Little Blurbs of Update
I fail at this "weekly" thing, but I suppose any amount of regularity and progress in posting blog entries is good for me. This is going to be a relatively short entry because rather than trying to think of a specific topic I want to reflect upon, I'm just going to briefly mention a few things that have been going on in the past few weeks.
Fall semester started a couple weeks ago. Since I've taken care of all of my non-major requirements for graduation, all I have left are biology classes, so that's what comprises my entire schedule now. I feel that this is going to be a semester full of depressing subject matter, because I'm taking many such classes as "Cancer Biology" and "Molecular Basis of Disease." Even the writing course that focuses on reading and writing biological literature focuses on the topic: infections that can cause cancer. It seems like a typical pre-med student schedule and if I don't become a hypochondriac by the end of the semester, I'll consider it a win.
James is in Switzerland now, working at CERN as part of his graduate work, and won't be back until mid-November. So long-distance becomes even longer... or more distant... however you say it. Skype is an incredibly useful invention, however. In the meantime, he did lend me an external hard-drive with a nice media collection, so I've been taking some advantage of that. Mainly, I've been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is my favorite of the Star Trek series. I started from the third season, which is where all the Dominion stuff starts and the plot gradually gains continuity. I love the way the series foreshadows itself at times, although part of that is just the pride I get for recognizing the foreshadowing.
Greg has been playing Star Trek Online recently. He's shown me some of it and often tries to convince me to play it as well, but as I watch him play the game, I find myself more or less uninterested. I could see myself enjoying messing around with character creation or just exploring some of the areas and being amused by various references to little details from the series, but I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy the actual gameplay, at least in the long-term. So I'm hesitant of the whole notion. Besides, at this time, you can only play as the Federation and the Klingons, and if I were going to play a Star Trek game, my first choice of race to play as would be the Romulans. And my second choice would probably be Cardassians. So if they introduce the Romulans as playable characters sometime, I might be more tempted by the game. Maybe.
I've been playing WoW, but in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated. I got my shaman to 80, which leaves two classes I still want to get 80 with, my hunter and my druid. However, instead of playing much on either of those characters, I've been leveling an undead rogue, which was rather unexpected since rogues and I do not always get along. I started playing the character mostly because I like being able to pick my own lockboxes and so it would be nice to have a rogue on each server I play. I also rather miss Horde, as I haven't leveled a Horde character much in a long time. And I don't know if they've made rogues easier to play over the years or if I've just improved in my skill at playing a rogue, but it's certainly not quite as painful an experience as I remember (once I got past the hurdle of the lower levels, where rogues simply don't have enough truly useful skills to survive many tricky situations). I just never thought that if I got attached to a new alt, that it would be a rogue... at least not until I played several other classes of alts first.
It does figure that now that I'm back to school, I'd get into all sorts of games and series to watch again, whereas when I had more free time in the summer, I found it hard to entertain myself at times, for whatever reason. So now I feel like I have so little time for all the things I want to do. I do multitask sometimes by playing WoW while listening to DS9 episodes, though. Sometimes I feel as though I've gotten so trained and used to multitasking that doing only one thing at a time can make me a little bored. That sounds like it could be a bad thing, potentially, but such a thing seems to be a side-effect of the Digital Age in which we live. I wonder if the younger generations have it even worse now.
Fall semester started a couple weeks ago. Since I've taken care of all of my non-major requirements for graduation, all I have left are biology classes, so that's what comprises my entire schedule now. I feel that this is going to be a semester full of depressing subject matter, because I'm taking many such classes as "Cancer Biology" and "Molecular Basis of Disease." Even the writing course that focuses on reading and writing biological literature focuses on the topic: infections that can cause cancer. It seems like a typical pre-med student schedule and if I don't become a hypochondriac by the end of the semester, I'll consider it a win.
James is in Switzerland now, working at CERN as part of his graduate work, and won't be back until mid-November. So long-distance becomes even longer... or more distant... however you say it. Skype is an incredibly useful invention, however. In the meantime, he did lend me an external hard-drive with a nice media collection, so I've been taking some advantage of that. Mainly, I've been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is my favorite of the Star Trek series. I started from the third season, which is where all the Dominion stuff starts and the plot gradually gains continuity. I love the way the series foreshadows itself at times, although part of that is just the pride I get for recognizing the foreshadowing.
Greg has been playing Star Trek Online recently. He's shown me some of it and often tries to convince me to play it as well, but as I watch him play the game, I find myself more or less uninterested. I could see myself enjoying messing around with character creation or just exploring some of the areas and being amused by various references to little details from the series, but I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy the actual gameplay, at least in the long-term. So I'm hesitant of the whole notion. Besides, at this time, you can only play as the Federation and the Klingons, and if I were going to play a Star Trek game, my first choice of race to play as would be the Romulans. And my second choice would probably be Cardassians. So if they introduce the Romulans as playable characters sometime, I might be more tempted by the game. Maybe.
I've been playing WoW, but in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated. I got my shaman to 80, which leaves two classes I still want to get 80 with, my hunter and my druid. However, instead of playing much on either of those characters, I've been leveling an undead rogue, which was rather unexpected since rogues and I do not always get along. I started playing the character mostly because I like being able to pick my own lockboxes and so it would be nice to have a rogue on each server I play. I also rather miss Horde, as I haven't leveled a Horde character much in a long time. And I don't know if they've made rogues easier to play over the years or if I've just improved in my skill at playing a rogue, but it's certainly not quite as painful an experience as I remember (once I got past the hurdle of the lower levels, where rogues simply don't have enough truly useful skills to survive many tricky situations). I just never thought that if I got attached to a new alt, that it would be a rogue... at least not until I played several other classes of alts first.
It does figure that now that I'm back to school, I'd get into all sorts of games and series to watch again, whereas when I had more free time in the summer, I found it hard to entertain myself at times, for whatever reason. So now I feel like I have so little time for all the things I want to do. I do multitask sometimes by playing WoW while listening to DS9 episodes, though. Sometimes I feel as though I've gotten so trained and used to multitasking that doing only one thing at a time can make me a little bored. That sounds like it could be a bad thing, potentially, but such a thing seems to be a side-effect of the Digital Age in which we live. I wonder if the younger generations have it even worse now.