Oh journal land, why have I forsaken you?

I guess I'm reduced to quarterly updates at this point, but it's better than nothing, I guess. Life's good, just awkwardly busy. I think I'll break down this update into multiple days, since I think it's better for everybody (*cough* me) to not be faced with a monolithic block of text and pictures, regardless of awesomeness.


Real-Life
I got the job I wanted, but since it's work and work is boring nothing more shall be said of it ever again. School is still going, I'm majoring in Geography (not Geology). I did a fair amount of academic destruction in my classes, which broke down thus:

Statistics:
This class was really annoying, not because the work was that difficult or the teacher graded hard (quite the opposite, actually), but because he was Chinese and obciously needed to take English as a Second Language again... gems like "Zee ova arfa" for Z/alpha made taking notes in that class a futile effort at best.

Chinese:
This made me feel a little more sympathetic to my previous teacher, since learning Chinese is an exercise in concentrated mind-fuckery. I forgot how fun learning a new language is!

Cultural Geography:
Such a good, easy class. The teacher introduces mildly mind-blowing ideas(J-curve, Guns, Germs, and Steel) about why the world the way it is, and then gives you the tests beforehand so you can study the exact questions he wants answered. I also got a 100% on my term paper on Saudi Arabia, so that was pretty sick.

Urban Geography:
Have you ever had a class that seemed less like an academic exercise and more like a farcical skit illustrating how a bunch of well-meaning ideas can be warped in a terrifying maelstrom of ineffectiveness and confusion? Well, that was Urban Geography with Dr. Brown, who is unfortunately department head. Everything that could be wrong with that class, pretty much was, the only mitigating factor being that while Dr. Brown might have been incompetent, he wasn't malicious about it. Possibly the most irritating part about the whole thing is how often the concepts we awkwardly learned come up in RL.

Cartography and GIS (Geographical Information Systems):
This is one of the make-or-break classes in the Geography Department, because it covers so much material is such a short amount of time. It's supposed to teach you the basics of Arc GIS (professional mapping software) and how to make really good maps at the same time, which would have been hard enough without our teacher being from zee Deutschland. Not that that's a bad thing, but she definitely did have that undercurrent that American students were stupid and lazy. I remember her complaining that students here only try for A's, not A+'s. I tried to explain that the way GPA is calculated at our school that it doesn't matter what kind of A you get, it ends up the same on your transcript, so there's not a whole of motivation to get 96%+ when no one gives a shit. She gave me a scary look and sighed.

I was tempted to tell her that I like A-'s because they tell me I put in just the right amount of effort, but I think she might have force-choked me.

But, thanks to that class, I have a couple maps to show off (they were our major projects). They should be relatively self-explanatory:


This was my final map, what is called a cartogram (where the areas are scaled according to their value). I need to make a better version that drops the alliances thing to make it clearer.


This is a chloropleth map... yeah, Geography has it's own collection of jargon which constantly pisses spell-checking software off.


Boss
Our current project is a space shooter, and we've made some (very) modest progress on it. Like you haven't seen it coming, school has been crazy for both Sir Sapo (the Illustrious Programmer) and I, so we're going to try to finish it up as fast as we can with one mission instead of 3. The last piece of art that it really needs to be reasonably complete is the boss at the end of the mission, so I've been spending a little time trying to get him done. In our traditional content development scheme, he made a placeholder using his (very) modest art skills...


Sir Sapo's Boss



It's uhhhh, green. Really, really green.

Prinz Eugn's Boss



Eh... needs more work. It is red, however.

I was going for a mobile armor look, but it was hard given how the basic texture was set up, so I opted for a blending of styles. I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out, but I don't want to spend too much time on it since I want to move on to our next project. Dun-duh-DUHHHHHN...


Coming Soon:
Christmas in review: Trickle down iPods and military surplus rifles...
Yet another new game project!
Gundam funniness.