More identity-defining purchases
Feb. 24th, 2007 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanThis past week, I finally got around to spending my birthday money from back in November (and a chunk of my first TA paycheck), replenishing the apartment's arsenal of nonstick skillets and clearing out two of the major categories on my wish list: Judaica, and video games.
I was going to get myself a Wii, but they're still flying off the shelves like they had wings, and costing an arm and a leg online, so instead I picked up a few used gamecube games I'd been meaning to get when I got a paycheck: Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Pikmin 2, and Star Fox: Assault.
Let me tell you about Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. It's exactly what it sounds like — a video game set in the universe of the licensed Star Wars Lego models. It's a perfectly designed game for little kids — the combat is simple, you can't really die, the characters are adorable (they're Lego minifigs, of course they're adorable!), and so forth. And, OMG, it's the best game ever. The puzzles, where you use your Jedi characters' Force powers to rebuild the Lego objects in the environment, are really cute. The combat system is simple, but it's not stupid — there's just one attack button, but timing matters, especially when it comes to deflecting blaster bolts back at an enemy, so combat isn't just button-mashing. I wouldn't call it a challenging game, by any stretch, but it's just so much fun!
In the Judaica department, I finally got around to getting a mezuzah (just one, for the front door — I donated what it would have cost to get them for the rest of the doors in the apartment to charity instead), which I will put up real soon now. I also bought a lot of Jewish books:
I was going to get myself a Wii, but they're still flying off the shelves like they had wings, and costing an arm and a leg online, so instead I picked up a few used gamecube games I'd been meaning to get when I got a paycheck: Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Pikmin 2, and Star Fox: Assault.
Let me tell you about Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. It's exactly what it sounds like — a video game set in the universe of the licensed Star Wars Lego models. It's a perfectly designed game for little kids — the combat is simple, you can't really die, the characters are adorable (they're Lego minifigs, of course they're adorable!), and so forth. And, OMG, it's the best game ever. The puzzles, where you use your Jedi characters' Force powers to rebuild the Lego objects in the environment, are really cute. The combat system is simple, but it's not stupid — there's just one attack button, but timing matters, especially when it comes to deflecting blaster bolts back at an enemy, so combat isn't just button-mashing. I wouldn't call it a challenging game, by any stretch, but it's just so much fun!
In the Judaica department, I finally got around to getting a mezuzah (just one, for the front door — I donated what it would have cost to get them for the rest of the doors in the apartment to charity instead), which I will put up real soon now. I also bought a lot of Jewish books:
- Magickal Judaism, a book on being Jewish and pagan by someone I know from a Jewish/pagan email list (much like that email list in book form, a good read, but a bit too frankly heretical for my taste);
- a collection of Reb. Nachman's stories, classics of Hasidic folklore (and a must-read if I really want to call myself a storyteller);
- R. Jill Hammer's Jewish Book of Days, a collection of folklore tidbits associated with the days of the Hebrew calendar year;
- Swimming in the Sea of Talmud, a sort of Talmud overview/primer (much more useful for a novice to have in his personal collection than an actual volume of Talmud — around the time of my bar mitzvah, I expressed an interest to learn more about Talmud, and the volume that I was subsequently given sat on my shelf untouched for 15 years before I donated it to Brandeis's beit midrash last semester);
- R. Heschel's The Sabbath, a beloved, classic paean to the Jewish idea of sacred time.
