PC
This Weekend
Woot. I had a good weekend… Friday night was a… social night out… and was a lot of fun. Saturday I went up to visit Cindy… her family’s restaurant is closing soon, but that just gives me an excuse to eat more delicious Chinese food. I’m sad about it closing, because it was such a big part of my high-school life, and such a big part of her family’s life. Since her dad needs a more wheelchair-accessable place and they don’t need the hassle and monetary investment of running the place, I completely understand. Looking over floor plans for new houses was kind of fun, and brought me and Cindy back to our old days in Mr. Poole’s drafting class in high school… what a grumpy old bugger.
We ended up spending most of the night watching old Zero Punctuation videos and a lot of Iron Stomach Challenge and Man Cooking… all while eating a bunch of pizza.
Sunday I finally found some more blank CDs upstairs with the help of my dad, and he gave me one… I went downstairs right away and burnt Grandia 2 to it… popped it in the Dreamcast… and now I’m really addicted to a console RPG for the first time in years. I can’t wait to play it next weekend… so I’m actually getting the PC version right now. Lol.
Well, that was about it for my weekend… wish it could have been a bit longer. For more Grandia 2. I didn’t see Kim much either other than Friday night… because of her work obligations. The ideal weekend would have more of her too!
Also, FML for not spending more time doing digital media.
Rants.
So I may stray away from (read: will most likely not cover) Digital Media topics in this post. Well, I will cover some stuff that really REALLY annoyed me yesterday, incidentally involving a combination of my own stupidity and Macs (they still suck, but not just due to my own stupidity), as well as a presentation I did today and then becoming a little pissed off at the other group that covered the same topic. So here goes. It’s gonna be long.
Before I start… Sharp Cheddar Kraft Dinner is delicious.
So… yesterday started out fairly normal, other than Kim and I woke up late. Things started looking up though, when we got an e-mail from our Production Management teacher that he’d be late for class too. We ended up getting to class a bit later than the teacher, but he’d not yet started. This turned out to be the day we’d not been anticipating, as it was the day he was splitting us up into groups that were not of our choosing. Now, I know it’s “what the industry is like” and all that jazz, but, from my experience in college, Kim and I work extremely well together, and when Samina is added to the mix, we can plough through projects like nothing and our individual strengths come into play very well when combined. Now, in addition to this… a lot of people in our classes seem to not really care as much about their marks, deadlines, and quality of work as we do. So we were extremely upset about getting split into these groups. I think I lucked out in my group, as I got mixed with a couple of people I know… but the same didn’t really apply to Kim and Samina. I know it’s not a terribly huge project that we have to work on or anything, but the teacher is going to be doing the same thing for the final, which is not only a pitch like this project, it is the actual completed project as well. I just wish he’d let us pick our group. Although it may be an attempt at simulating a real work environment, it is not the same. In a real work environment, people are being paid to care about what they’re doing, and if you end up picking up the slack of someone not pulling their weight… well… there will be ramifications for that person. Not so much in this situation. I’d rather work with a team of my choosing.
Next, we had to head off to Aviva’s Intro to Print class and finish up our business cards. I was pretty tired, grumpy, and hungry by this point, and the fact that I had to get some work done didn’t help. I ended up having some technical issues (Illustrator not having the fonts I needed on the Macs in the classroom) when I needed to submit the assignment and making an extremely small modification to my project required me to fire up my laptop which I’d just shut down not a minute before. On a side note, the Macs in the classrooms are terrible. They’re supposedly top of the line, but they can’t seem to properly load a webpage half the time, whether it’s in Firefox or Safari. That’s annoying. Also I will take the time now to mention that I HATE THE STUPID HIDDEN GARBAGE FILES THAT MACS CREATE ON MY USB KEY WHEN I INSERT IT INTO THE MACHINE OR OPEN ANY FILES IN A FOLDER ON IT. I also hate when clueless Mac users think that Windows is at fault for creating the invisible files when they put their drive into a REAL computer. Anyways, I got all of that sorted out after a couple of annoying screw-ups. Being tired and hungry didn’t help. Also the stress of having to do a midterm didn’t help either.
Before the midterm, I decided to grab something to eat. I went to the cafeteria with Kim. I picked out a caesar salad and a coffee, as I figured that’d be good before a test. I grabbed some fries to take back to Samina as she’d mentioned a desire for greasy food, and Kim got a bagel. We’ve never, EVER been stopped for taking food into the computing commons. They do have signs up but nobody ever follows them (classrooms also apply to this). We walked into the commons with the food, and this random woman not wearing any kind of uniform or whatever stopped us and told us to not bring food, and said it’s not allowed anywhere in the commons, although the signs up say not past that certain point. Kim held onto the food outside the commons, and I went in to grab my stuff for the test which was over with Samina at the far end. I’d say the commons was at 75% of its’ capacity, and of that 75%, 60% had food. Just from my walkthrough. I was absolutely pissed off. Instead of stopping responsible students from bringing in a little salad, why couldn’t this woman be going after the people already there goofing off with their friends and who were a little more at risk for spilling shit on their keyboards? After Kim snuck the food meant for her and Samina into the commons in my backpack, I headed off for my midterm. It turned out that the Seneca Test Centre also does not allow food, even if the testee (? (lol, testes!)) promised not to slop their caesar dressing on the test papers. I headed off to an empty classroom to finish up my salad. I was pretty peeved at this point, and wanted to listen to some music to calm myself while I ate, but I’d left my headphones with Kim in my backpack. As I ate the salad, I became more frustrated at the fact that the croutons were soggy and mushy.
