April ended too quickly

I'm actually surprised by how focused and productive I've been the past month.  Much like last year, I wanted to spend the month of April reading and I wanted to make a better effort this year than I did last year.  Although I've only finished 1.5 books, I did stick to the reading this month by reading 3-4 hours a day.  I started with a book written by a family friend called "The Lu Family Saga".  It talks about the many revolutions and wars China went through in the past century and her family's involvement in it.  It was a surprisingly easy read as it was about a history I wasn't very familiar with.  Right after finishing that book, I went back to continuing reading the Hellgate: London trilogy of books I bought over a decade ago.  I had recently finished playing the Hellgate: London videogame for the first time and felt inclined to finish the books.  I was halfway through the 2nd book before I stopped nearly 10 years ago since I last read it.  I'm currently on the 3rd and last book and think I can finish it sometime next week.  It was surprising to me that I remember all the characters and what happened before.  Still, that's only 1.5 books I finished and I had planned to read quite a few more books.

How I managed each day this past month was reading the first half of the day and then working on practicing "mastering" audio work the last half of the day.  I keep saying "I'll stop early today to play some games" everyday but never managed to do so.  After learning about being able to master my audio tracks last year, I really wanted to practice and learn how to use the program to make my music sound better.  So I've been going through my previous work and try to remaster each one.  I haven't finished that many as two particular tracks had me going back to them for 3 weeks because I was always unsatisfied with something.  I'm definitely getting better and it's making it easier to get through, but I can certainly tell I have a lot more to learn.  Which, by the way, here is my remix from December:


This was the most complicated video I've created for a music upload.  I experimented and learned a lot.

Because of reading and my work habits this month, I realized it's taking a bit of a toll on me.  I haven't been exercising, I'm making less time for playing games, and I feel more drained.  I'm hoping to balance this a bit during May.  I plan on working on a new remix I have a strong idea for while taking the time to get through some more games.  I feel restless with the games I'm playing and I'm in that mode where I feel like I'm playing more to complete a game rather than to have fun with it.  Maybe that's true and I just need to put a bit more time into games since I really want to.  I can tell my brain is looking for that stimulation as I've been staying up late at nights the past week just to play a bit more.  I'd rather not ruin my sleep schedule that I've worked so hard on trying to correct.  Besides that, I'd like to get back into exercising of some sort.  If I don't go to the gym or go out walking, I'm hoping I can do some floor exercise mini-games while I'm playing games.

If things go according to plan, May should prove to be an entertaining and productive month.

Life and school

I got back from Tomo no Kai's Semi about an hour ago, and I'm so glad that I went.  Thanks to Tricia for convincing me to go, I would have so missed out.  And thanks to all my Tomo friends for cheering me up tonight, becuase I've been having a very difficult week/month/quarter.

[Get ready, 'cause it's a lot of complaining]  It's mainly due to school.  This quarter, I was juggling 5 classes (20 units), 3 clubs (I'm staff for one of them), 2 recreational classes at the ARC, and in between I was signing up for housing, subletting for the summer, enrolling into classes, and getting ready to get into the Game Culture Program.  4 out of 5 of my classes are boring, I recieve 3-4 essays average a week, I barely get time to enjoy my World of Warcraft class (Game Design), and I'm only doing very average in my classes.  After a while, I got used to the consistant flow of the quarter, until mid-terms hit.

Stu Art 11A - History of Contemporary Arts class is very difficult to follow, and so I had a hard time writing a good paper for mid-terms (got a b-).  In my Visual Culture class, we have critiques on our artworks.  Before I presented mines, the people ahead of me showed theirs and people clapped and commented on them.  After presenting mines, the whole class was silent for the longest time....and when I did get some comments, they were negative ones are questions that challenged my project's intention.  I wanted to make my 3rd project really good, so I started planning right away.  I planned out to have 7 of my friends in the video, and we had very little time to work on it.  To make it things shorter: Everyone was busy on separate days, so I changed the story so that I could film each person individually.  I looked all morning the first day just trying to find a camcorder I could used.  After filming my first footage on the first day in the grass, I started having an allergic reaction, so my skin got really itchy and I started sneezing a lot.  When I finally got my footage recorded and tried to load it onto my video editor, none of them could read the format (MPEG).  I spent 6 hours just trying to find codecs and convertors and nothing was helping.  I just found out about 2 days ago that the Window's movie maker on my Vista side of the laptop works with it, it just freezes every few moments on me.  So I'm still working on the video.  But what worries me now is that I have 3 other projects other than that to finish and present this week.  So I'm already freaking about this, and more happens this month that makes it worse.....

