mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (SLoD - brains)

Yes. This.

@scottEweinberg: Again, the HFPA is a moronic farce of a critics group. They're asskissers who live to shake hands with Clooneys and such. Remember this plz.

@cleolinda: And also, there's booze and Meryl always gets her drink on and no one gives a shit by the end of the night! And that is why I love them.

@cleolinda: I'm just saying, the Golden Globes are intellectually bankrupt but they also don't make us watch interpretive dance.

From here: http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/2012/01/15/


[livejournal.com profile] columbina and I had a long conversation while playing SWTOR in the middle of the Golden Globes - I wasn't really watching per se but I would glance over and make the occaional random comment like, "ooh brendan gleeson." The gist of it was that he hates award shows and doesn't watch them, whereas I almost always watch and generally enjoy them, although I know and mostly agree with all the points against them. But, y'know, foofy dresses! Drunk Meryl Streep! I am weak. (Like that is news.) And I didn't really watch the GG's as I said, because SWTOR seems to demand more attention, for whatever reason, than a lot of the games we've played did. Which means that today, since I'm at work and bored, I'm looking up coverage of the show so I can goggle at the dresses some more and find out what else happened that I missed. (Not much, by the look of things. Except for a few dresses, and that's what the Fug Girls are for, anyway.)

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (buffy quote - death star)
OK, so this is what I get up to in The Old Republic when [livejournal.com profile] columbina isn't around - he was off today, and we played for a couple of hours this morning, but he left with a migraine around lunchtime. So after he left I:
1. decided I needed (game) money (which is, in grand old Star Wars tradition, actually called "credits" rather than money), and one way to get it is to kill a lot of stuff. So I...
2. run around the planet where we already were (Balmorra) and kill a lot of stuff. This does get me moneycredits, slowly, from looting directly and also from picking up sellable items. It also gives me a slow but steady pickup of xp (experience points), which is probably going to displease Col later because he doesn't really like it when I get ahead, and we have been playing these characters entirely together. But oh well, I didn't do it on purpose to get xp, and I didn't do any quests. (Well, except for one which I mention below, but that's a daily so it doesn't count either.)
3. I was also picking up archaeological items at the same time - that's my Sith's gathering profession - and I did some crafting along the way, and then I realized that I was running out of the crystals that you get earlier on, and I wasn't getting any more of them on Balmorra. But none of the crafting recipes used the higher-level items yet, so I decided to go to the Imperial Fleet to the crafting trainer, and see if I had any new recipes yet. (Eventual answer: I did, but they were not much help.)
    Now the game does not make this bit of travel really easy to do - I guess going from one planet to another really ought not be that easy, should it? so I trekked back to town to the spaceport, got on my ship, made the jump to the fleet (which actually is in an entirely different sector of the galaxy, so the galactic map says), got off the ship again, and ran through the cantina at the center of the spaceport (don't ask me why, but that's where you come out when you get off your ship) and halfway across the spaceport to the trainer - which takes at least as long to do as the hyperdrive jump took. The space station is big.
4. Then I made a pit stop at the Galactic Trade Market (which in any other game would be called the auction hall - although here there's no pretense of an auction, really - you put your stuff up for sale at a price you choose, and people buy it or not). I bought some of the crystals I was looking for at a fairly reasonable price, then I realized that all the rest of them were for sale for much much more (like 100 credits each) and I probably wasn't going to get any more at the reasonable price (which was more like 12 each). So then I...
5. bopped off to another planet, to Dromund Kaas, which is the Sith capital, and is where I got the crystals in the first place, to hunt down some more of them.
6. At DK, I get sidetracked between the spaceport and town by some elites that I figure out I can now kill without getting killed myself. They don't give me xp any more, because I am 10 levels higher than them, but they do give me a fair number of credits and I'm still interested in credits. (I also manage to do a daily that involves killing these elites. Once again, no xp, but credits.)
7. I cut across the bottom of town and head off toward the ruined temple place because I'm really supposed to be hunting those crystals, and I remember that that place had a lot. On the way, I wander into another elite area, and this one doesn't go so well - they are higher level - still lower than me, but they're elites and I'm not big enough to kill these guys yet. I die, poor Vette (my NPC companion) dies, and when I rez, I back the heck out of there.
8. Wander around the exterior of the temple looking for crystals. Find a lot of crystals, eventually also find a green doorway (meaning one I can go into) that I don't think I remember seeing before. Nothing tries to kill you, there's just some machines. (Apparently it is the Matrix Assembly place described here, but I just now got around to looking that up.) I poke around at the machines, and figure out that they have something to do with datacrons and something to do with these matrix shard thingys that are lying around in my inventory. Play around with them randomly and end up with a Matrix Cube, which describes itself in the tooltip as a relic, which is something I know there's an inventory slot for. It's not really the stats I need, but oh well. I'm lucky it was something useful at all, and it didn't summon some elite that would have killed me - or make my shards go poof because I did it wrong. I am just pleased I figured it out without consulting the wiki! (I think it was the RYG one I made, and those were the only three colors I had so my options were limited anyway. A blue one would have been required to make the ones for my warrior's primary stat, and I didn't have that.) Never did make it inside the main part of the temple.

