…at least for me.

The Boston Red Sox made it into the division playoffs as the wildcard, but were swept by the LA Angels. Closer Papbelbon gave up the runs in the third game, turning what seemed to be a series-extending win into a heart-crushing loss. Thus ended the 2009 season for the Red Sox…a season filled with many great games, but also full of inconsistent playing, injuries, and various other issues. Sure, I could watch the rest of the playoffs, and I’ll probably check in on the games now and then…but meh. It’s not like I care about the Dodgers or Yankees or even the Phillies (tho I do love Shane Victorino).

And thus, so far this week, around 4pm, I find myself thinking “What do I do with my late afternoon/early evening, there’s no baseball game!” Wah. Winter will be long, and Spring far away.

So, going through an old PC and all it’s ancient files, I came across a very short .avi file of the game KOTOR2. In case you don’t know, I loved that game to death and was completely obsessed with it for a while. The video bit shows Atton, Disciple and my main character all swinging their lightsabers at the same time. Don’t ask me how I managed that, I’m sure it was extensive use of the pause key and at a lot of luck and timing.

Anyway, it amuses me, it’s very short & small (500kb), and I placed in my random-junkyard media gallery here.

I loved the first Overlord game. It’s one of the few games that have a sort of Dungeon Keeper flavor…twisted, silly humor that turns the usual ‘good vs. evil’ in games on it’s head. Plus, it was one of the few games that my husband and I played together, or at least enjoyed hanging out/watching while the other played. So I was happy to hear that a sequel was being made. The demo was released this week and I tried it - it seems like more of the same awesome evil-cute and simple, but enjoyable, gameplay. The demo did its job and made me want more.

Supposedly it should be in stores tomorrow (24th) so I’m ready to get up semi-early and dash over to Best Buy and/or Gamestop to see if they have a copy. Please be there. Please please please. I want to send my little minions out to pillage and plunder and hear their gleeful cheers. It’s so much fun.

Penny vs. Sabathia. Didn’t seem like a level pitching match up. I think a lot of us fans weren’t truly expecting to win last night. Hoping, but not sure if we believed in Penny enough.
But then Penny pitched a gem of a game. A quality start and more. And Ortiz blasted another homer, causing fans everywhere to scream in joyful delight for the long-slumping Big Papi, who seems to have finally found at least part of his groove again. His home run gave the Red Sox a slim one run lead, which held for quite some time.

Then the Yankees scored some runs, pulling ahead in the 7th. Red Sox Nation groaned, wondering if the streak of wins against the Yankees was going to end. We had time to get it back, it’s not over, our guys can do it. We held our breath, we hollered at our screens, we pounded fists on tables, we wrote furious notes back and forth via whatever internet social network we had chosen to express ourselves.

Then Rocco Baldelli made a fantastic catch in center field in the top of the 8th, and along with relief pitcher Saito’s strikeouts, that helped keep the Yankee lead from growing.
And then in the bottom of the 8th, Nick Green hit a single. And Pedroia toughed out an amazing 10 pitch at bat to finally wear out Sabathia and gain base via a walk.
Then JD Drew got a hit and Green scored. Jason Bay hit and scored Pedroia. Mike Lowell managed a sacrifice that scored Drew. Suddenly Boston was ahead again, 4-3. Red Sox were making another bid for a comeback win, and as always it felt tingly-dramatic.

Then Jonathan Papelbon, the star closer, walked to the mound at the top of the 9th.
He got some help from Nick Green, who made a stunning, superb grab/spin/toss of a hard liner, stealing a base hit away from Yankee lead-off batter Derek Jeter.
Two more Yankees came to the plate - and two more Yankees were gone.

Red Sox beat the Yankees to sweep the 3 game series. More importantly, the Red Sox have played the Yankees eight times so far in this season, and they’ve beat them eight times. It’s a grand feeling, beating an “arch nemesis” like that. We can feel smug, we can revel in the emotion of being First. Oh, we all know it cannot and will not last…the Yankees have too many good players, and they must win against Boston someday. But the Red Sox/Yankees don’t play against each other again for a couple months - and in the meantime, it is glorious.

A win in baseball is always a team effort. There were good performances and great plays all around - particularly that forever-battle at bat of Pedroia’s that might just have turned the momentum around. But tonight my heart belonged to only one player.

After another long hiatus, I’ve decided to come back to the blog. Let’s see if I can keep up with it on at least a semi-regular basis again.

Since Spring, there has been one thing that I’ve been predominantly obsessing over, and that is baseball. It’s been a long time since I’ve followed baseball with any kind of regularity. I remember watching when I was younger…particularly the play-offs and World Series. I didn’t try to watch every single game of any team back then, probably because I never had much interest in my local teams - Oakland A’s, SF Giants and in a roundabout way, the LA Dodgers. Those were the teams that local TV stations were usually broadcasting. I’d watch other team games such as Yankees, Boston, Cubs, etc. when local teams played them or when networks deemed such games profitable enough to broadcast here…but it’s hard to become an obsessive team fan from a distance. I remember liking Boston and trying to follow them a bit, but there was no internet or live streaming feeds in those days. There were newspapers and sports columns. So if you liked a distant team, you’d follow them via daily print articles and box scores. Not very exciting.

