I have so many things to cover in this post. I’m a list person, so here we go, in no particular order:

• Dragon Age II. I was really looking forward to this game, having LOVED the previous Dragon Age. It was the best game I had played in ages. It offered genuinely rewarding relationships with well-written characters that I came to really care about (this sounds lame, but if you played it you know what I mean). Dragon Age II doesn’t have the same character quality. Even Anders, my funny sidekick from the Awakening expansion, is a total drag in this game.
  Technically, the game menus are better and a lot of the models look much, much cooler (Flemeth! Qunari!). On the other hand, I am really bummed that you can’t inspect items before looting them. It’s a mixed bag all around but I will hold off final judgement until I beat it.
• Illuminated Manuscripts. I am enrolled in a short UCLA Extension course about Illuminated Manuscripts and have been having a great time looking at tons of images and learning about the bookmaking process. The period of handwritten books spanned over a thousand years – twice the time we’ve been printing books on a printing press. I spent today at the Getty’s current manuscripts exhibition. Check out their interactive book!
• World of Warcraft. I canceled my account (temporarily) – in the 4 months since Cataclysm, I’ve found myself with less and less time to play. Work has been CRAZY busy and I only have time in my life for one game at a time. Console games have been filling that slot for the last few weeks. I definitely plan to activate it again if things slow down a bit, but right now I can’t justify the subscription fee if I’m not playing. It does make me quite sad to abandon Sisterbeth just as she geared up for heroics
• Reality is Broken. Haven’t had much time to read lately, but this book is extremely interesting. Speaking of WoW, here’s some food for thought:
  

  It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft…you get a grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours – or 5.93 million years…By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as we’ve spent evolving as a species.

By the way, I’m sick of filtering spam so I decided to shut down comments. If you need me, you know where to find me!