Equality

I've been thinking about this post off and on all day.  I meant to post it sooner, before the election was announced but I just didn't have enough time.  Today, Barack Obama was elected the President of the United States and I couldn't be happier.  I think that President Obama will do everything he can to bring about real change in our nation.  A lot of people *coughplumbercough* seem to complain about higher taxes and inexperience, but I think both of those things will work to his credit.  Higher taxes for the rich will bring our country more revenue while taking some of the burden off the people that are working paycheck to paycheck.  His experience is what we need leading our country, we don't need somebody that's been in Washington for 3 decades that's just working for the lobbyists and special interests, we've got a President whose special interest is the people of his country and this will really move our country forward.

Unfortunately, it also looks like Prop 8 is gonna go through, which is a real shame.  I thought one of the basic tenants the US was founded on was that the majority cannot take away rights from the minority, but I guess that all goes out the window today.  This was the first case that rights of a minority group have been voted away and it's really pathetic.  I don't think this is going to be permanent in our nation, eventually homosexuals will have equal rights to marry in every state and the children of that time will look back on this and scoff at the bigotry and discrimination that led to the elimination of rights.

Bloggity, Blog, Blog, Blog

Why do I stop blogging?  I suppose I don't really have anything interesting to say, but then again, nobody even reads this thing, so that's a pretty flimsy excuse.  I've always seen blogging as more of a therapeutic thing than anything else, I know lots of people get 'famous' on the internet with their blog, but that just never seemed to be very possible for some schmuck in a small, white, Republican town like Glendora.  I don't really have any kind of an answer on why I do this, or why I don't do it, other than sometimes I feel like putting my thoughts into some kind of written document to be saved for the foreseeable future.

School is pretty blah right now, ALL of my professors suck and I'm really glad that three of the four classes I'm taking right now are coming to an end.  Only my DreamWeaver course wasn't a pain in the ass, but it was so short I'd have to call it pointless, as I was telling Diana, I probably could have learned everything we did in one day just playing around with DW on my own.  But then again, I only took it in order to make the twelve units I need for the insurance thang anyway.  Speaking of, I should probably start trying to get a job again in order to start paying bills and/or saving money.  I think I should be getting a check from DeVry within the next few weeks, so that should hold me over until then, maybe I should just get some easy job just to make a few bucks.  But that goes against my whole concept of working, although that's another blog entry altogether.

Also, Windows Live Writer is fan-frickin-tastic.  For some reason I feel better blogging in a program that posts to the internet for me than putting it straight on the internet.  Yeah, I'm nuts like that.

135 Days

Well, it's certainly been awhile, hasn't it? For some reason I just haven't been in the mood to blog much. I think part of it is because of Twitter; I can constantly keep everybody updated on what I'm doing, so why should I sit down and bang out a couple hundred words when I've already done it throughout the day? And I know I'm not the only one too, I've read a couple blogs about how full fledged blogging just doesn't have the fluidness of microblogging throughout the day. Ok, I think I've hit the quota for internet buzz words in one post so I should move on to something else.

It's been about a third of a year since I last blogged, a lot's changed and a lot's still the same. Diana and I are still good, I'm still in school, and I'm still, uh... between jobs. I had a slight school crisis a couple months ago, I wasn't sure what I was going to do about staying at DeVry or if I should find another school, maybe even change my major. I'm still mulling things over, but I'm leaning towards finishing at DeVry and doing what I can to focus on MMO development. I'm playing Warhammer Online instead of WoW and so far it's been great. Kaitlyn got married yesterday (2 days ago now, actually) which was pretty unbelievable, I never would have thought she'd be the first to get hitched out of my friends.

I guess that's enough of a post for now. See you soon?

U(boo)ntu

So the Ubuntu thing didn't end up working out. Apparently my shitty old comp doesn't have enough RAM to run the installer, even though it meets the specs for the OS. I might try to find another Distro that can support it, but so far, XP: 1, Linux: 0.

Humanity to Others

After having a discussion about Linux in my networking class this week I've decided to take the plunge into a world that isn't Microsoft. I've heard a lot about Ubuntu recently and heard that it's really good, but the thing that made my decision was called Xubuntu, which should improve the performance of the computers it's on, which I think will help a lot on the PoS comp I'm gonna install it on. I'm pretty excited, cause I've been interested in Linux for a long time now, and actually installing it should be a neat experience. There's also the fact that it's totally free and comes loaded with free, open source software that just makes ya feel good inside. I'll update later with how it goes.