So there you are. Got some credits and some useful items, and learned something interesting. Not at all what I expected to do today, but not a total loss, in game terms.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (WoW - shiny)

I know some of you are not interested in hearing about games. Sorry about that. I find the differences between games rather endlessly fascinating, which I guess is obvious from the amount I talk about it, isn't it?


In addition to the real-life crafts I'm involved in, which are complicated enough, I seem to accidentally be playing two games right now which have very elaborate crafting systems. First there's Glitch, which has fairly detailed, realistic food recipes for the most part - with some goofy exceptions like the way you make all spices out of allspice, and you make fruit with a fruit-changing machine (out of cherries). I've been playing Glitch for, what, three months now, and so I've got that system mostly down. Not completely, because there are a lot of different crafts and there's a few I haven't really ventured into much, but mostly.

Now there's SWTOR, in which your companions do the crafting for you, technically - but you have to tell them what to do, for the most part. You can actually send them off to do "missions" on their own. You can read the description before you send them but you don't get to hear about what happens after they leave - they just come back with stuff for you, or not. (Them coming back with nothing is fairly rare, so far, but it's happened once or twice.) My Sith warrior, which is my most advanced character, has two companions now, and a ship. (A very nice ship, actually!) The 2nd companion came with the ship, and is a droid. (He says lots of comically servile things, C-3PO style, which I can't remember enough of to quote right now.)

Anyway, in SWTOR you have three "professions" - a crafting one, a gathering one, and a third one that I think is called "missions" or something, although actually the gathering one also has missions of its own. So my crew trained to be an Artificer, which so far involves making hilts for lightsabers, and also the color crystals which make the "body" of the saber turn different colors. Then my gathering one is Archaeology, which involves gathering crystals and various kinds of artifacts, and the third one is Treasure-Hunting, interestingly enough. (All Indiana Jones - similar to Archaeology, but not quite the same!) Some missions are to come back with lockboxes which might have money in them or other stuff, some are for different items which you can give to your companions as gifts, others are for gems. See what I mean about complicated? Oh, and also, sometimes she comes back with gift "fragments" which you can take to a "curator" who is supposed to be able to combine them. Col actually got sort of mad at me while I was wandering all over Fleet HQ - which is HUGE - trying to find this curator person. It turned out that they're really just sort of a vendor - you go to them with the proper number of fragments and they offer you a choice of several different gifts you can buy with your fragments. It really is kind of a crazy system.

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Xmas - pink aluminum)
It's officially winter. According to my phone (which seems to be fairly accurate as far as I can tell), it's 57F outside, and is supposed to be in the 40s at night for almost the whole next week, which is relatively chilly by our - admittedly wimpy - standards. We've had a lot of rain the past few days, so it's wet and chilly, yuck.

