
Wondering where the ’60s went? Just look at that screencap. This week’s Star Trek Re-Watch is “Elaan of Troyius,” a kind of cross between the Helen of Troy story and Antony and Cleopatra–only with skimpier outfits and even more chauvinism. Hoorah!

Assassin’s Creed 2 might be a perfect game.
It’s entirely not the kind of game I generally play. I prefer RPGs (mostly Japanese), and am just not very interested in combat-oriented games. Action-adventures like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Prince of Persia rely less on combat than they do on puzzle-solving and creative thinking, so they appeal to me in ways that, say, God of War or Devil May Cry don’t. But Assassin’s Creed 2 is special.
I watched the boyfriend play the first Assassin’s Creed game and while I loved the characters and the setting, the gameplay was too repetitive and the story too obvious and simple for my tastes. It was a fun game to watch someone else play but not compelling enough for me to pick up. When the sequel came out I expected the same, but I was wrong. Instead I fell in love. Read more »

In honor of Christmas Eve, I’m going to…catch up on all the things I need to catch up on! The Star Trek Re-Watch has passed “The Tholian Web,” which made absolutely no narrative sense to me, and “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which is just ghastly from beginning to end. I don’t know that I can ever watch that again, even in a fevered delirium with no other stimuli in sight.

Then there was “Wink of an Eye,” a solidly middle-of-the-bunch episode save for the irredeemably immoral ending. That said, I’d have rather watched it again than see “The Empath,” this week’s outing, in which big-headed sadistic aliens torture our heroes in order to drive a helpless empath to suicide. Can we just skip to the movies?
December has been an insanely busy month for me so I’m looking forward to relaxing a bit more in the new year. Happy holidays to all those that celebrate such things, and I hope the 2011 brings good things to all.

The Thanksgiving weekend has made me fall behind on so many things… Let’s see–there have been two new Star Trek Re-Watches over at The Viewscreen: “Day of the Dove” and “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” The former is kind of like an afterschool special (war is wrong!), while the latter has some gorgeous sets and a nice McCoy story but weak motivation and plotting. Coming up tomorrow: “The Tholian Web.”
The week leading up to Thanksgiving was Harry Potter-themed, incidentally. It was my sister’s sixteenth birthday and I promised to make her a cake. I enjoy making fun cakes so her request for a Harry Potter-themed one (white cake, strawberry icing–yay for parameters) had me in a tizzy1. A real challenge! I cycled through so many ideas–a Hogwarts crest? A caketopper of Neville and Nagini? But in the end, my fondant wound up too soft for a cake-topper, my experimental strawberry cake came out too dense and weird, and my food coloring was so shockingly pastel that at 10pm (after a full six hours of baking and decorating) I had to scrap the cake and start from scratch. The last thing I wanted was to give her a Cake Wreck. I was too ambitious. This time I used the fondant only for little decorations, and settled on the horcruxes as decorative elements around the HP logo. Can you identify them?2 Read more »