Respect the Narrative Flow

Whew, long time no blog. I think I've started other blogs with that phrase. Anyway, I haven't really had time to blog, or the pressing urge to, so I kinda didn't. I haven't exactly been busy with anything important though. For the last... while I've been leveling up a prot pally in WoW and watching Buffy/Angel again. Having a laptop has freed me of the confines of my room to explore the exciting world of the living room, which has a DVD player in it. The pally's gonna hit 70 within a day or so, and I've been having a blast tanking every Outland instance so far, but my guild is again starting to let me down. A month ago we had a solid group of people leveling to 70 for instances and maybe even raids, but now it's about four of us regularly and a handful of others, without any hope of progression. Nothing scares me more than a lifetime of PUGs. There's also the fact that Age of Conan just came out and Warhammer in the near future.

In the real world I've got two super dull new classes. I was really looking forward to the AI class I was gonna take but it was canceled b/c there was nobody enrolled. My networking class isn't really so bad I'm just not overly interested in the subject. GSP130, however, is the dullest class I've ever taken in any school... ever. The subject matter is about as interesting as fish scales and the professor makes me want to die every time he mispronounces a word. The good thing is that they're both half over and I can get out of there and have a whole week break.

Next week happens to be my 22nd birthday. That weekend we're going to the Stone Brewery in Escondido and then going back to my house for a party. Diana's taking care of the planning so it should be fun. I guess that's about all that's going on, maybe I'll blog again soon?

Been Awhile

Again I go forever and a day between blog posts. This is kinda surprising because there have actually been a decent number of things going on.

Probably the largest event was going camping at Yosemite with Diana, Robbie, and Jen. Yosemite was amazing and made for a spectacular camping trip. The nice thing about going with Robbie and Jen is that they like to hike a lot, so there wasn't much sitting around throughout the weekend. The highlight was on Saturday when we hiked to the top of Nevada Falls. This was easily the most strenuous hike we had ever done and it took us the better part of the day to get up there, but the work was very much worth it. On the way down we got to take a much more scenic and gentle route, which gave us a nice contrast to the 7 million stairs we climbed to get up there.

After this I started a new session at school which has so far been about as boring as watching grass grow. The class I was really looking forward to, GSP290: Artificial Intelligence, was canceled due to not enough people signing up, so I'm stuck in the stupid classes for now. There's also a new GSP club starting up, which I'm not sure if I'm going to join yet or not.

Internet wise, I've signed up for some new sites that have taken up a lot of my time. I finally signed up for (and kept) a FaceBook account, which so far has been way better than myspace. I'm using a new site that hosts flash games and records high scores and little badge things, called Kongregate. For a long time I've had an account on Remember The Milk, which is just an internet To Do list, but the last few days I've actually been filling it out and making sure that I follow through with things, which has been a big help to my lack of motivation. Until just a few minutes ago I had been using the Firefox 3 beta client, but I ended up going back to FF2 just for the Google Toolbar which I love so much. FF3 is gonna be awesome when it's released and websites actually start supporting it, but I just got sick of having to switch over to IE just to use certain pages, like DeVry's eCollege.

I guess that's about it for now, I covered a lot of topics and I'm about ready for bed.

Simulated Reality

For the last 7 weeks I've been in a group called Locker15 to develop a training simulation. On the first day of class Professor Maynes picked myself and Anthony to be the two team captains for the project. After that we picked out teams, picked our names and then went to work figuring out what our simulation would be about. We chose to do ours in a GTA/Crazy Taxi fashion where you'd have a top down view and would need to pick up patients and take them to a hospital. We got a chance to use Game Maker, and even though it's super limited we managed to pull off some really neat things and even though I was skeptical from the beginning our simulation turned out pretty damn cool. I'm not sure how much it would actually teach somebody, but it was fun and it looked nice. After we had our presentations today we still had a couple hours in class so we did some four player Wii Sports and the Prof even got down on it. Overall this class has been a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to next semester.