It hasn't been a good week, which is sort of typical for me for this time of year, really. I talked a week or so ago about having SAD, but then I also just tend to be sick this time of year - more often after Christmas than before, really. And of course it's really hard to sort those two things out - do you get depressed because you're sick, or vice versa? I really think it can work either way, and it's one of those things that's a complex interplay that people (being people, and impatient) have a tough time sorting out. 

Anyway, I haven't been to work since Monday. Monday I almost burst into tears at work - my boss was in a bad mood, and I was in a bad mood and/or sick and/or weepy... I cried through Hugo on Sunday, more than was really warranted, that was the first sign there, and then Monday in the Starbuck's drive-through the lady in front of my paid for me, and I barely got away from the window before I burst into tears again. I've been prone to that sort of hormonal-fueled (presumably) weepiness off and on the last couple of years. Who knows, I'm at menopause age and there's no telling what's going on with my hormones. I suspect I wasn't really needed at work for the most part, because there were things going on with the boat this week and I'm not involved with that. (I'm avoiding being specific about that, sorry.) I'm doing some work from home, in any case, more as the week has gone on, so it's not like I'm slacking off completely. And thank goodness, the tendency to weep at the drop of a hat seems to have slacked off a bit. I really do hate that.


------------------------------------------------------------------

I haven't played a lot of SWTOR except when Col is around - not because I don't enjoy it, but more because I am feeling the press of Other Things I Ought To Be Doing. I did get the last of the cards mailed the other day. I have some little bracelets I found to give my female aunts and cousins - they're cute, and they were inexpensive, and that may be all they get right now. I told my aunt that I was just doing token gifts for everybody anyway. Most of the rest of them ought to be doing the same thing - I know my cousins in particular don't have any money right now. So I need to quit stressing over that and just wrap the bracelets and get over it. I have the gift cards for the kids. I haven't gotten my dad and my sister (who I probably won't be seeing anyway) anything... which seems weird. Maybe I'll order my dad something off of Amazon. Actually, maybe I should do that now - it might not get there til after Christmas but oh well. In past years we have gone to see my dad and his wife sometime the week after Christmas, say, and hung out at their house for an afternoon. But we saw them at Thanksgiving (which is unusual) and I've got to work next week so nothing like that may happen. And my sister is in San Antonio (some 250 miles away) and we really have stopped exchanging gifts, anyway. I sent her a card, and I'll call both her and my dad on Christmas Eve (tomorrow, oy vey) or Christmas Day, but that's about all we do. P. works retail so she probably has to work all week next week as well.

Despite the tone of what I wrote above, I'm not particularly depressed. I've been enjoying the making and sending of cards this year - and receiving them, a lot of them (thank you, Weet and TUS exchanges for that!) - Rob comes in with the mail and says, "Another one for Mel" - that's how we know they're cards from the "online people". (I increasingly am wanting everybody to call me Mel rather than my real name, but that's another whole discussion. My cardmaking group does call me Mel, but they're the only real-life people who do.)

Anyway, I may or may not get updates in in the next few days but - I hope everybody is enjoying your holidays, whether it's Hannukah, Yule, Solstice, Christmas or whatever!


mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (nothing to say)
(I'll shut up about SWTOR in a couple of days. Probably.)

SWTOR is officially open for business, as of a couple of hours ago. It wasn't even all that crowded when I went in. Juyo, where we were playing last week, was full, but they'd opened a lot of new servers and most of them weren't. I guess starting at midnight eastern means a lot of the kids have gone to bed, the east coast ones, anyway. It's hard to tell what the mix of people is for this game, although I commented early on that I'd heard more sort of vaguely (and occasionally not so vaguely) mysogynist talk in chat here and there than in most of the other games we've played. It's a more military-seeming game, it may get more of an FPS sort of crowd, I don't know. Some people definitely come from an MMO background - by which I mean WoW and Rift and the usual swords-and-sorcery kind of thing - but maybe not all of them.