Then came my mid-teenage years and boyfriends, whereby my interest in baseball largely evaporated. None of my paramours, including my husband-to-be, had any interest in baseball, which didn’t help matters. I still watched the play-offs and WS when I remembered to, but not every year. Boston’s WS’s wins were exciting and reminded me “Hey, I like this team.” But it wasn’t for me the event that it was for people who have been active, dedicated fans of Boston for years…hats off to those long-suffering fans…for when the playoffs/WS would end I’d forget about baseball again, until I randomly happened to surf to a game at some point late in the season. It’s a strange relationship to have with the sport, for so long.

Last year towards the end of the play-offs I finally became frustrated by the fact that I’d get so excited/happy watching Boston during the post-season but then have to ‘turn it off’ during regular season because I couldn’t watch their games all the time. I wanted to be more than a long distance and post-season fan. I knew about cabletv sports packages, but had never investigated them to see what they were about…once I did, I also discovered that for the past few years MLB had been offering live streaming of almost all non-local games over the internet. It was a revelation. There were four main things that convinced me to try this service. One, it offered HD-quality streaming, while the cabletv baseball package where I live (Comcast) is relegated to the non-HD channels and looks rather fuzzy on the 50″ TV. Two, since I can watch games on the computer, I don’t have to hog up the TV all the time. Three, MLB.tv is about a hundred bucks cheaper than the cabletv package. And four, my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, is nowhere near where I live and it’s the only way I can see nearly all of their games live. NESN broadcasting does not exist on the West Coast. Also, when I wish to, I can connect a computer to the 50″ tv and use it to watch the internet feed on…and it looks fairly good too. Certainly better than Comcast’s non-HD baseball broadcasts.

Thus, this year I have been completely obsessed with baseball, and more specifically, the Red Sox. I check game times and I watch every game that isn’t blacked out in my area (occasionally happens), I read sports news and blogs, and I’ve found a few internet communities to share live game chats with. It’s cool. The strangest thing about picking up my interest in baseball again, after so many years, is how different the game has become. It’s like becoming a fan of the sport all over again, with many things seeming brand spanking new.

I’m not quite sure what my husband thinks of all this, when for so long he believed my interest in baseball/sports was extremely casual, heheh. He has watched enough of the games with me to be casually familiar with the current Red Sox roster, but he’s definitely not a baseball ‘fan.’ Myself…well, mostly I just love watching the games. The debates about trades etc. are background noise…I am a fan of the gameplay itself, not the managerial/business aspects, if that makes sense. I’m not the manager and I wouldn’t want to be, so I’m not interested in thinking about what I’d do if I was one. I understand why many do, tho. :)

I like several teams to varying degrees and try to keep tabs on them…but my heart is for the Red Sox. I may not be one of the “long suffering” Boston fans, but I have been an odd, distant fan for many years…and it’s very nice to finally be able to watch and follow them enough for my fandom to become a more permanent fixture in my life.

Go Boston.

Every time my husband wanders into my den when I’m playing WoW, and if I’m playing one of my dark elf characters, he watches for a few seconds, then says: “She has big ears.”

One has to wonder what Blizzard was thinking when they gave the Dark Elf such comically bizarre ears. I mean, they’re like pointy Vulcan ears combined with the floppy length of bunny ears - and they do flop around in-game.
BTW, I want a Homing Robot Chicken like in the lower picture. There’s some WoW quests where you ‘escort’ the mechanical chickens to safety, and they’re really cute. Maybe engineers can make one - I know they can make some other bot-pets. But it’s too much work to level a profession just for that…

Whereby I describe my on again/off again time and playstyle with WoW over the years, and finally get a WoW character to level 70.

I am what I’d call a hardcore player of video games in terms of task/tinkering obsession, but a casual player in terms of game-goal orientation. That is, I might spend hours and hours leveling up every skill/profession on multiple characters to check them out, but I don’t care about game-titles/awards, game-story-plot/factions, doing what it takes to acquire the “best gear”, racking up PvP scores, or even winning/finishing the game. So for a single-player strategy games and RPG’s I might spend months on certain aspects of the game, but never quite finish the game.

WoW, for me, has been no different. When this online-RPG first came out, I spent about 3 solid months obsessively playing. I loved leveling the profession skills and running around looking for resources in what felt like a gigantic endless game world. I loved Hunters, because I could have a pet kitty, and because I like to play alone and a pet is good for solo-Wow. I avoided other players, I didn’t accept party invites, I didn’t duel, I never had a character that reached lvl 60 (the max at the time) and I never saw the inside of a dungeon instance until it was useless to do it for anything but exploratory knowledge. Still, I was happy and had a blast. One of reasons I prefer WoW over other on-line games I’ve tried is that it’s fairly friendly to people like me - people who like to play mostly alone - or maybe with just a few friends - and don’t care much about the things that supposedly make an online game an online game. I’ve always said I’d kill for a complete single-player version of WoW.

