We’ll start with school, because that’s some­thing I do 3 days a week.

That’s right, you heard me: three whole days. It’s amaz­ing that I have time to do any­thing at all. Actu­ally to get tech­ni­cally it’s more like 2 point some­thing days, since one day starts at 11, and another one starts at 1 in the after­noon. Given this impres­sive crunch on time, It’s a shock that I haven’t been killed by my own laziness.

Where my in-​class sched­ule fails, my home­work kicks in. The first month was, for all intents and pur­poses, a joke. I had noth­ing to do and found myself very much want­ing in time-​killing devices. Thank­fully as we’re round­ing the midterm weeks things have picked up con­sid­er­ably. In the last 2 weeks I’ve had roughly seven assign­ments, two mid-​terms, and a pre­sen­ta­tion. This week offered two more assign­ments for tomor­row, another for Tues­day, and I’m sure I’ll have more for Thursday.

Last time I was in col­lege, I spent a max­i­mum of two hours on home­work before declar­ing it a lost cause (this of course excludes the last semes­ter where days blurred together in the mad-​dash that we cre­ated ourselves).

This time around, I rec­og­nize the impor­tance of doing ones home­work and assign­ments (a novel con­cept, I know). I’ve been bust­ing my ass to get every­thing done, and it’s paying off. I’m pretty sure at this point I’m run­ning a 90%ish aver­age. I’m going to con­tinue my efforts, because I don’t think I’ve ever run an aver­age this high…ever? The result of my work­ing hard is that I have 5-6 hour blocks where I’m hunched over my laptop at all hours of the day and night. My neck despises me.

Some­thing else that’s been eating up my week­end and sleep­ing hours has been rapidly pro­duc­ing and updat­ing the design and layout for my friend Bart’s new live project: Game­Cake.

The idea behind Game­Cake is pretty straight-​forward. If you have a game, and no where to host it, you can upload it to Game­Cake, describe it, pro­vide screen shots and the like. If you’re a fan of independently-​made games, The simple to use archive brows­ing, rank­ing system and over­all nav­i­ga­tion makes for a simple and enjoy­able game-​whore experience.

My role in the whole thing was and is to create, main­tain, and update the design of the web­site. I’m doing my best to focus on usabil­ity and layout, making things as pain-​free (for the users) as pos­si­ble. Con­sid­er­ing I rigged the entire design and layout up in a record time of about 14 hours, I’m happy with it. Now that it’s gone alpha, we’ve been get­ting good feed­back, and I’ve been improv­ing the design ever since.

Oh, I’ve had weddings/receptions to go to every other week for the last two months. Seri­ously, people need to calm down and not get mar­ried so much. Hon­estly some of us have things we need to do! In all seri­ous­ness though, the last couple of wed­dings and recep­tions I’ve gone to have been pretty fab. My one excep­tion to all of this is the exces­sive amounts of Coun­try music that I’ve had to endure. I know it’s your wed­ding and all, but what do you think the odds that 100+ people are all going to be dire fans of Country.

Finally I’ve been play­ing through Earth­bound recently, though I’ve hit a point where I have to power level, and so I’m taking a break from the monot­ony to play another kind of monot­ony: Har­vest Moon. I know I’ve talked about it before some­where (Wordpress’s search is not all that impres­sive), but I’ve been ever so slowly work­ing my way through this evil game.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Har­vest Moon series, and have from the SNES ver­sion. The prob­lem is that the ver­sion that I cur­rently have is such a bitch to beat that it bog­gles the mind. I would never give this game to a child, because they would weep at their own inabilities.

The premise of this game is that you have to col­lect musi­cal notes to revive the Har­vest God­dess. Yeah, really manly this game is. In any case, you can col­lect 50 notes, which revives the Har­vest God­dess in under a year (a year is 120 days in game). To get the next 50, you have to sell your soul to the undead legions of the Abyss. That or you can bust your ass in vain trying to get them. I’m fairly com­pe­tent in Har­vest Moon, and I’m only at 75 notes out of the pos­si­ble 100. I’ve clocked more game time with this ver­sion of Har­vest Moon than I have most of the games on my shelf.

Insanity.

So there you go, a nice per­sonal post to keep the site a float.

Oh! And Happy Hal­loween everybody.

She hangs around the
strangest kings and queens
She gets around,
but it only gets her clean
Well all the after­school spe­cials
of the days of your life
And all the anti-​drug com­mer­cials
as your high as a kite
But it’s all just another day away
from one less day to cry

Indie Queen - Mar­velous 3