I made a smuggler just now, because my bounty hunter was on the other server, the full one. (Smuggler is on the Republic side, bounty hunter is Imperial. They're practically the same, character-wise, really, except that they start on different planets and have different story lines - which makes them end up being not the same at all.) I am enjoying playing imperials, and especially the Sith, just because all the plots and the political machinations are so interesting. The Sith Warrior has a boss (or a "master") who seems like a nice enough guy - but then you are summoned to Darth somebody, who tells you to go kill the first guy, your master. And because I'm playing for dark points - I'm a Sith, after all - I do it. Actually, I suspect that even if you refuse - if you even can - you end up having to kill him, because he tries to kill you first. So if you kick about it, you just lose dark points. (And if you don't want dark points, why are you playing a Sith, really? Although it might be interesting to try to do a nice Sith, just for fun. I might try it sometimes. Col can tell you that I like starting new characters just for the fun of it, anyway - I have a long history of doing that.)
____________________________________

This is the first game I've played where you get a "companion" - meaning, an NPC who goes around with you. Well, GuildWars had henchmen and heroes, who you could take out with you on fights. Nightfall's "heroes" were probably pretty close to this, I guess. Anyway, I haven't played any game lately, let's say, that had anything like this system. It seems to be becoming fairly common, though, from what I've heard people saying about other games. So anyway...

A Sith Warrior gets a Twi'lek for a companion - you know, the ones with the long tail-like things growing from the back of their heads, like in Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi? This Twi'lek is a girl, and when you first see her, she has on a shock collar, and she's talking back to the jailer, just the same. Her name is Vette, and she's sort of a treasure-hunter sort of character. (In character for the Sith, who, remember, do have slaves - she is still a slave, more or less, and still has the collar on. I've even used it a couple of times when I had to for dark points, although that's of course not something I would ever do on my own. I've promised her if she "behaves" I'll remove it.) Col's Sith Inquisitor got a really big, really ugly guy of some unknown species for a companion (I can't remember his name, either) who you find in suspended animation in a tomb.

My bounty hunter hasn't gotten far enough to get assigned a companion yet, but I've already figured out who it's going to be. That one is another girl, named Mako. She's sort of a techie kind of person, but cute. (Some of those misogynistic comments I mentioned concerned what they'd like to do to Mako, as a matter of fact.) I also got far enough in beta to get one assigned to my Republic Trooper, and that one was sort of like getting your worst enemy attached to you - he was a guy named Aric who had been a real pain in the butt from the moment my character walked in the door. I actually successfully called it several levels before it happened - actually what I said was, "Please tell me he's not going to be my companion," and sure enough, stuff happens in the meantime, and the guy who was your boss is suddenly now your subordinate.

(To round out the other ones I've seen: smugglers get a sort of surfer-dude kind of guy, which annoyed Col no end when he was playing smuggler in beta, and Imperial agents get a tough-talking bald girl, who I only saw for a little while, because my lightsaber-wielding Sith turned out to be a bad combination with the IA, who can blast down everything in sight in what seemed like no time, and I was having trouble getting to fight anything. It made me really cranky.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Xmas - pink aluminum)
(written yesterday - I think there was supposed to be more to it than this at the time, but this is as far as I got!)

I got my SWTOR early access. It came slightly earlier than I expected - I figured I would probably have it by the weekend, but I thought it might be tomorrow instead of today. As it happened, I woke up with an earache and sore throat, which unfortunately is not really unusual for me this time of year, so I stayed home today. (I called in before I looked to see whether I had it or not; it seemed like cheating to look, somehow! But I couldn't help but be aware that it was a possibility.) Happily, my symptoms have diminished somewhat - I don't exactly feel on top of the world, but I'm not in real pain any more, anyway, enough that I can enjoy my my game that I've been looking forward to so much.

