Morning Ramble 338: Star Wars, SMITE, and Bates Motel

Today’s morning ramble takes a look at Star Wars day, my plans for SMITE, and the series finale of Bates Motel and I suppose it reflects beginnings and endings.

Star Wars

May the Fourth be with you…Happy Star Wars day! The past few years have been great for SW fans with the release of new movies and comics and I’ve been a huge fan since I waited in line so many years ago to see the original. More to the point, I’m so pleased with Disney’s running of the franchise that the pain of baby Anakin’s acting in The Phantom Menace is almost gone from memory. Looking to add new memories of the Star Wars universe, I’ve begun looking at the canonical timeline of Star Wars media that compiles the new history that has been named official since Disney’s reboot. There’s a bunch of cool comics, novels, and animation that I’ve yet to partake of and I’m getting the itch to start expanding my knowledge of the universe. With May 4th highlighting Star Wars, I think I’ll use this as a impetus to begin understanding this world that George Lucas create better – but then I’ve had grand plans before…we’ll see how this proceeds as the month continues.

SMITE Plans for May

This has been a fun change from League of Legends and I’m gonna stick with it in May so my plan is to work on an achievement: Earn mastery in 10 different gods. I’ve already mastered 3 gods (Ra, Neith, and Medusa) and I’ve got a few that I’ve started in on so I think this should be an attainable goal for the month. One thing that makes leveling up easy in SMITE is the bonus you get for the first win of the day – you can get it for each game mode so that’s a bunch of bonuses. Right now, I’m focusing on leveling up Kukuklan and I’m almost to mastery 1. From my understanding, there’s not really anything you ‘get’ for reaching a particular mastery level, but I think you need to have a certain number of gods mastered before you can play ranked once you reach level 30. I think this seems to be a decent way of ensuring you at least have ‘some’ knowledge of the game before playing ranked. I’ve spent too many ranked games in League with people who simply purchased the minimum number of champions to get into ranked play – its not fun. Perhaps the ultimate restriction would be to require mastering the god before being able to use them in ranked play, but that’s wishful thinking.

Bates Motel

I watched the series finale for Bates Motel last night and it was great. It was a good finishing touch for such a well written series and I really enjoyed the whole thing. Usually I procrastinate when it comes to finales, particularly with shows I enjoy, but I had to rip the bandaid off this one since I needed to know how it ended. And I was not disappointed, though I did kinda think they might lay the blame for all the killing at Romero’s feet. In any case, I’m glad they went the alternative story route to differentiate from the classic Hitchcock. Psycho was so good that to copy the story would never have done it justice, whereas the adjustments made by Carlton Cuse and company worked well for me – though I’m not sure why they went with Rihanna for the Marion Crane role. The finale brought a nice completion to a well told story and while I’m sad it’s over, I’m glad I watched and followed the series.