I go to the counsoler's office often to check on my schdules and classes and see what requirements I could fulfill.  When we were looking through classes for next quarter, we realized that I had conflicting times for a series I need for my Major and for my minor.  Because of this, I have to stay an entire year longer in order to finish one of the series.  I chose to finish my Major series first because it was more important.  I really don't know what to do, 'cause I could drop my minor and graduate by next year.  If I stay an extra year, my parents have to support me fully, which I don't want to burden them with.  I'm still keeping that option open right now, and I got 4 classes (16 units) that I could sign up for.  Then more problems occured.  When my window opened, I couldn't sign up for all my classes except for Asian Art History.  I went to the Arts office again to straighten it out.  My interactive arts class couldn't be taken because I did not take 65A - Digital Imaging (I petitioned).  So now I have to petition for that class too (still haven't got a response).  I was able to get into my Artists as Writers class by having one of the counsoler's lifting whatever was blocking me from enrolling to get in.  My Independent studies I'm not sure how it goes yet, but I might not get to get the credits for it until next quarter.  So I was left with 8 units at that point.  Then on the same day I recieved a message about my housing (which was yesturday (May 29th at night), I get a e-mail that says my writing class had a schedule change, and it conflicts my Asian Art History Class.  So now I'm back to 4 units again.  I don't get financial aid unless I have 12 units or more.  I think the most frustrating thing more than anything was housing.....

Living in Campus Village has benefitted me a lot this year academically and mentally because of the enviornment and atmosphere.  I worked on trying to get into Campus Village again, and when I finally did, it kept erroring when I tried to accept it.  I was so busy during that time that I didn't get a chance to ask for help.  1 day before the deadline, I was already in a rush to get to classes and run errands.  I went into the housing office to get help and they got me through the process and I accepted it.  Then afterwards, I found out that I, myself, had to find someone to sublet my apartment over the summer since CV doesn't do it for me.   If not, I have to pay $1500+ just having it for the summer.  I knew I was signing a contract from June to June though.  So I'm still going through this stress of trying to find someone to sublet from me.  I was having troubles looking for friends to live with at CV next year, and I finally found 3.  Sucks, 'cause all 3 didn't get in.  Not only that, I found out that I got placed on the far end of campus village farthest from the campus grounds, on the bottom floor, next to the streets when I asked for a 2nd floor apartment close to the campus and community center.

If you've read up to this point, I thank you from the bottom of my heart that you would care enough to know how I'm feeling right now.  This isn't a first of dealing hardship, but I write like this to blow off some steam.  I think going to semi helped me more than anything.  Please message me or let me know that you have read this so that I know that my friends (you) care.  Thanks, and good luck to all of you on your finals.

Accomplishments and Anticipation

The past 3 weeks have been a crazy ride of work, and it's not even over yet.  In taking a bit of time to unwind at the moment, I wanted to reflect on recent accomplishments and think about things to look forward to.

[Hagakure - Book]

I finally finished reading Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai!  I recieved it as a christmas present 2 years ago from my sister, and I thought it was strange since she knows I don't read too often.  Well, I started reading it earlier this year and stopped for the whole summer (I did not read at all this summer).  It was kinda hard to get into since it was supposed to be deep, intellectual anecdotes that follows the many philosophies of being a samurai and of how to act as a human being.  Some passages were actually inspiring, though it would be difficult to recall a specific one at the moment.

Throughout the last half of the book however, it was mainly about chopping heads off and performing seppuku (cutting one's stomache out at the death of one's master or as a consequence for one's foolishness).  So many stories of cutting a man down and blood flying everywhere and lopping heads off....it was funny and scary at the same time.  Did you guys know that you can stop the bleeding of a wound from drinking a mixture of horse feces and water?  LOL, yeah.....we have alternatives to stop the bleeding in our advanced technological age of medicine.  All in all it was a interesting book and I do not regret one bit in reading it.   Thanks to my sister for buying the book for me.  "It was about samurais and Japan, so I thought you'd like it." - Sam  (I did like it, very much.  Thank you).