Marching On

Wow, March wrapped itself up pretty damn quick, didn't it? This whole year's been going by pretty fast, it's hard to believe it's already a quarter of the way over. Wow, I was really inspired to blog and now that I've started it I just can't get it going.

Let's see, after Sweeney last week we had a party at my house. It was a pretty standard affair with the usual people, plus some cameos from the UC kids since they were on spring break. The mood was pretty chill, we had a couple good Smash brawls before I ended up passing out and making everybody go home, but all in all I think good times were had. This past week has been pretty shitty because I've been sick since Monday. Coughing, sneezing, fevering, the whole thing, it sucked. I started actually feeling better today but that's when I ended up going to the doctor to get some meds. Unfortunately I went to the wrong one and we might have to pay more for it, which pisses me off because I generally hate privatized health care anyway and this just gives me a personal reason for it. Now Diana's really sick so this weekend looks pretty uneventful as I'll probably just do what I can to take care of her.

I do have a lot of schoolwork to take care of though, so maybe that's for the best. I've got two weeks left in my simulation programming class so our game needs to be totally wrapped up real soon. I've got a whole issue with that project, but that blog can be saved for another time. Well, guess I got through that alright.

Attend The Tale

Way back in December, Diana brought me to see the movie version of Sweeney Todd. I didn't really think much of it going in, just another overly goth Tim Burton movie, but it really blew my expectations away. After Kara saw it to similar results, she pointed out that the broadway version was going to be in LA at the end of March and that we should go. After way more planning and postponing that it should have taken the tickets were purchased and Diana, Kara, Jason, and myself hoofed it out to LA to see the show. I went expecting greatness and left with even more. It was a really cool production, it all took place on one stage and the only thing that moved around were some chairs and a coffin, but they really did a lot with what they had. The actors were also playing the instruments for the show, which was really neat. I don't know if that's standard in the higher up broadway performances or even common, but I hadn't seen it and I thought it was cool. After that we went to eat and Jason and Kara came over to continue the musical theme with "Once More, With Feeling" which is the best musical ever as far as my totally biased oinion goes. A little while after that Jason and Kara took off and now I'm blogging. I wonder if I should play Warcraft....

Sako's Automotive

well my blog break turned into a blog hiatus for some reason. i'm waiting at Sako's Automotive right now so i guess this is as good a time as any other. The last few weeks have been okay, i've played way more WoW than i probably should have, but my lock is 70 and i'm gettin some welfare epics. Diana and i had another rough patch but that can be behind us now. Last night i listened to a recording of the Buffy reunion which was pretty cool, it wasn't the best quality but it beats nothing. I guess i was a little disappointed with it, but that could be just because i had built it up in my head so much, but either way is was kinda neat. Now my hands are hurting from the texting so i'll be playing DS till this is done.

Desert Storm

What a night! We had a small bonfire yesterday which went pretty well, but when we got to the beach we found out that there was a ton of wind, so we couldn't really hang out outside for very long due to being sandblasted. Once the sun started going down we got the fire going and all was well, except for the wind and the sand still. We had some smores and some laughs up until Albert decided to start throwing model rocket engines in the fire. The first one he didn't even tell anybody and it almost hit me in the face while I was roasting a marshmallow and then after that another one hit Diana on the leg, but thankfully she wasn't burned. He also through a bottle of lighter fluid in the fire before that. I had a lot of respect for Albert before this, but this made him seem like a fucking moron. After that we left to get something to eat but it didn't really work out so we just went back to my house and got some pizza. Everybody got pretty shitty and we played some Smash and some poker before everybody left around two. All in all it was a good night.

Oops

I broke my blog-a-day rule by like, a lot. I guess March just wasn't meant to be as bloggiful as February was. I've been doing alright though, for the most part. I think I blame WoW for making me not blog as much, seeing as I've been playing it a lot recently. Today's been WoW-free though, so go me! I do have class tomorrow though, so I should be heading to bed soonish. I tried to reset my sleeping schedule last weekend by staying up all night and then going to bed early, but I ended up passing out around 7am, I guess I'm not as tough as I used to be. I guess it's working out alright for now though. I did get Robbie to play WoW though, so I've been hanging out with him in the Ghostlands the last few days. He's kind of a newb, but I think he's got potential. I'm playing a mage with him and I've already got him to not attack sheeps! Anyway, I think I'm gonna get something to eat.