I've been playing Imperials all day - a bounty hunter, and then my Sith. The Sith trainer says, when you talk to her, "You desire more power? Good." and then when you're finished she says, "Remember - peace is a lie." (In her very posh Alec Guinness-y accent.) I think that gives you a good feeling for what the Sith are all about. They're not portrayed as evil per se - they believe that pursuing power is a good thing, and so is following your passions. Even if those passions aren't noble ones, obviously. (Several of the male NPCs are quite stout, which I guess could be a side-effect of following one's passions, too! So far, I haven't seen a stout female one.)

A bounty hunter is different - you start on Hutta, a swampy backwater run by (naturally) the Hutts. They are not even the natives there, but have seemingly stolen the land from the native Evocii. It's the usual kind of thing - some fellow bounty hunters to kill, some visits with His Immenseness Nem'ro the Hutt, and some side quests where somebody wants you to save their relative and that sort of thing. It's pretty fun.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (WoW - chicken)
(Sorry, another game-related entry!)

Columbine got his SWTOR early-access, and I haven't, yet - which is not a surprise, but I'm sort of bored with Rift and so I'm here writing an entry instead. I enjoy playing when he's around, but when he's not, well, I get interested some days and other days, not so much.


I seem to do better at getting interested in Glitch, at least if I don't overdo it. Glitch doesn't have quests like other games do - well, it has quests but they're all gathering and crafting rather than killing things, and there aren't many of them. They added a new achievement recently, which is to find pieces of your DNA, which can be almost anywhere - on 11 random streets throughout the world, and it's a pretty big world and constantly gets bigger. So that's a challenge, and I've been working on that off and on. (If you've played Glitch but not lately: the DNA thing is almost exactly like the ghost quest. The DNA pieces are easier to see than the ghosts but tend to be in rather inaccessible places. And there's a humming sound that alerts you that you're on the right street, which helps an awful lot!)

There are also some new skills, one of which requires herbs that I don't have, and which are going for a ridiculous amount of money in the auction house since everybody else just got the same new skill too. So I decided rather than do that, I would grow my own herbs - but that requires moving again, because you can only grow herbs in certain places. I like my house that I have now pretty well but eh, I'm not that attached to it. So I'm working on using up and/or getting rid of enough stuff that I can move without just giving up too much of it. I don't want to do that! - although one way I'm getting rid of some stuff is by playing santa and leaving bags of stuff around. If I'm going to give stuff away, I'd rather put it in random places where somebody who actually needs it get a shot at it, than give it to whoever buys my house - which is by definition somebody who has some currants to blow! (It's funny how quick game money starts feeling like something almost real. It happens to me in every game I've ever played.)

Hopefully I'll have Star Wars by this weekend, because I don't have to work, for once, so it'd be a good time. After Christmas we go on holiday hours and I'm working nearly every day that week.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (WoW - shiny)

OK, well, the first thing I have to say in my first Holidailies post for the year is a link. Most of you have probably seen it by now but if you haven't, go read it, it's funny and it's not very long. There are 9 entries, currently, and I'm linking to the first one. (Warning: cat-related. If you hate cats you will possibly not be amused.)
LOUIS VS RICK
(Also, if you're like me, and you've seen people saying, "CAPS LOCK IS HOW I FEEL INSIDE" all week, this is evidently where it came from.)


I'm not doing an introductory-update thing, at least not today. We'll be doing good for me to get any entry at all up right now, even if it's links and stuff about games. I suppose I could post the link and the paragraph above it and call it an entry, but I'm not going to. Instead I'll keep writing whatever it is that comes into my head next, which tends to be my M.O. in any case. (This is probably not any surprise to most of the Holidailies regulars by now.)

