KOTOR

This post has been a long time coming. One distraction leads to another, and things end up getting put off longer than they should. So instead of saying, “I recently played through the best game ever,” instead I’ll say…A couple of months ago, I finished playing through the best game ever- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or as I’ve come to know it, KOTOR.

That's me!

I used to be heavily into video games when I was a kid. I played Atari with my cousins until I got blisters and joystick claw hand, and once I got my Tandy (Who knows what that is? Yay for us Tandy owners!), I played things like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. I LOVED those games. Somehow I never got into console gaming or newer computer games. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like those games were all about fighting and I preferred games in which you had to figure things out? I don’t know. I do enjoy Asteroids, after all, and there’s no thinking there.

Dave knows that I used to play video games. And of course he knows the deep love I have for Star Wars. He had been telling me that I should check out a computer game called KOTOR. Sure, I thought. It’ll be like the other games I’m not interested in. Shooting and fighting and boring. Dave was certain I would enjoy KOTOR, so he bought it for me out of the blue. (He’s good like that.)

Yep, so he was right. I was immediately hooked. This game feels like Star Wars in a way the prequels never achieved. You pick your character and soon become a Jedi (that’s when the game really kicks into high gear). You explore different planets and talk to a wide range of different people and aliens. You go on side missions while working toward completing your main goal. It’s an adventure game. It’s a role-playing game. There are challenging parts, but it was never so hard that I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do next.

There is fighting, but once you become a Jedi with Force powers, it’s AWESOME. I decided to focus my character’s strengths on Force powers instead of fighting skills. I still did a good bit of fighting with a lightsaber. But I also blew people back with Force waves and persuaded them with my mind powers. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

You can choose to be a light side Jedi or a dark side Jedi. I went with the light side, and I eventually got enough light side points to be a master of the light side, which helped when I used Force powers. If you’re a dark side Jedi, you start to look withered like the Emperor.

I had to make myself take breaks from the game. That’s because I’d sit down to play the game after work, and the next thing I knew it was midnight. It sucks you in. The other characters are interesting and have their own backstories and issues. And Carth! Carth rocks. You can take two characters with you as you travel around, and I almost always chose to bring along Carth. He amused me.

So thanks to Dave, I love KOTOR. There’s a KOTOR 2, but they don’t make it for Macs. I think I found a way around that, so hopefully soon I’ll again be wasting more hours than I should in the Star Wars universe.

Doctor Who: The Celestial Toymaker

I'm losing patience at this point with Steven and Dodo episodes. I really can't get to the 2nd Doctor fast enough. And yet, the Whoathon has slowed down since these episodes are generally bad.

The Doctor and the Toymaker

The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo arrive in the land of the Celestial Toymaker. It's filled with crazy characters and creepy clowns. The Toymaker wants people to play games with him. He's bored. And evil. That pretty much sums it up. It reminded me of a lesser "The Mind Robber," but this one came first.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: First
Companions: Steven, Dodo
Episode: #24, "The Celestial Toymaker," four parts- 'The Celestial Toyroom,' 'The Hall of Dolls,' 'The Dancing Floor,' 'The Final Test'
Adversary: the Celestial Toymaker
Classic Lines: the Toymaker: "I'm bored. I love to play games but there's no one to play against. The beings who call here have no minds, and so they become my toys. But you will become my perpetual opponent. We shall play endless games together, your brain against mine."
Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: The Doctor has met the Toymaker before and hints that he might meet him again, but in the tv show, he never does.
Next Up: "The Gunfighters"

My first Iron Pigs game

I like baseball. A lot. I subscribe to MLB.tv so I can watch my favorite team even though I don't live near them anymore. So I love going to games- though I don't go as often as I'd like. Dave and I recently took his nieces to see the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs.

Seats in the third row for $10?!

It was fun! There's nothing like hearing that crack of the bat in person. I like watching races between bacon and ham and other food between innings. Although, as I pointed out to Dave, you'd think that since they're pigs, they wouldn't like bacon...but there's even a piece of bacon painted on the field near home plate.

I think it's clever that their mascot's name is Ferrous. And they have trams that drive through the parking lot bringing people to the stadium gate and back to their cars. It's a nice touch, especially for people going to the game with young kids. I'm definitely going back.

Space museum! (a.k.a The American Museum of Natural History)

If it wasn't obvious by the fact that I blog about Doctor Who, I'm kind of a science geek. I'm a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I've been wanting to go to his space museum for a long time. Here's where I say that it's not really called the space museum, and I confused my boyfriend for some time by referring to it this way. It's really called The American Museum of Natural History. The space museum part, of which Dr. Tyson is the head, is The Rose Center for Earth and Space, just part of the museum.

