The Other Side

Aquaria Review

2011-12-26T23:05:00.002-06:00

Aquaria first caught my eyes a few years back, when I still owned a Mac and would consistently see what games Ambrosia was developing/porting. Since then I'd learned almost everything about the game, bought and consistently listened to its amazing soundtrack, watched parts of its development and release through the developer's video blogs, even used its source code as a basis for some of Sorrowsong's engine, and yet I still hadn't actually played the damn thing. Who would have thought that it would take four years for me to actually play the game?

The game's main menu.

As most familiar with the game already know, Aquaria centers around a singular aquatic humanoid creature, Naija, and her quest to discover her purpose and who she is in a world devoid of any other intelligent life. The entire game takes place in a beautifully-crafted underwater world, which is not only expansive but full of life, detail and many secrets to discover.

I'm not lying when I say the world is huge. This is the full game map.

It's so hard to decide where to begin, seeing as there's much I want to talk about. So, let's start exactly where Naija does.

After a cryptic and enticing intro narrative, the player is introduced to Naija

The player first meets Naija resting in her hidden cove. Through her dialog, we learn that, as far as she knows, she is alone in the world. This sense of loneliness will resonate throughout most of the actual game. Everything in Aquaria is bright and seemingly full of life. However, no other intelligent lifeforms exist in the world aside from Naija. It's amazing just how well conveyed the sense of loneliness is. It's almost oppressive, traveling through this massive world and yet never encountering anything else but simple sealife. This is the first point of praise that I want to heap onto this game. Too many games nowadays lack emotion. They are dry, cookie-cutter and feel so detached from the player that it's more like you are watching a movie instead of playing a game. If I remember correctly, the game's programmer, Alec Holowka, was in a rather lonely state while making the game, and wanted to convey his feelings through the character of Naija. He succeeded in a way few developers could have.

After getting acclimated to the basic controls, the player learns of Naija's main ability: singing. In the same way games have you execute combos to cast spells, Aquaria allows you to cast spells by having Naija sing songs. Most of the spells are simple melodies (although there is one later on that, to my enjoyment, echoes one of the main motifs in the soundtrack in a beautifully haunting way) and easy to memorize, giving Naija a plethora of abilities (and later forms) that can be used for combat, discovery, exploration and main story progression.

The singing UI

Aquaria gives you a good hour to explore its beautiful environments and ponder the exact reason for Naija being there before the player ever enters combat. Many say this downtime and lack of excitement turned them off to the game immediately, but it just drew me further in. The mystery of the game grew thicker and thicker as I discovered Naija's empty home, the surrounding waters, and many areas of the game that seemed inaccessible. The slow beginning really gave me a feel for how much passion was put into designing the game. Everything, from the background art to the music to the OpenGL engine behind it all, was full of life and detail.

And then the player is introduced to combat through use of the "Energy Form", one of the many forms Naija will learn to aid her in her journey.

Naija fighting in her energy form.

Combat is extremely fluid and fun. It takes a bit of practice to get used to fighting whilst floating around in water, while also trying to dodge enemy attacks. It definitely has a decent learning curve on it, but that's another thing great about Aquaria: easy to learn, difficult to master. The hardest part later on in the game is when Naija has multiple forms she can switch to. The player needs to know exactly which form to use in each situation and the song to sing to gain that form (the game offers hotkeys for each song, but I felt like that was cheating), which can be quite daunting at first. It takes a while to get down but the game slowly introduces each new form to the player and gives you plenty of time to acclimate to it.

The Sun Form allows Naija to light up dark areas and can be used against certain enemies

that are sensitive to light.

Aquaria is ostensibly non-linear and fully open world. However, the game cleverly enforces some linearity. Rocks block the path that must be lifted with the Bind Song, which can only be learned after exploring a certain cave. The Bind Song allows Naija to lift obstacles out of her way, opening up a few more areas. Areas even further out are blocked by strong currents of water, which require Beast Form to pass, etc. As Naija learns songs, the amount of explorable world available to her slowly increases. This funnels the player into the main story without them even realizing it (I sure didn't), since almost every Form acquisition is part of the storyline. I was driven forward by the desire to explore and discover the game's secrets. I not only got satisfaction from that but also from the fact that I was learning more about Naija and the world she lived in along the way.

Naija happening upon her homeland's throne room.

One of the reasons I have to heap mountains of praise on Aquaria is the fact that--for the longest time now--any time I play a game I rush through it. Most recent games have elicited an "is it over yet?" reaction from me because they get stale, fast. Even games that try to entice you with achievements and secrets don't give the player enough reason to go out of their way to discover these things. Aquaria never told me there were secrets everywhere, it never forced me to find them. I wanted to. The game is structured in such a way that, without even knowing in, the player is rewarded for exploration. Treasures found around the world add on to Naija's home in interesting ways and give you more backstory. Aquatic pets can be acquired that give Naija special abilities that songs cannot. The world itself is just so breathtakingly beautiful that I wanted to see it all. I didn't need a story to force me to do it or some "achievement" for seeing it all. I didn't want my time with Aquaria to end. I wanted it to last as long as possible, and I found every excuse to stay just a little bit longer.

Reaching the ocean's surface feels just as good to the player as

it must to Naija.

I couldn't put the game down. I played it over the course of two days, almost 16 hours each day. I got lost inside its world, inside the cryptic and mysterious story, inside the fluid and intuitive controls, inside the beautifully haunting music, all strung together by a singular motif. Everything about the game wanted me to stay inside of it and never come out.

As Naija discovers the remnants of more and more civilizations within Aquaria, she learns of each race's sad fate. They have all been wiped out or gone extinct through certain circumstances, leaving Naija completely alone. These stories were told in an ingenious matter, normally involving the spirits of said race communicating with Naija and subtly leading her to where she would find the truth. This normally involved a few puzzles, most of which were excellently crafted. A few left me stumped for the longest time, and required a decent amount of thought to figure out.

Aquaria has many interesting features besides exploration and combat. One of the most enjoyable is the game's cooking system.

The main Cooking UI

Throughout the game Naija collects both recipes and ingredients that can be combined to make food that gives various benefits (and disadvantages), including health regeneration, added defense and added power in Energy Form. There is a plethora of ingredients to acquire and dozens of recipes (I believe the number of recipes is near 100) to use. The coolest thing about this system is the fact that the player does not need to have a certain recipe to make an item. Items can be combined and experimented with freely, and Naija will learn new recipes as the player finds the correct combination of items.

When I finally made it to the game's final boss battle, I was really bummed knowing that the game would end soon. I made sure to do absolutely everything I could before entering into the battle: I had all the treasures, pets, areas explored and a plethora of food items prepared for what I knew was an intense fight... and damn it was intense.

Did I just step into Touhou?

Each boss fight was uniquely scripted and challenging. However, this one took the cake, and I had absolutely no problem with it. Nowadays most games have cookie-cutter boss fights that take 10 seconds even on the hardest difficulty. It was such a breath of fresh air to finally be challenged by a boss fight, Secret of Mana style. Every boss fight was extremely enjoyable and I loved figuring out each boss' weakness and exploiting it. This all culminated in the epic 4-stage final boss fight, leading the player to the game's outro, which left me absolutely speechless and begging for more.

I seriously cannot give this game enough praise. If I didn't know beforehand I wouldn't have been able to tell it was an indie title. Actually, yes I would have. While the game oozes an extremely polished look and feel, it is still very obviously indie. Why? Because it's so different from the modern video game. It's something fresh, something a large company would never try for fear of losing profits. It has a handcrafted feel to it, something most games don't. It conveys a personal message, something only possible when the game is given love and absolute passion (again, that's essentially impossible when you have a team of hundreds of people). Aquaria is a prime example of how to make a game and do it right, and if you haven't played it yet I urge you to try it out for yourself. It's only $10 on Steam and regularly on sale. Hell, I would have payed $25+ for this game. It's that good.

Christmas Loot!

2011-12-25T17:12:00.000-06:00

Sennheiser PXC 450 Active Noise-cancelling Headphones (can you tell I'm brand-loyal?)

Kyubey Plushie :D

Funny The Way It Is

2011-12-19T22:58:00.001-06:00

Oh, how time seems to pass me by. I'm already halfway done with my junior year and I have no idea where it went. Or rather, I do, but it all is already a blur. My last post was, what, three months ago? What an adventure those three months were. But, oh, where to start...

I have no idea how many people follow my blog anymore, seeing as I haven't really been publicly productive (with machinima, AMVs, code, etc.). In reality, yes, there was a lot of downtime during the past few months in which I could have produced something, but for the most part the drive wasn't there. I had other obligations. I bonded with a lot of friends that I had only just barely known at the beginning of the semester, I wasted time on women, I caught up on many games that I had been wanting to play, and I re-read my favorite book series. After all the work I did over the summer I wanted to reward myself with some downtime. So first, let's break up the downtime activities.

On the video games front. After playing the first Deus Ex and being massively disappointed in Invisible War, I was quite hesitant about Human Revolution. However, the live-action trailer changed my mind entirely. I knew that if a company spent that much time and energy just on an advertisement for a game I could not imagine how much effort they put into the product itself. That trailer still gives me goosebumps. When the game finally came out, I was not disappointed. Back was the old feeling of the original game: the amount of choice given to the player, the impressive amount of backstory and extra content not even associated with the main storyline, amazing music, great weapons, items, and balance. Eidos and Square had pulled it off: a prequel/sequel worthy of the original. I played through as fast as I could and loved every second of it. The only thing that I have to complain about is the length of the game. It seemed so much shorter compared to the original. Oh, and some of the boss fights were ridiculously hard. But whatever, I still kicked their asses.

After Human Revolution I believe it was Dead Island. I have become increasingly irritated by the Left 4 Dead franchise. I played the first one for maybe a week before it utterly bored me and I was really excited for Dead Island. Non-linear gameplay, an RPG-style leveling system, unique items, sidequests... AND zombies? Sounded like a recipe for success! It was. I thoroughly enjoyed it and, although I only play occasionally now, it was definitely worth the money. I blazed through the game, completing all of the side quests, farming experience and spending as much time in the world as possible. It was definitely a great game!

I actually think Dead Island was the only other game worth noting until I played Need For Speed: The Run last month. I've always had a soft spot for Need For Speed games, although I've been disappointed in most since Underground 2. After seeing the trailer for The Run I had a feeling this one would finally not let me down. From the look if it, EA wanted to profit off of how damn awesome Split/Second was and took a leaf out of Disney's book. I must tell you, I was not disappointed. If a racing game can get my heart pumping, make me shout loud explitives at my screen and keep my face glued to it throughout the entire duration it's a good racing game. I really enjoyed the story (which was very contrastive from other Need For Speed games), even the quick-time event sequences were fun.

Then the next leisure activity that took place this semester was rereading the first three books in The Inheritance Cycle before the fourth, Inheritance, came out. I have been a fan of the series since 7th grade and was really pumped to finally read the conclusion. I remember reading Brisingr in my junior year of high school thinking "Wow, I'm going to be in college when the next book comes out.". And woah, I was in my junior year of college reading it. It was kind of surreal: the book series that I had loved for almost 8 years finally coming to an end. I wanted to re-read the first three so that the story could be fresh in my mind when the fourth one came out, and I was glad I did. I love being drawn into the world of Alagaesia and its wonderful characters and story. I don't even care about all of the Star Wars parallels that can be drawn from the series, it's just overall awesome. The final book didn't let me down. Okay, it let the hopeless romantic in me down a little bit, but not a huge deal. It was a worthy conclusion to the series and I was locked into the book the entire time. I got extremely emotionally involved in it. I probably looked like an idiot reading some of the scenes. I was cheering, voicing my internal theories about the story out loud, etc. I really hope Paolini picks up the story again eventually. I can't wait to hear what happens after!

Oh, and somewhere in there I accomplished to rewatch the first two seasons of Shakugan no Shana. The third and final season is airing now and I wanted to freshen up on the story before seeing the conclusion. So far the final series has been completely, mind-blowingly epic in all ways! Sadly, it's really the only anime that I've watched since going back to school. I have an ever-decreasing amount of free time that has forced anime to the back-burner, again.

Now, what absorbed most of my time after the first half of the semester was the project for my software engineering class. It was a daunting shadow hanging over most of the semester as the presentation for it slowly arrived (this was my final project, determining whether or not I graduate). It stressed me out to the max and I even gave up on it and one point (and exchanged some pretty harsh words with my professor, I will admit). It was definitely a humbling experience. But looking back at it I am really glad that I went through with it.

A short overview of the project: dubbed PastFinder, our software engineering project involved mapping a real-life cemetery in virtual space, complete with images of each grave (all perfectly geotagged), an updated reading of the cemetery, biographies on as many of the deceased as possible, geolinks to the places that they lived, audio clips that were managed to be recorded before they passed away, etc. All with a desktop and Android viewing application to browse these assets. Each student was given complete control over a section of the cemetery (mine was South of West: all the way at the southwest corner of the cemetery, obviously). Due to various reasons I had to take each picture about 3-4 times, which meant hours alone with dead people. We all collaborated on the PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database schema to hold all of the assets and then each person was given two projects: a personal project and one that directly related to the final product.

My personal project was to create a multi-platform EXIF/IPTC metadata editor for our images (each image is also tagged with its position in the graveyard [section/row/etc.] and the names of those buried there). I went all out on the application, utilizing wxWidgets and exiv2 to make the app as multiplatform as possible. I had a dynamic thumbnail view of all of the images, a quick, easily-editable, tabulated version of editing the tags, advanced search options, etc. Sadly many of these features are still crippled at the moment (I planned to do way more than time could allow), but the basic functionality is there in the application and it runs quite well. It was really a fun experience. I now also have an application to tag and search all of the 25,000 anime images I have (that's going to take a long while).

My contribution to the actual product was that of a virtual reality viewer of the graveyard. We were originally going to do it all in the Google Maps API but it was too restrictive for optimal use, so I was charged with writing a multiplatform (and Android) version of a quick-and-dirty top-down viewer of the graveyard. This was one of the most intense applications I had ever written. Utilizing the desktop/Android OpenGL wrapper I wrote for Spaulding over the summer, I had a basis for the program. It used PHP scripts to dynamically pull down all of the grave images from the database and then some complex math to map the geotags to screen coordinates. I also wrote a thumbnail loader that streamed the thumbnails from the Picasa pages where we uploaded the images and texture-mapped them to the graves as they were downloaded. You can try out the Java Webstart desktop version here.

The two days before the presentation were what has been dubbed "crunch time". Crunch time is a glorious, masochistic event involving sleep deprivation, caffeine consumption and hours of programming. I put almost 50% of the work into the VR viewer in those last 2 days, barely slept, and was absorbed in it the whole time. Crunch time is always stressful as hell while you're in it, but the moment you get out you realize that you live for the crunch. The amount of focus, drive, energy, and passion needed to go through with it is what defines you as a programmer. Crunch proves that you have the skill and the absolute love of programming needed to get shit done when it needs to be done, and I would not trade crunch time for anything else in the world. I'm already craving the next time I will be able to do it!

Then came the day of the presentation. I can't tell you how nervous I was. The president of the college would be there, all of the computer science professors would be there, press would be there, my fellow students would be there, and I had to give a 15-minute presentation about my involvement in the project. The class practiced the presentation three times the day before and we still only barely had it down. I dressed to impress in my best suit and got ready for the longest oral presentation I have given in my college career. It went flawlessly. I was almost exactly on my time mark (I went like 15 minutes and 30 seconds), managed to say all I wanted to, and had a great presentation prepared (you can find the Google Docs version here). After the presentation the feeling was absolutely transcendent. It was over. The cause of most of my stress the entire semester was over. Looking back on it, I learned a lot, accomplished a lot, and loved every second of it. But that glorious feeling when a project is finally over cannot be matched.

And now onto the final part of this post, which is actually the one I've been most eager to talk about. If you remember the lovely depressed section of my last post this is a direct continuation of it. The girl I liked since freshman year who pretty much ignored me? I confessed everything to her and was still ignored. I eventually realized it was because her relationship with her previous boyfriend left her so jaded that she's pretty much become an entirely different person (and in a very bad way). She's no longer the same girl I liked in freshman year so I've stopped caring and just enjoy watching her trainwreck her life. The girl in a relationship who obviously liked me? We had a pretty long conversation about that in which we both admitted that we liked each other, but that she loved her boyfriend too much and that, he being my friend as well, I didn't want to come in between them. And so our relationship hasn't really much changed and I'm content with just being friends with her.

After the software engineering project was over I finally had time to sit back and reflect on the subject of my love-life. Since the aforementioned girls were obviously out of the question and I had pretty much given up on them I resigned myself to enjoying another lonely winter to myself. However, funny how things work out.

I had recently met a girl who, at the time I met her, was dating one of my friends. Although he's a really cool guy, he's also known for having relationships that last about two weeks, so I kind of knew in the back of my mind that it wasn't going to last long. After they broke up I started talking to her and she seemed really interested in me (I don't know if my friend talked me up while they were dating or what). She's a really cute girl, kind of quiet and small, and I was definitely interested as well. So, after talking for a few days, we arranged to meet up at The Hub (which is sort of an on-campus carry-out restaurant with much better food than the cafeteria). I wasn't really sure what to expect going in, it had been a long time since I had had a conversation, alone, with a girl that I was interested in. To my surprise it went extremely well. I had her laughing and we maintained eye-contact and conversation pretty much the whole time. We sat there talking for almost two hours before I had to go to a final. It went so well, in fact, that she asked for my number before I did.

We then hung out later that night. We watched a movie (she had never seen Inception, so I watched it for the 11th time [so worth it]), I introduced her to Steve and Amber and we all just had a really good time. Later on in the evening it was apparently really obvious to Steve and Amber that I liked this girl and she liked me back. I definitely enjoyed being with her and stayed up way into the night talking with her. We did that whole "take 30 minutes to say goodbye because we couldn't stop talking for long enough to say it" thing, and I walked back to my room smiling the entire time. It was great! Only bad thing is that this was the day before winter break started so we didn't spend as much time together as either of us would have liked.

Now I'm on winter break and we've been texting pretty much nonstop. I'm really curious as to how this will turn out. My last two relationships have left me quite weary of trying again, but I'm quite hopeful that if we continue that I will actually, truly enjoy this one. In the little time that I've known her, I already really like her and can tell that she really likes me (this mutual feeling really wasn't felt at all in my previous relationships). Ah, this enjoyable ambiguity! Where will the wind take me? Only time will tell :D

It's been awhile since I could hold my head up high

2011-09-02T01:35:00.003-05:00

Oh man, where to start? There's a plethora of reasons and excuses I could give as to why I haven't posted in over 2 months, but the main reason is is that it's become so hard to concatenate my thoughts together into something coherent. There's just too much going on nowadays, and too much on my mind for even myself to make sense of it.

Where did we leave off? That's right, DIA. Little did I know that little excursion was far from my last for the summer. I had a slight ease of workflow after the show, but relatively soon afterwards I was given a completely new assignment, one that matched my strengths perfectly.

Now, I probably shouldn't get into too much detail, but it was something that required my OpenGL expertise and my ability to write fast, optimized code. I also had to write it in a way so that the code could easily be carried from a desktop application to an Android one. I was given this assignment 2 weeks before our quarterly meeting, and had it ready well before then.

It was excellent: playing my strengths so perfectly. I learned all about the wonders of vertex buffer objects (Sorrowsong is rendered in immediate mode, but Android applications use OpenGL ES, which has no immediate mode rendering) and wrote and extremely slick rendering engine for the application. It was definitely the best project I've ever worked on for Spaulding. I, again, worked overtime just because I didn't want to stop coding.

In late July I went up to Wisconsin for the quarterly. This time I didn't have to take a train, either :) It was by far the longest drive I ever made but I enjoyed every bit of it. Listened to a few CDs, rolled my windows down, and enjoyed the absolute freedom of being able to drive myself anywhere. Even the Chicago traffic didn't bother me. I felt like I was on top of the world.

Actually being at Spaulding physically is always a great experience. I don't feel isolated anymore, I can actually interact with everyone there, I can attend meetings and see the amazing progress that the company's making. It's actually quite a humbling experience. When you work from home you kind of forget that it's an actual job and not just code you're writing for fun. Being on site makes me realize that I'm a full-fledged adult, doing what I love as a job and not just as a hobby anymore.

The quarterly meeting went well, but with a few hiccups. My laptop decided to shit itself as soon as I tried to hook it to the projector to display my work, and I spent most of the meeting getting the darn thing to work. But I digress, it was better than having a few tornadoes come through like last year. After the meeting we had a company cookout, which was excellent. There was some great food, great company. I met a lot of coworkers who I really connected with, had some great conversations, and got back to my hotel room a very happy man.

Something hit me then, though. Exactly a year ago, after our quarterly meeting, was when I started talking to Erin. That one conversation started our relationship, that, of course, eventually trainwrecked. This year, however, there was no such incident, and it felt rather saddening. But more on that later.

I drove back home the next day to find a shiny new PlayStation 3 sitting on my porch. Yes, I finally broke down and bought a console. I blame Catherine, I blame it all on Catherine. Ever since I watched the first trailer for that game I knew I wanted it, so much that I would buy a console to play it. And of course I wasn't going to get a 360. I prefer something that actually has power, not a cheap toy sold to stupid teenagers.

Anyway, consummated the PS3 with a playthrough of both Catherine and Heavy Rain that weekend. I must say, Heavy Rain is quite possibly one of the neatest games I've ever played. The controls were very innovative and intuitive, the story was full of great twists and turns, the artwork was very film noir and beautiful. It was just, overall, a very good, well-rounded game.