I am pleased that the new guys* managed to get Holidailies up and running in the old format. Reddit just did not cut it for me. Actually the current front page format is still missing my main motivator: the list of who's "above the line" (i.e., actually posting an entry a day) and who's not. If you look back over the years, I am right under the line, if not above it, pretty consistently. I don't know why that works to get me to post, but it does. But anyway, I missed the regular format last year and I'm glad to see it back. So thanks, Richard and Jennifer!! (And thanks to Jette and Chip, too, for finding somebody to hand it over to! as well as for running it all these years.)


* "New guys" who I've known in an online way for years and even sent cards to and such, but still, they're new in this role. Not to mention that one of them is a girl.


...so, games. Let's talk about games. We are currently in sort of a transition between games, that's the thing. We are waiting for SWTOR (that's Star Wars: The Old Republic) to start - I started to write about that the other day (here: http://mellificent.livejournal.com/334777.html) and I got to talking about Star Wars the movies and never really got around to talking about the game, much. [livejournal.com profile] columbina and I are both still sort of playing Rift, and sort of playing Glitch, but we aren't synching up very well with either of those. Occasionally we do sync up in Rift, and once in a while we chat while we both play Glitch, but that's it. We probably are managing sort of 2 nights a week in Rift, for a couple of hours, and once in a while on the weekend. He plays some on the weekends without me and I play some late at night without him. This is probably not going to particularly improve when we start playing SWTOR (which possibly will be as soon as Tuesday, although more likely it will be later in the week).

The schedule problem is because I am neither (a) working 8-5 M-F like I used to nor (b) unemployed, like I was more recently. Nowadays I work two out of three weekends and unless something happens to change that, the game scheduling is going to continue to be an issue. I don't like that part but quite honestly, I don't miss the aforesaid days of working 8-5 M-F, either. I miss the money and it'd be nice to have the bennies back, but really, unless something happens to force my hand, that's not about to happen. So that's that.

Columbine bought SWTOR months ago. I bought it - or so I thought - around Halloween, and then figured out only this past week (I wasn't paying near enough attention, obviously) that the transaction didn't go through the first time and so I repurchased it again. (EA/Origin has it set up really stupidly - you put in your credit card and hit submit, and it gives you a confirmation number, but after that there's a box you have to check and it's down at the bottom of the screen where you can't see it unless you scroll down, and apparently it's not REALLY confirmed until you check the box and hit submit again. So that appears to be what I failed to do the first time.)

We played in the SWTOR beta Thanksgiving weekend, thanks to Col, and then we both got invited to the last, smaller beta last weekend - we figured that was a thank-you present for giving lots of feedback. Col filed lots of bug reports and I did fill out all the surveys and stuff, but I also did a lot of complaining about lag, which presumably they also like to know about, and then I wrote another long note when I figured out how to fix the lag problem, telling them what I changed - and it was much improved last weekend and the graphics choices had been changed, too, so I like to think I helped a tiny bit with that! We both played several different characters and classes at one time or another, including playing on both sides - Republic and Empire. Playing the "dark side" is very entertaining, but it turned out that we both liked playing the classes that use a blaster more than the lightsaber ones - those classes are called trooper and smuggler on the Republic side, and Bounty Hunter and Stormtrooper, I guess, on the Imperial side. With lightsabers you are of course a Jedi or a Sith, and there are a couple of classes for them also - something like a "knight" (of the light or dark persuasion, respectively) and a mage for each side. They have obviously put a lot of thought into the quests and the respective storylines, and also you get Light or Dark points for various choices you make, and that affects what choices you are offered later on, although we didn't really get far enough to see too much of that. So anyway, we liked it and we are looking forward to more, that's what it comes down to. If MMOs and Star Wars are your kind of thing, then this one comes highly recommended.

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (buffy quote - death star)
I have just come from the end-of-the-world party (that's what they were calling it) at the SWTOR beta. That's Star Wars: The Old Republic, for those of you who don't follow such things. I played right up til about 20 minutes to go, and then I went to the skill trainer. For no good reason except that I wanted to see what the new skills were, really, but I did. Then I went and joined the party, which was on the Senate Plaza in Coruscant, which is, of course, a completely fictional/virtual place. And that's sort of what I wanted to talk about.

