It’s been almost two years since the official announcement of Diablo3 and I’m growing impatient.

I’ve finished playing Borderlands (a few times), I’ve played parts of Divine Divinity, Crysis, Tropico, and Torchlight. I’ve replayed parts of numerous favorite old games and currently my spare time has been spent playing …. absolutely nothing. I need a new smash&bash, item-hoarding gaming fix.

HURRY UP, BLIZZARD. MY SANITY IS AT STAKE HERE.

…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.

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 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 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 mostly through box scores & out-of-state papers at the library. Not very exciting, with a lot of disconnect.

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 pleasing to see, but it wasn’t for me the event that it was for people who have been highly active, dedicated fans of Boston for years or decades…and when the playoffs/WS would end I’d mostly 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 the few Boston regular season games I could & the post-season games if applicable, but then have to ‘turn it off’ the rest of the time because I couldn’t watch them all season long. I wanted to be more than a long distance and post-season fan. I wanted to be a baseball fan again. I knew about cabletv sports packages, but had never investigated them…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, blogs & histories - so I’m at least not a complete dunderhead about some stuff - 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’s 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’m a fan of the gameplay itself, not stats or the managerial/business aspects, if that makes sense. I’m not the manager and I wouldn’t want to be, so I’m not very 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 true 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.