Catherine... oh man, where to start. To sum it up in a paragraph: Studio 4C's animation kicks ass, the story was full of so many WTF moments and kept me hooked until the end, excellent prominent anime VA's, Vincent is a wimp, the puzzles were the hardest I have ever played in a game, but still fun as hell. It was everything I had hoped for from the trailers and more. I must say the PS3 was totally worth it just for these two games :)

After that awesome weekend, it was back to work as usual. I still had a decent chunk of my project to finish and took to it with delight. This part of the project was porting the ECG viewer I wrote back during spring break to an OpenGL implementation instead of Java Swing. It took up the rest of my summer, but it is some of the best, cleanest code I've ever written and I'm quite proud of it. I got to use dependency injection and a few other cool Java tricks that I've never used before to make the code as portable as possible. It also runs about 50x faster than the Swing version, capable of achieving a perfect 60FPS on Android devices with ease.

I managed to get that code finished up right before school started again. I checked the code into Subversion on the last day with a bittersweet feeling. I had so much fun this summer working for Spaulding, but now it was time to leave for a while to go back to school, and I wasn't sure if I was ready to go back just yet.

It felt really weird packing my things up into my car and driving myself back down to The Joe. Again, I was hit with that feeling of adulthood. I don't need to rely on my parents to go somewhere anymore, I just can.

Being back here is surreal as always. It's crazy to think that I'm already an upperclassman with only two years left before I graduate. It's crazy coming back and realizing how many friends I've made, how enjoyable my time here is, and just how much I love this place.

However, one thing that's hit me again recently is that damn Hikikomori depression. A few contributing factors really didn't help me. Being a shut-in all summer burned me out on working and now that I'm back at school my work ethic has tanked. I mean, I'm still getting my assignments done, but when I'm not doing schoolwork I'd rather fool around. I have a game that needs to be finished but no drive or inspiration to finish it. I have massive software engineering projects for my major that need to be done that are going to push Sorrowsong even further onto the backburner, and it's all just massively frustrating. I want to work on Sorrowsong, I want to code more, but I just can't concentrate, I can't get in the zone, I can't keep my mind off of my main source of worries.

I'm pretty sure many of you can guess what that source of worries is, seeing as it's pretty much the only thing that can make someone like me worry. Yep, that's right. Women.

After I broke up with Erin being single was great. I was in the whole "Ridin' Solo" mood and was just enjoying life by myself. Then the novelty wore off. It took a while (until about the middle of the summer), but it did. I find myself wanting someone more and more as days go by. As I've stated before, women have always been a huge source of inspiration for what I do. I always find a way to channel myself back into whatever woman I current have feelings for. I work harder for them, I try to better myself for them, and when they aren't there I kind of slowly slip down into a horrible state of mind.

I try not to think about it, I really do. But my mind keeps wandering back. I'm remembering my time with Erin before she showed me her true self, back when I actually, genuinely cared about her more than anything. I miss those times, lost in an almost indescribable bliss. I could do anything at that point in time. I felt absolutely amazing and loved every second of my life.

And now, as I watch everyone around me find someone, I get constant reminders that I have no one. It's horribly infuriating. I can't even concentrate half the time just because I'm so worried about it. I'm trying to not miss any opportunities, but so far that has pretty much backfired. A girl I've liked since freshman year pretty much ignores me, a girl that very obviously likes me is dating someone else and I'd rather not screw their relationship over, I don't even know half the girls at this school and probably never will. It's absolutely vexing, and I really don't know the best way to chase away these feelings. Should I just repress my loneliness? Should I just man up and not care about rejection or possibly ruining a relationship? Should I just become a complete douchebag, because apparently being a nice guy doesn't work on girls nowadays?

But that's all I have for now. I definitely need to hit the hay. I will probably write a continuation of this post sometime soon, but for now I will leave you with the song that inspired the title of this post:

Makoto Sawatari School of Design

2011-09-01T19:09:00.004-05:00

Title inspired by one of Jeff Lawson's blog posts.

Current setup of my Junior year dorm room :)

The main battlestation

The doorside wall is somewhat empty at the moment. Working on that.

The Wall of Haruhi, guitars, awesome egg char, fridge and extra table for LAN'ing

Bed and associated posters.

Computer-side wall.

Textbooks, PS3 and headphones.

Current Software Engineering reading.

Inside my computer a little bit.

And, unlike Jeff Lawson, I DO have a lava lamp!

Will be adding a few things to the room as time goes on, but that's the basic setup. Also, yes I know I haven't posted in well over two months. Expect an extremely verbose post in the coming days about all the crazy shit that's been going on in my life.

Electric Emotion

2011-06-21T21:10:00.003-05:00

So first let me tell you: life has taken me on such a ride recently. This ride has been full of stress, insomnia, a complete sense of disbelief, and, most importantly, one of the greatest experiences of my life. And now that the project has gone public I can talk a little about it.

When I first started at Spaulding the "Peanut" project, as it was called then, was only in its early stages and I really didn't understand much about the device. Over the next year the project became more and more prominent as I started working on it as well (making an offline ECG viewer over spring break, etc.). When I came back to work over the summer, the PC client application (that interfaces with the actual device) was near completion. I used my own graphics knowledge to make the interface cleaner and prettier and also to added some functionality :)

However, when I was up in Wisconsin in late May, we started discussing moving from a PC client to something a little more portable. I attended a meeting where we discussed the possibilities. iPhone, iPad, Android? We finally decided, due to time constraints and legal matters, that the path of least resistance would be to get the application running on Android tablets (such as the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab), which just had a recent software update with built-in USB drivers (the IQ communicates over USB).

I was given a Motorola Xoom by the company and charged with porting over the PC code to Android. At first, it seemed a very daunting task and I was afraid the project would break me. I had never before done any mobile software development or interfacing with peripherals, so there was a lot of uncharted territory ahead of me.

However, as I started working on the project, the only thing that ended up being broken was my sleep schedule. I was writing something revolutionary, never done before, and I was loving every second of it. I was writing something so low-level, so complex, that it made me feel alive, like a true programmer.

My deadline was June 19th, when we would be showing off this new technology at DIA, an annual pharmaceutical trade show. As that day drew closer I became more and more absorbed in the project. I worked massive amounts of overtime. There was even an entirely sleepless night in there.

One of the downsides to having a mind such as my own is the fact that it will never stop. I laid awake and my brain was just swimming with thoughts on the project, and I couldn't stop them. After three hours I finally threw in the towel, sat down at my computer, and continued to code.

"This is what crunch time is like," I thought to myself, "and it is glorious!" The rush, the pressure, the caffeine abusing, everything that makes crunch time what it is, and I was in the middle of it. It was AMAZING! I operate so well under pressure that I was churning out code like never before, and managed to finish the project with hours to spare.

Last Saturday I did something that I had put off for way too long: I took my driver's test. Even though the instructor was a complete douche, I managed to pass the first try. I can now legally drive the car I recently purchased.

The next day, the deadline for the project, I drove myself up to Chicago to hand off the Xoom and software to the company. Driving up to the city the first day with my license was definitely a daunting experience. However, after throwing on some tunes and turning the volume all the way up I found driving to be quite enjoyable. It was actually quite relaxing: I wasn't thinking about the project anymore, I was just letting the music play as I traveled 70 miles per hour down the highway on a warm Sunday morning. I relished the experience.

Upon making it to the city (and let me tell you, that's when driving gets stressful) I found the convention center and met up with the others from Spaulding. We hammered out the details of the interface and oriented our presenters on the use of the device. Brock and I then cleaned up all of the last-minute changes that needed doing and we went out to eat. I ended up chauffeuring a few employees to the restaurant and we made it there without incident.

After eating, I headed to my hotel, which, I forgot to mention, was the freaking Palmer House Hilton. I felt like a celebrity walking into the place, it was definitely the nicest and most grand hotel I had ever been in, and I got to stay in it for a night!

However, when I got to my room, I experienced a panic attack for the first time in a long while. I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was the culmination of stress finally getting to me, maybe it was the lack of sleep the past few weeks, maybe it was the sudden rush of responsibility thrown at me from actually driving somewhere by myself, maybe it was just the fact that I couldn't believe how awesome this experience was. I don't know what it was, but I had to sit there for a few minutes and calm myself down. I had to lay out the situation right in front of me: the hard work that got me here, the work that still needed to be done, and the fact that I was now a fully-responsible adult with a great job that lets me not only do what I love and enjoy the hell out of it, but also treats me so well.

That night I was up late fixing up the code and getting ready to hand off the tablet for presentation. I then sat down in my bed on the 21st story and fell asleep watching a terrible movie on Showtime (just so you know, there is no actual orgy in "All American Orgy").

The next day I woke up, grabbed a bite to eat downstairs at the hotel, and sat down to start cleaning up the messy code that resulted from the massive rush to get it all done. I didn't manage to get passes to the convention, but I kind of wish I had. I really wanted to watch all the work put into this project shown to the world. However, it was also nice just being able to code in a nice hotel room, with some loud music and zero distraction.

I then checked out of the hotel and made my way back home, again just enjoying the ability to drive wherever I wanted. I rolled the windows down since it was a nice day and turned the volume all the way up as I put my iPod on shuffle. I reveled in the experience, the feeling of accomplishment, the absolute grandeur of my own life.

Words cannot describe this entire experience completely accurately. I'm realizing more and more that I am truly a professional programmer. I have already made this passion of mine a career, and it is accelerating me well past the days of writing simple DOS games. I'm writing complex code to interface with a revolutionary ECG-acquisition device. I'm making money doing something that I would normally be doing for free as a hobby.

Life just keeps going faster and faster, and not slowing down. I'm not complaining. This is great. I'm doing so much, learning so much, and finally feel like I've grown up.

I will leave you with the awesome song that inspired the title to this post (and is also EPIC to blast in the car):

Some people say video games aren't just about graphics

2011-06-15T00:19:00.005-05:00

But I'll be damned if Alice: Madness Returns isn't one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I really don't understand why it's getting so much hate from reviewers. Maybe they never played a good platformer before (like *cough*SPYRO*cough*). I'm really enjoying it so far. The attention to detail is unmatched, the visuals beautiful, the gameplay smooth (of course, after removing the 30FPS frame cap) and the combat very intuitive and fun. Add to that one of my favorite fictional characters of all time and an amazingly large amount of unique gameplay mechanics, and Alice: Madness Returns can definitely be called one of the best (if not THE best) game released so far this year.

Guess who just bought a car? :)

2011-05-27T20:49:00.002-05:00

2005 Dodge Neon SXT :)

Reflections of an Unfamiliar Face

2011-05-06T23:37:00.002-05:00

The song that inspired the title of this post :)

So, here I go again: not posting for a long while then having a LOT to talk about.

I just got back home for the summer after an extremely eventful semester at The Joe. The last few weeks were jammed full of events. I wasn't busy, per se, I just spent a lot less time in front of my computer.

So far my 3.98 GPA stands strong, which I am quite proud of maintaining throughout 2 years of college. It's insane that I'm already an upperclassman... these 2 years have gone by so fast it's been a massive blur. It seems like just yesterday I was that shy, scared kid on his first day of college. Now I'm a confident, successful 20-year-old Junior who can barely relate to the "me" of two years ago.

It's insane, looking back, just how much happened my Sophomore year. I experienced another relationship, and, although it was a complete failure, I'm not sure I regret it. I learned a lot about myself in the process and who my best friends were during the entire debacle. I learned what it was like to truly love someone who doesn't feel the same way, and I learned to get over it and to look ahead.

I'm happily living the single life now, doing things for myself and myself alone, and taking a step back and waiting for the right person so I can experience those same amazing feelings again, hopefully much more successfully than the past two times.

There have been a few women who have shown clear interest in me, but I've learned from my mistakes and am waiting for one who I am also interested in instead of jumping into something half-heartedly for the wrong reasons. It's depressing sometimes, but then I sit back and realize that I love my current life too much and would only want to change it for the better, and I haven't found anyone yet who looks like they could do that.

Also, I'm not happy enough with myself to do that yet. I've been making small changes in my life. I cut off all my stupid hair and regained the mohawk of 2 years ago. I've decided to start dieting and working out. I'm going to become even more outgoing, no longer afraid of what others think of me. I'm going to work even harder towards my goals, both and work and at school, but also my personal goals.

Speaking of personal goals, work on Sorrowsong has hit the point where it's really hard to work on it. It's so close to completion, but I'm just not happy enough with it to release it. It's so aggravating, when I set a goal for myself but then have to delay it because I'm just not happy with it. I'm my own worst critic, and even though all the code is in place for Sorrowsong I've been making a ton of minor tweaks to the gameplay.

I love to code more than anything else, but balancing and gameplay tweaks require very little, if any actual coding, and this sends me into a downward spiral of hating to work on Sorrowsong, but then I realize that in the end it will all be worth it, because I will have a game I'm proud of and all of the work will have paid off. I'm now hoping for a mid-summer release. I want to give myself enough time to weed out all of the bad aspects of the game to have an extremely polished product under my belt.

Looking at Sorrowsong, it's insane what it's become over the past nine months. I wrote the base OpenGL engine last summer but most of the actual game was made over my Sophomore year in my free time. I've learned so much about programming through this project that even if I never release it it will have been time well spent.

One of the major areas I've improved in is optimization. With a complex OpenGL engine and real-time gameplay (instead of turn-based like Blackfyre) you have to take a lot of aspects into consideration to keep your game running smoothly on every possible machine, and I spent a LOT of time making sure the code runs as quickly as possible. I had to come up with some really inventive techniques to pull it all off and I'm very proud of my optimized engine :D

I have some very big plans for the game and I hope you are excited as I am to see it finally completed!

Now that the game programming class is said and done, I'm quite impressed at my ability to teach. I did a lot of things well, but I also know I did a lot of things incorrectly, which I'm chalking up to a learning experience for myself and learning from those mistakes. In the end, most of the students definitely got something from the class and it was enjoyable for both myself and them. I really hope they'll expand upon what they learned this semester and, if they so chose, enter the industry as I plan to.

Speaking of the industry, I know I've always wanted to work for Blizzard, but after playing through Portal 2 I want to work at Valve just as badly. Portal 2 was such an excellent sequel that it surpassed the original and then some. The puzzles were mind-bending and extremely well designed, the writing, full of dark humor, was top-notch, and the base engine was completely flawless. Listening to the commentary (especially the more technical bits) made me realize just how much work went into programming the game and how I would have loved to have been a part of it. It looks like two companies will now be getting my resume when I graduate :)

Of course, I still have my current job which I am very excited for. My summer project looks like it will involve a lot of awesome things (C++ and OpenGL, a little bit of Objective-C, and a lot of new experiences for myself). Last summer's experience with Spaulding was an amazing learning experience, and I'm really looking forward to expanding my programming repertoire even more!

Man, there's so much to talk about. One of the things that just entered my mind were two assignments for Core that I recently completed. After reading Dante's "Inferno" we were assigned to write our own circle of Hell. I decided to go one step further and use the terza rime rhyme scheme (ABA, BCB, CDC, etc.) for the paper and I managed to pull it off flawlessly. It was pretty damn hard getting the rhythm perfect but I feel I did a good job (and I got a 100/100 on it, so I think I did). Another interesting assignment involved telling a story with a moral in front of the entire class. I decided, again, to challenge myself and not only tell a story, but tell it in song. I ended up playing "Over the Hills and Far Away" by Gary Moore, which I re-arranged for acoustic guitar (and to fit my vocal range). I've never performed in front of more than 3 people and it was definitely a nerve-wracking experience, but the entire class really enjoyed it (even though I made a few mistakes).

In other news: I'll be getting a car this summer! It's been something I've long lacked and am now very excited to finally acquire. It's always been irritating being locked down to destinations only withing walking/biking distance but now I'll be able to have a lot more freedom in that respect :)

On the anime front, things have been rather slow for me. However, I recently watched Eureka Seven (which you'd be able to tell from my AMV two posts down). I was really hesitant going into it (50 episodes is a huge time investment for me), but a few episodes in I was completely hooked and couldn't stop watching. For a mecha, it had a lot of things the stereotypical mecha doesn't have: an engrossing plot, large amounts of character depth and progression, and an engaging romance. It definitely goes somewhere on my top 10 list.

I've also been watching [C] as it's been airing and I'm loving it so far. It's like Shakugan no Shana, except instead of Flame Hazes it's Entrepreneurs. I can't describe exactly what it is about the show that I love so much. Maybe it's because I just love money, or maybe because I can relate with the business aspects of the show, or maybe it's because the music is just so damn awesome:

Speaking of Entrepreneurs, I took an Entrepreneurship class this semester. We had to write an entire business plan for a fictional business. I, however, convinced my group to write a plan for Anarchy Games Software. It was very surreal going through and analyzing all the business aspects that are required for a start-up game company. I also used it to further my knowledge, including the exact process which one goes through to get a game onto Steam (which I will attempt to utilize with Sorrowsong *hinthint*) and just how much work goes into starting a business. For our final we had to present the business plan, and it felt extremely surreal standing there demonstrating our product (I played through some of Blackfyre and Sorrowsong), that might actually be used to start a business someday.

Well, that's all I can think of to talk about for now. There will definitely be more to come once I collect my thoughts even more. Until next time :)

Sorrowsong Official Gameplay Trailer

2011-04-29T18:50:00.000-05:00

Eureka Seven AMV - Satellite

2011-04-07T09:18:00.001-05:00

We Have the Rest of Our Lives

2011-03-12T02:49:00.003-06:00

So, spring break is in full effect for me, and it has been a glorious one.

I just finished marathoning all of Noein. It was a complete mind-screw in many ways, mostly because of the whole many-worlds quantum theory stuff. It really makes you think. This year I've really been trying to get back into watching a lot of anime, and that plan is going quite well so far. So far this year I've watched Psychic Detective Yakumo, Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt, Bartender, Kimikiss, Nogizaka no Haruka no Himitsu, Noein and rewatched Kanon and Myself; Yourself. A pretty good list for being only 3 months into the year :)

In other news, my video cards are running like absolute beasts. I started playing through Metro 2033 the day I got the cards, and even at absolute max settings at 1080p my cards didn't even break a sweat. I have to say, Metro was a really good game despite some of its shortcomings. For as good as the graphics were, they really should have spent more time on the character models. They looked like something 3 years outdated thrown into an other-wise breathtaking world. I also was kind of turned off by the level of difficulty in the game. There is no reason any human should take 8 shots to the head with no armor on and still live. It just doesn't make any sense. The game was also quite buggy, but those bugs saved my ass a few times so I won't complain.

Where the game really shines in is the story. Not only is it highly thought-provoking, but it's extremely well-written (it better be, since it was based off of a novel!). It really makes you think about what you would do in a situation such as that. Would you die off and let natural selection take its course, realizing that you are no longer the dominant species, or would you fight back against the very laws of nature and destroy the new fittest race?

I got Bullsetstorm when it came out and really didn't expect much of it (I just bought it for the controversy :) ), but it was one of the most fun games I've ever played. The graphics were mind-boggling (UE3 has to be the best video game engine ever made!) and the gameplay was all manner of awesome. What's better than kicking someone into the air then taking off his head with a shotgun blast, all bullet-time style? Yea, that's right, very few things.

I got the Crysis 2 demo and, of course, my 580's decimate that as well. I'm actually really enjoying the multiplayer, which is a huge surprise. It's very balanced and the nanosuit adds a lot of strategy to the game so it's not just run and gun. It may actually finally replace Counter-Strike: Source for me, it's quite possibly even more fun.

In terms of my own game, the past month or so has been all about optimization. One of the things I didn't realize going into Sorrowsong is that OpenGL is a hard beast to tame, and unless you know exactly what you're doing, it's going to bite you eventually. This happened when I tried to run it on any computer not as powerful as my own. Massive slowdowns and horrible frame rates.

Although I have to say optimization has now become one of my favorite things to do. It really requires you to think outside of the box to come up with a solution. I had to do some really counter-intuitive things to optimize Sorrowsong. I also had to do some very awesome things, such as getting OpenGL to straight load the textures in DDS instead of passing them through SDL as PNGs then compressing them live in texture memory. Streamlining my use of Framebuffer objects also was quite the challenge, I had to do some hackish things with alpha blending in order to achieve the same effect without the FBO.

If everything goes according to plan, expect Sorrowsong mid-late next month. I'm getting extremely excited. Now when I look back at Blackfyre I realize how poor of a game it was. With Sorrowsong I've put my entire heart into it and really hope that effort shows in the form of a smooth, clean, fun, optimized, balanced game that others will enjoy :)

In other programming news, since I've been authorized to share the information (wow, that sounds pretty badass), my work with Spaulding this past week was AWESOME:
In the span of a week I wrote a full-featured ECG viewer that supports zooming on all 12 leads (horizontal and vertical), printing, a perfectly accurate graph (where horizontal is 40ms/tick and vertical is 0.1mV per tick), and basic calipers (the weird tuning-fork like things you see) for precise measurements.

It was definitely some of the most fun code I've ever written for Spaulding, requiring a lot of low-level I/O (some of my favorite stuff) and a lot of graphics work (obviously for mapping the actual ECG, scaling, calculating the real-life units of measurement, etc.). It was awesome amounts of fun and I'm really surprised I managed to complete it in only one week.

The only problem I have with breaks is that about a week in I finally get settled to being back home and then I just have to go back to school and resettle. It's a little irritating the say the least. But there's also a lot of great things going on at school as well.