Since Dave is big into astronomy, too, he was also excited about a trip to New York to see the space museum. While the planetarium show, narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, was great, my favorite part was the Scales of the Universe. In the center is a giant sphere, called the Hayden Sphere, and there are various other items, like planets or molecules or galaxies, around the walkway or hanging near it. The signs along the walkway say, for instance, if the Hayden Sphere was the sun, then the planets were to scale. The outer planets were hanging near the sphere, while the inner planets were on the walkway itself. We walked around from largest to smallest, so we went from the universe and superclusters of galaxies to viruses and atoms and quarks, with the sphere representing different things (e.g., if the sphere was the Virgo Supercluster, then the object on the walkway was the Local Group, a group of galaxies that contains the Milky Way- for context, there are millions of superclusters in the observable universe). It was really very cool to have the universe put into perspective like this. I had no idea just how small our sun is compared to some other stars or how much bigger the Oort Cloud is than the Kuiper Belt. It's hard to get my mind around the vast scale of the universe, and this demonstrated it very well. Dave agreed.

Guess what? The space museum has way more cool stuff than just space. In fact, I didn't realize just how much neat stuff was there until I downloaded the museum's app. I don't think most people who know me know this, but I'm fascinated by whales. I love them. I'm dying to see some in person. What does the AMNH have? A giant, life-size model of a blue whale.

This is friggin' huge.

The blue whale is huge. This photo in no way does it justice. I was not prepared for just how big this thing is, and I was aware that it's the largest animal on Earth. Enough about the blue whale. One of the things I wanted to see was Lucy. I'm also fascinated by human evolution, and I've seen countless tv shows featuring Lucy, the Australopithecus. And here she was!

Okay, no one but me is interested in Lucy, so we'll move on...to a giant head.

This is a moai from Easter Island. At the time I thought this was a real one, but I have since learned it was a cast. It was still cool. And now for Dave's favorite part, the dinosaurs.

If I said that Dave knows a lot about dinosaurs, that would be a ridiculous understatement. Dave knows everything about dinosaurs. Dave should have been a paleontologist. Dave could spot a skeleton of a dinosaur I've never heard of from fifty feet away and tell me the name of it. And he did. Repeatedly. And it's not like I don't know my dinos. I know Triceratops from Stegosaurus.

This would be Stegosaurus.

But Dave knows them all. Anyway, this section of the museum was great. The immensity of these creatures is amazing. I couldn't even fit this one in the photo.

Giant body, tiny head, evil glowing eye

I can only imagine what it would be like to encounter a live one. If it were a carnivore, I'd be a goner. The dinos were the last things we saw, although we did stop by the Hayden Sphere for one last look on the way out.

Sitting by the dinos before we head out

In the morning, we walked from the bus station to the museum through Central Park, and we took the reverse path on the way back.

It was a fun adventure. We were at the museum for almost the entire time it was open for the day, and the time flew by. It's a cool place. I liked it a lot.

Doctor Who: The Ark

The Whoathon slogs on. It's getting harder to get through the end of the 1st Doctor's tenure, especially with such terrible companions. Dodo is incredibly annoying. She is so awful, she has me longing for the days of Susan. So in the four-part serial, the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo arrive on a spaceship.

This ship is carrying the population of Earth, both human and animal, and a group of aliens called the Monoids. It's ten million years in the future, and Earth is about to be swallowed by an expanding sun. So they're making a 700-year journey to another planet to make a new home. But wait, Dodo brings the common cold along and almost kills them all since they have no resistance. Luckily, the Doctor finds a cure and they go on their way.

The TARDIS dematerializes and reappears in the same location. But now it's 700 years later. The Monoids are in control of the ship, all because that cold wasn't really cured by the Doctor. It mutated, and the Monoids enslaved the weakened humans. Let's make a long story short...too late. The Monoids are jerks who want to leave the humans on the ship and blow it up. Some of them don't. They fight amongst themselves, and the humans and the good Monoids live on the planet together with the current, invisible (?) inhabitants. The end. I recommend skipping this one, although I did think that ending part two with them leaving and starting part three with them materializing 700 years later in the same place was great. Too bad it didn't live up to its potential. Maybe if they had left Dodo on this planet...

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: First
Companions: Steven, Dodo
Episode: #23, "The Ark," four parts- 'The Steel Sky,' 'The Plague,' 'The Return,' 'The Bomb'
Adversary: the Monoids
Classic Lines: while the Doctor is giving Steven the treatment, Dodo, to the Doctor: "Don’t you have to squirt it into his arm?" the Doctor, in reply: "What with a hypodermic needle? Good gracious, no. That went out a long time ago."
Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: The treatment for the common cold devised by the Doctor was a mixture made from animal membranes.
Next Up: "The Celestial Toymaker"

Coffee cake

I've always liked coffee cake, but I've never tried making it. I follow David Lebovitz's blog, and he made this recently, adapted from a cookbook he liked. You can find the recipe here.

YUM. It was good stuff. My family went nuts for it.

There's a thick layer of topping. Delicious. I was worried that the topping seemed too wet when I was putting it on the cake batter, but it turned out great. The cake tasted much better the next day, too.

Not that it wasn't good the night I made it...but it was fantastic the next day. This is definitely a keeper.