Some Quick Thoughts

So I’ve been poking around with some stuff and have some thoughts on what’s happening there.

I started watching “Babylon 5” as per my December/Christmas tradition, but I found that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I usually do.  And the reason is that it turned into an obligation to me, and as I discovered at times during the pandemic with “Dark Shadows” if I feel that it’s an obligation I don’t enjoy.  Now, you might wonder how I can enjoy some of the shows that I watch in the evenings and talk about because, well, aren’t all of those shows obligations, things that I’m going because I want to get them done so that I can talk about them?  Well, yes, but I realized that the issue here is less with it being something that I’m trying to get done and more with my feeling that I have a deadline.  I wanted to watch “Crusade” all one shot after finishing “Babylon 5”, and wanted to make Fridays — since I was off — my days to watch marathons, and so felt like I needed to get it done by the end of the first week of my vacation so that I could just jump to “Crusade” and be done with it.  That made me feel that I was on a deadline, which made me feel rushed, which made me enjoy it less.  I don’t have such deadlines with new shows, as the plan is to get them done not get them done by a certain time.  Thus, I can enjoy them despite them being an obligation, because they don’t feel like the same sort of obligation as they do when I feel that I have a deadline.

I’ve also finished off Trunk’s story in The Old Republic and started a new one based on Corran Horn.  For that character, though, I want to do a lot more with the character, as for the longest time all I had been doing was the Class and Planet stories since that was all I needed to hit the max levels, but since TOR is now the game that I play the most and the most consistently I decided that I should really get more involved in the game.  So I’m going to start with doing more sidequests, and then also getting into the space combat portions if I can still do them solo.  It will take me more time, but on the plus side I will definitely be overleveled for all the later story and planet portions.

I also started playing Star Trek Online a bit again, and was hit by the same feeling:  I like the game as the space combat is fun and the ground combat inoffensive, but the game seems to lack something.  I think the issue is that there are a lot of conversations in the game, but there are pretty much no choices you can make in those conversations, even to the extent of choosing what your general attitude will be.  Now, I like Dark Age of Camelot a lot better, and it hardly has any conversations, so why does STO disappoint me so much with this?  I think the reason is that DAoC doesn’t have any roleplaying options most of the time, but when it does give you real conversations you do tend to get to make some meaningful choices, while STO has a lot of things that seem like they’d lead to roleplaying choices but they usually don’t, which makes me wonder why they even bother.  I could be missing something and maybe more of the choices matter, but STO always strikes me as missing something whenever I play it, despite my generally enjoying the gameplay.

Speaking of Star Trek, one of the things I did early on during my vacation was get in another session of “Star Trek Scene It!”.  I played three games against myself (what I do is take all the ships they give me — TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager — and play them all out in order of when the series ran) and TOS, TNG and Voyager all each won one game.  I really regret that I never really played it until after the Scene It! games went out of stock because those games are incredibly fun to play.

And on that note, I had picked up the “Ultimate Horror” edition of Trivial Pursuit and played it, although with some trepidation because I was worried that it would prove that I didn’t really know anything about horror at all.  I played with two tokens against each other, and each token won a game, but as it turns out I was actually not too bad at the game.  I did miss a number of questions, but a lot of the time I remembered the show or movie in the question but couldn’t remember things like specific names, and more importantly on a number of occasions I got the question right because I was able to think “What would a horror movie do in that case?” and come up with the right answer.  For example, one question talked about how two characters killed themselves in a movie that had “Bay” in the title and so I came up with “drowning” because, well, what else would a movie like that do?  Also, I probably should have shuffled the questions because there were a number of cards in a row that had questions from a specific series, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Supernatural” or “American Horror Story”.  It’s not that big a deal with Trivial Pursuit because you aren’t that likely to get that many questions in a row from the same category, but if things had been shuffled better I could have come across more Buffy questions when I needed that category instead of getting Supernatural ones that I didn’t really know the answer to.

Anyway, those are some quick thoughts that I’ve been pondering over the past week or so.