Our DJ crew is gaining more popularity with the rise of dubstep in the mainstream. More and more people on campus are getting interested in EDM, which is very very good news.

The game programming class is all going according to plan, even though judging by the midterm grades some of the students are going to need a little help. A select few, however, are very dedicated and really showing their stuff. They've definitely been making me proud.

I've recently been getting to know a lot of awesome people at school. Not only have I really deepened my relationships with some of my friends I've also gained a lot of new ones, and I'm surprised at how many people genuinely enjoy my company. It does get irritating sometimes, especially when I'm trying to do work, but I digress, it's nice either way.

This year has also been amazing so far in terms of music. Not only did I find out that The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus released a new album late last year, I also found out that it doesn't SUCK like their previous one. It's like they realized that selling out destroyed all good in their music and they've reverted back.

Good Charlotte also released a new album late last year. They're kind of a guilty pleasure for me, since I've been listening to them since I was in 6th grade and they really are more for angsty preteens, but I still really enjoy their music. Their new album has some really good songs.

Trust Company just released a new album and it's really awesome. I got into them a few years back after hearing Downfall in Tales of the Past 3. Their music is really unique and has just the right amount of hardness for me.

Rise Againt's new album comes out in 3 days, but I already torrented myself a leak (don't worry, I've already pre-ordered the album so I'll be getting it legit. I always want to support my favorite bands.) The song from the album that this blog post's title is from is definitely the best one in the album:

I love how it starts off quiet than hits you with all it has. Then the bridge comes in and it's just so damn beautiful. I've been listening to it over and over and am not getting tired of it one bit!

I'm getting really excited for the summer as well. I can't believe I'm almost halfway done with college. Time really flies. This summer, however, is going to be awesome. More work with Spaulding, I'm going to start learning DirectX for my games, I'm finally going to be getting my driver's license and a car (something that I've been wanting for a long, long while), and if it's anything like last summer was I know it's going to be amazing :)

But I'm getting ahead of myself, I still have half a semester of schoolwork, programming, anime and living the dream!

For my birthday I made myself a beast

2011-02-17T15:44:00.002-06:00

This arrived in the mail today :)

Unboxed sexiness!

Halfway through the carnage

Closer to completion

I do love me some stickers :D

Yep, SLI-ed 2 GTX 580's today. My computer scares me now. I can play Crysis Warhead completely maxed (16xAA and all) and get a smooth 60-80 FPS. Everything else runs in the 300's. I'm future-proof and ready for EVERY game that comes out in the next 3 years.

Let's See How Far We've Come

2011-02-17T00:26:00.003-06:00

It's really hard to think of a way to write this post. I mean, it's really hard since I've written about almost everything I want to talk about before.

I turned 20 today. It really doesn't feel weird at all. Many people told me "how's it like not being a teenager anymore?" and I just shrugged. At 18 I felt I had entered adulthood and really dissociated with the fact that I was a teenager, so 20 wasn't a big step up to me. However, 20 feels different for the fact that it's a whole new decade for me. So much happens during someone's 20's. They graduate college, settle down, possibly get married. I'm realizing that these things are slowly becoming closer and closer to reality.

It's mind shattering, really, realizing that I am now in the decade of my life that really is the most eventful. The decade that decides whether I win or lose, so to speak, at life. Of course, I've already won at my pre-20's life, so I'm confident that the next 10 years will play out as well.

Like I wrote in my memoir freshman year, my life as I know it didn't start until a few years ago. Specifically 4 years ago, when Dopefish inspired me to start model changing on my own. This experimentation quickly cascaded into my career as a machinimaker and finally my career as a programmer.

I have a job programming now, I have a huge game project that I'm currently working on, and I'm teaching a class in game programming. It really is surreal, there's no other word for it.

Last weekend I was at a house party at Mr. Green Baron's (the leader of the DJ crew) house. The Baron bummed a Monster off of me and asked if he needed to repay me at all. I told him "It's all good, I make more money than a 19-year-old should." I felt weird just saying that. Just the realization that I made $10,000 last year as a programmer. It was just so mind-boggling, realizing that my dreams became a reality in my teenage years. I have a well-paying job in the programming industry, and I'm loving every second of it. I love being able to write code, something that I would do for free and fun, yet getting recognized and payed for it.

Programming has always been like that. It's a challenge, it's hard, it's constant research. That's why I love it. As an intellectual who loves to challenge himself and his brain, there is no better thing in the word than programming. The technical world is always changing. There are always new things to learn, always new game ideas to enact, always new applications for software in the modern world. It's limitless creation, the ability to shape the future, to become a part of its making.

The game programming class is going well, extraordinarily well. The students have seemed to pick up on C++ extremely quickly and we've already written one console-based game so far. I didn't think that I would be a good teacher at all, but I'm proving myself wrong every day. I know enough about my craft that I can actually teach it! There's even a prospective Beatrice in the class, although I've learned not to label someone as such since that gets my hopes up and creates expectations, and she's currently taken, so whatever.

I've also realized, speaking of Beatrice, that I currently enjoy the single life too much to be anything but. I'm just too busy of a person to have to juggle my career, my hobbies, and a girlfriend all at the same time. I love being able to live by my own rules without having to manage another person's rules as well. Just today Ayn Rand's fan page on Facebook posted a quote:

"Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person."
- Ayn Rand

For my previous two girlfriends, it was always self-sacrifice when I was with them. I sacrificed what truly made me happy to make them content, I sacrificed what I would rather be doing to be with them. This model of love is counter-intuitive. You should rather be with them than doing what you want. They should make you happier than anything else. Neither of my previous relationships were like that, it was never about what made me happy, but what made them happy. This is where I realized something was wrong.

However, I've learned from these mistakes and am waiting for the person where sacrifice isn't necessary, where my happiness and her happiness can be one in the same. And, until I find that person, I'm content with keeping my own happiness.

That's not to say I don't have temptation. There are a few girls on campus that I like, but I realize that they are not the ones to compliment me and make my happiness and their happiness increase, but rather make me forsake my happiness for them.

It's late and I'm rambling, I apologize. This is just something that's weighed on my mind recently. It gets really irritating with the previous two persons constantly taking jabs at my person and character just because they were too selfish to realize my selflessness. There has been a constant Facebook status war between Erin and I after our breakup, and I realized that it was so immature and that I would rather spend my time worrying about better things than some self-absorbed, depressed, helpless individual. I de-friended her and have cut her out of my life entirely. I literally haven't spoken a word to her since we broke up, and it feels so DAMN LIBERATING!

Enough of my shitty love life. The meat and potatoes of this post comes from the fact that I'm realizing just how much I've accomplished before I even turned 20. I'm amazed at where model changing has lead me, where my programming career already is and how far it's left to go. There are so many things to learn, so many opportunities waiting for me. I'm not depressed at all that my teenage years are gone, because this opens the gateway for even more possibilities now that I'm in my 20's. Time will tell how I fare, but I believe that I will fare quite well in the years to come.

Happy Singles Awareness Day

2011-02-14T02:32:00.005-06:00

This is my date for Valentine's day :)

But sadly the lovely Hirano-san will be covered by this most of the day :P

In other nerdy news, Sorrowsong is getting closer and closer to being a finished product. I've been working my ass off debugging/polishing and adding final features to the game. Internal beta testing has begun and it is looking and running awesomely :D

I also decided to give myself a birthday present this year, since I am going to be turning 20 (holy shit I'm getting old!). I ordered myself two GTX 580s and am going to SLI them. With all the awesome games coming out this year (Crysis 2, Portal 2, Guild Wars 2, Deus Ex 3, Diablo 3, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls V, Dead Space 2, etc etc.) I thought I might want to future-proof my machine in every way possible.

Sorrowsong Gameplay Screenshots

2011-01-25T19:53:00.003-06:00

Sorrowsong is coming nearer and nearer to completion. So near, in fact that I've decided to start releasing gameplay media to get your mouths watering for the release :D

Epic Sorrowsong Bug #1 - Super Fast Level Changing

2011-01-20T13:41:00.000-06:00

The power of solid state

2011-01-14T22:28:00.002-06:00

Boot drive: OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCIe Solid State Drive
Games drive: Western Digital Velociraptor (10000RPM) 600GB HDD
Storage drive: Seagate Barracuda XT (7200RPM) 2TB

Got them today and already have most everything migrated over, and the speed difference is insane :D

Kanon 2006 AMV - Shiori's Sorrow

2011-01-07T18:22:00.001-06:00

A Year to Remember

2010-12-31T19:31:00.006-06:00

As the hours begin winding down on another year, I always begin to feel nostalgic. I remember this time last year, and the two posts associated with that time. It's been a very long and eventful year since then. Almost too eventful to fully remember. So much has happened that it's unbelievable, and I cannot believe where my life is at in just one year's time.

This year has held a lot of the two sides of many emotions: happiness and sadness, joy and tears, accomplishment and despair, love and hate, peacefulness and anger. This is the same with any year, but this year has held probably the most emotional turmoil out of many of the previous ones.

This year has seen many things, the earliest of them being the release of my first major game. Even though I look back at Blackfyre and realize how bad it is, I still feel very happy and accomplished that I actually managed to create something as big as that. I remember the long nights near the end where I was frantically hunting down bugs for hours on end. Every time one was fixed it felt like I had just won the lottery. There was much caffeine gorging, loud music and profanities. It reminded me of the many times id Software had done the same thing. It was awesome!

Early on in the year I nearly lost a good friend due to my own misunderstanding and overreacting. Thankfully everything turned out for the better, and we're closer now than we ever were.

After my 9800GX2 died I was left with barely any money and was less than looking forward to cooking food every day over the summer. However, I was allowed the opportunity of a lifetime: a paid internship. The summer was absolutely amazing. I learned so much during my time with Spaulding. I had a lot of fun on the trip to Wisconsin for their quarterly meeting. So much fun, in fact, that something I did during that time has been one of my few regrets this year. My boss, so to speak, is awesome! He's an excellent and very skilled programmer, surpassing myself by far. He's always been helpful, and made learning Groovy/Grails a very fun experience. I'm currently working for them again over winter break, and it's been great. I've watched a client-side program go from a mocked-up user interface in Visual Studio to a full-fledged, completely working Swing Builder application in a mere span of two weeks. I love watching all the plans for a project come out in the code and start to work together. It's a wonderful thing to build the code and just sit there thinking: "wow, I made this." Even only a few years ago, something like that would have been completely impossible for me. Now it comes so easily.

Over the summer I started playing an electric guitar. I quickly learned the techniques: power-chords, pickslides, palm muting, etc. to play my favorite songs. Guitar has quickly become one of my passions, falling second only to programming. I love being able to play music. It's such an empowering feeling. One of the things that affects me every day emotionally: music. I can now create it myself. I can perform it, I can use it to relieve stress, to indulge the creative side of myself.

I also acquired my own DJ gear. It's a great feeling being able to spin with real tables and records, instead of using just MP3s and a laptop. The tactile experience alone is amazing. You can actually feel the music, so to speak: interacting with the vinyl, the tables, the mixer. I fell in love with DJ'ing a few years ago, but finally can say that I'm a real one, not just a kid with a laptop. I have to thank Steve for keeping me motivated, for inspiring me to become as good as he is one day.

I also watched my computer go from a budget gaming machine to a developing workstation. I now have more screen space then I know what to do with. I have a watercooled, 4GHz beast of an i7, and in a short while I will be making to move to a solid state hard drive. Not only does it feel amazing to be using a machine like this, the status points you get from it are quite nice. I love having people walk into my dorm room and just stare at my setup. It's quite the eye-opener.

After the summer came time to move back in at The Joe. One of the weirdest things I've found out about growing up is how adaptable to change I am. I used to hate change, it used to elicit a very odd, out-of-place feeling. Not anymore. Working full-time at Spaulding didn't feel strange. Staying in a nice hotel room for three days, attending a business meeting, traveling so far by myself, etc. didn't feel weird at all. Going to college, which I had always thought would be one of the biggest changes in my life, was so easy to adapt to. When I finally went back to school in August, it just felt like I was leaving one home and entering another. I was situated in one of the nicer, larger dorms on campus (thanks to my outstanding grades and my roommate's upperclassmen status) and proceeded to make it my home.

Classes were enjoyable and easy. I even started to enjoy data structures, even though I despised the professor for her better-than-you attitude, even though I could code circles around her. I actually think I skipped class more this semester than during my freshman year, but I still managed to have a 4.0 GPA. Funny how college works :)

I really buckled down on Sorrowsong after getting to school. It was hard to work on over the summer, since I was spending 8 hours a day coding for my job. I would much rather relax my brain with a video game or some anime. Although I had no problem with that, I had let game-playing and anime watching fall to the sidelines in my life and it was nice to fit them back in.

Much of the first few months of school are an absolute blur. I was more busy than I'd even been, thanks to a certain thing that liked to take up 6 or more hours of my day. Although it was kind of nice. It made me manage my time a lot more, realizing "hey, I know that 6 hours of my time are going to get sucked up by her, so I really need to make the other hours count". Any and all of my free time on the weekdays was spent working on Sorrowsong. I watched it quickly go from a design on paper to a fully-fledged, completely working, and beautiful game. It's very close to being in a good enough condition to release a gameplay trailer, and I'm hoping for a release within the next couple of months. I really cannot wait to show everyone it. I've made so many strides since Blackfyre in ability and it feels great!

The weekends were awesome. Living with your best friend is the best thing ever. My former roommate and I barely spoke, were never in the room together, and when we were there was always a hostile feeling in the room. Not anymore. Steve and I get along like brothers. We had so many great, late-night conversations about every subject imaginable. We enjoyed the weekends as much as possible, with a lot of game-playing, movie-watching, and random DJ parties all the time. Even if every other weekend the frivolities were stopped by the selfish one who couldn't bear to watch me pay attention to anything else that I loved, I still enjoyed them immensely.

My professor and I started talking about teaching a class in game programming next semester. As the new semester comes closer and closer I am getting more and more excited. I get to pass my knowledge onto others. I get to show everyone how much fun game programming is, why I forsake everything just to continue doing it. I get to watch others experience it all, exactly what I went through almost 4 years ago. Those were the best experiences of high school for me. The long nights, blasting music, with nothing but some C++ code in front of me. Not to mention the other nights, lost in filming and editing the Dreamscapes.

It's been over a year since Shining Dreamscape, and I'm longing to bring Cataclysm into the light of model changing. However, time does not currently permit for this endeavor to be achieved. I want to surpass all of the other Dreamscapes in every way and I need to perfect time to do such a thing. Maybe 2011 will hold this glorious timeframe?

I am currently typing this blog post while blasting music on my brand new pair of Sennheiser HD595's:

I've come to the realization that I'm an audiophile, and I've gotten tired of using cheap pairs of headphones, so I decided to request these babies for Christmas. They are absolutely mind-blowing so far. Songs sound so vibrant and clear. The soundstage, thanks to their open-aire design, is amazing. It really feels like the music is all around me. The frequencies are perfectly balanced. I'm a huge bass-head (probably thanks to DJ'ing EDM) and love a lot of bass. These have a perfect amount of bass: nice and loud but not overpowering. Everything is amazingly balanced. Quality is insane. I can literally tell the difference between 128kbs and 320kbs MP3s now. I can tell the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a FLAC file. I've been wearing these things almost all day every day since I've gotten them. They are extremely comfortable and allow me to become lost in a beautiful soundscape for hours on end.

I've been re-watching Kanon, as is my tradition for the past 3 years. I'm always glad that it is. Kanon is the most beautiful and touching anime that I've ever watched and rewatching it during wintertime makes it even moreso. I love getting under my warm covers every night and watching a few episodes. Kanon, just like 5cm, always manages to make me realize a few things about my life and help me to reflect upon them. On the anime front this year, there have been a great many things that I have watched, but I'll list the more noteworthy of them:

Bakemonogatari - Interesting story, memorable characters, and beautiful animation style

Hidamari Sketch x Hoshimittsu - I fell in love with the show ever since the first season. It's so cute, carefree and funny. This season has been my favorite so far, with a lot of more serious decisions coming into play for the girls.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya - Pure epic. 'Nuff said.

Full Metal Panic! - Yes, I'm late to the party, but I enjoyed FMP immensely. Definitely makes my top 10. I quickly devoured all of the books after I finished the anime, and every book kept getting better and better. The finale was just pure mind-blowing awesome

Angel Beats! - Every adaptation of a Key game has left me speechless and crying at the end, and Angel Beats was no exception. It was very humorous, well animated, and quite touching.

El Cazador de la Bruja - I finally finished watching Bee Train's "girls with guns" trilogy. Just thinking about this show brings back memories of summertime. It was very different from Noir or Madlax, but in a very refreshing way. I loved it :)

Black Lagoon - One of the most badass shows I've ever watched. Lot's of violence, action, blood and profanity.

Eden of the East Movies - I finally managed to get these watched during the year and they really ended the story very nicely. I loved them a lot :)

Asobi ni Ikuyo - So bad it was good. I found myself laughing hysterically at just how stupid the show was. If you're a masochist or just love watching horrible anime, this is for you

Gunslinger Girl - A very good, psychologically-charged action-packed anime, full of a lot of drama, a hint of romance, and a lot of guns.

Ga-Rei -zero- - Serious, dark, great music, lots of good action.

The World God Only Knows - A high school-aged guy treating real women like they are characters in a dating-sim? Amazing concept. It was well played, very funny, and quite cute.

Amagami SS - Very cute, very kinky (especially the first two arcs). Each heroine was very unique and had an engaging story. I enjoyed it a lot.

Allison and Lillia - I was originally going to take this show off of my list, but I'm so glad that I didn't. It was exceptional. It had plenty of action, a lot of romance, and a really good story to boot. The characters were very realistic and human and were very easy to relate to.

I still need to get around to rewatching Myself;Yourself, since the past attempt to rewatch it was hindered immensely. Myself;Yourself has also become one that I've rewatched many times, thanks to it being applicable to those around me. People with abusive parents, depressed, suicidal girls, etc. It really gives a good insight into what your life is like when you have problems like that, and gives some really good advice on how to deal with it. It's helped me give advice to people in such situations, even though they rarely appreciate the advice and completely ignore it.

I actually was planning to have a list of my new year's resolutions in this post, but it's become long enough as it is. That'll wait until tomorrow :)

Even though this year was full of a lot of stress (especially close to the end) I have enjoyed it immensely. I'm living my life to the fullest and not letting anything or anyone get in the way, bring me down and control me. I've accomplished so much and still have so much to go. I've learned to stick up for myself, to stop being a doormat. I've learned to express my emotions instead of hiding them. I've learned to not take shit from immature, selfish people. I learned a few new programming languages, I accomplished so much work on Sorrowsong, I made 3 new, amazing AMVs. I learned so much guitar and DJ'ing. I had a lot of joyous experiences and a lot of extremely sad ones. C'est la vie, and I cannot wait to do it all over again next year!

iPod Touch Theme #1

2010-12-27T14:20:00.002-06:00

Been doing a lot of customization of my iPod Touch's interface the past few days. Just thought I'd share the first draft.

It's winter time and the Disappearance just came out, so that's my choice of lockscreen wallpaper. Lockscreen is here.

I've been addicted to Umineko lately, seeing as I just finished the 7th game and the 8th comes out in 4 days. I also am a huge Battler/Beatrice shipper so this image wins in all ways. Like my insane folder organization? Skin is here.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya AMV - With Me (Sum 41)

2010-12-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

Here's a belated Christmas present for you readers :)

No Love

2010-12-14T03:39:00.008-06:00

Seeing as I'm a sucker for romantic stuff, and I just had the idea to write this today, I thought I would write this out before my mind pushed it aside for other matters, such as the lengthening list of bugs to sort out in Sorrowsong's engine. So, here it is:

I still remember that late summer night, lost in the intoxication of my own prowess and accomplishments, after a surreal experience in Wisconsin. Sitting in my hotel room, knowing I should sleep, I started talking with you again.

I don't exactly remember all that was said. It was late and I had many things on my mind. I was lost in the absolute surrealism that my summer had become. I was lost at how accomplished I had become in such a short amount of time. A full-time job in the programming industry, a huge game project finished and a large amount of cash flowing in.

However, I wanted to talk with you. I don't know exactly why, the urge just struck me very suddenly, and I knew that I wanted to. We talked of a great many things. We talked late into the night, resulting in my having less than three hours of sleep before I had to awake to get to the office.

On the train ride back to Chicago, I finally slept. My subconscious mind wandered as it always does. However, my dreamscape centered around you. I dreamt of what we may have become in the coming months, of what love had in store for both of us.

Walking around Chicago, in 105-degree weather, business attire, with two laden bags in tow, my mind began to wander again, constantly thinking about you. Constantly wondering what fate had brought on this sudden change of feelings and opinions.

The next two nights we talked non-stop over the phone, using up all the minutes on my new phone plan over the hours. We quickly switched to texting, keeping each other up late into the night all of those days in August, until the time came for us to finally unite back at school.

That first night back, we wandered around Rensselaer, speaking everything on our minds. We spoke about many subjects, until, finally, we looked into each others' eyes, and, slightly timidly, leaned in for our first kiss. I can still remember the warmth on my lips as they met yours. I still remember the passion that that kiss held. Would I have known, back then, how much that passion would change in the coming months? Did I know that it would mutate into almost the exact opposite?

The next few weeks after that night are a blur. I remember the long conversations. I remember pulling each other aside into the alcoves of hallways to share the tenderness of a kiss once again, the thrill of clandestinely sharing this closeness in public adding to my already-increased heart-rate. I relished those moments. I dreamt that moments like those would never cease in their grandeur, their shear intensity. However, as everyone knows, pipe dreams are just that.

