Friday Ramblings

A few new, fun, things have been occupying my fleeting Facebook time of late. Aside from flair (which i've already talked about some) and keeping up with friends and family, i have two new interests there. One is Yoville, and the other is these personality tests. Yoville is sort of a Sims like application where you explore a really small town filled with other players from all around the world. Other than the socialization aspects (i am not going to debate virtual socialization here) the main objective seems to be to decorate your house/apartment and/or your self. This application is passively fun. I don't sweat worry having the latest or greatest rugs or whatnot, but i did recently "purchase" my first house - a tree house. It goes with my elvish tendencies. 8) I know the personality tests are subjective and only as accurate as the interpretations of the creators of the questionares ~ but they are still fun. Several have been kind of surprising. One was "What is the purpose in life?" - Healer. Really? I don't publish all of the results i take, just ones that are fun and i don't mind the results of... :) I was really happy with the result from one i took today: "What type of Warrior are you?" My result was Jonas Blane. I was pretty happy with that result because i have really enjoyed CBS's show, The Unit. I was devastated when Molly called in a debt by asking Jonas to make a choice between her and The Unit while he was in the middle of a very delicate mission. And then to see Jonas sitting alone at "Betty Blue's" wedding... it broke my heart. I am so hoping that there will be a season 5 for this show (i think i will know around 20-May), if for nothing else than to see this relationship restored! I have a couple Google alerts set up so that i get occasional e-mail updates on "important" news articles. You know, things about "The Hobbit" movie, "Tron 2.0", etc. Well, one item recently was a 'related' thing but it drew my attention to the new trailer for "The Road". At first i was really pumped about this movie because of my interest in 'post apocalyptic' genre. After i saw the trailer i am nervous that it will be more of a "Dawn of the Dead" type of deal. While i could live with that, i am thinking that my beloved may not want to go see it with me. As a matter of fact... i am positive this will be the case. Still... i have moved to a 'wait and see' mode. Speaking about the "Post Apocalyptic" genre... i have not even finished my first run through of Fallout 3 yet! I really do enjoy playing this game, i just don't have enough time to do it! After all, the game is NOT a priority in my life, and when i sit down to play i really want a minimum of two to three hours to dive into it, which as anyone who is married and/or has children is extremely hard to come by. That's ok though. Bethesda Softworks has released three aftermarket files (also known as DLC) to expand the game even more. Which of course has my curiosity peaked. So in the OCD part of my personality i amn reluctant to play and work towards finishing the game until i can have the complete game... Now, since the only way (until recently) to get this DLC has been through GamesforWindows (Microsoft)... and since i have made a consious choice to NOT connect my personal laptop to the internet for ANY reason... this has not been a viable option. However, i am told that Bethesda usually releases another copy of their games that include the DLC, or the DLC by itself... i just need to be patient... But in the meantime i have been considering starting over. Not because i don't like the file i have going currently, but because it is a file that is running on an incomplete version of the game. And now i am hearing of another computer game that i would really like to have... recently i learned of a French software company known as Cyanide Studio is making a game called "Bloodbowl". Now this is a computer version of a Games Workshop game that i LOVED to play way back when. It has several elements that i enjoy... 1) It was a table top miniature game, 2) You could play Elves in it, 3) it played a LOT like American Football. One problem i did run into though, despite a lot of my friends also owning the game - it was not the first thing they would want to play should the occasion come up. A few times they would humor me, but for the most part i was the only one with the desire to play. Well, now i will be able to play (probably just as often as i get to play Fallout 3 now) by myself! All of this rambling has brought to mind my favorite memory of when i did play AD&D. (Bear with me... this sort of ties some things together.) We had a favorite quote from a comic book series, "Rain was the healer, and he was the first to die". This was because the one person/character you always needed in tight situations was the one who was the healer type, and inevitably it would seem like this character was the first to go down. Well. i had often favored playing fighter types, but i wanted the challenge of playing a Paladin. This is a character that played by a very high moral code, and was generally considered a very tough one to role play. We were very early on in what is called a "campaign". We were all still very low level, but what we did have was numbers. I believe we had eight or more people playing (which was very rare for us). Anyway, we came into a small town that was being harassed by something up in the hills. You know the drill, running off with live stock, and recently one of the elders children had disappeared. My Paladin of course wanted to help... it was a moral obligation to help those poor people, and it took a long time for me to convince the others the back me up on this one. When we arrived at the beast's layer we learned that it was a young White Dragon (which was the weakest of such monsters in the game), and it was sleeping! The whole party was besides themselves on this opportunity, but my Paladin would have none of this. It is not fair to ambush a sleeping foe - no matter what they had done. I was alone on this one... finally i told the guy running the game, "I walk up to the sleeping dragon. draw my sword and tap it on the nose and declare, 'awake foul beast!'" The battle was over in two rounds. After it turned our thief and several others into Popsicles, it batted my Paladin across the cave leaving him barely consious. The only survivors were a mage who had refused to even enter the cave, and my Paladin. The pair sulked back to town licking their wounds. My friends absolutely refused to let me continue to play that character. So, despite my only playing that character in two adventure, he remains my all time favorite.