What I'm Playing Mondays: Skyrim

So I'm working on picking a couple of days to do themed post and this is my first foray into this experiment. Hopefully this will spurn me to have more text in my blog since it seems to be mostly mobile pics and book reviews as of late. My first themed post I thought of is "What I'm Playing Mondays" (as you might have guessed by the title of this post).  Most of my videogaming happens on the weekends so I figure that monday might be a good day to do a geeky post about whatever games I played over the past weekend.  Since I don't know how this experiment will go, I'm not going to bother making another category for it, and Geeky Stuff is probably fitting enough for the time being ;-) So the game I've been playing recently is Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I was lucky enough to get this from GameFly not too long after it came out.  I had heard a lot about it, but had to admit that I was a bit wary after I heard it came from Bethesda.  Bethesda is the same studio that released FallOut 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, two of the buggiest games have ever played (to the point of completely locking up my PS3 every hour or so).  Luckily, I have had no issues with Skyrim so hopefully Bethesday decided to start doing some testing on their games before releasing them into the wild. One of the prominent things I heard about this game could be summed up in the alternate title "Skyrim: Life sucker".  I can definitely understand this after playing for a bit.  Pairing such an expansive land with so many details (e.g. most books you find have at least a few pages of actual text, most completely irrelevant to your quests) definitely gives the player tons to do / fiddle with / waste time on.  It is all too easy to start messing with your alchemy station (to make potions/poisons) or cooking pot (yes, you can make a slew of different recipes) and realize you just spent half an hour making venison stew or some potion that does half of what the potions you already had did. I haven't played too long, but I've already been amazed with the number of paths down which you can take your character.  You have a ridiculous number of perks and skills that you can choose to enhance and there are random changes that you discover during your quests (e.g. my character just recently became a werewolf!).  I have been spending most of my time with myriad side quests (as I like to do so I am better equipped for the main quests) and have been developing quite the little archer/mage.  I am not yet sure whether I prefer it to the Dragon Age series, but it is definitely looking to give it a run for its money. Now to see if "What I'm Playing Mondays" get bogged down with multiple Skyrim updates over the next few weeks, haha.  

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I realized when I saw this on our reading list that I had seen the Disney movie version, but I had never actually read this book! It is super short (read the entire thing on a flight from Salt Lake to Atlanta) so it was a very easy read (and a quick check on our reading list). It is a fun, psychedelic adventure where I can definitely see the appeal of doing an animated version. Definitely worth the hour or two :-) We have the Kindle version, so the title is a little different, but this was as close I could find on Goodreads.

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I probably could have just written a single Harry Potter review and just copied and pasted it each time I finished another one, haha. This is the first that really starts having some length (over 700 pages) so it is a little more of an obligation once you start reading it, but it is still super easy to read and easy to get lost in the story so it still just flys by! This is the last that is actually part of our reading list, so I will have to fit in 5-7 as my off books from now on. As with the previous books, it has been really cool to have my memory refreshed about the way the actual story went since the movies are more prominent in my mind. I look forward to the next one!

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From Park City to the airport.

It has been an awesome trip!

Melted Snowdrops

Melted Snowdrops

Beer sampler at Squatters? Yes please!

Beautiful panorama from the mountain

Let it snow!

View from the condo in Park City! Woot!

Poached egg (somewhat) success!

Looks like a good way to start the weekend to me!

Reading List - Year in Review

I could have sworn that I did a 1 year wrap-up post with regard to our reading list, but it appears that I am mistaken because I can't seem to find it!  So we decided on the reading list that we use almost 2 years ago (exactly 2 tomorrow) and began this reading adventure. On the spreadsheet (yes, I created a fancy google doc to track our progress) I have a little table to fill in our number of books read each year, but I didn't separate them so the numbers comprise our totals between list and non-list books for the first year. We decided to track everything since we knew this list is probably going to take the better part of a decade to finish, and there is no way we would want to be restricted to just list books for that long! So here was our breakdown from year 1. Me - 7 books, 2009 pages MC - 6 books, 1771 pages While those numbers may not look too impressive, 9 of those months were the ones leading up to our wedding so we had some pretty important distractions :-) I am happy to say that our year-to-date totals are a little better. Me - 22 books (11 from the list), 6905 pages MC - 23 books (10 from the list), 7088 pages As of late, I try my best to alternate between list and non-list books, and the next 4 or so that I have planned will keep with that trend.  I am shooting for reading at least 1 book a month this year, but we will see how it goes considering I also plan on defending my dissertation this year (someone told me you have to, like, prepare a lot for those or something). My other goal is also to tackle one of the monsters on our list.  We have several 1000+ pagers and it would be nice to not save all of them for last. ;-) We'll see how it goes!

Bowlegs 5k

Nice to get back into the groove of the race scene!  We have been running pretty consistently as of late, so I was ready to start running some races again.  Knowing races are coming up are always a good motivator for keeping with the exercise! It went fairly well, though MC had to keep reigning me in because I just kept speeding up for some reason.  As I have a lot of holiday weight I am just in the beginning of getting rid of, so I would have very likely struggled had I been left to my own devices. ;-) Altogether, it was a pretty good first race of 2012! It was also my first run trying out the RunKeeper Android app.  I didn't look through the settings so it turned out she was pretty chatty during the run, but nothing too intrusive.  Below is the snapshot from the site. Always fun to try something new! 32:49 MC - 32:49  

Machine of Death edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories about People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was turned on to this book by the first editor, Ryan North, as he is also the author of one of my favorite web comics, Dino Comics. It is a collection of submitted stories all based on the premise of a machine being invented that could use a simple blood test to predict exactly how a person would die. It was usually very short and ambiguous (e.g. "old age" could mean you literally die of old age or an old person runs you over with their car). Hundreds of people wrote short stories stemming from this idea. I gave the book 4 stars because, as you can imagine when faced with the writings of over 30 authors, some will align with a certain reader better than others. Some stories I tore through and thoroughly enjoyed, while others were mildly interesting but didn't quite captivate me. Some followed story lines that I could have predicted, and others took the premise in directions I never would have thought about. Altogether, it was a very enjoyable read and very interesting to see so many different takes based on such an intriguing premise. View all my reviews