Salad Sammich

CHRIIISSTMAAAAAAAAS!

It happend much quicker than I expected it to. I guess we’ve just been really distracted by rent/government stuff and terrible terrible dental pain.

But yeah, Christmas was fun this year :) I’ve still got a big pile of miscellanious candy left over, I think I’ve already destabilized my health enough today by eating nothing but sugary junk XD This stockpile will last a long while I think :P

Our old friend Davy (in the Navy 8D) came to visit us, and because of his excess income he bought us Super Smash Bros. Brawl! YAAAAAAAAAY! We showed our thanks by playing many many hours of co-op and regular matches with him. It’s awesome fun, we finally have a good reason to boot up the Wii now! Our online code is 1032-5242-8815 if anyone’s wondering :P

I also got an awesome iPod speaker mount thing from my parents, now I can use it as an alarm. My brother also got a rockin’ waffle iron from his girlfriend. WOO! WAFFLES! we can make waffles now :D no more square pancakes for us!

They also got me some great art books, one of which I’ve been wanting to buy for myself (and hence how my brother knew what to buy ). The former was a book on fantasy vehicles and the other one was fantasy landscapes/cityscapes. This is good, because currently my skills with vechicles and landscapes are crap :O

OOH also have  sweet new phone, one capable of actually accessing the internet without getting a gigantic bill :) It’s the Nokia E51, it’s got some great specs, I’ve spent a lot of time customizing the hell out of the apps :P

Another kinda boring day, although I did manage to get the collision detection working very nicely :D It rained heavily again today as well, I’m just glad we live on the top floor where it’d take a massive flood to reach this high :P I also played some more Kongregate games at last. One in particular was Mytheria, which was obviously inspired by the MTG card game, but it’s nicely made and has some interesting differences. No land, and strength/toughness is calculated differently. I’d recommend it to any MTG players :)

Today’s “public exhibition” didn’t have much of a turnout, must have been the heavy rain. Nobody goes out on a rainy day. So since it was just us students the whole day turned into an impromptu pizza party and DS game session. We played a lot of 4-way Tetris and Mario Kart, it was fun :P Didn’t eat much in the way of healthy food today though XD Also, I have a loud and looping background music from the exhibition stuck in my head, I’ve been around it so long it’s stuck in my head :o

Now that university is almost over I feel a bit of anxiety about what the heck I’m going to be doing now. Both in the short term of organizing how to finalize things and also about planning for my future career :S Final marks, graduation, tying off loose ends.

Cakes that are lied about...

I replayed Portal again, just as fun as the first time (only a bit stale after the umpteenth time). I’ve already played a bunch of bonus maps, including the We Create Stuff map pack. I crave more maps, if I had the time to spare I’d try my hand at making my own. Then again if I had more of this theoretical “spare time” I’d just as easily be playing more TF2. Heck, I’d settle for enough spare time to goof off at Kongretate.

As for what I’m busy with, just mostly tooling around with communicating with Flash via XML Sockets (not fun) and messing around with the ARToolKit. It’s fun to mess with, I wouldn’t mind making something out of it outside of assessment. For our project we’re actually just going to be stripping it down to some 2D co-ordinates, no 3D involved.

I know it’s technically closer to next weekend than last, but hey! :P

My brother and I went to visit the folks last weekend, both for a friend’s birthday and for Father’s Day. I bought my friend some Magic the Gathering cards because I wasn’t sure what games he did or didn’t have. Lucky for me they release new MTG cards quicker than fall fashion :P I also bought something for dad over eBay, but stupid PayPal decides it takes yonks to authorize a payment without a credit card, so it’ll take ages before it gets delivered in the mail. I won’t say what it is because he checks this blog XD Mum had the good idea of buying him a model tractor as an extra for the actual day (he likes tractors, btw).

The train trip took over three hours and was excruciatingly painful because we had to sit in city train seats the whole way. I only found out afterwards that a couple of train cars at the front of the train were in fact the nice cushy seats. Grr…

The party was pretty fun. Ate some party food, chatted with peeps about random stuff. I was nerdy enough to start up a conversation about Google Chrome. Also about who is the best ninja ever. We also played a wrestling game on someone’s Xbox 360. I got plenty of virtual concussions and massive head wounds. Fun! :D

We spent Father’s Day afternoon having a picnic by the beach. Noosa was full to the brim as usual so we went to a less-bloated beachfront. We didn’t go swimming, but it was nice to sit down and eat near the beach. We ate some really nice salad sammiches (with avacado! :D avacado! it’s the fanciest of condiments!). Hench the title. (I guess this was a really appropriate domain name decision for me XD )

But seriously, it was great to sit down on a sandy bench beside the beach and build some sammiches with the family. We also ate cheese and fruit salad. Alex (brother unit) didn’t want to eat persimmon, which prompted me to eat way too much fruit salad trying to convince him to eat it XD Well, okay, I also couldn’t resist the blueberries. I love blueberries.

We took the train back to Brisbane afterwards. And by train I mean not by train at all. They were doing maintenance work so we had to spent most of the trip on the ‘rail bus’. I want to take this opportunitity to remind you never to spend so much time on a bus. I didn’t even play my DS or listen to my iPod like a sane person. I spent the whole time staring out the window and thinking about how blood clots were forming because of my terrible terrible legroom. There must be something wrong with me that I decided not to distract myself with something during that entire trip. Maybe I was trying to pretend the bus ride wouldn’t actually last that long.

In closing; fear not Dad! That package is literally coming in the mail! :D