Sun

Mornings suck, there's birds singing and so much light it hurts my eyes, I wanna sleep.

Chosen

Diana and I finished watching all of Buffy the other night and had watched Angel all the way through just before that. Although she did it mostly to make me happy I think she enjoyed it and really liked a couple of characters. We originally started watching Angel because I was trying to get her into Buffy and the Jossverse in general, but she just didn't care for the character of Buffy in general. Not wanting to give up I suggested that we should watch Angel, because she really liked that character and it's just as good in overall quality. In between Buffy and Angel we also watched Firefly and Serenity for a break, which was nice. Watching Buffy and Angel been such a regular thing for us for the past several months that I'm not sure what's going to take it's place, but we'll find something, maybe even get into some shows that I haven't been interested in.

Wolves At The Gate #1

Happy B Day everybody. Issue 12 starts off a new story arc written by former Buffy scribe Drew Goddard. I'd say it was a pretty good read. Some things were surprising and some weren't. I liked Xander's "Merciful Zeus!" exclamation from OMWF, actually, that whole was hilarious. I guess I thought I'd have more to say about it when I started writing this, so much for my career as a comic reviewer.

Legacy

I just spent an hour fixing up my Legacy Scorecard instead of actually playing The Sims, bleh.

Locked In

The last few nights I've been playing my lock. I haven't really talked to Jenn or anything, so I'm not sure what she thinks is up, but it seems like she's usually busy so I don't think it'll be a big deal. The lock's been fun so far, I've still had shit luck as far as instances go, but at least I've been able to blow up some newbs. I can't really complain so far, and it's been fun to be back on the WoW track.

My new semester starts up tomorrow and I'm pretty excited. DeVry switched to two eight week sessions now so I've only got one class, which is GSP280: Intro to Simulation Design, with the same prof and just about the same class as my GSP240 last semester. Having half the time means we'll have to pick up the work load, but it should be a good time. If only I knew where the hell we were meeting.

Red-Green

I just read some neat stuff on colorblindness. I'm happy to say that I'm not quite as bad as the average color blind person, but I'm still messed up. For instance:

Did you know there's a 45 in there? I didn't until I saw what it looks like to normal folk. This site's got some cool stuff about how color blind people see the world and ways to change images so that we can see kind of what they're supposed to look like.

A Hole In the World

" This goes all the way through to the other side. So, I figure, there's a bloke somewhere around New Zealand standing on a bridge like this one, looking back down at us. All the way down. There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known." - Spike

I don't really have anything to relate that quote to, I just like it. The other night was pretty good. I hung out with Diana during the day and then some other people I'm fond of into the morning. We didn't do anything special, but it was nice getting to see people that I don't see often enough. Today was a little more downtrodden. Diana had some stuff we needed to work through, but it was nice to just talk. Now I think I'm going back to FreeTime, cause it's more interesting than WoW right now. For tomorrow I've gotta get my FAFSA done cause it needed to be finished by today and hope to find some way to occupy myself while Diana's at school.

March

Well, February was an interesting month. All in all I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Things are going well with Diana and at school, as well as with the rest of things. I still need to get a job but other than that I think I'm doing a lot better. It was full of blogging too, so maybe that helped? I always thought it might but after melo and live journal I just couldn't sit down and blog much, but I managed to get one out each day for the second half of February, which added up to almost as much as I posed throughout 2007. Will it continue for March?

Leap Year

I can only legitimately title a post "Leap Year" once every four years so I didn't wanna pass up this chance. So far I haven't really done much, I was up late playing The Sims, the second generation of my legacy was popped out and she's now a happy child. The legacy thing overall is going well and it really does give me a reason to play the game. The stupid thing just froze while I was at a community lot though, so I'm getting over my anger at that with a blog.

Free Time

I haven't had a chance to post about Free Time, the new Sims 2 expansion, yet. I guess the main reason for this is that I've been too busy playing it and WoW again. So far FT has been pretty sweet. They added a lot to the game instead of just a new gimmick, although I guess the hobby thing is kinda just a big gimmick, but it comes with a lot more depth than the other ones. Before FT I could take any family and do my usual routine to have them making money hands over fist in no time, but now my time is a little more stretched and I can't just do the same thing everyday, which is nice. Also in the game your sims can play The Sims 3, and if it looks as awesome as it does in the game it should be awesome. It's Maxis though, so of course it will be awesome. WoW's also been working out better than I had thought it would, Jenn and I got a chance to play together the other night and it was fun, she's busy a lot with her raiding guild and assface, but that leaves me time to play on Ravenholdt and The Sims, so I don't mind much. The druid's fun and I can't wait to try out the alliance outland quests. Now I'm gonna go play one of those.