But like with any game, I eventually I got a little bored of the repetitive “grind” and I stopped playing for a long, long time. Then I picked it up again for a couple months, then stopped again. Then I picked it up yet again. Only this time, I started completely over again on another server, instead of going back to my old characters. Things had changed a lot…the first expansion had come out by then….but my style of playing hadn’t changed - I still largely run around collecting resources, and I’ve become an Auction House/make gold addict. If you don’t know, the Auction House is where WoW players can buy/sell items they find to other players - without having to actually talk to other players. I love this aspect of WoW - it’s kind of like a mini-game. The challenge of acquiring the stuff to sell and the timing of when to sell and what to sell and so on.

Currently I have one main character (hunter) and several 25-40-ish “alts” - alts are characters you play when bored of your “main” or for other various reasons. Most of my alts exist largely to have access to the max level of non-Outland lvl profession skills, such as enchanting, but it’s also just nice to play another class now and then. Anyway, this time around I reached level 60 and beyond w/my main - wanting to see the new Outland expansion areas was a strong incentive. After that, I’ve been playing off and on (mostly off), obsessing for a few days or a week at a time and then ignoring the game for 3-4 months. When I did play, I hunted resources to make gold. Obviously, this isn’t a great way to level up a character, so my main has been “stuck” at level 68 for over half a year.

Now the new expansion “Wrath of the Lich King” is supposedly going to be released semi-soon, so I determined that I had to get to lvl 70 to be ready for it. Much agonizing and horribly, horribly annoying monster-grinding later, I got there…and since I had so much gold already saved up, I immediately bought the Epic flying mount. It did make me sad to part with so much of my hard-earned gold (I’m even more miserly in WoW than I am in real life), but the Epic flying mount is much much faster than the ground-mount that I’ve been using forever. And I must say - if I’d know flying around Outland would be this cool, I’d have done it a bit sooner. It really is awesome. Too bad you can’t use it in the old pre-expansion lands, too.

My only problem now is that I don’t know what to do next. I mean, you’re supposed to do all this instance-goal-oriented stuff once you reach lvl 70…but that’s not my bag. I don’t want to play with other people. And most of the great items can’t be had without doing that stuff, so I doubt I’ll ever be equipped with anything much more than I already have. Besides, what I have allows me to survive/do ok in the surface areas already as it is. I’m not powerful, but I survive. So I guess now it’s back to the Auction House game to restore my depleted gold reserves as I wait for the 2nd expansion…I wonder how long it would take me to collect 100,000 gold, for instance…why, you ask? Because I can. And now that I can fly, it should be a lot more efficient.

My husband and I rented “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets” last night. We had thought the first movie was passably entertaining despite it’s flaws, and thought we’d give the sequel a shot. It wasn’t long before I’d formed the opinion that Book of Secrets contained most of the same flaws, and maybe some new ones. The film was watchable and even made me chuckle here and there, but it was, as I often like to say, nothing special.

Small side characters like Harvey Keitel come and go like the wind, appearing when necessary to the plot (such as it is) and nothing more. Which is a bit disappointing since I like/admire many of the big names in the movie. I mean, Helen Mirren, Jon Voight, Ed Harris, for goodness sake - all largely wasted in this fluffy adventure film. The action is swift and frequent, but the plot and circumstances surrounding it only makes you shake your head. The “bad guy”, played by Ed Harris, doesn’t come off as scary or dangerous, for one thing - he’s just a little kooky and determined to be written about in history books. Poor Ed. Now, one doesn’t typically expect realism in this type of film - but characters are so thin that there’s no excitement, no emotional drama, to any of the action. Another big car chase, will our heroes get away, ho hum. Still, despite all this, Book of Secrets would satisfy those who liked the first film, and it’s watchable enough to pass the time on a Sunday evening with.

The best part of the movie is the segment dealing with the kidnapping of the President of the United States. The President is played by Bruce Greenwood, and some of the brief script exchanges between him and Nicholas Cage as they explore a hidden tunnel/rooms are priceless. Bruce Greenwood is a wonderful character actor, and watching him in Book of Secrets made me want to watch “Thirteen Days” again…where he plays another US President: JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Thirteen Days is an awesomely entertaining political drama/suspense movie…like most historical-drama films, it takes some liberties with history and characterizations, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fantastic flick. Bruce Greenwood is (or was) an oft underrated actor who’s been in many films - one of those actors where you might recognize his face but not remember his name. In case you’re one of those who can’t place a face to the name, here’s a small picture:

He’s most excellent - if you haven’t seen Thirteen Days yet, go rent it. You’ll have to ignore Kevin Costner’s bad Boston accent, but other than that, it’s an A+ movie in my book, mostly because of Mr. Greenwood. So yeah, as you can tell, I think he’s awesome….and best of all, I hear he’s been slated to play Christopher Pike in the upcoming Star Trek movie. I haven’t been too eager over the prospect of a new ST film, since I think Paramount has just about bled that franchise to nothing, but now I have a reason to go see it.