That first weekend, when everything started to reveal itself, when you began to get comfortable enough to show your true nature, I shed more tears for you than I had for anyone else in my life. I shed tears for your misfortune, for our future, and for the one who ultimately brought all of this upon us. I shed tears for the realization that I could never judge a book by its cover, that everyone had something lurking deep inside of them that made them become an entirely different person at random.

As the days went by, that feeling of intimacy and closeness began to replace itself with feelings of lust, anger and irritation. I began to realize just who you really were – the person you refused to admit that you emulated in every aspect – and began to regret that summer night, lost in my ego-induced intoxication. I began to dread the very sight of you, knowing that a torrent of hatred, anger and selfish sadness would soon make its appearance again, as it always did.

I cared for you, probably more than anyone else had, because that is the way I am, and that was my attraction toward you. I always put others in front of myself, no matter the consequences; and you, knowing this, took every advantage that you could to control me, to keep me in check, to channel your own emotional stress into, without ever realizing the absolute pain that you put me through each and every day.

Every day became torment. Every kiss that we shared became painful, knowing that the tenderness that we once had was slowly being eaten by your true self, by the monster lurking inside of you. You kept spewing those same words, the same “I love you”'s, the same “I care about you”'s, yet I never believed them to begin with. I felt both of those emotions, and wished that you would have seen them for what they were. However, you clearly did not, for you exploited those very feelings which I had publicly made known what I was so hesitant to make them known about anyone before.

You began to break down more often, with more intensity. You began to indulge more in the catalyst which fueled your implosions, you began to reveal more about yourself. This was out of jealousy. You were jealous because of my devotion to my career, because of my devotion to my art, because of my devotion to my friends; and the only way you knew to break back into my life was through intoxication and the resulting emotional breakdowns that always followed.

One breakdown in particular made me realize that this behavior of yours was not accidental, but purposeful. You did this as a way to get my attention back to you, as you always did. You hated not being the center of attention. You hated being “ignored” for things that were important in my life, even though you were one of the prime members of that set of importance. You just failed to realize how much you actually meant to me: how much I wished for those halcyon moments of romance lost in the alcoves of Saint Joseph's College.

That night, I shed more tears for you and for myself than I had ever shed before. I seriously considered suicide, if even for a very brief moment, for the first time in my life because of you; because of your manipulations, because of your abuses. This was when I realized that something needed to change.

You told me, when I ended it all, that I seemed too calm about it. This is true, I was calm about it. I was calm because I realized that being in a relationship with you was detrimental to my mental health. You want to know why the last person abandoned you and preferred the company of those in Mexico? It was because of the exact things I learned about you. You are controlling and manipulative, just like your father. The only relationship you knew growing up. The only relationship you saw. You wanted to emulate it. You saw me as your mother. You saw me as the person who would handle your bullshit, who would handle your abuse, who would handle your immaturity. You saw me as the person, so in love with you that you cannot imagine that he forsake everything for you, and you destroyed it. You destroyed probably the only person who ever cared for you in your pitiful existence. You destroyed the one person who actually listened to you, the one person who actually truly cared. I was that one person who still longs for those halcyon times of love shared in forgotten corners of this school. I was the one person who attempted to aid you with the problems that only you, yourself, are to blame for.

Now I'm doing the only thing I know to do. I did it with Jeralyn, and that paradigm proved itself successful. I'm completely ignoring you. I'm ignoring your ignorance, your objectivity, your abuse, because I realized that all of that made me a worse person. I lashed out at my closest friends, my own family because of you. I betrayed all of the morals that I thought I had known because of you. I gave my very life and soul to you. However, you destroyed it all. You screwed it all up. You broke me, and you realize it. Where were you when I needed help and I was down? No where. You showed me nothing but hate and ran me into the ground. Bitch, you get no love. [Eminem reference lol]

And now, you are trying to treat me as the bad guy. You are trying to deface me without knowing the true reasons behind my actions. You are trying to call me immature. As I wrote in a Facebook status last night about this very action:

Maturity is eliminating major problems in your life, no matter the consequences, for the betterment of themselves. Immaturity is holding a grudge against those who make such a decision and insult them behind their backs without any knowledge of the motives of that person. When someone cannot understand the difference between these two terms, they clearly have no right to judge those who actually understand.

You should do best to realize this. You are the one who is being immature. I'm realizing the true person that is you. Even if I long for those times past between us, I realize now that all you can do is abuse those feelings, until you, yourself, are content with them. You want the feeling of love to be known. You want to be able to manipulate those feelings to your will, to be immature, lost in your own selfish pity. Now, I'm telling you, that I am one person who will not stand for that kind of abuse. Go find someone else. Go find someone weaker than I am, who will stand for all of your asinine, selfish bullshit. I'm not that person. Know that for sure.

I did not write the following out of regret or depression. The thought just struck me tonight, as I was walking back from printing out papers for my final. I had never before written an account from my mind on my previous relationships and felt that this one required actual accounting.

Bear in mind that I still love everything about my life. I do not regret pushing this person out of my life in any way. These past few weeks I have been so happy in all aspects that it's almost frightening. However, whenever I feel that fear, I realize that I did the right thing. I eliminated my own major problems and now I am happier today than I have been in a long time. I'm loving life and kicking ass. Sorrowsong is becoming much more than I ever hoped it would be, I have a fresh fury of AMV ideas in my mind, and even an idea for a ground-breaking machinima. All of this is because I realized my own mistakes and cut the person who destroyed these ideas out of my life.

Recovery

2010-12-01T15:44:00.003-06:00

It seems I'm a stronger person than I had originally thought. It's only been a week and a half since my last emo post, but I'm already loving life and living the dream again, with a new mindset and a positive outlook.

I must apologize for my last post, like I said in the edit: I wrote it at 4AM while under the clutches of sleep deprivation, insomnia and depression. I asked a close friend whether or not it sounded too harsh on the third party. She told me it wasn't harsh, but honest. I got a lot of flak about that post, mostly due to how honest and true I was being, so I really don't care if it angered or upset anyone. I need to stop hiding how I feel inside and just let it out when I need to, instead of holding it all in, resulting in the mental implosion that caused that post.

The day after I wrote that post I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. I have to say it was the best in the series so far and I cannot wait to see how they adapt the rest of the 7th book. The movie, through Harry, Ron and Hermione's close relationship, showed me that the best thing you can have are good friends who support you. I started thinking about it and realized that I've (Steve's going to kill me for saying this) compared Steve, Amber and I to Harry, Ron and Hermione in my mind multiple times. I know that Steve's got my back and that I've got his back. He's really helped me come to realizations about myself that I, alone couldn't have figured out.

When we got back from the theater, I sat down on my computer, confused and depressed. Without realizing what I was doing, I had attached my old WoW account to my Battle.net account, added the TBC 10-day trial to the account, updated WoW and logged in. I looked at my friends list and saw that forever-remembered name "Verlynne", online and in Stormwind. Now, this gets a little embarrassing but bare with me: you know that feeling that's described in songs galore? That uncontrollable nervousness that you get when you just see a certain someone? The one that makes your heart beat a million miles an hour and want to pop out of your chest? That's how I felt when I sent her a message. It's only ever been Chloe who's elicited this feeling from me, no matter what. It's happened before, but the feeling is short-lived and only happens the first few times I'm with the person. This nervousness may have also been added to by the fact that I hadn't spoken to her in four years. I sent her a very simple message: "Guess who?"

"Wow, I was just thinking about you earlier today."

All of a sudden, everything changed. I wore the biggest smile on my face, I was happy, none of the stupid drama of the two weeks before mattered. None of it. Chloe still thought about me, just as I her, even four years later. She asked me how my life was going and I responded as such:

"Going to college, majoring in computer science, working as a computer programmer, writing my own video game in my free time, and I'll be teaching a class on game programming next semester."

I didn't list those things to brag, I did it to be able to show her just what she had caused. She inspired me to make machinima, to show her the hidden and beautiful things in the game that she loved to play. I wanted her to know just how far that inspiration had led me. However, this also made me realize something: Look at that list. How many 19 year old's, sophomores in college, can say they've accomplished that much? I'd hazard a guess at very few. I realized that I had accomplished so much, done more than most, and was now able to tell the inspiration of it all that I was already accomplishing my dreams. Why the hell did I ever feel depressed? Why the hell did I ever doubt myself?

We started talking again, just like normal. Just like nothing had ever changed, just like we did four years ago. It was amazing, it was surreal.

I didn't ask her about the boyfriend she had back then, if they were still together, or if she had a new one. Byousoku 5cm managed to show me that some things just aren't meant to be, and I'm happy with that. Yes, I might still love Chloe, but I'm just content with talking to her, because even doing just that is enough to brighten my day and lift even major depression off of me. I didn't even talk to her about my current state of mind, it just all seemed so irrelevant. Why would I let someone I didn't love destroy my mind? Why would I fall prey to the very thing that she did that made me more angry than anything else? I was talking to the person I actually do love, and that's all that mattered.

I was grinding some mobs for fun and nostalgia later, listening to music, when Eminem's "Not Afraid" started playing on my iPod. Music has always been a huge inspiration for me and this song, even if it's rap, hit me pretty hard. Especially the bridge:

And I just can't keep living this way
So starting today, I'm breaking out of this cage
I'm standing up, Imma face my demons
I'm manning up, Imma hold my ground
I've had enough, now I'm so fed up
Time to put my life back together right now

This part of the song just blew me away. Not only is it amazing-sounding (this bridge is sung and not just rapped), it made me realize that I need to do the same. All of these problems that I have that build up inside me, I need to fix. I need to stand up to all of the people who purposefully try to use and hurt me, and I need to KICK SOME SERIOUS ASS programming and living life the way I want to live it, not the way others' think I should.

Kind of a random insert, but my brother was telling me about one of his friends who would come up to him and say "I hate everything you choose to be.". I found this quote quite fitting. We choose to be who we are. We can choose to be self-absorbed, immature, depressed slaves whose emotions are manipulated by their family members, who think that life has no meaning, who take that feeling of loss out on their significant others and friends, or we can choose to be confident, humorous, intelligent, hard-working, ass-kicking, lovable people who don't give a damn about others' attempts to subdue them. I'm sure you can guess who I'm referring to with each of those descriptions.

Some people just cannot realize this. I did only a week into my little depression phase. Like I said before: what the hell do I have to be sad about? I'm awesome! I'm living my life the way I want to live it and that's all that matters. No one is going to send me down some stupid, pitiful, weak road where I wallow in my own misery and problems. I'm not her. I'm not the kind of people I hate. I'm my own damn person and I'm kicking ass and loving life!

Threnody to Nuclear Arms: A Metro 2033 Machinima by Insomniac

2010-11-29T12:32:00.001-06:00

My roommate's first machinima, and I have to say he did a damn good job. Tops my first machinima by a LOT.

And that's what you get for falling again...

2010-11-22T01:06:00.004-06:00

Holy shit! Two big posts in one month. You might ask yourself why, which is quite the same question I've been posing to myself recently. This is a rather momentous time in my life, and the only way I know how to communicate my feelings completely is through my blog.

First and foremost: the bubble burst. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I have a massive ego. Of course, those that know me well know that this ego is quite justified, mostly due to myself having no life. My machinimas were quite famous in their day. I started learning programming in high school, whereas most in my class didn't start learning until college. I already have a job as a software engineer. I'm creating a kickass, OpenGL-powered game in my spare time. Hell, I'm freaking teaching a class next semester.

However, even those who know me personally have no idea that I have a major self-esteem problem. I may exude an air of one so confident and egotistical, but my mind is always full of conflict, doubt, even self-loathing. I rectify this internal problem through my external appearance. I act egotistical to force my doubting mind to re-think what it is thinking. This has always been a struggle, fighting my own mind for control.

And, sometimes, my mind wins that fight. In my last post I spoke of the fight with Erin and the resulting weekend-long stupor. However, I failed to mention the fact that the fight with Erin resulted in the bursting of my bubble of ego. Many people have warned me that this would happen, that just one little thing would drive myself over the edge. However, it wasn't a little thing, it was a "someone's life may be at stake and I'm powerless to stop it" moment.

I'm a weak person, I can admit that. I'm very easily controlled. All a girl has to know about me is the fact that I'm a hopeless romantic and hold on to chivalry, and they know they can get easy access. I'm not saying that I regret these traits of mine, I pride myself in the fact that I'm one of the few decent guys left out there. However, there are a multitude of women who take advantage of that, while truly wanting guys who treat them like complete shit. I cannot stand those people. They make me sick to my stomach. Their lack of dignity, respect and love is absolutely horrible.

Twice now, I have fallen into this. I'm so desperate to hold on to the vestiges of so-called love, just because it's an ephemeral, elusive and enigmatic thing that I seek to understand. I fail to realize the fact that I'm hiding away my true feelings out of fear. Fear of hurting the other party, of upsetting them, making them mad. I'm a non-confrontational person and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. Again, a trait that is very easy to take advantage of. One might even go so far as to call me a pushover.

I wish that there were some women out there who were actually receptive of my feelings, who would show me the same respect and dignity I show them, to give instead of always taking. It's becoming harder and harder to imagine that there are people actually out there like that.

When someone rebounds less than a week after their relationship ends, it brings a whole lot of self-doubt. What was wrong with me? What does he have that I didn't? Did you already have other suitors lined up? Were you lying to me the whole time? Did I really mean the world to you?

Going off on a tangent here, but when you tell someone that they mean the world to you, that's something you don't say lightly. I could easily say that Chloe meant the world to me. It'll be exactly 4 years tomorrow since we've spoken to each other, and I still think of her every day whether I will it or not. That's the world. Instantly pursuing one's close friends out of spite and libido definitely means that that person did not mean the world to you.

Speaking of Chloe, today was the first day in four years that I actually considered activating my WoW account again, just to speak with her. That's how confused I feel right now, that I'd spend $15 and risk the chance of addiction just to be able to speak with someone who could have changed completely in the long span of four years. I know I'm a completely different person than I was back then. Whether I prefer the present me or not, I truly do not know.

Because of the incredible implosion of my own self-esteem, I've found working on anything to be like grinding teeth. The past two weeks I've barely written any of Sorrowsong. Even finishing my homework before Thanksgiving break became an intense struggle. I have work lined up for Spaulding over the next holiday, but I'm already worried that I've forgotten too much Groovy to perform well. The game programming class looms ever closer, and finding the strength and confidence to prepare myself for that is as frustrating as it gets.

This is one of the few times in my life where I've begun to question everything that I do. I couldn't sleep at all last night, kept up by this incessant nagging coming from my brain: who are you? I cannot answer this question. I racked my brain, trying to come up with the reasons I am the way I am. Why do I program? I enjoy complex technical challenges and the accomplishment of bending a machine to my will. Why do I make machinima and AMV's? To express my feelings through an audiovisual medium. Why do I play guitar and DJ? To express my feelings through an aural medium. However, what feelings am I trying to express? Love, hate, anger, sadness, happiness, hope, faith? I've forgotten how to tell. Did I ever even know?

I've realized that one of the driving forces behind my creativity has been girls that I've liked. My first machinima, all the way up to White Dreamscape, were for Chloe. Shining Dreamscape was for Jeralyn. I have no idea why it's like this, but when I have a goal outside of programming, when I have a reason outside of my computer to wake up in the morning, it keeps me energized, fresh, inspired. Now I'm left with a sense of emptiness, of no goal outside of programming.

Of course, it's not like I have no goals for my career. I hope one day to work as a programmer for a company as prestigious as Blizzard. I hope to make more money than I know what to do with, own a sports car, a $50,000 PC, a penthouse in Los Angeles. However, those are all material things. There needs to be another motivation behind this driving force of mine. I've had to ask myself the question: what will make you truly happy?

I still, myself, do not know. I talked with my mother on the ride back home from school. I told her almost everything about the current situation. She listened and gave some good advice. However, one thing that she said stuck out and frightened me. She told me that I shouldn't seek out female companionship, that I should just wait, and I'll find the right girl. However, I'm not even sure if that optimal person exists. A girl who's cute, funny, extremely intelligent, matches my wit, not abusive/controlling, not loaded full of psychological problems and who loves me deeply just seems to be more and more far-fetched. Maybe my aspirations are too high? Maybe I'm just not suited for anyone at all? Maybe I shouldn't even actively pursue something that doesn't exist? Again, I'm full of doubt, and it's terrifying.

In an attempt to change some part of my life, to give myself some form of external motivation, I've decided to focus more on my health. One thing that many nerds like myself fail to take care of is their bodies, which they abuse fully. I've started dieting, working out, I decided to cut energy drinks out of my diet. Any time when I lack motivation or get frustrated with myself I'm going to go for a run or lift weights. Anything to give myself an external reason to do what I do, and in the end I strengthen my body and become healthier. It's a win/win situation, is it not?

I can only hope that this resolution will hold, that it will reignite my passion for programming, for learning, for existing. Only time will tell, I guess.

The day after postscript: I wrote this post at 4 in the morning, under the clutches of sleep deprivation, insomnia, and depression. However, I do not redact anything that was said. I was writing at a point in time where I could freely translate my thoughts into ASCII characters.

Head Automatica - Beating Heart Baby Guitar Cover

2010-11-13T20:21:00.001-06:00

Just some stress-relief guitar playing.

You Forget Where The Heart Is

2010-11-12T17:43:00.004-06:00

Firstly, I must apologize for the lack of posting lately. No, the cause is not laziness (which I've finally managed to break free from), it's actually quite the opposite. I've been extraordinarily busy as of late. Sorrowsong is coming along ever so nicely. The game engine is almost 100% finished and all I'm left with is the story, artwork, sound and level design to do.

Level design was tough for Blackfyre and is what ultimately made the game a failure in my mind. Everything was just thrown together essentially at the last minute, with no game balance, confusing controls, extremely difficult enemies, etc. Now with Sorrowsong I'm going to spend as much time as possible on fixing the shortcomings that Blackfyre had. My sister has to take time drawing all of the sprites, so that gives me the opportunity to spend that downtime working on making the game fun, challenging and enjoyable. Once I get the first couple of levels completed and polished I will be releasing a gameplay trailer of the game, which I hope is going to spark enough interest to get the game a little more widespread than Blackfyre ever was. So, if any of my readers know good places to promote the game, I'd love to hear about them!

Blackfyre was also much too challenging. From playing it constantly I obviously got very good at the game, and thus designed it to be hard for me, yet, consequently, way too difficult for others. I'll try to remedy this in Sorrowsong. However, after watching some gameplay videos of Touhou's “Phantasm Mode”, I am going to add some bonus levels to Sorrowsong that are completely ass-kicking hard.

I'm really excited for this game and I hope everyone reading my blog is too. I've made major strides since Blackfyre in terms of programming ability and I really want that to show. I want this game to be as amazing as I envisioned it two years previously, when I first starting playing Touhou and realized that I wanted to create something as amazing.

I've been getting extremely inspired and motivated through music. I've been listening to Touhou re-arrangements like none other and also have been picking out the OCRemixes that I will be using for Sorrowsong. Here are some links for the various songs:

Once Steve, my composer, gets his pieces for the game finished I will be uploading them to YouTube. They are coming along amazingly so far and he has really managed to capture the spirit of the game. It's really awesome being able to not have to be a one-man-team anymore. Having close friends and family working on a game with you is amazing. Steve has also played a part in the game design. He'll be watching me playtest the game and throw out suggestions like “Wouldn't it be cool if...”. Almost all of his ideas have been really good and have helped move the game in a very positive direction.

I even managed to turn part of Sorrowsong's development into an assignment for school. We just finished reading The Odyssey in Core and were assigned to write a paper that follows the same paradigm: the main character must make a dangerous journey in which (s)he learns valuable lessons. I've been putting off writing Sorrowsong's story for a while (I, obviously, already have the backstory written) so I decided to combine that with the assignment and write the story as a paper. It has a lot more depth than Blackfyre did and I hope I can implement it into the game.

So, on to the meat of this post. My sister came down to spend the weekend with me last week. We had a number of awesome plans of things to do. Everything was going amazingly on Friday until Erin and I got into a bad fight. Remember that time way back when where I was just so emotionally drained that I couldn't do anything for a whole day? Yea, this time it happened again but for an entire weekend.

Through the course of this mental confusion I realized how close I had become to my sister and to Steve. They both stayed up until well past 5AM just talking with me, as I was there, confused, hurt, and crying. They both gave me really good advice and counsel, and it made me realize just how close especially Steve and I have become. He told me the next night: “Dude, last night I made my decision. You are going to be the best man at my wedding. We're bros.”. All I could do was nod my head, it was just such a shock. I've never before in my life had someone I could label as my “best friend”, and I'm happy to say I've finally found that person. Even my sister forsake our plans to help me out, and still managed to have an enjoyable weekend.

So, on Monday, I got a project assignment for data structures class to write a benchmark to test various sorting algorithms. I started writing the code in class (since I'm always bored in it anyway) and realized something: when I code I feel happy, excited, powerful, content and just plain at peace when I'm writing code. There's nothing better in the world. That got me to thinking, and I realized that I sadly didn't feel the same way when I was with Erin. My priorities were clearly different and I realized that a relationship is not beneficial to me at the moment. If writing code makes me happier than being with someone, it's going to result in a very unhealthy relationship, and I didn't want that to happen.

I thought about it more and more over the next two days. I spoke with my brother, my sister and Steve a lot and finally came to the decision that I needed to break up with Erin. Long, personal story short, I broke up with her on Wednesday.

