Just a quick post to wish everyone who reads this a merry Christmas. I hope that whatever you’re doing you enjoy yourself, load up on food and drink, and get given whatever it was that you wanted.

I got King Kong on the 360, a silver Game Boy Micro, and Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, so I’m going to use my first Sunday off in a long time to get in some quality gaming. Have fun.

Christmas isn’t even here yet, but at work we’re stocking up for the post-Christmas sales already, and I can’t think of a better time to stock up on DVDs that you might have missed during the year or some older ones needed to round out your collection.

Can anyone argue with Sideways for £5.99, and Team America and Anchorman for £3.99 each? I grabbed those and also saw Friday Night Lights (five stars from Empire, and only released in September) for £5.99 and Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy for £8.99. I definitely recommend hitting the shops as soon as possible before all the good ones sell out – all our copies of Team America had already been nabbed for that price.

This made me laugh so I thought it needed to be blogged – I was doing my daily check of Mail Watch (Christians are oppressed and discriminated against in all provincial councils, didn’t you know?) and saw that an enterprising fellow hater of the right-wing press has come up with Daily Mail-o-Matic, a program to automatically generate Daily Mail headlines. It kept me entertained for a few minutes so try it out.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the Mail, I suggest you begin your research by looking at this and checking one of my older rants on it here.

As I’m sure many of the UK residents who have ordered region 1 DVDs from PlayUSA have found out, for some time now they’ve only stocked Canadian DVDs. You’d imagine that there wouldn’t be any difference, but because of laws giving the English and French languages equal rights it means that many of them have French titles and synopses plastered over them, ruining the cover art.

I’ve never been too bothered because they just have to sit on my shelf (although a reversible cover that was completely English on one side and completely French on the other would seem like a simple solution), but now that I’ve seen first-hand that they drop features from the DVDs to make room for the French language I’m hunting for a source that sells US R1 DVDs.

It all happened when I decided that as I didn’t have Sin City in my collection I needed the new Sin City: Recut and Extended package. I ordered it from Play for the great price of £17.99 and sat back and waited for it to arrive. Then, as I was waiting, I was browsing IGN’s DVD General Board and saw a topic entitled “Canadian version of Sin City recut replaces DTS with french 5.1 track???” (requires IGN Insider), containing the following post:

It’s true… no DTS track. Not a *huge* deal for me, but CURSE YOU UNE HISTOIRE DE SIN CITY – VERSION LONGUE ET NOUVEAU MONTAGE!!!

It’s not a huge deal for me neither (my current 5.1 system can’t even handle DTS) but when I buy a DVD I want all of the features, and now I have to go to the trouble of sending this one back and getting a refund and find somewhere else to buy it.

My problem is the principle of it – I have foreign language DVDs and most of them have the original language in Dolby Digital 5.1 and/or DTS and, if they even include a dub, English in 2.0. Why then do English-language movies have versions of the original language dropped to include a 5.1 French track? Can’t they cram in a French 2.0 track and leave the original languages intact, or even just add French subtitles? I know plenty of film buffs who wouldn’t dream of watching a dubbed movie so are French people philistines or something? In my experience definitely not – they have more appreciation for art than most.

This has really annoyed me and I’m not risking Canadian DVDs again. From now on I’m going to have to risk customs charges through DVD Pacific or hope that a UK retailer like DVD Concept are selling the unbastardised version.

It’s been announced that WordPress 2.0, the new major release of the CMS that this site is run on, is finally getting its official release on Monday. I’ve been looking forward to this because I’ve been using WordPress since the launch of 1.5 when I moved this site to a proper blogging system (I used to edit all the HTML by hand when I wanted to edit) and this is a pretty huge upgrade. There’s a good rundown of all the new stuff here.

I installed the latest release candidate on a test blog yesterday to make sure my theme and all my plugins work and was very impressed, and I’ve been testing it on WordPress.com for some time before that. I’ll be installing it on here as soon as the final version is out and, if all goes according to plan you shouldn’t notice anything apart from a few minutes of downtime.

If you’re interested in a blog/site I really recommend trying out WordPress, either hosted yourself or not. It’s the best CMS I’ve tried and has a great community involved in the project.

It’s not out officially until tomorrow but I got my copy of Serenity on DVD last week and reviewed it here. I still love this whole series so it’s not so much an unbiased account as a declaration of love, but whether or not you’ve been exposed I recommend checking it out. With the TV show cancelled and the movie falling short of a profit it looks like the only way to keep this boat flying is for this DVD to become a massive cult hit like the last one, so I suggest buying several copies to inflate the numbers.