Popcorn is yummy

Right now I really want to make a game. I've been reading some things online about C++ programming and I just bought an old famous book called The Petzold on Windows programming. Hopefully it isn't too out of date. Oddly, I have not been playing games nearly as much as I once did. I attribute this to no good ones being out. Good ones include those that sound interesting AND worth the money. That second criterion being the main reason there are no good ones, cuz iyam cheap. When I do play a game, it is either Defense of the Ancients (dota) or Civilization IV, both of which are effectively free. I made the only purchase necessary to play dota in 2003, I think, and I got Civ4 free from Eli. Civ4 is a great way to relax without relaxing. When I play it, it is all I think about, and those games last for many, many hours, so that's really nice.

The past four Mondays I have gone to the meetings for the 'Video Game Design Club' here at UCI. It's good to be around my own kind again. That kind can be equally well catagorized as either socially inept and hopelessly sad, or smart and creative. I feel a small amount of guilt because the project which I have committed to contributing work towards is, for me, completely a learning experience, but I know one must start somewhere and this sort of environment is exactly the right sort of somewhere to start at. The learning curve I am facing as I attempt to write code for "Afro Shooter" is a painful prospect, but one I will face soon enough.

I really like some of my teachers. Bing Cheng taught my calculus class last quarter and by most fortunate happenstance I managed to get into his calculus lecture this quarter, too. He is very energetic in his lecturing... and very fast, which I am sure is awful for some folks. He describes math so very simply that the speed doesn't bother me one bit, in fact, I enjoy the speed because it means I get to learn the next part sooner! Another thing he does that is really nice is incorporate regular examples of real world situations in which the theorems or techniques he is describing are used. Yet another personal benefit is that the examples he gives are often programming oriented.

My T.A. for linear algebra is very sarcastic and cocky. In the first class I felt dislike for him because of the cockiness, but eventually it became evident that he was aware of the personality he projected and did not care what it made people think of him. With me independence from opinion scores way more points than it should, so I ended up liking him. I guess he is decent at teaching; it's hard for me to tell because for whatever reason linear algebra makes me sleepy and is impossible to focus on. Ken something would be his name.

My ICS professor is Dan Frost. He seems like a real neat guy. He annoys me by couching his statements (expression? i think) constantly in lecture, but that is a small thing. Unfortunately for Prof Frost and myself, I find "Software Engineering" to be extremely boring, it is basically a class about how to plan well.