This has left me in a very odd funk for the past two days. I'm starting to realize that I do enjoy having someone there, someone who loves me, someone to spend an enjoyable romantic time with. I'm realizing more and more than I am an absolute hopeless romantic. However, I couldn't really classify my relationship with Erin as romantic. We didn't go on dates, most of the time we spent together wasn't really amorous at all. Call me old fashioned, call me hopeless, blame my mental influence from romance anime, but I really do want to have that sort of cliched, lovey-dovey relationship with someone.

I hate to bring this subject up again, but I realize that I need the Beatrice to my inner Battler. If I can have someone to love who pushes me in all ways, who inspires me to become a better programmer, a better student, a better worker, a better lover, that would be ideal. However, I'm having the sad realization that there's probably no one out there who can do that. I've always motivated myself to learn, to become more skilled, to test my knowledge, but recently that's become something that I alone sometimes cannot do. I'm becoming more and more pessimistic and full of self-doubt and it's getting to the point where it really troubles me.

What else bothers me is the fact that I did really like Erin, but just couldn't see our relationship ending well. So, I did the reasonable thing to do and ended it before it could escalate to being problematic and just cause both sides more pain.

Bluemist wrote a very interesting blog post the other day about an issue that hit home for me. In it, amidst all of the references to various memes, he talks about wanting love and yet not wanting it at the same time. I feel very much the same. I want love. I want to be loved. I want to feel that emotion that I've only been able to slightly grasp through animated media. Yet, nothing ever works out when I do think that I've finally found that emotion. It's utterly confusing and devastating at the same time, when I myself can't figure out what I truly want.

To continue on one of the memes Bluemist pointed out:

Am I hurting? Am I sad? Should I stay, or should I go?
I've forgotten how to tell. Did I ever even know?
- Bad Apple [English Translation]

Bad Apple has recently been more and more applicable to my life. It's about Hikikomori depression, which is something that I've been having more and more recently lately. I do enjoy long nights with nothing but a couple of Monsters, some challenging programming, and loud music. I enjoy how much I know, how much I've learned, how far I've already come. However, being a nerd, for lack of a better term, has it's drawbacks. I'm too intelligent for my own good. My mind can never stop, it's constantly going. I can never truly relax. Nothing I do can stop my mind and tell it to calm down. There are thoughts constantly floating around. Worries, ideas, plans, wishes, dreams. My mind is too absorbed inside of itself for me to make decisions about anything. I'm always doubting myself, wondering whether or not even I know what I truly want.

Even with the game programming class that I'm teaching next semester, I'm excited about it one day that anxious and worried the next. Can I ever even attempt to compress something that took me 2+ years to learn down into 15 weeks? Will the students hate me for the amount of work that they will have to do in order to keep up? Will I even be able to convey my knowledge onto others?

This post is so long because I've kept all of this inside me for a while, for fear of how those close to me will feel about it. All of my friends and classmates know about my blog and a decent amount read it. It was so much easier to open up and pour my feelings out to an anonymous audience, who couldn't judge me. Now it's becoming increasingly harder to open up when I know that many people close to me will be reading my confused and obfuscated thoughts. I've decided that it doesn't really matter. Sometimes you just have to say what's on your mind and how you are feeling at a given moment in time. Hopefully it will help some people understand my decisions better, and, in turn, understand the mechanics behind my brain that make me tick.

I'll See You On The Other Side

2010-11-12T12:07:00.001-06:00

Three years after the release of Ultimate Dreamscape, I finally own my favorite hardcore track on vinyl, and it is AWESOME!

And, I'll have a new, fully loaded sentimental post coming (hopefully) later today.

Broken Girl - Gunslinger Girl AMV

2010-10-13T01:30:00.000-05:00

All because of you I believe in angels...

2010-10-02T10:26:00.003-05:00

This is going to be one of those posts that contains way too much due to the fact that I haven't written a post in so long.

I was in the shower this morning, and how most people are, I started doing some deep thinking. I thought back to 2006-2007 (as my mind just loves to do) and all of the things associated with those two years. Those were probably the most productive years of my life, and helped jump-start my career. The majority of the Dreamscapes were made during this time, I worked unbelievably hard to get them done and to make them perfect in my mind. I built up a fanbase, I watched myself turn from just a normal high school student to a model-changing, machinima-making, semi-famous high school student with a desire to learn more about game design and programming, a desire to be the sculptor of worlds like the one I enjoyed toying with so immensely.

During this time I parted with Chloe. I still can't believe she enters my thoughts as much as she does. I haven't spoken to her in almost four years, and yet, I still think back to the times that we had. Last weekend I accompanied a friend of mine to southern Indiana to help him find a grave. The first girl that he loved had passed away a few years back, and he was still in denial about it. He never went to the funeral, never saw where she was buried. An experience during a class here at school made him remember her, and he came to my room afterwards and told me the story of her. He told me that he still hadn't gotten closure and I urged him to do so, and told him that I went through a similar experience and that it would destroy him inside if he didn't eventually face the music.

And so, we found where she was buried and went to visit the grave. I think I was emotionally effected moreso than he was, due to the fact that I started thinking of Chloe. My reasoning for killing her off in Ultimate Dreamscape was exactly the same reasoning as to why my friend wanted to visit the grave. It was for closure. However, as White Dreamscape and afterwords, Shining Dreamscape showed, I could not free the thoughts of her from my mind and she was brought back to life. This is one of the aspects that I loved about making the Dreamscapes. There was a lot of personal feeling and thought put into them to portray my emotional state at the time. It didn't matter that I was probably the only one who understood the emotion in the movies, it helped me to sort my own thoughts out.

I wanted to watch Byousoku 5cm again over the summer and still haven't managed to fit it into my increasingly busy schedule. I need to watch it every so often to put my life into perspective, to remember why I need to forget Chloe, and to prevent present mistakes from happening.

On that note, I spoke way back when about the need to look ahead of you instead of on what's in the past. On that note, I may be accomplishing that very thing. Although it's still tentative (we actually sort of prefer it to be "unofficial"), mine and Erin's relationship has definitely become quite fruitful. I've liked her ever since the beginning of freshman year and it's sort of unreal that I'm actually in a relationship with her.

Although that itself brings on more problems. I'm still not sure whether or not my goal in life is to be in a relationship with someone. I'm always busy, have a type-A personality, and am constantly feeling that I am blowing her off because I have work that needs to be done. I still manage to spend a few hours a day with her, but it seems that she gets irritated that it's not more than that. I'm entering one of the busiest stages of my life ever and have had to put a lot of things on the back burner due to this relationship, and even though Erin definitely gives me an immense amount of happiness, there is still that question as to whether or not I'm the right person.

This busy-ness comes from a lot of reasons. I have been working on Sorrowsong like never before. It's really shaping up quickly and becoming exactly the game I imagined it to be, if not better. Steven (my best friend and roommate) is a music major, and is composing some of the music for the game (and what he has so far is amazingly beautiful), my sister is doing amazing artwork for the game (I'm still waiting for the legal issues associated with using Ferazel's Wand's sprites in Blackfyre to hit [which, if they haven't yet, they probably won't]), and I'm writing some of the most complex code I've ever written in my life for it and it's been absolutely amazing so far. The complexities that come with an OpenGL engine are just so much fun to figure out!

I'm also deeper into school work than normal. There is a lot more programming in my computer science classes this year, and even though I enjoy programming immensely, it's already gotten me into trouble. When I write code, I write the best, most optimized, most user friendly, and most functional code possible. This has led me to modify my assignments so they don't pertain to the actual grading rubric, but rather to how the program would look in the real world (and not just as a crappy student assignment), because I cannot get myself to write bad code that looks like an average student wrote it. This has become a point of contention between my professor and I.

I'm also getting a plan ready for a game programming class that I will be teaching. This is one of the more surreal things to happen as of late. Yes, I am teaching a class next semester on game programming. It's on the student schedule as being Professor Capouch's class, however, he told me that he is just going to manage the class while he hands the teaching off to me. It's just so surreal. I will be imparting my knowledge gained over the years onto others, I will be helping those like me on their quest to become a game programmer. However, I've never taught a class before, so coming up with a schedule, required reading, etc. is proving quite the challenge.

I know for a fact that I will try to get the students to read Masters of DOOM. I must, as always, thank Dopefish for his recommendation. Masters of DOOM has kept me inspired and motivated to code for the past few years. Any time that I have coder's block I just sit down and read it. By the end I'm ready to just jump right in again. This is why I want the students to read the book, because I know it will become a valuable asset in their programming careers.

Speaking of Masters of DOOM, I have ventured even further into the world of nerddom: I've started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Back in the day, I used to think D&D was for uber-nerds with no life at all and that it was an evil game that made kids go crazy. After reading Masters of Doom, however, I discovered how much fun it could be and how much creativity and imagination is needed to play. I found out that Steve was a DM back in his underclassman days, and we started planning to get a campaign back together. We've only had two play sessions so far (albeit 7-hour sessions), but I can already tell that this is definitely something I should have started doing a long time ago. It's immense amounts of fun, completely open-ended, and allows for much more creativity and sociability than a video game.

Speaking of video games, I managed to squeeze in time to play Amnesia: Dark Descent. I absolutely loved the Penumbra series and its ability to, for lack of a better phrase, scare the shit out of me, and was very excited to get my hands on the next game by Frictional. I wasn't disappointed. It was a terrifying experience. The game was challenging, mind-boggling, and scary in all the right places. What can I say? If you enjoyed the Penumbra games, Amnesia is definitely the game for you.

Oh, I almost forgot. A few weeks back, Amber (Steve's fiance and Erin's sister) had to write a profile on a person as an assignment in her English class. She decided to write her profile on me, not only because she wanted to get to know me better, but also because she finds my life interesting. So, we sat down one night with a voice recorder and I started talking. She wanted to know everything that has made me the person I am today. I spoke at length about WoW, about Chloe, about the dreamscapes, about programming, about the challenges associated with being a programmer, about the fun, about the immense enjoyment I get out of what I do, about my current job, about life in general. It was the first time that even I chained the past five or so years of my life together in one space of time. It really helped me to put things into perspective, to realize how much I've accomplished and how much there still is to accomplish.

Speaking of accomplishing, as for today, I have all of my homework done and am planning to work on Sorrowsong all day long, and get a lot of anime (one of the things I've had to force to the back burner) watched during the evening and night time :)

Oh, another thing I forgot. I recently purchased a new 4th generation iPod Touch. It's freaking amazing! Even though I am not an Apple guy by anyone's standards, I think it's absolutely amazing. The processor is insanely fast (the graphics on some of the games are just amazing-looking), the retina display looks beautiful, and I can watch 720p, yea, that's right, 720p video on it :D

First Sorrowsong Screenshots

2010-09-23T14:56:00.003-05:00

Main Menu, featuring the main characters: The White Lady and Alice Sorrowsong

Options Menu: That's right, resolution independence :)

One of the downfalls of Blackfyre was the lack of control customization. Sorrowsong will not
have that problem :)

Very early screenshot of gameplay. User interface is still WIP.

The College Setup #2

2010-09-11T15:19:00.004-05:00

Main computer set up on the desk and dresser, Laptop on nightstand with XBMC and a remote [wirelessly networked so I can access everything on my desktop]. Watching anime on it at night is awesome :)

Have my headphones pre-amped by my Numark M3 (connected to my computer), and they sound amazing :D

I'm also in a much bigger room in a better dorm. Steve's my roommate but we each have separate rooms connected with a door.

Clear Blue Water - Bioshock Scenic Machinima

2010-09-04T22:27:00.001-05:00

<3 My Core i7... FRAPS can do anything at 1080p and 60 FPS

You Say You'll Haunt Me

2010-08-25T15:03:00.004-05:00

This is going to be a very contrastive post.

It has recently come to my attention that certain individuals have misunderstood the reasons why I have a blog and have been using it for their own personal, selfish reasons. I post to give a little insight into how the Snobaste operates, to encourage those with a passion for programming to continue in their path, and foremost to document my life for myself so that I can remember past events.

However, there are those who believe that everything I say on my blog is truth and interpret it in a way that gives them false hope due to the fact that they think they can get insight into my inner psyche only through reading my blog, and decide that this knowledge justifies their absolutely, ridiculously asinine decisions as to their education and general lifestyle choices.

One of these individuals apparently missed the plethora of references to Byousoku 5cm I have made in the past few years, and the point that I have been trying to make. Just GIVE UP. 5cm showed me that the best thing to do is give up and move on, and it's managed to keep me sane and not dwelling on something that will never happen. My point was apparently completely missed.

Now, after that rant directed at two people who know who they are, it's time for a little bit of lighthearted news. I may or may not be dating (it's still tentative) a girl I've liked since last year, and it's absolutely amazing. I'm actually feeling an attraction towards her, unlike in my previous relationship. And spending time with her is all kinds of awesome. That's all I'll say about it right now :)

A Year Later

2010-08-21T02:00:00.001-05:00

This was my room last year.

Now, only a year later:

Real Estate

2010-08-13T19:53:00.004-05:00

What do you do when you have too much real estate and processor cycles to waste? That's right, pimp your desktop out!

Power

2010-08-05T19:20:00.003-05:00

It's kind of like this.

Current specs are now:
EVGA X58 FTW3 Motherboard
Intel Core i7 930 @ 4.0GHz [HyperThreading On] (watercooled with a Corsair H50)
6GB Corsair Dominator RAM (1600MHz @ 8-8-8-24 timings)
EVGA GTX 295 Co-op Edition @ 680/1466/1103
Antec TPQ850 850 Watt Power Supply
Antec 900 Case

The Perfect Cure for My Current Feelings

2010-08-01T23:41:00.002-05:00

The lyrics perfectly describe them.

English version:

Life isn't like this

2010-07-31T00:16:00.007-05:00

Yes, more 5cm references in this post. Damn you Makoto Shinkai!

This is what I get for not posting often... again. A lot of backlogged feelings all coming out in one post. Where to start...

Well, since I got a full DJ setup at home I've been practicing like crazy. I got a shipment of new vinyl a few weeks before I got my decks, so I've been experimenting with all the new music, finding what mixes well and what doesn't, getting good sets together, stuff like that. It's a really fun experience and I enjoy it immensely. I've gotten some really good remixes of my favorite trance tracks, such as Southern Sun by Paul Oakenfold, Drifting Away by Lange, and this little beauty right here:

If you've watched Yume's Damaged Dreams machinima you should recognize the song. And if you haven't, I highly recommend it.

As usual, my job is completely unreal. I can't believe how much I'm learning, how much I'm doing, and just how much fun I'm having. These past few weeks have been rather hectic, with a big study going on and a lot of custom code to write. Having a deadline definitely makes you work your ass off (I experienced this at the end of Blackfyre's development when I set a mental deadline for its release).

Last week I went up to Wisconsin for 3 days to be there for the company's quarterly meeting. I hopped a train from Chicago to Milwaukee, and from there another intern at Spaulding picked me up and took me to the company. I met a few people, talked with them, etc. I got situated in a space with a few of the other IT guys, and got talking with one of them. He's pretty cool... he used to DJ trance and house, used to play WoW, etc. He was amazed when I started talking to him about model changing. When I told him I "modded" WoW he thought I meant UI mods. I had to explain to him the process of model changing and how it's much much harder to do than Lua scripting (ha). At the end of the day he took me out for a bite to eat and we had some good conversation.

He then took me back to my hotel, which was completely paid for by the company. Add to the surrealism. I was in a really nice hotel room, with a bed 3 sizes too large for me (ha), a nice big TV, etc. I just sort of stood there right after getting into the room thinking "There's no way in hell this is happening. This must be a dream or something." I couldn't believe it. Me, 19 years old, fresh out of my freshman year of college, with a job that I absolutely love and that treats me so well.

The next day I went to breakfast with a few of the other employees who came in from out of town. Got energized with some coffee and came into the office bright and early. I kicked some serious ass coding that day, and still managed to socialize a decent amount :)

Then came the quarterly meeting. We managed to get 15 minutes in before the tornado alarm went off (which is situated right on top of the building). Two tornadoes touched down about 8 miles away from us. Everything was hectic as they got the study subjects to safety... there was flooding, fun stuff like that. After everything finally settled down we did an ultra-short version of the meeting in about 20 minutes. Definitely a lot of excitement. The rest of the night was more or less enjoyable, though :)

The next day, same deal as the last. Got a lot of work done and managed to (barely) catch the train back to Chicago. All in all, it was a very surreal and fun trip.

When I got back I had a new phone waiting for me. I've been using a cheap $25 phone ever since I got one, and I decided it was finally time for an upgrade. I now have an LG Rumor Touch with a really nice plan that has unlimited texting and data. It's a pretty slick phone... I'm digging the touchscreen, web browser, GPS, etc.

Now time to get a little more personal (again), due to something that happened at around this time.

I've always been one to live vicariously through other mediums. This is why I've found myself gravitating towards romance anime. It seems that I'm content enough just watching others, albeit fictional ones, in love. And I'm always like Takaki Tohno, longing for something that will never happen. But, somehow, I'm content with that. It's hard to see myself falling in love, having a real relationship, getting married and all that jazz. This coupled with my only relationship failing as hard as it did (and it's really only become worse) has made me rather hesitant to even care about love at this point. There are more important matters to deal with.

That being said, I've recently started talking to a girl again who I liked at the beginning of last year. I don't know where this will lead and I'm scared of making history repeat itself. I'm just too absorbed in my job/studies/hobbies to have the time to actually have a good relationship, and unless I can find someone who shares almost all of my interests, it's going to fail miserably.

I guess Byousoku 5cm hasn't helped that part of me. In order to avoid becoming Takaki Tohno, except with Chloe instead of Akari, I've tried to not ignore what's right in front of me. However, this is easier said than done. I really don't know if I still like this girl after a whole semester of not really talking to each other, and I really don't know if I'm ready to even try a relationship again. I guess I'll just have to see where the wind takes me on this one.

I hardly have enough time to program, practice guitar, DJ, and watch anime as it is. It's likely a relationship will just stress me out even more. The latter in that list has really been hit hard as of late... I'm barely watching any anime right now and it's quite infuriating. It's something I've been loving for over 3 years now, and I can't believe I've already put it on the back burner.

Not only that, but after programming for 8 hours a day, it's rather hard to sit down and work on my new game. Not that I don't love my job (I really do), it's just that my brain is mush by the end of the day and I can't even manage simple three-dimensional transformations.

So, here's a little something to keep myself motivated: the details of my next game.
The game will be called Sorrowsong. It is akin in gameplay to the Touhou Project. It will be a vertical, bullet-hell style shooter. It details the story of Alice Sorrowsong. Here is a rough draft of the background story:

You are Alice Sorrowsong, an inexperienced witch who has just begun training under her master, The White Lady. Little is known of The White Lady, for she has appeared and disappeared throughout history, her most recent appearance being the occasion in which she smote Arochnog, the legendary dark dragon, twenty-five years ago. Her reappearance to train one such as Alice is a very suspicious sign. She must see great promise in the girl.

However, Alice awoke one day to find her master gone. While searching The Lady's home, Alice found a written letter in her study. The letter reads as thus:

“Alice, I apologize for leaving you so suddenly. However, an urgent matter has come up and I must
leave you at once. I am unaware as to when I will return. Until then, practice the fire and water incantations
that we have gone over. Do not overexert yourself, though, as it may prove more harmful than you think.”

This letter left Alice feeling quite curious. What was this urgent matter? There were no current wars or any other incidents that would warrant the intervening of the legendary White Lady; and what was this nonsense about overexerting yourself? The witches of old used to push their endurance to the maximum, and, despite needing an abundant amount of time to recuperate, came out completely unharmed.

Days passed with no sign of the Lady. Alice was starting to become anxious. However, on the fifth day, a stranger appeared at her door. The stranger was Baroness Betrysse, an old acquaintance of the White Lady. Alice was looking for answers, but instead got a cryptic message. The Lady was in trouble, no one was to be trusted, we are all being watched, it isn't safe, take this. She handed Alice an unmarked bottle filled with a clear liquid, then turned and fled. Right before her eyes, Alice saw the fleeing Betrysse slaughtered at the hands of beings she had never seen before. These beings were nothing more than a wisp of shadow, yet had an immense amount of dark magic about them.

Acting on instinct, Alice drank the clear potion, grabbed her wand, and began a journey to find and rescue her master. She was completely unaware of the immensity of the situation she had accidentally wandered into, and only time would tell if she could make it out alive.

The game will differ from Touhou in many ways, including a full repertoire of spells depending on your specialization (either fire or water), with varying levels of each spell. Fire spells are meant for the offensive player who just likes to shoot things up, and water is meant for the defensive player who would rather slow down enemies and take them out from a distance.

I've slowly been working on the game's OpenGL engine, which is quite a task (being stuck in 2D for so long makes this a real problem). However, it's coming along quite nicely. My particle engine looks beautiful with alpha blending and all of the spells are going to look really sweet once it's polished up :)

My sister will be doing the artwork for the game. She's really talented and recently acquired a tablet. Now she has a chance to get some really good experience.

I will be paying her by building her a computer. This leads me to my next news. I've decided to step up to a Core i7 and will be ordering the parts soon, complete with water cooling :) So I can start off my sister's new computer with my old Core 2 Duo, motherboard and RAM. I'm getting really excited to push my computer's power to the max.