The midterm went surprisingly well as compared to the rest of the day. The questions weren’t terribly difficult, and I finished in about 50 minutes. Heading back to the commons, I found that Samina had left ten minutes or so prior, and Kim hard at work on our presentation (which we did today!). I joined her, and we got an hour or so of straight work done on it, which was good, because it was kind of last minute. After a while, one of the commons employees asked us to move across the commons for no reason. We decided to head home instead of relocating pointlessly. It was pouring rain and we got soaked. Kim moreso than me. When we got home, we continued our work on the project. Kim was using the wrong shade of black on the slides, and I was accidentally saving over slides I’d already finished. FFFFFFFFFFFFF comes to mind. Anyways, the presentation got finished, and that was the end of frustration for the day.
Today we got up, made it to school early, printed our paper, and had our presentation prepared. We were ready at the beginning of class except for the hightlighting of what we wanted to mention from the paper, so we went… 5th-ish I think? We were wired on coffee and I was a little jittery during my part, and Kim stumbled a bit, but overall I think it was an informative, enjoyable, and concise presentation. The class really enjoyed Crayon Physics, which, if you know me, I’ve been mentioning/showing it to just about everybody. It turns out the teacher even plays it on her iPod Touch/iPhone/whichever she has, I forget.
The other presentations were fairly alright. Most of them had fairly interesting topics and had information presented well. I had a problem with two of the projects though. First one, minor complaint. The topic was comparing the stories of movies and tv shows to those of video games. First problem, they said that Pokemon was a game based on a TV show. WRONG. DO YOUR RESEARCH. THE SHOW IS BASED ON THE GAME. Next problem. Someone said X-Men games were based off the movies, but technically X-Men is based off a comic book so the group shot that down… but THEN they said that Dragonball games are based off the TV show which is partially true, but DRAGONBALL WAS ORIGINALLY A COMIC AND THEY DIDN’T SHOOT THAT DOWN. GOD. I don’t even like Dragonball that much but it’s pretty mainstream and most people that know Dragonball OR EVEN A QUICK WIKIPEDIA VISIT would point you in the right direction. If you’re doing a presentation and want to be informative, at least research your topic, because if you’re not into it all that well, chances are you’re going to look like a tool in front of people that know.
Second presentation that pissed me off – the one that was the same topic as ours. Firstly, it seemed like the people making the presentation picked the topic because it was video games, and not because they were actually interested in and followed the topic on the side. They definitely came across as the “hardcore” gamer type of guys, and although it was nice to hear about it sort of from their point of view, the way they went about it seemed all wrong to me. FIRST OF ALL, a lot of the games they mentioned and references they cited came right out of MY TOPIC over at the Escapist Magazine boards. Here is a short list out of things in that topic they used:
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – they mentioned that they recently found out about this game and stated what the posters that mentioned it had learned from it.
FarCry2 – they mentioned about weapons smuggling and African politics, almost exactly in those words. They didn’t flesh out this part of their presentation much.
Daniel Lloyd’s Video, Video Games and Tangential Learning – was mentioned in the topic, and it was the first I’d ever heard of the video. These guys used it in their presentation, to bring the length up to about 25 minutes (limit was supposed to be 5-10, Kim and I went almost 15)
I know this isn’t a large list or anything, but it just bugs me that they found the forum, read the topic, didn’t bother to check the profile page of the user who created it, and it didn’t occur to them that the original poster who mentioned doing the presentation this week MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THEIR CLASS. I confronted them after class, and asked if they’d heard of The Escapist or its’ board and had seen my topic on there. When they both replied no, I said how it was a strange coincidence that they’d used the games mentioned in the topic without providing any additional information that wasn’t mentioned in the topic. I had caught them in their lie and they tried to weasel their way out of it. It just bugs me that I went to the trouble of asking an intellectual gaming community for suggestions, and they went ahead and used my efforts to prolong their project and make it look better.
The second thing that bothered me about their project was that they just made up some bogus facts about the Wii, a video game system they obviously know nothing about as they seem to love Grand Theft Auto so much. They said that the Wii was concieved as a toy for children. This is an incorrect “fact”. The Wii was concieved to appeal to a wider demographic, yes, but that does not mean only children. One of the very first games developed and released for the Wii was Red Steel, and is definitely not aimed at children. The presenters said that at first the only games out for it were kiddy games, and that the pack-in games that come with it were learning experiences. The only pack-in that has ever come with the Wii is Wii Sports, which I would hardly call educational. There were 21 launch titles for the Wii, which included such mature or more realistic titles as Call of Duty 3, Red Steel, GT Pro Circuit, Need for Speed: Carbon, and Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. The majority of these games were ports from other consoles or PC, but Red Steel was originally developed and only for Wii. There. Shot that one down too. People frustrate me.
Anyways, I’m done ranting, and my attentions are wanted elsewhere. That felt good.
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