New Year

I had a concurrent nightmare about grad school my first two nights of the new year. In this dream, I suddenly discovered that I didn't meet the course requirements to graduate just yet, so I had to take 3 more classes, which I was pretty depressed about in the dream. One class was some crazy mathematics class on differential vector calculus or some esoteric topic like that, another was digital signal processing, and the last was some neuroscience class. Why these specific courses were required by my degree, I have no idea. When I woke up both mornings it took me well over 10 minutes to realize what I had just experienced was a dream, and that I am truly and absolutely finished with grad school. But you know what? I still don't feel like I'm 100% done, because I have no document or status that says "yes, you graduated". They don't mail degrees out for another week or two! Seriously, what school can you graduate from but still not know for weeks after if you really graduated or not?

Luckily I didn't have that nightmare three nights in a row. Last night I had a series of some very strange and very interesting dreams. I don't recall them very well, but in one of them I was at some track and three girls came up and started singing to me in unison while holding giant beer mugs in each hand. The song they sang told me that they wanted me to go to Louisiana with them so that they could take a picture of me and strawberry lemonade (why we had to go to Louisiana to do this, I had no idea). Then after they finished their song, they pored the contents of their mugs on my bare feet, which became covered in red, yellow, and purple yogurt. Yes, that's right. I have dreams about girls singing to me about strawberry lemonade while poring yogurt on my feet. No, its not some sick fetish that I've been hiding.

I've started working on Allacrost hard-core again, which feels really good. I did some work cleaning up the scripting engine, then I started working on the new map mode design, I've been mopping up the sloppy mess that we call our video engine, and I've been writing more of the story as well. I'm well enough now that I can do a decent job with these things, but my mind still is foggy so its more difficult for me than it should be. The map code I'm exciting to do a complete re-design of, because the old code was getting awfully messy. The biggest changes I'm doing to it right now are adding in support for free-range movement to replace our old tile-movement. Basically what this means is: you can walk more freely rather than being forced to walk only from tile to tile. It's a little tougher to code than tile-based movement, but it will be worth it. The video engine is pissing me off though. The code in there is just so messy and it doesn't follow the code standard very well at all. The data types used don't make sense half the time (using floats to represent the number of pixels, for instance) and its just generally frustrating. The video engine works and works well, to be sure, but when it comes time to modify it or add new features, it can be a nightmare.

Well one of my resolution's for the new year is to stop using my blog as an ad-hoc "emo Tyler diary", so I'll just say that I'm feeling much better after two weeks at home, but still have a ways to go. :)