Wow, this post has gotten way too long. I guess that's it for now :)

I'll leave you with the song that was the inspiration for the title of this post:

Please take me to the party

2010-07-05T16:03:00.004-05:00

2 x Stanton T.62x
2 x Stanton 500.V3 Cartridges
1 x Numark M3 Mixer
1 x Pair of Sennheiser HD205 Headphones

All mine :)

Blackfyre Source Code

2010-06-29T15:31:00.005-05:00

Source Code:
MegaUpload (tarball)
FileFront (tarball)
Saint Joe Wiki (online)

Sorry this took so long to release. I was attempting an OpenGL version for a while, but just decided to move on and write a new game entirely in OpenGL, instead of attempting to re-write an old one.

The included ReadMe file explains how to compile. Hope you enjoy :)

Take me away from this empty apartment

2010-06-25T16:26:00.003-05:00

My first Full HD AMV. Watch in 1080p if your computer can handle it!

I recently sat down and watched Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu with my brother. It's the second season in the series, but the plot isn't really tied to the series at all. It got me absolutely addicted to FMP, and I quickly watched the remaining two seasons.

There was a sleepless night near the end in which I watched the episode "Edge of Heaven", and I just couldn't stop until I finished all of The Second Raid. This AMV is dedicated to and contains clips from the episodes I watched that night.

The third season ended on such a cliffhanger that I had to continue the story. Thankfully some amazing fans translated the remainder of the books
[The last couple are an extremely rough translation, but I loved it so much that even machine translated-esque dialog was bearable]. The story is just amazing, and with each book it gets better and better :)

In other news, my job is going extraordinarily well. I've been writing a large amount of code to be used in an upcoming study, and may even be using my reverse-engineering skill (that WoW helped me acquire) to make a SAS Transport file creator. I wake up every morning excited and happy to start work. I didn't even know that was possible! I really do have my dream job :)

In other other news, I haven't spoken much on the video game front. I finished Assassin's Creed 2 around a month ago. It was good, and a lot more linear than the first (which I liked), but the story was just so convoluted that it took a while to really get into it. The gameplay improvements were quite nice (the dual hidden blades kicked considerable amounts of ass and the inclusion of a firearm was pretty beastly), and movement felt more fluid than the first game. What can I say? If you liked the first one, there's no way in hell you won't like the second.

After seeing the giant Disney logo on Split/Second, I was hesitant. I thought it was just gonna be like any other Disney Interactive game: a shallow game merely intended as yet another form of income. However, I was dead wrong. This game is intense. It is the most intense racing game I have ever played. I was shouting expletives and trash talking the entire time I played. If you don't know the gameplay mechanics, imagine a normal racing game, but with the ability to blow up the environment around you at will in order to crush your opponents or knock them off of the track. You can even perform massive power plays to change the entire course of the track. It is adrenaline-pumping like none other. I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend it!

I am also getting increasingly excited as Witch Hunt, the team translating the Umineko games, comes closer and closer to completing their translation of the 6th game. Playing the 5th game got me inspired in so many ways, and I attribute the insane amount of work I did on Blackfyre in the new year to my playing of it. Who knows what the 6th game holds in store?

Hmm, well that's all I can think of for now. I hope everyone else is enjoying their summer as much as I am :)

Dualies

2010-06-09T00:52:00.002-05:00

Sorry, had to show off some of the super-wide images I had :)

(I actually wrote a really neat program to find these, which recursively crawls my image folder and looks for anything wider than 3600 pixels)

Using my laptop with my monitor back when my video card died made me fall in love with dual monitor setups. Not only do they look pro, but they can greatly increase productivity :) So, with my first paycheck I grabbed me one of these babies!

The Good Left Undone Guitar Cover

2010-06-04T21:21:00.001-05:00

The Good Left Undone by Rise Against
Rhythm guitar cover.

Arise and be all that you dream

2010-05-14T23:13:00.005-05:00

This is pretty much my morning every day.

I wanted to write this post a week ago, but I decided to let my mind mull over everything. You'll see why in a bit.

So, two weeks ago I went up to Wisconsin to visit the company that was offering the internship, Spaulding Clinical. It was really surreal, the entire process. I got a tour (which was interesting because the company building used to be a hospital, and a lot of the wards aren't being used and just abandoned [which was creepy, in a cool way]) and got set up with a company account, laptop, etc. I spoke with the CEO, who is a very business-savy guy and had enough of an engineering background to understand my talent. Then I got a run-down of what I would be doing for the company. Mostly writing Java/Groovy/Grails code to manage their SQL databases where the clinical trial data is stored. At the time, and as my previous post stated, it all seemed rather daunting. However, I walked away that day with a job and a tremendous amount of drive to learn.

Fast forward two weeks. I finished my "training" (acclimation to the development environment and to Java/Groovy) in 3 days. It was supposed to take me the entire first week. Java is so similar to C++ that I caught on instantly. Groovy is an extension of Java that adds a lot of functionality and speeds up the development process a lot. SQL was easy as cake to learn, it only took me a few hours to grasp. I'm now working on code that the company will actually be using in an upcoming study.

I expressed doubt in myself in my last post. I must say that those fears were completely unfounded. This is why I started learning how to program early. A freshman in college getting a paid internship is unheard of. All of the time I've spent learning has finally paid off. I will admit that it was a pain at times (a huge pain), but I just kept on learning and having fun. Now I have a big game project completed and a job doing what I love: programming for hours on end. It's completely surreal.

I re-watched My Burning Valentine recently. As I watched it, I thought to myself "This is it. This started everything." My Burning Valentine and Dopefish's talent in model changing inspired me to emulate him. Model changing introduced me to the complexities of managing undocumented file formats. This lead me to a desire to program. That desire turned into a drive. That drive turned into a passion. Now I am turning that passion into a career, and it's completely unbelievable. So, Dopefish, I extend a tremendous amount of thanks to you for inspiring me to become what I have become.

As always, I associate memories with seasons. Now with the emergence of summer and air conditioning, this afternoon I had a reminiscent flashback that left me confounded. Three years ago I was working on Wandering Dreamscape. Would I have known, back then, what this would have started? My work on the Dreamscapes has probably been the most fun time in my life. The ideas, the model changing, the filming, the editing. Every part of the process was not only an opportunity to learn but also a very enjoyable one. I cannot believe how much has happened in a mere three years. And now, after getting my hands on the Cataclysm beta, I am itching to do it all over again. Another Dreamscape may be in the works. Time permitting, of course.

I said way back when that learning to model change would not help me in my programming career. I stand 100% corrected. You cannot believe how much it has aided me. Everything from writing the level files for Blackfyre to managing and exporting data from a SQL database has been helped by this knowledge. My work with SQL (in using a private server) helped jump-start my learning at my current job. My work managing DBC files has helped immensely in not only navigating the tables but also exporting to formats like CSV or Excel (which I am doing quite regularly). So, those who are still model changing, know this: there is, indeed a point. Not only will you have something impressive on your resume (reverse engineering) and portfolio (game companies love seeing mods), you will also learn skills that will be incredibly useful later on in your careers.

I cannot express how surreal this entire experience is for me. I could never have imagined this happening, let alone so quickly. I was completely expecting to be making minimum wage making burgers over the summer, now I am getting paid (a generous amount, I might add) to do what I love. I have a job programming and I still cannot believe it. It's actually quite devastating. In my mind, this would mark the end of my journey. However, since that end has come so quickly, I know that the journey has just begun. That journey just has different goals than originally. Instead of learning in an attempt to acquire a job, I can learn to fuel my own curiosity. I'm learning 2 new programming languages and am currently working on porting Blackfyre's graphics to OpenGL. The next step will be to not only have a job programming, but also have a job programming for a game company. That, however, probably will not be until after I graduate, so I have much time to learn and hone my skills.

I also have another thing to learn. I've been playing guitar for a year and a half now, and consider myself above average in skill level. However, I have only been playing acoustic, so my knowledge consists mostly of chords. My dad recently got his Fender Telecaster fixed, and I downloaded a slick VST plugin to simulate hundreds of guitar amps. I've been practicing like crazy, learning power chords, tabs, everything. And, tonight, my dad decided to pass his guitar on to me. I cannot believe it. Now I own two guitars, both of which offer an insane amount of opportunities to learn. I cannot begin to express how amazing it feels to play music. I used to just be able to sing, albeit badly, to songs. Now I can actually be a part of the action and play along with them.

I also have much to learn in terms of DJ'ing. I'll be spending some of the money I'm making over the summer to expand my vinyl collection, and since my roommate next year is the leader of the crew, I will have an infinite amount of time to practice and hone my skills.

This is where I'm starting to realize that I have too many hobbies. Trying to balance my job, my game programming, guitar playing, DJing, and my love of anime all in one day is becoming increasingly hard. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I digress, I just need to prioritize.

Well, I'm pretty sure I've said all that I wanted to say now. I will keep you posted on any new or interesting developments in my life over the summer. Who knows, there may be even more surprises waiting to happen!

In my own, personal Unnamed World

2010-05-08T20:53:00.005-05:00

Wow, it's been a while. I've been using the excuse of wanting to keep Blackfyre up for as long as possible to hold off this impending blog post. But, I'm quite bored and lost in my thoughts tonight so I feel it's time for another one.

I got home from school two days ago. I can't believe it. It seems like only yesterday I was packing up to leave for school. Now I am already done with my freshmen year. As I've iterated in many posts, so much has happened in the past year, and the time has passed so quickly.

A few weeks ago the folks at Mazui released a camrip sub of the Haruhi Suzimiya movie. The movie is based off my favorite book in the series, and the movie did it every justice imaginable. It was 100% like the novel and absolutely amazing. I was completely speechless throughout almost the entire movie. I can't believe it was 3 years ago when I originally read the book. Would I have thought, back then, that in 3 simple years I would be where I am now? There's no way in hell I did.

Since the release of Blackfyre I've been spending most of my time working on some projects that I never got around to finishing. I upframed two of my AMVs: Into The Night and A Poet's Dream to 60FPS, which was finally made a little easier by learning a bit more about After Effects. I also worked on a short machinima that Mnemosyne gave me the idea to make a few years back:

I've also been dabbling in OpenGL a little bit and it is a challenge. Just attempting to port Blackfyre's graphics to OpenGL is quite the chore.

However, I've mostly been busy getting my head out of my ass regarding my schoolwork. I had let a lot of things take priority over my schoolwork at the time of Blackfyre's release. However, I managed to rectify this just in time for finals, and I managed to finish the semester with straight A's :)

The most exciting and worrying news however, is the fact that I was contacted by my computer science professor about a week back about a last-minute internship. I had never expected to be able to dodge working back at fast food over the summer and though I would have to deal with one of my co-workers who I have written about on multiple occasions, who I have burned the bridges with and never want to look back.

The internship involves writing SQL code to manage a clinical research facility's databases. What's incredibly intriguing about it is that it will be done remotely. I will be able to do most of the work from home. Although the company wants me around every few weeks to talk with the tech guys about what I've done, do code reviews, etc.. Another pro of the internship is the paycheck: $20/hour and 40 hours a week. That's a considerable amount of money, and seeing as I blew most of what I had on a new video card, it'll be nice to fill up my pockets and bank account again and possibly upgrade my system even more (and maybe finally get a car?).

However, this is the first time in a very long time that I am hesitant about something. Although I'm really excited for the learning experience, not only in the field but also the personal challenge of learning SQL and Java, I'm actually questioning whether or not I will be able to do it. I know that it's my dream: getting paid to program, kicking ass like Mimi, working autonomously. However, I am unsure as to whether or not I am ready for it. I'm going down to the company on Monday to finalize everything. I guess I will have to make the decision then and let my inner Takaki Tohno take control.

I'm already missing school, even though I've been back for two days. I prefer the autonomy it allows me, the peace and quiet, the friends, the fun. Home is hectic and boring at the same time, and it's actually quite detrimental to my work ethic. I just don't feel like doing anything here, and it's incredibly vexing.

I'm also more confused on the female front as I have ever been. Although I still haven't found my Beatrice, there are a couple of girls on campus who I like. However, I feel like pursuing them may be merely a waste of my time. My inner hopeless romantic, however, tells me differently.

But, I digress, I'll just have to see where the wind takes me. If it takes me in the direction of a summer internship and a good relationship, there's nothing wrong with that; or if it takes me in the direction of fast food, game programming and no relationship to speak of, I'm fine with that as well.

Blackfyre

2010-04-07T22:17:00.006-05:00

Anarchy Games Software is proud to present:

Blackfyre

Download:
MegaUpload [.zip]
FileFront [.zip]
[more to come]

Just download and unzip. There's a manual in the ZIP containing all the things you need to know.
Have fun, and I hope you enjoy it!

You came out of nowhere, Into a Nightmare

2010-04-07T20:52:00.003-05:00

So I'm sitting here watching Blackfyre get translated into a series of 0s and 1s and sent across a fiber-optic cable to some servers in God-knows-where.

It's surreal. The last 9 months of my life have been spent working on this game. From the first conception (I'm making it sound like my baby, lol) of it in my mind all the way up to the last two weeks in crunch mode getting everything cleaned up. It's the largest program I have ever written, clocking in at about 30,000 lines of code.

Where will everything go from here? I have no idea. Life has been taking me on a wild ride as of late, with multiple twists and turns. Indeed, I have seen more changes in my life during the development of this game than ever before. I still cannot believe I am 19, with a big game project under my belt, going to college, DJing, getting best friends.

As I've probably said before, I document my life in my mind using triggers, which could be a scent, a song, an anime, a game, a project. Thinking back on Blackfyre is sure to be one of those triggers. How couldn't it be? I can still think back on my first model changing movies and get memories from back then.

I know where my programming will progress from here. Just as I broke out of the console and learned SDL, it's time for me to take the next big step into OpenGL. I had to optimize Blackfyre so much due to the fact that it uses a software renderer. I want something more efficient. Better, faster, harder, stronger. SDL already has bindings to all OpenGL functions, so I have a little bit of a head start.

I'm planning for my next game to be a bullet hell shooter, much like Touhou. I became entranced with the Touhou games about a year back, with their insane, fast-paced action and beautiful music. SDL's software renderer could never handle something like that, so it's time for some hardware rendering.

I also have a few other projects planned. I'm going to port LightMapper to OpenGL and clean the code even more and officially release it. I'm also planning on making a few smaller games before the Touhou one.

That's all I have for right now. At least, until Blackfyre finished uploading that is.

Blackfyre Gameplay Video

2010-03-23T23:01:00.002-05:00

Yes, there is a reason for my recent lack of posts. I've been busy on this little beauty :)

7 Is a Lucky Number

2010-03-09T13:11:00.004-06:00

Got Windows 7 a little sooner than I thought I would. Windows 7 Ultimate x64 to be exact. I was tired of only having 2.5 GB of my RAM and 1.5 GB of my VRAM addressable. I'm really liking it so far, and can definitely see a huge speed increase :D

It's currently running on a separate partition and I'm slowly but surely migrating all my stuff over.

After a little more customizing (including the lovely Windows 7-tan)

It lives!

2010-03-07T13:34:00.000-06:00

Now my video card is actually being bottlenecked by my CPU and RAM. Looks like I won't have to update my video card any time in the near future, and EVGA's lifetime warranty FTW. So if my card dies again I'll actually be able to get a replacement :D

John Romero says: "It's crunch time, bitches!"

2010-02-22T17:16:00.001-06:00

Dual Monitor Setup

2010-02-17T20:51:00.003-06:00

Just thought you might be interested in how I have Visual Studio set up now that I'm using two monitors:

Editing

Debugging

Ingame

Yes, I was smart and kept my Blackfyre working directory on a flash drive. So I'm back up and devving like mad on my laptop while my desktop is dead. It even encouraged me to do some optimization in order to keep it running at 60 FPS on lower-specced systems (damn software renderer).

Ding! 19 IRL

2010-02-16T22:46:00.002-06:00

And so another year of my life has come and gone. I am now 19 years old; this blog is now three years old.

You know how I'm always talking about how fast time seems to go? Looking back, I cannot believe that my first blog post was 3 years ago. It seems like so much longer. Back in 2007 I knew nothing. I could barely model change, I could barely edit video, I could barely program. Now, a mere 3 years after, I can model change like no other, edit video better than I could have ever hoped, and learned so much about programming that I cannot even believe it myself.

It's been well over 3 years since I played WoW. I'm so glad a stopped playing back then, it allowed me to become so much more productive. However, a dream I had last night brought back those halcyon memories. Not fondness of the game, rather a fondness for a certain person I met in the game. I wonder sometimes if she still occasionally thinks of me like I think of her. I have no idea why she is still a constant thought in my mind. I guess I still am like Takaki Tohno. I have that faraway memory of a first love that I hold on to, even though I know that its fruitless to.

It seems that that is my paradigm. I have always been content chasing someone. Sadly, I prefer it do to the fact that when I finally catch that someone, my expectations are never met. With Chloe, I never caught her, so those expectations were never shattered. With Jeralyn, I thought I had found someone better. However, once I got to know her, I realized that I was chasing a phantom. A dream that would never be realized.

I have no idea why I'm going off on a tangent about my previous love interests. I guess it really was triggered by that dream last night and the fact that I am quite tired and just typing whatever comes to my mind.

It's funny. I have a draft of an extremely verbose blog post I wrote back on October 17th, 2007 all about Chloe. I never posted it. I really have no idea why. I guess it's because I am rather embarrassed about it.

I have changed so much since back then I don't even know if she'd recognize me. I don't know if that change is for better or for worse. I really don't. There are so many things that I am proud of myself in doing, but a lot that I am not.

However, on to my birthday. I was considering skipping class and sleeping in this morning, due to the fact that I really needed a day off. However, I'm too much of a good kid to do that. I was glad I did go to class, however. My Core professor gave me a much needed ego-boost. She handed back the exams we took a week ago. She was highly disappointed in our overall grades. She also handed out a sheet with 2 questions from the exam on it, with an example "good" answer and an example "bad" answer. Not only did I get an A on the exam, but both of the "good" answers were mine :)

Later I went to the school's computer center and "borrowed" an HDMI->DVI converter in order to hook my laptop up to my 22" monitor. I'm using my laptop as my main machine until I fix my desktop and wanted the extra screen space in order to increase my productivity. It feels pretty awesome having ~38" of display space.

I'm also going to the school's computer center tomorrow and testing out my components in working computers to find out exactly what's broken. I have a suspicion that it's actually the motherboard that's bad, not the video card. So I'll be able to find out tomorrow.

So, 6 PM comes and David and Rob come to my room to go with me to dinner. They take the long way (out the front door), which confuses me. And we smell some food coming from the basement and decide to check it out. Dark as hell in the basement as always. All of a sudden I hear "Cannonball, cannonball, cannonball" and the light turns on. "SURPRISE!" all of my friends were there, and they even got my family to come. This was the first time I have ever had a surprise birthday party. I was so shocked I just stood there.

I really have to thank them for going through all the effort (they even got me a cake!). However, the secrecy about it caused a decent amount of misunderstanding, which was the cause of a decent amount of stress referenced in my last post. However, I am very relieved that I got the problem resolved as fast as I did.

I'm sure that I have more to post about, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. I have a test to study for and an early class...

Makoto Sawatari's Words of Advice

2010-02-14T22:23:00.003-06:00

When rewatching Kanon last month, the part about halfway through episode 23 hit me hard emotionally. Yuuichi is having a breakdown in front of Makoto (the real one) and Makoto gives him these words of advice:

"Yuuichi, do you know about the trees in the north woods? Each one forms a clear new ring every single year. A ring for every cold winter they've had to endure. Those trees are strong and healthy. The harsh conditions have made them that way, made them able to withstand anything. People are the same. By living through pain and suffering, we become stronger."

I didn't know at the time why these words affected me so much. Now, I can surely say why they did. Have you ever had one of those days where everything seems to go wrong? Well, I just had one of epic proportions.

I'm loosing my best friend and I have no idea what to do about it. I've been having some suspicions about it for a while, but at a party with the DJ crew last night those suspicions where confirmed. I hate seeing him the way he is now and nothing I can say will change his mind. He's changed so much since the first semester and it's really worrying me.

I had a breakdown right in the middle of the party. I haven't cried in front of other people for a very, very long time. I'd rather not get into detail, seeing as it's not something that I really want to advertise to the world. It's just absolutely vexing that I know I can help him somehow but I don't know how to do it.

I quit the DJ crew. I spun the two best 45-minute sets of my life, whereas he spun the two worst sets of his life. He doesn't care about DJ'ing or music or school or friends anymore. And I'm not going to be part of the crew until he decides to grow a brain.

So, I get back from the party, completely drained. Hoping to pass out. I get into bed, my roommate decides I'm asleep and starts having sex with his girlfriend. I had to listen to the whole thing. My roommate is increasingly pissing me off. He is the most ignorant, unintelligent person you could imagine. He has absolutely no feelings for anyone else (I really hope he has the same fate as Makoto Itou from School Days, seeing as this isn't the first time he's had sex while I was trying to sleep [and not always with his girlfriend]).

So, when she finally leaves, I decide it's worthless to attempt sleep anymore. I get up and start up my computer just to hear an extremely long beep from my motherboard. I have spent all day trying to fix it and have come to the conclusion that it looks like I'm shelling out $500 for a new video card, which will leave my poor college self essentially without money.

A few days ago, a senior computer science major came up to me and asked me:

"So, why are you even here? You know more than even I do. You could be out getting a job instead of being here in college."

I've been realizing this more and more lately. I can't stand my computer science classes. We get one semester of C, that's it. And I already know it all. I'm writing more complex programs than anyone else in my class, and my professor just gets angry at me for "being a showoff". I like challenging my brain. I don't program to show off, I do it for the challenge. Nothing is more enjoyable than solving a problem through code.

