Alright, enough laziness, I'm writing a journal. Every time I mean to write one, something happens and I get distracted and when I mean to do it again, it's suddenly past bed time or I don't know what to write so screw that but now it's the weekend so sleep isn't an excuse.

T'was a pretty long but interesting week. I thought it'd be a relatively calm and relaxing semester since the classes sounds easy and enjoyable, but ends up it might be the hardest to date. Sure the animation class has my favorite teacher from the first semester and he's still as awesome as ever, but we sure won't be slacking off and from what he said, it sounds much harder than I thought. There's lots of maths involved and we'll be cooperating with another class during all semester to make a game.

As for AI 2, I now understand why the department responsible and all the teachers were praising the teacher who gave that class and UI; they really weren't kidding when they said he was competent. You know the kind of teacher that's so overflowing with passion about his work that you can't help but absorb some of it and get hyped for what, at first, didn't sound so fun? He's that kind of teacher, REALLY hardcore. You can almost oversee the fact that he's a fat dwarf with a lisp (the schfifty five kind of lisp) and a permanent, suspiciously large bulge (I guess he's literally passionate about his work). In the class, we're gonna work on an ant game all semester, no exams or theory at all. The graphics are already done, the sounds are already done, the logic is already done... we're gonna focus 100% on the AI. Plus we'll compete our bots against each others in class and we'll also compete against students who are studying for a doctorate in AI for bonus points. REALLY intense, but this also means that I'll be spending a LOT of time working on my AI since it sounds amazingly fun.

Wednesday I was supposed to have Animation again, but my teacher was called for a business trip in Halifax so I got the day off and used it to try out a new MMO that came out on Steam called Royal Quest. It sounded interesting at first but when I read the reviews on the forums, I saw that people were calling it the real Ragnarok Online 2 and that piqued my curiosity further. It certainly has a Ragnarok Online feel to it and it without a doubt does a better job than the official Ragnarok Online 2, but since it's F2P, it's also P2W. Thankfully, you can buy the cash shop money with ingame money, although expensive, so it isn't fully P2W, but I still got bored after a certain level when I ran outta quests to do so I quit for the day. The next day though, I tried again and when I leveled up again, I unlocked a whole bunch of new quests so now the game is fun again.

Since the Rendering 2 class is given by the same teacher this semester and it lasts five hours this time, I was expecting to be bored again and figured I might as well work on my ant game in class, but it ended up being pretty fun. We learned about reflections and refractions so I experimented for the rest of the class and came up with something pretty neat. I placed an ambient light inside a black, fully transparent refractory sphere, which was itself inside a closed box where all the faces are mirrors of different colors. The result is so pretty the girl artist in the class who's an expert and the real teacher with this 3D stuff asked me if I could send her my scene. I'll upload one of the results after I'm done with this journal to give you all an idea of what I'm talking about but suffice it to say, it's freaking awesome. Physics can be pretty sometimes!

Finally, today I had the GUI class I was waiting for. I loved making GUIs with Visual Basic when I was studying in computer science back in college so I was already hyped for this class, but after experiencing the AI teacher, I was anticipating it even more. Ends up it's gonna be more awesome than I thought but infinitely harder. Again, no theory other then debates on ergonomics and we're gonna spend most of the time working on a GUI for the ant game to help debugging it for when we work on it (meaning the developments will go hands-in-hands), but we'll also make stuff for the animation class which, as I mentioned, is gonna be a cooperation with another class. Worst part is that we'll be working on another team's intended project since the teacher means to teach us what it's like to tell someone what to do and what the results usually are, thus teaching us how to formulate our demands clearer. As I said, really competent.

When I came back home, I figured I'd watch that Brynhildr in the Darkness anime everyone is talking about and about four hours and a half later, I can safely say it was indeed pretty good. A few meaningless plot holes that were rushed at the very end to provide a happy ending to make the anime more accessible and a cliffhanger that will most likely never be developed further, but a pretty good anime nonetheless. If you like dark, hopeless but still humorous animes that parody clicheds, I can definitely recommend it but for now, I'm off to bed.

Tomorrow I plan to play some more Royal Quest and maybe finish The Last Remnant's storyline since I'm getting sick of grinding to give my characters a chance of surviving the last set of optional bosses, and Sunday I have another date with Mystery Man. This time, we're gonna go watch Dragons 2 :3