[Draglade - DS Game]

It took me a while to get around beating this game, but I managed to find the time to finish it.  It's a mix of rhythm music with fighting genres into one game.  An activity or sport known as "Grapping" becomes the biggest thing in the world.  The player takes the role as one of 4 characters, and each one has their own ambition and story behind why they want to enter in the competition to become a Major grapper (kinda like going pro in a sport in real life).  Each character uses a "G-Con" (summons your weapon) to strike the opponent and create melodies out of the strikes.  This is called grapping, and you can customize the melody and the way it sounds so that you'll get the sound you want when you perform a combo.  The game can get quite challenging, and I've never played on wi-fi; however, I'm pretty sure there are some crazy pro players out there.  The concept is intuitive in that you can change the sound of your combo, combine different bullet sets to use in battle, and combine the attacks together to create some wicked moves.

Graphics are pretty nice.  They have duplicate npcs and monsters, but I'm not complaining.  The animation is pretty smooth, although the controls need a bit of getting used to.  The story mode I finished was Hibito's, the flame glade user.  He says a lot of corny fire puns like "Play with fire and you'll get burned" or "I'll heat things up".  There isn't actually any voice overs, and the dialogue is kinda weird because of the translations (I should get a job at Atlus as a translator [Atlus resides in Irvine, CA]).  The music is okay and distinguishable, though the most memorable tune would be the title theme (which I don't know the name of).  Story is very simple and predictable, but it was still fun to play along with it.  The boss battles get pretty intense, and I think that's what makes worth playing the game (besides making your own "beat").  Overall, I'd give this game about a 7.5/10 or so on the top of my head.  Oh yeah, there's co-op quest mode too, I haven't tried it yet, but that's a plus too!

[Visual Culture Project - Video]

I'm not complete yet, but got most of it done.  I just have to compose, mix, arrange the music and edit the film.  I've spent most of the past 3 weeks working on this, and since I think I'll like it, I'm probably gonna put it up on Facebook.

[Fallout 3 - PC Game]

I'm sorry to say that I haven't played (or possibly heard of) Fallout or Fallout 2.  But when I heard about Fallout 3, I still wasn't interested.....until I heard it was an RPG game.  I do love games of all genre, but after the explosion of games that came out when there was once 4 major consoles (now 3, sorry Sega) I started to become very careful on what game I choose to play that won't take up so much time so that I can play other ones.  Anyways, I heard nothing but great reviews about Fallout 3 (except that it's full of glitches).  The graphics are amazing with its crazy rendering of an entire city and vast land areas to travel to.  The quest system keeps the players coming back for more (I heard you could be busy an entire year just by playing the game).  And the concept is completely different from the once top down view and action/rpg mix.

Man, pretty violent....

[Left 4 Dead - PC Game (Steam)]

I used to hate zombie games a lot.  Especially when Resident Evil first came out, I asked "why do they make games that freak you out?"  Well,  I learned later that it was the same reason why they make horror films: "For the thrills and chills....I guess?"  Anyways, it gets your blood pumping and it got really exciting when they started making those zombie games action genres.  Left 4 Dead is a 4-player co-op Action Horror survival FPS game that pits you and 3 of your friends with a city filled with zombies everywhere.  It uses the steam system, so we can expect the controls and graphic rendering to be good.  It looks pretty crazy from what I've seen so far from this game.

I'm not going to say that it's an original concept with super intuitive gameplay and all (especially since past games on steam such as Counter-Strike, The Specialist, and Half-Life all had some sort of play vs. hordes of zombie mods implemented on the server's list), but I am very excited that there is a (supposedly) decent multiplayer co-op game coming out that my friends agreed on trying out.  A demo is available on the steam engine Nov. 11, so you'll know that I'll be trying it out this up coming weekend.

So that's it for now, I should go cook dinner, work on my Videogame development work for tommorrow, and continue my visual culture project by starting on the music!  (So tired....)