The next three years at this college will be spent in Java, a language that I don't ever plan on using any time soon.

3 out of my 17 credit hours that I actually care about and I'm not learning anything from it. I have an increasing amount of homework leaving me less and less time to focus on my game. Now, without a computer to develop on, there's no chance that I'll be able to release Blackfyre in 3 weeks (which was my plan).

The only reason that I haven't decided to just say "screw it" and go get a job programming is because of my friends here at school. But, seeing as I'm loosing them one by one, there may very well be a time in which I decide it's not worth it any more.

I feel like my life has literally just turned itself completely around. I just wish this day turns out to all be a bad dream.

My best friend is replacing me with something useless, my roommate's the world's biggest douchebag, my computer is dead and I'm thinking of dropping out. How'd your Valentine's Day go?

Although I do hope Makoto is right. I do hope that this is somehow for the best, even if I can't see the good in it yet.

Frets and Strings

2010-02-13T16:21:00.000-06:00

Bioshock 2 Review

2010-02-09T15:51:00.006-06:00

I've been waiting for this game for a long time. Almost Two and a half years to be exact. Got out of class this morning, sat down and played through the whole thing.

Most of you know the story already. It has been 10 years since the events of the first game, now 1970. Rapture has gone even more to hell since Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine were killed. Leadership of Rapture has been taken over by a woman named Sophia Lamb, who was a political opponent of Andrew Ryan back in the good ol' days.

You play as a Big Daddy, Delta, one of the first ever created. Sophia Lamb took your Little Sister, Elanor from you, 10 years ago, and forced you to kindly put a bullet in your brain. Elanor, however, could not bear having her daddy killed and revived him. You wake up to find rapture in complete ruin and disarray. Dr. Tenenbaum is still alive and in Rapture, and leads you on a quest to kill Ms. Lamb, rescue your daughter, and escape from Rapture.

Review:

Graphics: 10/10
I have a huge attraction to the Unreal Engine 3. It is the most sophisticated, advanced, streamlined and optimized graphical engine out there. The CryEngine has nothing on it. Even though Rapture is in an even greater state of ruin than in the first game, the beauty of it still shines. The atmosphere of the game is a lot more suspenseful though. Obviously, much of the electronics have broken down in the past ten years. There are very few lights that still work. The infrastructure of Rapture has been completely demolished. There are leaks everywhere. Oceanic plants have found their way into the city and are overgrown even moreso than in the first game.

The sections of the game that took place underwater (thanks to the Big Daddy's suit) are absolutely breathtaking. Walking around at the bottom of the ocean with the city of Rapture all around you is quite an experience.

I especially enjoyed a section of the game in which you took over the consciousness of a Little Sister. Apparently, the Sisters see Rapture as it used to be. It was absolutely gorgeous! Seeing a section of the city as it was in the halcyon days of old is amazing. It makes me wish that the entire game took place in Rapture's hay day. Every once in a while when controlling the Little Sister, your vision would flash back to reality: a complete change back to the city as of 1970. It was quite haunting, seeing everything as it was an now as it is, and then back to the way it was.

Gamplay: 9/10
Much has been improved since the first game. There is a much larger variety of weapons and plasmids. The asinine hacking (plumbing) minigame has been replaced with a much faster version, reminiscent of many other games (The Hobbit is the first one that comes to mind). Instead of re-arranging pipes in order to direct water flow from one place to another, you now have to center a constantly-moving pin on a green or blue section of the UI element. Landing on the blue gives you a bonus (free items from a vending machine, longer alarm times on a security camera, etc.). You even have a remote hacking tool that lets you fire a remote-controlled hacking device at turrets/cameras, so that you do not have to get up close and personal with them.

Little Sisters work a little differently than in the first game. Since you are a Big Daddy, you now have the option (after killing the Big Daddy of said Sister) to adopt her and carry her on your back. She can then lead you to splicer corpses and retrieve Adam from them. However, this draws out more splicers, and you must protect her while she collects the Adam. After she has collected Adam from two corpses, you can take her to a vent and either harvest the Adam she has collected, or save her (just like in the first game). I didn't really enjoy this section. I was normally too low on ammo/healthpacks to even bother fighting off waves of splicers and took the Sisters to the vents and saved them right after I adopted them (which still gave me 80 Adam per Sister, enough to buy any of the Plasmids and Tonics that I needed.).

The added ability to zoom with any weapon really helped. I could use even the machine gun to hit faraway targets. The Brute Splicers (new, even more spliced up ones) were a pain in the ass at times, but I enjoyed the challenge. There are way more Power To the People stations than there were in the first game, which let me upgrade more of my weapons to extreme power.

The Drill.... IS AWESOME! I made sure to upgrade the shit out of the drill before any other weapon. I loved being able to run up to a splicer and rip it apart. When you run out of fuel for the drill, you can still use it to inflict massive amounts of melee damage by slamming it into your enemies.

The new research camera was very fun and reminded me of something out of Manhunt. Your camera now records video instead of stills, so you can make snuff films of your kills. Start recording and hit the enemy with everything you have, a nice variety, to get more research points and better bonuses. It was pretty damn fun to do!

The only real complaint that I have is that the game was way too short. It only took about six hours to complete. Of course, this may be because I'm a pro, and that I haven't even tried the multiplayer yet.

Design: 9/10
As with the first game, the design was amazing. There was so much attention put into detail. Even though Rapture is far gone, it still felt alive. The environments were well designed to convey the emotion in the game. The story was as good as the first game's, the audio diaries supplementing it and adding to it. Although I found it hard to sympathize with a Big Daddy, seeing as they were the ones ripping me apart in the first game. The characters felt a little bland, however. There were no crazy eccentrics like Sander Cohen and no crazy political struggles (like the ones between Atlas and Ryan). Even Gil Alexander (who even admitted, himself, that he was crazy) felt very 2-dimensional and emotionless.

Overall: 9.5/10
Despite the game's ephemerality, it lives up to the name of Bioshock. I am slightly disappointed in the fact that it did not surpass the first game. The two are equal in my mind. I was hoping for a mind-blowing sequel like Mass Effect 2 was. However, it was still an excellent game and as good as, if not a little better than the first one. If you enjoyed playing Bioshock, you'll love playing the sequel!

EDIT: Don't even bother with multiplayer at the moment, seeing as it's pretty much unplayable due to massive graphical and networking bugs.

The College Setup

2010-02-07T15:36:00.003-06:00

Recently changed my setup a little bit, and it just looks too pro not to post it here.

My laptop is only connected to its charger and the wireless network. I use Synergy (a virtual KVM switch) in order to control both my desktop and laptop with my mouse and keyboard, and I can switch just by moving the cursor off one screen and onto another :)

How I 1-Up My Computer Science Class #1

2010-02-03T19:36:00.003-06:00

That's right.

We've only been studying C for 2 weeks. Our assignment was to modify a 10-line program in the book in order to make it countdown using ASCII chars instead of ints. No, I go above and beyond that just to be an asshole :)

(and yes, I intended for the comments to be conceited and ridiculous)

Games like Mass Effect 2...

2010-01-27T20:11:00.006-06:00

... are the reason I became a programmer. If I could program something as amazing as ME2 in my life, I will die a happy man.

I just finished it. Holy SHIT. They took the first game, made everything that was good about it better and everything that was bad about it good. EPIC gameplay, EPIC storyline, EPIC ending. If you have not already done so, buy the game NOW!

I chose... Rapture

2010-01-20T19:53:00.001-06:00

Pre-purchased on Steam, and I'm excited :D It's gonna be AWESOMMEEEEEE!

Vodka means "water" in Russian

2010-01-11T09:51:00.001-06:00

And it's not even supposed to be out for another 8 days :D

Happy 2010!

2010-01-01T01:29:00.003-06:00

I tried to capture the essence of drunkenness while
maintaining Rin and Mimi's sexiness.

Yes, I already posted a New Year's post. However, as the same with last year, I felt the exact same feelings when the clock struck 00:00, amplified by the fact that I realized we are now 10 years into 2000. It's been going by faster and faster as each year comes and goes.

I feel both melancholic and joyful. I've had a lot of painful times this year: the loss of a family member, of a love that I once thought was true. I've probably had more emotional stress than any year before during 2009, mostly due to my anxiety about my transition to adulthood. However, I have managed to prove myself wrong. As I've mentioned before, I already feel more at home at college than I do in my own house.

I've had a lot of happy times as well. I had many new experiences over the last year. A few were bad. However, most of them were good. I've learned so much in so many ways. My programming skill is slowly being refined into something that truly feels like an accomplishment. I've only been playing guitar for a year, but when I play for someone they always say it sounds like I've been playing for a much longer time. I've learned the basics of DJ'ing. I own my favorite Happy Hardcore tracks (including Cannonball [Shining Dreamscape]) on vinyl and can mix most of them together flawlessly. I met new friends, went to my first rave, and have been living the dream for the past few months. I really feel like I've slipping into a pattern that I can be content with.

This new year is already looking to be amazing. The English dub of Mnemosyne comes out in a mere 18 days. Mass Effect 2 in 22 days. Bioshock 2 in 39 days. I turn 19 in 46 days. Who knows what else this year might have in store?

I'd like to talk about something that's really inspired me the past week. I finished watching Umineko no Naku Koro ni, which ended in an extreme cliffhanger. The anime only covers the first 4 games in the series. The 5th game's English translation came out only a few days after I finished watching. I really wanted to see how the story continued, so I downloaded the game and the translation patch. I was in for a surprise.

With Higurashi, I prefer the anime adaptation over the original games. However, I discovered with Umineko that the games are much better. Umineko focuses a lot more on the mystery of the mysterious murders, and playing the game gives you a lot more information to the player regarding the evidence and backstory. Even though the game is only a visual novel (like a picture book with sound), it really gripped me. It's just so inticing: the ingenius game between Beatrice and Battler, each trying to prove their own point. Beatrice is trying to prove that magic exits whereas Battler is trying to prove that it doesn't. The game leaves it to the player to make their own deductions as to what is really going on, and I've found myself anylizing even real-life situations using Knox's commandments (which are referenced constantly in the game). It's surprising how much a game has influenced my thought patterns.

Even more a source of inspiration is the engine that the English translation uses. ONScripter, an open-source port of the original game's NScripter engine. Even though a visual novel engine is quite simple, this engine is written entirely in SDL. I've learned so much from its source code to aid me in the development of Blackfyre. I'd see something cool graphically while playing the game, open up the source and find the code that controls it. I find it crazy that I can actually read the code. I actually understand what the code is doing, and have managed to gain insight to make my game cleaner, sleeker and more complex.

Another source of "inspiration" is the dynamic between Battler and Beatrice. The battle of intellect and wit held between them over the course of the games is so intricate. I really love Foe Yay. Battler and Beatrice, through their constant competition, slowly develop feelings for each other. And I find it so freaking cute! Sworn enemies turned romantic partners.

Can this be any more epically adorable?

I want my own life to be like that. I want a girl that can challenge me to the very limits of my intellectual strength. Someone to push me to become a better thinker, a better coder, a better person. As always, this is merely the wishful thinking of a hopeless romantic fanboy. However, I really hope I can meet this Beatrice in my life.

Another source of inspiration is the anime that I finished a few weeks ago: Real Drive. Its extremely intricate digital world and the way it is interacted with is just amazing. I've found myself listening to its kickass ED song over and over while programming.

Being back at home for such an extended period of time over winter break has proven my thoughts voiced in a previous post. I really work better, live better, hell, even sleep better when away from all the distractions. I can focus on the things I love doing rather than be bogged down with the constant tiring bore of social interactions. Of course I prefer the college life, but if I can integrate it with my "previous life" I feel I can accomplish a much greater deal of things.

Another thing I forgot to mention in my other new year's post. A few weeks ago, Steve and I stayed up almost all night talking about music. If I ever do start up my own company, I know for sure that I will hire him as a composer. He's been working on an absolutely beautiful three-movement piece entitled "Phantom Lullaby". He really has a talent for conveying feelings through the medium of sound. He also introduced me to a piece of music composed by Philip Glass entitled "Metamorphosis":

He played this video for me and told me to close my eyes and just feel the music. I've heard of people having visions while listening to classical music, driven entirely by the mood conveyed by the song, but this was the first time I actually experienced it. A story played out in my head along to the music. A story that might very well become Wandering Dreamscape 6. However, I want this Dreamscape to have a much deeper meaning than the rest, so it's still only in the very early planning stages. I have no idea if I can transcribe the story into a machinima, but I hope that I can, because if so, it will be amazing.

Wow, two posts on the same subject less than a week apart from each other. It seems that my blog has become the main outlet for my thoughts and feelings over the past few months. This blog started as a mere means to give my fans updates on my current projects, but has evolved into something much different. I hope my fans aren't bored by this new direction. It seems that as my own personality evolves, so do most of my activities. However, I am working long and hard on Blackfyre and really hope to start divulging more information about it in the near future, as well as a few other projects that I may undertake.

I again wish that this new year brings with it many new experiences and happiness for all of us. A new decade, a chance to change. A chance to develop. A chance to fulfill our desires...

2010.

Another Year Goes By

2009-12-25T19:35:00.005-06:00

A new year is upon us, bringing with it the same melancholic feelings that it always does. I don't know if it's a side-effect of maturing, but years keep going by faster and faster in my eyes. It seems like last Christmas was only a few months ago.

However, as always, when I look back at the past year, I'm filled with a feeling of accomplishment. In January, Rin, the biggest project that I have ever undertaken, was born. Rin quickly became a highly technical, 25,000 line-of-code beast. I learned so much during the development, including the proper use of the A* pathfinding algorithm, which I still cannot believe I managed to write.

After I dropped Rin, I was at a loss as of what to do. So I decided to finally venture out of the console. The reason I decided to stop working on Rin was due to the fact that I could not accomplish what I wanted to while inside a text-based game. I found the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, and quickly learned the intricacies of its operation, which occupied most of the spring/summer for me. I wrote a few simple games and realized that writing code that manages a true two-dimensional space is actually easier than writing a console-based game.

In July, I had an epiphany. I realized that the time was right, my skills developed, for the most complex and beautiful Dreamscape ever. Shining Dreamscape was born. I had an absolutely amazing time working on it. I still remember that day when I let a test render go while I was at work. That night was hell, and when I came home I was exhausted and angry. However, when I sat down to look at the test render (which consisted of the second part of the second verse, with the extremely quick cuts timed to the bassline), my day was made instantly, my mood increased infinitely. Writing the specialized programs for Shining was extremely fun and challenging. I was able to finally give my area changes that final touch that could only be added through the use of custom programs.

Shining Dreamscape is my personal favorite Dreamscape. I know it's the lowest rated and least watched on WarcraftMovies, but I don't care. It's the only Dreamscape I can watch without having the thought "Why the hell did I do that?!" constantly while watching it.

Shining Dreamscape spawned LightMapper. I was getting increasingly irritated at manually finding the indices for the Light.dbc entries. I had finally had enough and decided to write a program to graphically map the entries. It started extremely simple, with an 800x800 heightmap with dots layered on top for the entries. However, after Shining Dreamscape was done I decided to revamp the program and wrote one that featured a 9000x9000 scrollable minimap image, graphical representations of the radii of the lights, as well as the individual colors.

I wrote on Facebook the day I finished the new version of LightMapper: "I just realized that LightMapper is one of the most complex and difficult programs I've ever written. I'm amazed at how much my skill has progressed in the 2.5 years I've been programming. Hell, I remember looking at Cryect's tools thinking "What the hell is this?!", now my tools have clearly surpassed his and my code is way tighter and slicker."

I really cannot believe just how much I have learned. It's truly been an amazing journey so far, and I know it's only just beginning. There's so much more to do, to learn, to code, to hack. Programming has given me more joy than anything else I have ever done. As I have said in a few previous posts: If I could live my entire life listening to music, watching anime, and programming without anything or anyone else to worry about, my life would be perfect.

Now Blackfyre is progressing amazingly. I believe it's time to release a little more information about the game:

Blackfyre was intended to be a remake of one of the first games I ever programmed: DuelQuest, back in 2004 using AppleScript. It was a simple game, involving turn-based combat between two spellcasters. I dropped the game due to the fact that AppleScript was too cumbersome to program in. However, I now had the skills to do it all over again, in a proper language.

I ripped the graphical data from Ambrosia Software's Ferazel's Wand, because I could never draw sprite sheets of my own. These were perfect for my game, and I quickly wrote a system to handle the sprite sheets.

I then wrote a quick design document for the game, which is still changing to this day. Combat is still turn-based. However, it is much faster paced than the original DuelQuest. I took some elements from fighting games and mixed them with RPG elements. Each turn, the player has a short amount of time in which they can execute a combo, which can range from a 2-button combo for a simple spell to a 10-button combo for a much more complex one.

Screenshot of a preliminary test level.

After the player attacks his enemy, the enemy has a chance to attack back. If the player has good reflexes, he can dodge the attack with a two-button combo that will momentarily flash up on the screen when the enemy attacks him.

The player faces off against increasingly stronger enemies until finally fighting against the demon queen who pitted him against this array of foes. The player will learn spells and obtain items throughout his journey and increase in strength in order to face the challenges that are ahead.

In August I moved to Saint Joseph's College in order to start my collegiate journey in obtaining a degree in computer science. I am amazed at how quickly I acclimated to college life and being autonomous. I've recently realized that I enjoy life there more so than when I am home. I love being able to manage my own life.

I'm wondering why people tell me that college is hard. I barely spent much time at all studying and yet I still managed 4 A's and 1 B+ for my entire first semester. I really enjoyed most of my classes and am actually excited for my next semester.

I became a DJ, which has been one of my many dreams of the past few years. I am extremely happy that I met Steve and that he invited me into the Tuff Customers. I now have vinyl records and decent skills. I am spinning a 45-minute set at a party next month and am extremely excited for it.

At first when I thought about this year, I didn't think that I accomplished much at all, mostly due to how quickly it seemed to pass by to me. This caused me to make an extremely stupid decision a few weeks ago which involved a ridiculous correlation between my lack of work and a habit that I had picked up this year. However, looking back, I realize just how much I have done in this past year and will probably reverse this decision I made, seeing as that choice has managed to get nothing accomplished over my winter holiday and I am becoming increasingly frustrated due to that fact.

Wow, I just realized that I've completely forgotten to follow-up on my last post. I have, indeed gone back to watching anime nightly. My expectations were met. I have managed to obtain more inspiration, easier slumber at night, and an excitement for the end of the day when I get to cuddle up and watch the next few episodes in a series. However, I do realize that these attempts to revive the halcyon times of the past are, for the most part, fruitless. I recieved an amazing Christmas present from a friend that was an abstract painting with the following quote from Buddha on it:

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. "

I am, indeed, one who dwells in the past and dreams of the future way too often. This is quite detrimental to not only my state of mind, but my ability to concentrate on the task at hand. I keep thinking about previous descisions, friends, relationships, happiness and sadness. Trying to regain a certain aspect of my past life normally results in a fruitless and often damaging attempt. I put the paining with the quote on it right next to my computer desk, and have found it an amazing way to get me to concentrate on my current work.

Wow, this is quite a long post. I guess that's what happens when there's a one month break in posting. Too much gets piled up and I end up sitting at my computer for over an hour typing this up. So I'll leave you with a hope that your 2009 was as full of accomplishments and interesting developments as mine was and that 2010 will be an absolutely wonderful year for all of us :)

Mega Man 2

2009-12-04T16:23:00.000-06:00

This video is just epic in all ways. I can't stop watching it!

Fly far beyond these silver winter skies

2009-11-30T15:53:00.005-06:00

With the annual emergence of the winter season and the cold weather that accompanies it, I always have a little reminiscence in terms of memory, remembering past winters and all the things that occurred during them.

Writing my memoir has also aided in this mental reversion. My memoir became 32 pages before I finally scrapped it and rewrote a highly truncated version, seeing as the assignment was only for 8 pages. However, the original still remains as a good summary of the past five years of my life. I wrote about everything, about WoW, about model changing, about my horrible love life, about programming, about gaming. It really helped me realize how much my life has changed.

Over Thanksgiving break, I had the swine flu. Or, at least, that's what I reckon it was. I had never had the flu so bad that I felt like I was literally dying. Lying in bed almost all day for a week really helped me organize my recent thoughts concerning college, and I've come to one conclusion: although I'm living the college-life dream, I have lost sight of my goals.

Deciding on taking Nayra's advice and attending a liberal arts college and getting a degree in computer science instead of attending a game design college, I told myself I would teach myself to program games by myself while getting a well-rounded knowledge of the theory involved in programming. I'm definitely doing okay with the latter, I've learned binary and machine language, and am now progressing onto assembly. I ran Blackfyre in debug mode and looked at the assembler and was actually able to read a lot of it.

However, on the former point, I have really gotten lazy. I haven't gotten anything done that I would have liked to. Sure, Blackfyre is progressing slowly, but I could be doing so much more with it. In the stream of halcyon memories, I remember last November in particular. I watched Mnemosyne for the first time, and Mimi inspired me so much that I programmed like a madman, for hours on end every day. Mimi was just so badass that I wanted to become like her.

I have barely been watching anime, one of my main sources of inspiration, lately, mostly due to how busy I've become getting caught up in the college life. I remember two winters ago, cuddling up in my warm bed with my iPod loaded with the current anime I was watching, tackling a few episodes every night before I went to sleep. I enjoyed doing so so much, I watched some of my favorite anime this way. I decided I'm going to start doing it again. I've had a lot of trouble sleeping lately, and I think watching some anime on my iPod before I go to bed will help to relax my mind and aid me in going to sleep.

