Thanks to everyone who's posted and mailed their commiserations - no worries, people: nothing Dreamfall related went belly-up in the meltdown. All pertinent work documents are kept on the network drives, not locally, and they're backed up every single day. The material I lost - aside from my mail - was semi-rough work-in-progress, mostly for my next game. And most of those documents I have in different form elsewhere, in bits & pieces. Generally, everything is reproducible - with a bit of patience and perseverence. The only delay incurred will be a personal one: I'll have to devote some time to setting up my work environment from scratch. Which is a pain, but Overtime Is Our Friend. Welcome it. It wishes no harm.

William Shatner's new record, Has Been, is - and I say this without any trace of irony - a great pop album. It honestly is. Don't believe me? Read the reviews. Even better, check it out for yourself. (It's available through the iTunes Music Store: if you only want to sample one track, get That's Me Trying - with lyrics by Nick Hornby, no less.) I listened to the whole thing earlier tonight, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying most of the tracks...and I was even moved by a few of them. It is, at times, bizarre, but it is also very honest, very melodic, and, at times, very funny. A surprise, then, but a pleasant one. I'm making room for it on my iPod tomorrow.

Watched The Chronicles of Riddick last night - the 'unrated' director's cut, no less. My expectations were extremely low, and I wasn't disappointed. Granted, it wasn't that bad. Incoherent in places, yes; often cheap looking (what were those CGI creatures supposed to be? Dogs?); Vin Diesel is looking increasingly bloated and silly, and his one-liners were quite embarrassing (wasn't he supposed to be the Next Big Thing?); and the so-called 'ending' left me cold. But there were a few good set-pieces, the middle part of the movie was entertaining, the design was often intriguing, and, hey!, big screen sci-fi! We don't see a lot of that these days. And given how this movie flopped big time, it'll probably be ages before we see another one. Well, until the Firefly movie - Serenity - that is. At any rate, it wasn't all bad, but it was far, far, far from great.  ¶ 23:41