As I expected, more Dark Souls 2 and videos today, as well as an awesome stream. What I love about Dark Souls 2 is that there seems to always be two ways you can go. One that's hard and another that's much harder and requires special equipment, but yields better rewards. Like, in the beginning, you can either go to Forest of the Lost Giant, or to Heide's Tower of Flame. Both places lead to the same area and have really good loot, are fun to explore and have pretty neat secrets and hidden NPCs to talk to, but Forest of the Lost Giant has the easiest regular enemies and hardest bosses, while Heide's Tower of Flame has much harder regular enemies that resist sharp weapons, meaning you need to have upgraded blunt weapons... your best bet being the mace you can buy from the blacksmith, which you unlock after venturing about halfway through Forest of the Lost Giant. See where I'm going with this? Yeah, you're basically going back and forth between places, re-exploring parts you couldn't reach before because you needed something from another area. Thankfully you can travel between bonfires right from the beginning of the game this time, but it can still get pretty confusing and once you've fully explored both paths, you can get pretty confused as to where to go next so it's time to go back to previous areas to see if you missed a hidden path that leads to a NPC you need to talk to to unlock something.

Right now I have three paths open before me. One is an area full of toxic mist that I don't think I can proceed through without a poison-resist ring. The other is, again, an area full of statues that spit poison at you so even though I could technically dodge 'em and complete that area, I think I'll do the third area instead. That one's a nice enough foggy forest full of ghosts that curse you and basilisks that petrify you. Somehow, I think that's much less annoying than poison.

Tomorrow I have my final algorithms & data structures exam and I expect it to go pretty smooth and easy, but I'll still study quite a bit and do exercises and stuff since the teacher isn't competent enough to follow a predictable pattern; he could have whipped up an impossible exam for all I know. Plus I've been trying to contact him for two weeks to help me with a data structure I just can't seem to understand: binary trees. I tried sending him a message on the school's messaging system, to no avail. I tried sending him an email on the weirdass custom email he gave us, to no avail. I tried asking him directly last week and he basically repeated what was on the slides and course notes he handed us two weeks before. You know, the ones I read multiple times and still didn't understand. Well, tomorrow's the final exam so by now, I just hope there won't be too many binary trees in it.

I'll still try to get him to help me again, though. Even if that class is over and I'll most likely never use binary trees without STL in my career, I still want to know how they work.