Anime, as mentioned before, has been a huge asset in my inspiration. I've managed to gain so much drive and passion in programming just through watching it. I've lost that drive and am trying to regain it.

I remember making some of my favorite AMVs in the wintertime. Into the Night was my first one, and I still have extremely fond memories of watching Kanon in late 2007, hearing the song for the first time, and making an AMV with it. A few months later, Myself; Yourself inspired me to do it again. The next time I watched Kanon, I made my best AMV yet, If Everyone Cared.

I remember playing Devil May Cry 4 last November, gaining huge inspiration for making games, through a game of all things. I really haven't been playing any games as of late, aside from playing through all of Modern Warfare 2 in one day. Bioshock 2 is coming out in two months, so I'm planning on replaying the first one. I also have a handful of games that came out this year that I still haven't played that I'm planning on tackling soon. Yet another source of inspiration that I can regain.

I've made a new year's resolution for myself a month early. I want to get that old inspiration back. I want to watch as many anime as possible, play as many games as possible, and program as much as possible. I've become too lazy since entering college, preferring to spend all my time with friends. I've forgotten some of the best times of my life and traded them for worthless substitutes. I'm going to regain that halcyon state of mind and return to the times I loved: the times of kicking ass programing, blasting music, playing games, and watching late-night anime.

And with that, I will leave you with an absolutely amazing trace track I discovered last November, that has become one of my absolute favorites and the inspiration for the title of this post:

A True Expression of Feeling

2009-11-11T00:56:00.005-06:00

I have to write about this. In the past two days I've had an emotional 1-2 punch involving 2 of the 3 girls that I have liked in the past few years of my life. Normally, this fact wouldn't bother me as much as it did, but that, coupled with a few other things that have happened to me recently, really hit me hard emotionally. Although, I am of course, still extremely troubled by this, I am so glad that I have friends here at college that I can share everything with, and who mutually share everything with me as well.

I'm not going to go into much detail about the two circumstances, but let's just say that both of these girls have done things that I would have never thought possible, in an extremely bad way. To think that I had ever, even at one time, considered my feelings towards these girls love, let alone any sort of liking towards them whatsoever, is a complete mystery to me.

I cannot overstate the fact that I am extremely glad to have the great friends that I do here. I was able to tell them about this, and they all understood exactly what I was going through and gave me not only consolation, but truthful advice as to what to do about it.

Steve, the leader of the Tuff Customers Rensselaer Chapter, who I definitely consider one of my best friends, is also having a troubled time currently. He managed to express his feelings in a way I never thought possible, in an eloquent and emotional way that even I, myself have never been able to convey through the means of mere text. He wrote a note on Facebook, in which I will quote one part verbatim:

...Lastly, my friends are there for me. Now, when I say friends I do not mean acquaintances, rather my best friends. You all know who you are, and you are my brothers and sisters. It's a mutual thing... I have your back and I know you have mine. Nothing is comparable to somebody who was once a perfect stranger, growing in friendship, and then sticking by you during the worst times in your life. There is nothing like the bonds that friends share. I am proud to call my best friends as such, and I would do anything for them.

He was there when I read this. Afterwards, all I could do was look at him, tears in my eyes. He understood exactly, the bond of friendship that we share in which we could mutually understand and help each other.

Although I would like to place all of the credit on Steve, it wasn't just him who helped me. Trey, Amber (Steve's fiance), David, and Monica (yes, Monica) all helped show me that, although my previous loves are important, current friends are a much more valuable asset. I now have people in which I can share everything with, unconditionally. And this feeling is one of the greatest in the world.

These two situations with these two girls really made me think about my choices as of late. And, although I am still extremely emotionally attached to Chloe, I need to understand that time goes on, life goes on. I grow and become stronger. I grow and achieve friendships beyond which even supposed true love cannot compare. I am beyond overjoyed, beyond comforted by this fact. I have always been seeking true happiness within others, even though I am not normally the person who feels that happiness comes from anything other than one's-self. And I think, rather than seeking that happiness from a romantic relationship with a female, I would much rather have the stronger bonds of friendship.

I need a little downtime, away from my mind.

2009-11-07T18:34:00.004-06:00

The beautiful song that inspired the title of this post :)

It's been a pretty busy time for me, but today I've done absolutely nothing. Slept til noon, spent the afternoon listening to music and finally playing Resident Evil 5, then a little bit of work on Blackfyre.

One of the main reasons I've been busy is the fact that I'm getting serious learning to DJ. I've probably been in the crew leader's room on his turntables more than I've been in my room on my computer. Happy Hardcore just inspires this amazing halcyon energy inside me, literally making me high... thinking about when I first discovered trance and how amazingly beautiful it was, and how amazing it made me feel. Then to discovering Happy Hardcore last summer and learning to digitally DJ. Now I'm making that final step to actually becoming an EDM DJ, which was one of my dreams since I first discovered trance.

I ordered about 20 vinyl records last week (Including See You On The Other Side (Ultimate Dreamscape) and Cannonball (Shining Dreamscape) :D). I found some amazing happy hardcore remixes of some of my favorite trance songs (Drifting Away by Lange and The Sound of Goodbye by Perpetuous Dreamer, both of the original trance versions given to me by Baron Soosdon :D).

Mixing is a lot harder when you don't have a computer telling you the exact BPMs of each song, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. I'm getting really good at scratching already. My goal is to pull off this:

The scratching starts at 3:00

I have that exact track I'm slowly getting the scratching part down. It's freaking sick! :D

Another reason I've been busy is the fact that I finally made another AMV. I've been wanting to make one for a while but nothing really inspired me to do so. If I don't have an epiphany when listening to a song or watching an anime that makes me think "Holy shit I HAVE to make an AMV of this!", I don't make it. However, my brother commissioned me to make one, using a song I'd never heard before. I listened to the song, and the epiphany came. Here is the result:

I've been writing my memoir for Core class, which is turning into a novel. We were only assigned 8 pages, but mine's already 15. I'm pretty much covering the past 5 years of my life, which, you can tell from my blog posts, have pretty much been the most eventful. I'm actually quoting some of my posts in the memoir.

Well that's it for now... time to actually go do something :P

gRave Digger

2009-10-26T11:13:00.004-05:00

My first official event with the crew, and my first official rave. Yep, I had never been to a rave before, and can definitely say that I've been missing out. It was the best night of my life!

I've made it this far now, and I'm not burning out

2009-10-23T19:15:00.003-05:00

Yes, I know I said I'd try to post every week, but I've become so overwhelmed with how busy I am that I keep blowing off writing another post. I'm also currently writing a memoir for my writing class, which feels to me like a huge blog post.

Due to the last post being a month ago, I again have a multitude of things to talk about. For one, I am single again. I finally grew some cajones and broke up with Monica. Everything I said in my previous post still stands true, of course. I'm very grateful for being single again. I've realized that the last thing I need right now in my life is a girlfriend, even though, until recently, I thought it was the only thing I needed in my life.

I was not ready for the crying though. She's pretty much head over heels for me, whereas I feel the exact opposite about her. I tried to be as nice as I could when I broke up with her, but she still bawled her eyes out for a good half hour. But, it's in the past now.

A few weeks ago I ordered a Flip Video UltraHD. Ever since seeing Infinite Ammo's video blog, I've wanted to be able to document my adventures/exploits in video format. I've really enjoyed playing with it so far, it's a very reliable little camcorder. The quality is really amazing at 720p, the low light performance is amazing for such a cheap camcorder, and it has a 2-hour recording time. Although I really haven't used it that much, I've found it a great way to not have to take notes in lectures. I can just record the whole thing, which is so much nicer :)

Work on Blackfyre is progressing slowly, but surely. My level editor is now fully functional and amazing!

I have all the core systems in place, and the main framework of the game done. Now it's time for the fun part: the gameplay. I have a lot of really interesting ideas that I hope I will be able use in this game. I'm going to attempt to not make this become another Rin. Come Hell or high water, I will finish and release it!

I'm even already formulating another game to do after Blackfyre. Playing Devil May Cry 4 again last week really made me want to make a 2D side-scrolling hack 'n' slash. Although, that plan's still on the horizon. We'll have to see where life takes me with my current game first!

I still cannot believe how much my programming skills have evolved over the past 2 years. I'm doing things now that I wouldn't have even dreamed of when I started programming. And it's all so easy for me now. I remember when I first looked at the code for Cryect's tools and thought "What the hell is this?!". Now I'm writing things even more complex than that from scratch. I feel very accomplished :D

Okay, maybe I don't have that much to talk about. Or rather, I have something that's currently bothering me but I'm not ready to post about it just yet. Time will tell!

LightMapper 1.1

2009-10-04T15:45:00.002-05:00

What's New In This Version:

11x faster. The light circles are now pre-buffered, uses up a little more RAM but runs much faster.
Due to the optimization, lights with a huge radius no longer slow the program down. The code to prevent rendering these lights has been removed. All lights are now visible.
Resolution independence. The program now prompts you to select a resolution for the size of the main window. I got a few emails from people with smaller monitors having problems. So now, if you have a smaller monitor, you will still be able to use it; but those with bigger monitors can also make it much bigger :)

Download:

MegaUpload

RapidShare

A Question of Motivation

2009-09-20T16:39:00.010-05:00

I've written and re-written this post about a dozen times. I haven't done a big, deep post (with a Lucky Star title) about my feelings since last year, and it's really hard to summarize it all so it isn't TL;DR. But here goes...

So I'm sitting here in room 213 in Merlini Hall. Listening to City and Colour and drinking a 50/50 mix of Monster and Mana Energy Potion out of my kickass shot glass. Programming the level editor for Blackfyre, and getting ready to watch some more Mnemosyne. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's rewind to about a month and a half ago. I wanted to get Shining Dreamscape done before I started school. This I managed to accomplish, and then I wanted to work on Blackfyre and start packing. Well, Light Mapper came along and I ended up creating a really useful tool instead of working on my game. It was worth it though, I got a lot of experience when writing it. Anyway, the last week was mostly chilling and packing. There was a pizza party at Dairy Queen for all of the employees leaving for college (including me). It was a really enjoyable night, just a lot of food, conversation and jokes. Afterwards me and Alyssa went out in the parking lot to enjoy a Black & Mild (by the way, I find women who smoke cigars extremely sexy, probably mostly because I'm a smoker myself). We were hanging around there with a few other co-workers for a long while. I didn't get back home until almost 2 in the morning. It was definitely a great night that will remain in my memory for a long while, and a great way to say goodbye to some good friends.

The pizza party was 4 days before I left for college. At this point I didn't know whether to feel excited or nervous. I ended up feeling a lot of both. I was excited to live on my own, to be in an environment where I could make friends, to start the long journey to a Computer Science degree, to party, to have fun. I was also very nervous, mostly about living on my own and having to be autonomous. Although I've always preferred being alone (which is something I've learned even more since coming here, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself), I still realized that I rely on my family for a lot of things.

So August 20th, 2009, I move into Saint Joseph's College. I'm on the second floor of Merlini, which is the dorm that everyone agrees should be torn down. Although it is pretty ghetto, it has its advantages. The entire building is full of football players with a below 2.0 GPA, which means most of them don't know how to use a computer. This gets me all the bandwidth. I'm consistently getting well over 5MB/s on torrents, which affords me a chance to download an insane amount while I'm at class. And, I found out, because I have asthma, not only do I get an air conditioner (the dorm is normally not air conditioned), but I also get the cleanest room in the building... so it's not bad at all. I managed to get all my stuff (which isn't that much) moved in pretty quickly, there was even a poster sale on campus where I managed to get some more posters to add to the anime ones (which include a Serenity movie promotion, a poster of Bob Marley toking up, and the infamous Fight Club soap poster).

We had a full weekend of orientation, which allowed me to acclimate to the campus. I managed to make friends extremely quickly. Among the first were Joe, Heather, and Tony. Tony's a pretty cool guy, he's into computers, gaming, and the same music I am. So I already made friends and was feeling pretty good. The first time I actually woke up, I was surprised that my alarm actually woke me up. At home I had my CD player blast screamo and even that wouldn't wake me up. I was kind of scared that I would end up oversleeping every day, but somehow I didn't. Now just the default chime alarm on my clock can wake me up.

So on Saturday, I had to take this test. It really wasn't a placement test or anything, it was just to see how much we knew. I sat down next to some random people and started talking to them before the test started. Their names were Erin, Sam, Tora, and Alyssa. Four more friends.

The rest of orientation was really kind of uneventful, so now let's go into a more general summary of the past month...

I have mixed feelings about my classes. I absolutely love my computer science classes. In this first month I've learned how binary and hexadecimal work and can easily do arithmatic with numbers of any base. We've also started learning about basic circuits, which are really interesting. Core is complete bullshit. Core is supposed to be a replacement for all the pre-requisite classes that you take your first year (English, history, etc), but all it's been so far is reading a bunch of bad books and having political opinions shoved down my throat. Calculus would be fun if I hadn't already taken two years of it in high school. I was going to test out, but can't due to lack of staff. I'm really enjoying Accounting though (I'm minoring in business management... want to have a good education in business if I truly want to start an indie game company).

Being autonomous really isn't bad at all, I love it. I like being able to do what I want, when I want it. Even having to do my own laundry and dishes isn't as bad as I thought. There's also some strange allure to managing my own schedule. I guess it kind of makes me feel more mature, knowing that I can manage without needing my parents to support me.

I've already had too many adventures to even begin to try to list. Random road trips, hookah, sleepovers, parties, fun stuff like that.

I found out Erin's sister's fiance (thats a rather large stretch) is a DJ and was starting up a section of the DJ crew he belongs to down on campus. Steve's a really cool guy. He spins Drum 'n' Bass, Hardcore, and Dubstep. Since I've been mixing happy hardcore for a year, I was really interested in learning how to do it with real equipment, kickass lights/lasers and all. I'm now a member of the Tuff Customers, with a half-hour timeslot at a crew event in October. I'm learning really quickly, the transition from digital to vinyl isn't that hard at all.

DJ Sabio (the picture of me at that party turned out really blurry)

You can see the pimping lasers and lights all over him.

And on to one of the bigger things I want to talk about: women. The instant I met Erin, I was attracted to her. It also helped that she was clearly attracted to me, constantly hitting on me and hanging out with me. Then I found out she already had a boyfriend back home. What followed was an insane amount of mixed signals and drama, in which I finally got her to admit that she was not only attracted me, but using me as an on-campus surrogate for her boyfriend. I'd still actually like her if it wasn't for the fact that she gave me more mixed signals than even Jeralyn managed to do.

One of my other newly acquired friends, Trey, was concerned at how distressed I was over Erin, and hooked me up with one of his friends, Monica. Due to peer pressure and desperation, I now have a girlfriend. But I really don't know how long that will last.

I'm slowly realizing that I actually prefer being alone. Never having had a girlfriend before, I'm starting to think that it's majorly over-rated. Or maybe it's because I really have no feelings for her whatsoever. I merely got into a relationship, just to be able to say that I'm in one. This is the large cause for my distress. We were cuddling last night, when I seriously thought "wow, I'm not enjoying this at all, but if I was cuddling Chloe...". I'm pretty sure I should end the relationship before I go off the deep end, and actually wait for someone that I have feelings for, because right now there's nothing there at all and it's really irritating to be around her.

Don't forget that being in a relationship sucks up most of your free time. I've been really sick this past week, spending most of my time in my room... and it's been the best week in the past month. Again, I'd rather be alone, left to my own devices... reading, watching anime, listening to music, programming. I re-read Masters of DOOM, and I'm really starting to understand how Carmack feels, because I'm slowly becoming like him. Reading Masters of DOOM got me all inspired to work on Blackfyre, and now I'm watching Mnemosyne again (which, last year, was a huge inspiration, which really got me back into programming like a madman), which I hope will get my inspired even more to work on my game... it's been working very well so far.

Another problem with being in a relationship is that it alienates a lot of people. Tony's a really cool guy, but can be a jerk at times. He likes Monica, and ever since I got together with her, he's completely ignored me and won't even talk to me. Erin's also been the same way... I've already lost two good friends that I just made, all over a relationship that I don't want to be a part of.

I made a promise to myself that if I were to get a general degree in computer science, instead of going to a school geared towards game design, that I would learn as much as I could about programming games in my free time. College life has kind of absorbed me, and I forgot about that promise to myself. I'm remembering it now, and regretting this past month in which I accomplished absolutely nothing in my programming. Only this past week have I really gotten back into it... I've been programming like crazy, and I've never been happier. I realize that all I want to do is sit in my room, drinking Monster, programming, listening to music, and watching anime, taking the occasional smoke break. That is my life, that is what I love doing... I don't need friends or a women to be happy. As John Carmack once said : "Put me in a closet with a computer, a pizza, and some Diet Cokes, and I would be fine."

I really don't care if people see me as a shut-in with no social life. I'd rather be away from all the stupid drama, and just do what I do best. This may seem a little drastic, but it's completely true.

I know this post is already too damn long, so I'll leave it at this for now. I'll try to post at least weekly in an attempt to avoid posts as long as this one.

I just watched the finale of Requiem for the Phantom, and it was damn amazing! The ED song, with its trance-y feel, really gave me chills at the end. I'd definitely say it's been my favorite anime this year... anyway, time to go to bed. Oyasumi-nesai!

In Memory Trailer

2009-08-18T18:07:00.003-05:00

Btw, the release date is actually August 30th

This just looks so amazing that I had to post it. This could give Tales of the Past III a run for its money!

And for eternity I'd lay in bed

2009-08-16T21:43:00.003-05:00

Finished the first of two moves in one week :)

Old Room (now empty :D)

New Room

So my dad's spent the past couple of months remodeling our really crappy basement. It's pretty much finished (just needs a few doors :P), and he wanted me and my brother help move our stuff down here before we go off to school. Our old room is going to be re-decorated and made into a room for my little sisters, and my brother and I only need a place to crash when on break.

I get to move into another new room in 4 days. I'm starting to get really excited and nervous for college!

LightMapper

2009-08-14T15:16:00.003-05:00

Download Links:

MegaUpload

RapidShare

FileFront

There's a ReadMe in the RAR that explains how to use it :)

LightMapper 2.0

2009-08-11T22:22:00.005-05:00

As you can tell, I've been spending a LOT of time revamping LightMapper. In the original, the maps were just too damn small and confusing, so I decided to use much larger ones (8192x8192 to be exact), and give the user the ability to click and drag the map. But then I found that confusing to navigate, so I added a minimap (in which you can also toggle little dots showing the lights on the minimap as well). Obviously you can click on the minimap to look at that area. Then, sometimes it's hard to know exactly how much area a light covers, so I implemented the ability to draw the radii of the lights (the darker yellow is the inner [hard] light, while the lighter yellow is the outer [soft] light). When you hover over a light point, it singles out that one's radius (all the others disappear) and info about the light appears on the bar at the bottom of the screen.

UPDATE:

Updated the light circles to actually display in the color of the fog in that zone. I'm working on getting the alpha blending right :)

Wandering Dreamscape 5: Shining Dreamscape

2009-08-08T13:03:00.006-05:00

FileFront (720p)
MegaUpload (720p)
FileFront (480p)
MegaUpload (480p)

Waiting For Disaster

2009-08-08T02:19:00.000-05:00

Running Like A Cannonball

2009-08-06T00:27:00.002-05:00

Things are going incredibly well! As you can see, over halfway done now :D. Let me tell you, nothing beats coming home from work when your mind's a mess and sitting down to watch the newest test render to find out IT'S AWESOME! See the last 30 seconds or so, with A LOT of cuts? Yea, that :)

False Start

2009-08-04T00:26:00.005-05:00

I guess you'd consider this the official first day of editing. I did manage to get a bit done last week before I had to leave for one of the worst weekends in my life. Well, at least I can channel my emotional distress into creative energy. Here's a few (more like a lot) of screens to get your mouths watering! :)

Wildwood

2009-07-29T21:39:00.005-05:00

Made up for lost time. Did this entire thing today, and I think it's one of my best ever :D

Was a lot to do in one day. Now I'm hot and tired. The good news is I'm pretty sure that's the last change I need before I start editing. The bad news is I won't really be able to start editing until Monday, seeing as I'll be gone all weekend. I'll see if I can start on it tomorrow, though :)

Grizzly Woods

2009-07-29T00:18:00.007-05:00

Okay, this one took WAY TOO LONG!

Let's see, not only are there an insane amount of doodads in Duskwood, but Blizzard decides to NOT use a standard orientation and scaling. I had to write a program to rotate all the fences 90 degrees and make them half-sized in order for the Grizzly fences to be placed right. Don't even get me started on the tree barriers! But now I'm finally content with it and I think it looks quite nice :)

Autumnfall

2009-07-23T01:13:00.004-05:00

And here's the fourth change for Shining Dreamscape. You see what I did with the title? :)

This one took much longer than I'd have liked. First I had to write the tree growing program, because as mentioned in my previous post, the trees were way too small at first. Then I was attempting to write an ADT version of my falling leaf adder. But after almost two days of work, I realized I'd pretty much have to start over from scratch, which really wasn't worth it for a small graphical addition that I've already done in another change. I still think it looks amazing without the falling leaves :)

Why I love Being Able To Program #2: Tree Grower

2009-07-20T21:05:00.003-05:00

I'm working on a change, but the trees I want to use in it are just too damn small. So, enter Tree Grower. It takes every doodad that has "tree" in its name on an ADT and multiplies its scale by a user specified value :D