Year 3, Week 1

Live from tutoring... because this is how much tutoring I really do. Well, okay, no, I'm showing him how to use Powerpoint. Okay? Okay.

Also, I can't think of any good titles at the moment.

Like the previous semesters of classes (excluding Spring / Summer), the first week was relatively chill. First set of lectures were the typical "here's what you're doing in the course" and "how you'll be graded" type things. As important as those are... they're not very interesting.

So the classes themselves, the courses seem pretty interesting. Course-load wise, the semester should actually be really really chill if I keep on top of things. I mean... think about it, Nans511 seems to be on the same pace of Nans301 and Nans401 (as in, it's going to be chill), Nans599 I have to give 3 seminars for the whole course (well, this could be difficult if I don't keep on top of finding the articles I need... speaking of which I haven't started on any of them), Bcem575 seems to be alright so far, and only Zool461 seems to be of real difficulty.

At least for now.

The apparent ease of the course-load comes mostly from the fact that I have practically no labs. Previous years I've had either 2 to 3 labs per semester alongside the regular tutorials, while this year only Zool461 really has a lab. Actually... there's also Nans502, but that's a lab course, so there's no lecture or anything...

Actually, I have this feeling that irony will bite me back after me saying how chill everything is. I sure hope that's not true.

I have epic long breaks throughout the day Monday through Thursday. 2hours. 5 hours. 7 hours. 8 hours. So. Long. At least I can fill it with things like 'studying' or squash or swimming or jogging or whatever. It's a lot of free time that I need to be able to organize or I'll fall behind everything. =/

Also... I'm ridiculously exhausted despite not doing much the past week. I blame it on the excess amount of free time not doing much and also staying late every single day...

I finally got a chance to sit down and game yesterday...

In other news...

Finally got a chance to sit down and game the other day. Beated Muramasa: The Demon Blade for the Wii. The game is pretty fast paced and also ridiculously difficult in hard mode (that you can shift between. I gave up on hard mode because I wanted to enjoy the game, not get immensely frustrated). The part I enjoyed most about the game actually isn't the gameplay, but the visuals and the audio in the game. All the visuals in the game, whether it's the backgrounds or the characters, look like they're painted. The colors are rich and the character's animations are fluid as well. Minor details to the characters eyes, hair, body movements bring them to life. It's relatively fun despite the repetitiveness of its combat, which wears out after a while.

Recently got a new board game called Small World. It's sort of like Risk without the dice rolls and with a fantasy setting instead. The premises of the game is that the world is too small, forcing all the different civilizations and races to fight over the limited resources. The twist here is that the players don't play as a single race, but rather control different races as they start to explore the world and when their civilizations go into decline.

There's a lot of strategy involved in the game as knowing when to throw your civilization into decline and choosing a new one is advantageous. There are two mechanics in this game that I found neat: race combos and choosing your race. Each race has it's own unique abilities and they are paired with a random special power that can make them extremely useful or kind of useless. The game was designed such that each time you play you'd get new combos thrown together, making for a different game each time you play. When you choose your race, you're given the ability to choose from a list, but the game forces you to pay a penalty for choosing races that are further down the list. This balances out the game by allowing you to choose your race (it's not randomized), while forcing players to make a tradeoff between stronger race combos that are expensive or a weaker one that's free.

And... it's just plain fun. And this makes... the 3rd game that Jho has bought after playing with us? Munchkins, Killer Bunnies, and now Small World. Huzzah.

I regrettably had to miss the OL Appreciation Banquet for classes and lab orientation. But, having met a wonderful group of OL's, we met up afterwards to play Taboo at the service stop. What awesome people.

After Dr. T introduced Google SketchUp to us for making objects for our Nans599 presentations, I've been messing around with it a little. It's an intuitive and pretty powerful program that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. The only drawback I've found is that it's all static and you can't make animations with the objects. But hey.. it's free. So far, I've made some dice / table, a pencil, and a Rubik's cube.

I should really start on that Nans599 seminar in case I run into snags. I should also read the labs for Zool and for Nans. I should also also start figuring out what to do for Nans502 research. Lots to do... actually. But there's something else here to do right now. Whee.