­dog Millionaire

  Despite the hype around this movie (and my hatred of all things hyped), this was a fun, enjoy­able, warm two hours of enter­tain­ment. Award-winning? Prob­a­bly, for all the wrong rea­sons. But absolutely some­thing I'd watch again.

• Mega-Man 9

  A game so hard it caused me to throw the $40 con­troller for the sys­tem across the room like a frus­trated 10 year old, a habit I haven't had since I was a frus­trated 10 year old.