Elundil

Rawr
Zangarmarsh
Armory

Waste of Time

I was going to write a reflection paper on my CIS247 course like I did for my GSP courses, but I don't really see the point. It didn't cover much that I didn't already know, and most of the time I spent helping other students. I took the final today, drove out there and finished it in about 15 minutes, which is annoying b/c I spent more time in the car than taking the final but she wouldn't let us take it at home cause we might cheat or something, not like it was hard anyway. But whatever, I'm done with it, too bad I've got the same prof for 246 next semester =/

I guess this is a reflection paper after all.

New Shit

I finally did some stuff with my sidebar. I signed up for a Digg and Del.icio.us accounts and posted them over there to display news and sites I look at and all that. I also added a couple other blogs and I hope to add more soon. I think that's all I've got for now.

In The Middle

I just aced my first final of the day and now I'm in the computer lab studying for my next one. I ended up with a 98% in the class, which is really good, but I'm kinda down because I spent 3-4 hours last night doing homework and a reflection paper that would have put me over 100%, but since I didn't turn them in before the test I didn't get credit for them. It's not really a big deal, on transcripts an A is an A, but I'm pretty sure the prof thought I just blew off the last assignment because I had my grade padded enough that it wouldn't matter, but I really did do them! Anyway, I've gotta get back to studying, this next final requires a lot more studying than the last one did.

Reflection Papers

As an extra credit assignment in two of my classes I had to write a short paper about what I got out of the class and how I felt the class worked. I wanted to post them here because... well because this is my blog and I can.

GSP220 Math for Game Programming:

Going into this class I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I was hoping to take out of it some of the math concepts that I would need to program games but I ended up with a lot more. I had taken up to Pre-Cal in High School so none of the concepts were really new to me, although I did need a refresher for some, but I learned a lot about how they relate to game programming. One of my favorite things was working from the first couple weeks on our Point class, then building on that for the Vector class, and finally using that along with our Matrix class to play with the shapes for the final project. I had heard the class was a lot different with other professors and I think that our class got a lot out of it that wouldn’t normally have been offered. Although this was not a C++ class and a lot of what was going on in the program we looked at was over my head, having a chance to put my hands in it and play with what’s going on was very interesting. Not to mention the things we were able to do with what we learned about matrices was just awesome.

I was very comfortable with the pacing and structure of the class, but I think that was largely due to having a basic understanding of the math and C++ coming into the class. If I had to find a flaw in the class I think it would be that some people were overwhelmed by what was going on. To improve this, the school could make a C++ class a pre- or even a co-requisite for this class. All in all though, I got a lot out of this class and had a lot of fun doing it, I’m very glad to have taken it when I did.

GSP240 Fundamentals of Game Design:

Game Design was the first class I’ve taken at DeVry that I was really excited about when I signed up for it. Having a chance to learn about the game development process was a very interesting process. In addition to all the technical terms for things that I already knew I learned a lot about what goes into making games in a professional environment and the kind of effort that needs to be put into each and every game, even though most of the games that will be pitched won’t ever be made. Professor Maynes also brought a lot to the class that had nothing to do with the book, such as the importance of pitching the game and being confident in telling stories and presenting in front of a group in a highly stressful environment. Although I did know a lot of the concepts that were explained particularly in the last chapters that were covered in class, having an actual knowledge about it is better than the general understanding I had going into this. There was also a lot that had to do with the way levels are designed and the type of information that needs to be done before any work can start on a game.

My favorite part of the class was working on our own game as well as seeing everybody else’s presentations. Working on our game and being able to play off of each other’s ideas was a lot of fun and interesting to see what we came up with. The presentation itself was also an important learning process because the Professor gave the class as a whole feedback that I had never heard in a class before. Learning about what works and what doesn’t work in a Power Point presentation was a nice bonus to the other things I learned in the class. To improve the class I would have loved to have more time to spend tweaking and refining our game, including more than one presentation to see how everyone’s game changed over time, but that isn’t going to be possible with the semester changes that DeVry is adopting.

No Extra Credit

I missed an A in COLL148 by 10 points because the prof didn't add up my Extra Credit right. I hate her.

dr00d

My new Druid build

I've decided that I want to get back into WoW for sure. It may not last long, but I intend to play a druid. If things don't work out with that then I'll go back to my original idea of a Belf pally... again. The only problem is where to play this new Druid. I could always go back to Ravenholdt with Chuck and them, who apparently have a decent guild going now. But Chuck's a big fat Republican and not the best player, not to mention the server fucking sucks. Appolonius wants me to go back to Maelstrom, and I've already got a 20 something Druid there, so that's a bonus, but while I don't have anything against App, he's not my favorite person, and his gf is flat out annoying. My current choice is on Zangarmarsh with Jenn, but that comes with enough problems too. For one, Jenn and I aren't exactly close, we play at way different times, and I'm not even sure we'll ever get to play together, due to her being busy on her Shammy and her jealous, assface boyfriend thing. I also thought about asking what server Anthony from my school plays on, they seem like good guys and they do some casual raiding, which could be fun even though I wanna focus on PvP. Why do video games have to be such a pain in the ass?

Injustice

According to Access Services' Website, they have a vision. They accomplish this vision by "Providing quality, efficient and dependable ADA paratransit service." I may be crazy, but I don't think that quality, efficient and dependable service would leave a handicapped person in the cold just because they weren't waiting in the street when their transportation arrived nearly 20 minutes late. It's pretty appalling that they have such blatant disregard for their customers. The drivers won't go out of their way to find a passenger and usually late or early, making it almost impossible to go anywhere that requires an appointment, such as a doctor's office or, god forbid, most social events. I think the point of Access is to make handicapped people just stay at home. Access exists because a state law requires there to be some form of transportation for handicapped people but they really need to step up their service in order to represent the state in a positive way.

Who are you?

I'm bored. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I'm apprehensive about playing with Jenn again. I'm sad that my GSP classes are ending (crazy, eh?). I'm excited for my new GSP classes. I'm cold. I'm tired of Tara jumping all over everything. I'm having fun playing The Sims. I'm jonesing for Warcraft. I'm done with this post.

Weekend

Things I need to do this weekend:
-Write reflection papers for GSP 220 & 240.
-Evaluate CIS247 Proff
-Study for Finals
-Think of a way to get out of going to the VS launch on Wednesday
-Finish Uni to get ready for Free Time!

Meh

My friend Jenn came online today after I hadn't talked to her in a couple of months. Things with her have been kinda weird ever since I found out that she had been lying to everybody in our guild about something which I don't need to go into here, but needless to say this was not the most comfortable discussion I've ever had. Eventually we just stopped talking about what happened and we played WoW together for a little bit. I guess it wasn't so bad but I'm not sure if we can ever get back to that friendly place we were in before. Which is weird b/c we used to hang out a lot in the game, but then she started being super distant shortly before she moved and then told me what was really going on just before she moved and broke all communication. I guess I kinda wanna give her another chance b/c of the situation I was in with Diana and the fact that she forgave me, but this is a lot different. I can only imagine if I had told Diana that I was lying to her, then disappeared, then came back a year later and said "Let's be friends again!" what she'd have done to me. I dunno, I'm kinda jumbled with this and I wanted to get it off my chest.

My Legacy

I started the Martinez Legacy Challenge tonight. Shortly I'll be posting a link to my spreadsheet score card so that it will be trackable on the internets. I'm using some modified rules that I made myself, I don't have a problem with using a relationship decay mod and I'm using any items I feel like, although I'll do my best to resist using the inSIMinator. I've never really been big on money cheats, so I don't think that is gonna be an issue. I'm also starting a little early so that I can get my founder through college before Free Time comes out in a couple days, since I don't have any challenges that go along with that yet.
I also priced out my books for the next semester today and it came to just under $300 bucks on the school's site. Tomorrow I'll find em on Amazon used and compare the prices!

Gaming

It's starting to look like my gaming time's gonna be pretty full soon. The new Sims expansion coming out, Free Time, actually makes me wanna play the game again. And to celebrate, I'm gonna start a legacy family. I'm currently making up my own rules and point system because I think some of the other ones are a little too constricting. I'm also gonna make up some new rules that I think should have been included, like getting gold badges and whatnot. I also don't really care about using cheats, so I guess this is kind of just a way for me to keep track of what I do in the Sims. I'll probably get bored of it in not too long.

I'm also starting to get the WarCrack bug again but I'm not sure where I'm gonna end up playing. I'll keep you posted.

The Weight of the World

I'm finally done with my WaterWorld project. All in all it turned out a lot better than I was kinda fearing it would. The documentation turned out solid and even though we didn't have the best presentation, we didn't do bad, so I call it a win. Maynes was clear that even the best presentation was weak compared to what we could have done. I think he was kind of expecting that though because he more or less through us the assignment without even really telling us what we needed to have. People always say that the best way to learn to fly is without a safety net and that's pretty much what he did. Sure all of us could have done better, but what we ended up with was four solid game concepts and a shaky foundation for presentations that we could all improve upon. All in all I really enjoyed this semester even though I've been somewhat overloaded for the past week, Maynes really changed my mind about the standard of education at DeVry, you just gotta get the right prof.

Jukebox Hero

After playing Through the Fire and the Flames a couple times I think my fingers are going to fall off.

Another Bitchfest

The COLL presentation went better than I thought it would. Our presentation was still shitty cause the others were complete morons, but the other groups set the par so low our badness was actually a couple of notches above all the other groups today. The first group was a bunch of kids doing lowering the drinking age. These guys weren't bad and aside from a technical issue with their videos I'd say they were pretty solid. Next was a group about sex ed. I don't really know what their stance on the issue was b/c one girl was saying that teaching abstinence was the best way, the next girl said... something, I don't really know, the con side of their argument was a bunch of stories and then the guy literally saying "That's crazy." The last guy was also con and I really don't know what he was saying either, he just kinda rambled off some statistics and then said he was done. The funniest part was that their thing was just the four of them reading off of cards, they couldn't even manage to make a power point between themselves, which lead to theirs being the dullest thing I've seen in a long, long time. Next we were up, and even though it was short we had some good points and it sparked some decent discussion. The last group was about legalizing marijuana, and even though they had some valid points on the legalization, they didn't have any kind of debate at all. Most of it was just statistics about what happens to you and then at the very end they said some negative things but I don't even know what they were b/c they didn't have a slide or anything. The thing that bothered me the most was the prof was saying how medical marijuana wasn't a good idea b/c it should be up to the FDA not voters on what constitutes medicine. The problem with that reasoning is that the FDA hasn't said that marijuana doesn't have medical purposes, in fact they haven't said anything b/c they don't test it, they just stick their thumbs in their ears and wag their tongues at the idea of marijuana. The federal government had 15 medical marijuana test subjects in the 70s and then never asked them how the treatment was working for them. I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem to be a valid way to decide on a drug that could potentially help millions of people. This has kinda turned into me talking about drug legalization, which is a whole nother blog topic. I think I'm gonna end it here.

You Can't Do That, It's Wrong

Bleh, I've actually been doing homework for the last couple nights, what a fucking drag! Now, I know what you're thinking, and really, it wasn't all bad. I had some quality day dreaming and forum posting in between and some delicious beer that made the time go a little bit quicker, but other than that being at home has been dull city the last few days. The biggest project I've worked on was our WaterWorld game for GSP240. It was fun but painful at the same time. It's a group project, but my partner wasn't exactly involved with the whole thing. It wasn't his fault as I kinda took it upon myself to do it, and the parts I asked him to do he did perfectly, I just wanted more creative control over it, I guess. In class today I managed to completely finish the project I've got due Tuesday for GSP220, which turned out fucking excellent. We've been learning how to apply matrices to transform points and I really didn't understand the point to it all, but the prof gave us a sort of test bed with some objects and we had to manipulate them in various ways and the result turned out way cool. After the short stint I had as a construction worker I had a real fondness for working with my hands, being able to look at the result at the end was a great feeling. I can confidently say that typing in code and watching a world come to life is exactly the same feeling. Programming is awesome. On the neg side, I just finished a rather craptastic PowerPoint for my oh-so-dull COLL148 class. I predict we'll be the second or third worst group, cause there's some total fucking morons in that class. The entire project was done by me b/c the two other people in my group can't handle the most basic of instructions. Now this would usually lead to a pretty satisfactory presentation, however, I just didn't give half a shit about it. I mean, it's a totally bullshit class that's designed for them to squeeze just a little more money out of you. The prof is clueless and I'm pretty sure that we'll get a pretty good grade regardless of the shitpile that is our project. The only upside to it was getting to really work with office '07, which rocks. I think that's about all for now, gotta get up early and present tomorrow >.<

EDIT: Wow, that was long as hell and I didn't even get to the point of the title and Faith-in-Buffy pic that I chose. The topic for our presentation is abortion and all of the "pro-life" reasons have to deal with how abortion is murder and blah blah blah. The whole time I was typing that out I just kept thinking about Faith mockingly saying, "You can't do that, because it's wrong!"

The Long Way Home

I finally got the trade paperback for the first Buffy Season 8 arc titled, The Long Way Home, and reading it all over again was even better than reading it the first time. Yeah, I've got all the single issues, but I didn't wanna take them out of their shrine to reread them. There were a couple things that I didn't realize at the time or just plain forgot, b/c they did start coming out a year ago. One thing was that Buffy thought Twilight's symbol was "a beautiful sunset" and issue #11 where she actually fought Twilight was called A Beautiful Sunset. Also in issue #11 they reveal that Satsu was the one that gave Buffy the kiss of true love; however, when Buffy wakes up she says she has a funny feeling on her mouth and then yells "Cinnamon buns" when she wakes up. In the next issue she points out that Satsu's lip gloss is cinnamon flavored, reveal much? Anyway, I just thought I'd blog about that b/c Season 8 is the greatest thing ever and I loved rereading all of it, instead of doing my homework, of course.

Crastination Skill Level: Pro

Why is it that whenever I've got a lot to do I always get distracted and can't focus on it?

Scientology

Scientology is way awesome. Friends and I have always said that we should start a religion, but now I'm really serious. Look at Scientology, Mormons, the many, many cults out there, and of course good old Christianity, if those schleps can pull it off then I'm sure that I can get famous people to give me their money. Apparently L. Ron Hubbard had a really in depth documentation for all of it, so maybe that's the key. I just need to make a super detailed story and then tell people that it's real and that they need to pay to find out more about themselves and their god. This is gonna be sweet!

The Modern Buccaneer

I've been sailing the seedy seas of internet piracy for many years now. I was into Napster before it was on the news, I found Kazaa and Morpheus before they were filled with crap and viruses, I jumped on the torrent bandwagon before the RIAA started randomly suing people for using the default ports that torrent software uses. My upload is measured in terabytes and I always upload to at least a 5.0 ratio, sometimes up to over 100.0. Now I find myself studying to become a game designer, my dream is to make a living in an industry that I've been stealing from for years. Does that make me a bad person? Should I stop downloading software? I've been thinking about this for awhile now and I really can't come to an answer. I've never downloaded out of malice, or because I thought that these people that toil away at their craft don't deserve the residuals they get form the games, but out of my desire to play games without having the financial backing to buy every game that strikes my fancy. But does that really justify it? Or should I just get a job and save up like a good little wage worker? Oh morality, why are you such a burden sometimes?

Two to go

I can't believe i've been in this class for an hour, i really thought it had been two :( this class is the dullest thing i've ever had to do. Even if i were starting college this stuff would be totally worthless. I don't know what they plan on teaching us but it shows how disconnected and fucked up the whole "Do everything in chicago" system is. Before committing to this i should have looked into some other colleges like westwood or something. Oh well, maybe i can take courses there after this or something. Unfortunately the lame ass prof is back.

Lost in a sea of ignorance.

Here we go with another in class blog. funny how the most time i've ever got to sit around is in this class. I think the worst part about this school is how damn stupid people are. We're doing one of those "you're gonna die, rank there items that you need to live" things and one of the items is a sextant, now i have no idea how to use one or even what one really looks like, but at least half of the people started giggling and saying that was the most important one. I guess i just expected more of higher education, but that's what i get for going to a school that accepts anyone that could pay and probably a few that can't.