I get off work in 10 minutes and I did all my work-stuff already. I figured I should spend some time writing about the two most unfortunate events in my college career. Actually, just one. I don’t have that much time and I need to go to places to have people to be.

The funniest thing is that they both happened during the last quarter of my senior year. What a nice way to almost end school, right?

Anyways, story one took place in the game lab during my senior design sequence. We, me, Chris, and Trevor, stayed up programming very late because Ripholes was in terrible shape. Terrible is an understatement, by the way. That story is for anther time though. At any rate, we slept in the lab because it was 4:00am ish or so, and had class early in the morning and we both lived in inconvenient places.

I lived by the beach that took route 20, which came ONCE every hour. Chris lived near the campus, but his bus stopped running at 6:50pm, and it only came twice an hour. If we were to go home, we’d get an hour of sleep, and then we’d have to wake up to get ready, and catch the bus anyways. Why not just stay?

The lab did have fancy couches. The professors even said they chose those particular designs because they knew students would get sleepy.

About 6:00 – 7:00am, a technician from BELLs comes by, kicks our door open (because it was locked) and questions our presence. He threatened us with expulsion because it was “against university policy” to allow students to sleep in the lab.

First off, we were scared as hell. Being forced awake to an angry man in a baseball cap early in the morning isn’t quite pleasant. Second, we were confused and delirious. He could have told us the world was ending and we would have believed him. Third, he didn’t notice Trevor sleeping on the couch in the lounge area. Fourth, its not against the rules. Fifth, why was he there. And sixth, of all the excuses in the world for not wanting us there, why did he have to add even MORE stress onto our shoulders by telling us we couldn’t be there?

He told us we could stay, but we couldn’t sleep. We had to “pretend” we were working so he wouldn’t get into trouble. What a load of ass. We waited for class to start and told Mateas everything that happened and wined a lot more amongst ourselves.

It was very stressful, but eventually things got fixed. Students in the future sleeping in the game lab should thank Ripholes for screwing up first!

Winter quarter is nearing its end… that is. I’m going home for the first time since summer last year in a couple of weeks. Finals is actually next week. I am so done with this quarter! Try to stay away from taking three CS classes at a time. There’s a lot to learn and so little time to do anything. I’ve even had no time to sew my precious plushies this quarter. It was terrible!

Tryton told me to post something since I haven’t updated in a long time. So what have I been up to? The most exciting thing is probably this game I’m working on, though the original plan changed since we first started. Here’s some example artwork I drew if anyone (out there) is interested. I’m coding it in C#/XNA for my computer game design class. We had less than a quarter to toy around with it and that’s not nearly enough time to get many things done! Unfortunately it’s due tomorrow morning…

Some sprites, concepts, and other junk: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

And then a super tangent of other drawings! Such as Penguin and Penguin and raining PEAS.

I’m finally not being called an overachiever anymore. There are students in my courses that have been breathing codes and have been programing languages since they were two years old. For our last assignment in graphics class we had to program an animal with a body, head, four legs and a tail with multiple segments. We also had to animate this animal with the choices of running around in circles or some other complicated movements. Those were the minimum requirements. I added a neck, hoofs, ears, horns, and all that other crap. There were some hideous animals that weren’t identifiable and moved awkwardly freakish-like, and then there were the genius students who programed dragons with claws and wings and made them fly around using various camera angles, pretty colors, added lighting effects, texture and a bunch of other stuff the beginners never learned yet.

“I feel inferior,” said a friend.
I think I did too…

But the nice thing was that mine everyone was on a different level. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. You can tell when someone is an excellent programmer but lacks any sense of art at all. You can also tell if a person intentionally overdoes the assignment just to get pride within the class (not like that’s of any worth or value) and you can tell when people brush the assignment aside and barely meet the requirements.

I would like to say I’m stuck in the middle. I try my best to achieve something and if I have extra time I will try to polish up my program. I wont ever be the best though, it seems. More than half of my class have far more experience than me and they seem to be growing at the same time.

This quarter is going to be interesting.