Holy Thursday

Day off, numero uno.

A bit of a lie in to start with and then out in the garden to satisfy my atheist work ethic. I spent a good hour putting away the garden chairs, raking the leaves and sucking up the stray ones with the leaf blower. There's still half a tree full threatening to come down, so no doubt I'll need another session at some point, but at least things look tidy out there now.

The reason for doing some housework was so that I could spend the rest of the day playing video games with a relatively clear conscience. I set a particular download going and then fired up Animal Crossing. It's the first time that I've played in the daylight so I had a whole different set of bugs to hunt - monarch butterflies mostly - and I caught a couple of new fishies as well. Somehow I managed to blow 8000 bells that I had just earned buying a giant chess piece from Tom Nook - ah, how I've missed this!

At last, the download completed and it was time to switch from the family friendly Wii to the grim world of Liberty City and the long awaited (by me at least) Ballad of Gay Tony. First impressions - very positive. The opening scene intercuts with one of the most iconic moments from GTA IV, followed by a shot of the protagonist of this episode Luis Lopez, walking down the street with a swagger. If GTA IV was Goodfellas and The Lost and The Damned, The Wild Bunch then Gay Tony is looking like Saturday Night Fever.

I've seen a range of reactions online from 'Gay Tony is teh gae! LOLZ' to 'Gay Tony is homophobic' but I think that Rockstar have actually done something very subversive here. In the opening missions Luis and Tony are subject to a torrent of insults from various characters and, for a straight, white male at least, being on the receiving end of such homophobic and racial abuse really did make me stop and think. I hope that it has the same effect on the typical xbox live players who use such language with casual ignorance.

Oh, and an acebest episode of Sarah Jane as well which you should all watch as soon as possibles!