More of you probably know things about Star Wars than know much about MMOs (although with a blog audience, it's hard to be sure about that). It's strange, millions of people play MMOs, and Chuck Norris is currently starring in advertisements for one, but they still seem to be an almost underground thing, for the most part. I talk about it some, to people I talk to in real life, but a lot of people don't seem to get it. Usually I don't talk about "MMO's" to real-life people, I say things like, "I've been playing this Star Wars game online." After all, most people do understand computer games nowadays, to one degree or another, even if it's just something like Farmville.

And of course, most people do get Star Wars, to one degree or another. Or if not, they at least know what it is.

I was 17 when the first Star Wars movie came out. I was only vaguely aware of its existence until I went up to Austin for freshman orientation at UT - you know how they do those corny skits for things like orientations? Well, in 1977 at UT, those skits were All Star Wars, All the Time. They even got hold of (or possibly made) a Darth Vader costume somehow. I suspect that most of the incoming freshmen hadn't seen the movie yet, but I'm sure a lot of them were like me and ran right out to see it when they got home. And I loved it, of course. I'm not sure who I went to see it with - maybe my sister or my friend Amy. I remember going to see it a second time when they re-released it in the fall, though, and then a third and fourth and fifth. It was the first movie I ever went to see over and over like that. I'm sure part of that was the timing - I was finally old enough that I had a driver's license and then shortly after, the freedom of college (although no car there). I could do things like that that my parents would think was slightly odd. (I remember my mother being baffled later on by the way my sister and I could both recite all the lines from the first movie, and my sister is no science fiction fan. I don't think either one of my parents ever got Star Wars. Certainly not my mother, anyway.)

I do know when I saw the 2nd movie - that one was with Amy, and it was at the old Alabama Theater in Houston, and we had to stand in line for a couple of hours. And I saw Return of the Jedi in a very crowded theater in Austin - I have this vivid memory of standing in the concession line with my friends, for that one.

Oh, also, I think the fact that I had the album of the soundtrack is fairly important. I remember blasting it on the stereo in my dorm room often that year. I think I also bought the one for The Empire Strikes back when it came out. I never really got to the degree of fandom that involved buying the series of novels, later, though. I don't know why, but I never got interested in those.

This is all by way of saying that I am a Star Wars fan, going all the way back to the beginning - but not an utterly fanatical one. I know the basic canon. I don't know the names of every single minor character or every planet that's ever been mentioned, like some people do.

-----------------------------------------------

Well, the people who came up with this MMO were the fanatics, I'm pretty sure. It was all done in association with LucasArts and it's utterly faithful to canon, as far as I can tell. All the familiar species are there, although I still couldn't tell you the names of most of them. I suspect that if you ask me in a couple of months, I will know. Assuming we keep playing this, and that's a pretty sure bet, it's going to be like a total-immersion course in Star Wars lore.

This is why I said the soundtrack was important: because when you FINALLY get to play the game (after the usual hours of downloading and installing and then waiting in a queue to get in and then creating your character) the first thing that happens is that you see a screen, just like in the movies: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

And then the main theme starts up. And I swear, I get chills every time. That's why I've been thinking so much about this, about my history with Star Wars and maybe I have more of a reaction to them because of that. I did actually watch the original three movies last weekend when they were on. (I wondered if the timing was not an accident, that they were showing them the same weekend as the SWTOR beta weekend.)

I have more to say about this, particularly about the game, but it will have to wait until later. It's past my bedtime.

Profile

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Default)
mellicious

December 2024

S M T W T F S
1 2 345 6 7
8 9 1011 1213 14
151617181920 21
2223 2425 262728
2930 31    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 15th, 2025 04:24 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios