Weekend recap
This weekend was the penultimate 3-day weekend of the summer before MJC returns to a 5-day, 8-hour schedule. While it’s nice to have Fridays to do whatever, I look forward to getting back to regular hours. With Fridays off, it feels like too much time elapses between the last day of work for a week and the first day of work for the next. Yeah, weird, I know.
So here’s what happened over the weekend.
Thursday night, I went down to the St. Stanislaus community center to observe the dress rehearsal for a friend’s dance recital. I had been asked to video record the performance and I wanted to get a sense of how it would look through the camera.
Friday, I got up late, played on the computer for most of the day and attended the dance recital in the evening. The dances were good and I enjoyed the show. The performance did suffer from poor lighting and there was an unnecessary intermission and WAY too much talking between dances, but these problems, rather than suggest to me that it was a failure, made me hope that these things can be fixed and improved. That can be a subtle difference but a significant one.
On Saturday, I hosted a Community Education trip to the Giants game. On my way to the school in the morning, I was rear-ended. Very little damage but it delayed me and even if it hadn’t, who enjoys being in an accident? Anyway, the weather over in San Francisco was pleasantly cool, maybe too cool, and everyone on the trip enjoyed the day despite the Giants’ loss. It did eat up the entire day and I was able to spend only a few hours in the evening playing LotRO and watching tv.
I got up early on Sunday to go do music at the morning Masses. Jody’s daughter, Hilary, and Hilary’s new husband, Christoph sang with us. With the addition of Don, we had a crowded little space up there. Then I sang with the choir for the 10:00 Mass. It wasn’t bad, actually. I think if they discontinued using the microphones, they’d sound better, so I’ll work on making that happen. Kyle asked if he could come play bassoon with me at the 11:30 Mass next Sunday so that will be pretty cool. Then there was the 11:30 Mass which went fine. It was Mike, Christy, and me. The rest of the day was spent online with Danny and Suzanne.
Some of the tv I watched this weekend: Scrubs, Eureka, Flash Gordon, Psych (I love this show! It has all these obscure 70s and 80s pop culture references that the characters acknowledge are obscure references. Just my kind of thing!), Dead Zone, and Burn Notice. You might think this is a lot of tv, and you may be right. But I tivo everything and skip the commercials so that cuts viewing time by 20% or so. Yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses. I like tv. Sue me.
I also found time to mow and water my lawns this week.
MMORPGs
For the last year and a half, I’ve been into playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The first I played was City of Heroes. In CoH, you create a superhero, choosing from numerous powersets, origins, and costume designs/combinations. Then you sally forth into the game world to right all wrongs and arrest bad guys. I liked this game and played for over a year. I was part of a small group of friends that had met in-game and we always found each other to team with.
But after a time, frictions within (and the subsequent disolution of) this group as well as the limits of the game itself caused me to move on to World of Warcraft. WoW is set in a fantasy genre with dwarves, gnomes, elves, and so forth. Character creation is similar to CoH but one is far more limited in the choice of how a character looks. But WoW has more dimensions of gameplay than City of Heroes. While CoH is pretty straight forward, in WoW, there are numerous things that a player can be working on at once, e.g. questing, crafting, reputation, earning money. These are all valuable pursuits in WoW.
Some of what I don’t like about WoW is that is looks somewhat cartoonish, and the game is full of pop-culture references like an engineer named Scooty and another character named Haris Pilton. Things like this really hamper the sense of immersion that I am looking for.
A few months ago, my cousin, Danny, suggested I check out a new game, Lord of the Rings: Online. I was a bit reluctant but agreed to try it out. LOTRO is also in a fantasy genre; the land of Middle Earth created by J.R.R. Tolkien. As such, it has an incredibly rich back story and anyone familiar with the movies or better yet, the books, already has a sense of what this world is like. Game play is much like WoW, with things like crafting, combat, questing, and so forth but the world has more of a photorealistic look to it. The graphics are just beautiful.
WoW has been around for years and is highly successful. It is still fun for me. LOTRO is new. While I enjoy both games, I am enjoying LOTRO more these days.
