Aquaria Mod Database

How have you been?

I’ve been okay. I haven’t really done much recently, but today I found myself suffering from a little productivity. Before that, though, I found the Humble Inde Bundle, and as I’ve heard of World of Goo before (I played Tower of Goo back when it was new and always wanted to try the full game xD), and it was too good of an offer to miss, so I got one for myself.

I played World of Goo, which was pretty exciting, but I wanted to try some of the other games in there, so I tried Gish. I heard of that one before too. Unfortunately, I was rather unimpressed by it so I moved onto the next game. Aquaria looked interesting, but I wasn’t sure of how well it would run on my computer with the ripply effects. It ran perfectly.

After I finished the game (which took quite some time), I even got the soundtrack because I really liked the music in the game. So I had new music on my iPod for a while. Old games are fun too! And now I can’t wait for Marian.

Anyway, I met some people on the Bit-Blot Forums and IRC, and got involved in a mod database project to allow others to upload databases and share them with others as a web designer. I made a mockup a while ago, but never got back to making it into a website.

Until today. (Made from scratch by me of course) Yay!

Ripple (Rough Draft)

I’ve uploaded yet another redesign of my blog. The previous version of the blog was brighter, but I thought that it didn’t really reflect my personality accurately enough, so I made a few tweaks to the coloring. I actually wasn’t going to upload the design yet; I wanted to finish making a portfolio page first, but earlier today I realized that my search form on the sidebar (on the previous version) was very badly broken, so I had to fix it as soon as I could. It is now fixed.

A Rough Ripple

Ripple’s rough draft is now done. In fact, I finished last Wednesday, but things have been so hectic I haven’t been able to post anything since then. The draft is 92,361 words and I’ve saved a copy of it so I don’t lose it. “What do you mean lose it?” you ask? Well, it was only a rough draft and still has a few rough edges that need to be fixed. Like I say in a “Disclaimer” (yeah, it’s not actually a disclaimer, it just sounded nice) at the beginning of the draft,

This is a rough draft. As such, please expect it to have some rough edges, spelling errors, dragon teeth marks, singed edges, and untied plot lines that don’t quite make sense. There are also quite a few incongruities in the text, since I’ve removed or rethought out some of the things that appear in the beginning of the story.

Moreover, there are also a few things that some may consider explicit, inflammatory, or inappropriate content. This content will most likely not make it in to the final version of Ripple, and are only there on account of the naiveté of the author at the time of writing.

This version is meant to be a super-exclusive edition, and will likely be never seen again. It will never be published. Even if there is a “First Draft” version of Ripple published, it will be a revised version of this draft with the aforementioned elements resolved or removed. Please do not share this document, as you will likely make me explode from embarrassment.

Finally, I would like to remind all readers of this work that this is an original work of fiction, and any similarities to locations real or fictional, events past or present (or future), or persons living or dead (or fictional or not yet born >_< ) are purely coincidental.

Enjoy! =^.^=

Unfortunately, there still is a long way to go for Ripple, but now that the hardest chunk is done, the rest shouldn’t take two and a half years. Hopefully. I might get more busy, or things outside of my control might happen, or… really, who knows?

Splash

Ripple was a bumpy desert road with a lot of… Ripples. Though it has been influenced by the many things that have gone on in my boring (what a paradox) life, I really started to pull them together in a meaningful way in the summer of 2008. I had created vivid dreams from other combinations of thoughts before, but really, the idea of a game in which relationships forged would be more of a “you should actually feel attached” instead of something like Dream of Mirror Online‘s (yes, I have played that game before, but… due to… complications I no longer do) relationship system’s “Oh, marry with this person and you can get special skills to kill stuff!” Since I knew I would never get around to figuring out how to create such a game, I let my imagination run wild in a hotel room in Rome on a People to People Student Tourists Ambassadors program. There was nothing else to do. You, the player, a hitman sent out by an unnamed organization to kill target after target after target. You rescue someone. You befriend the someone. The someone helps you. You are asked to kill the someone because the someone won’t love them. It was a fun game to imagine.
Fast forward a month. I’m staying at a well known university for another trip, this time a People to People Leadership Summit. We learned how to be leaders there. Incidentally, I am in JROTC, so there really wasn’t much there for me except for the chance to visit said college. And one other thing. Ripple. I met someone there who wrote. I expressed my desire to start writing. She told me, “Just write!” We were eating breakfast.
And then there was the question of what to write. I scratched my head a bit, and dived into the murky depths. It wasn’t long until I rammed my head right into the aforementioned (I love that word. ) game idea. I thought, hey, if the game idea was way beyond my abilities, but writing is simply limited by my vocabulary, why not try writing that? I can put the game idea into words…
Now of course, there were the details I had never thought of before that needed to be fleshed out. So on the way back to the dorms that were our temporary abodes, I thought. There needed to be a setting. Great, I’ll just use my fantasy setting Lemonia. I needed an organization. CLIMA, Center for Legalized Murders and Assassinations! With an I in the middle for good measure! I was on a roll. Or rather a stroll. Since I was still walking back to my dorm. It was taking a while. How to make it more interesting. Fantasy setting… Magic? Magic!. There would be magic. Finally, a title. A title… a title… a title title title. I thought of beginnings. A good name for a beginning. A story that symbolized a beginning. “Hey, have you read Twilight?” No I hadn’t. But that was an interesting title. The beginning of night. I thought about the things I liked. I always saw myself as a watery type of girl, so why not a water themed title? And… Ripples! They start out as teeny little circles… and then continues through the medium to affect everything. Perfect.

The First Ripple

A few days later, after I had gotten the time to revive the ideas, we just happened to be going on a bus ride somewhere. So I grabbed my computer and left. On the bus, I decided that I was going to use Google Docs to write my story, now named Ripple. I had Google Gears installed, so I could write it even offline. I opened a new document. A blank screen. But my mind wasn’t blank. I started to write, “The pod landed with a deafening thud.” Oh No! I forgot character titles! I pulled two names off the top of my head. I switched one of them, and then decided that I was going to use them. Jonathan and Ashley. The date was Thursday, August 14, 2008. Fast forward.
I’m at home. I tell my parents I’m writing a story. “Oh, let us know when you give up in ten pages.” Paraphrased. At first, I didn’t doubt their assumption. It is true that I’ve really never succeeded with any of my projects–just look at Mesh, which I blogged about a bit after I redesigned this blog. There’s also Downlink. Yeah, I’m full of ideas, but I don’t have the motivation to actually execute them in their entirety. In fact, I’m currently debating whether or not I should continue writing this blog post.
But just like I persisted in writing Ripple, I shall continue!
They were right with one thing–I did, in fact, stop writing in ten pages. It wasn’t because I gave up, though. I simply realized that writing about a fictional world in which fictional rules about what one can and can’t do is a bit too… free. I wanted swords, but I wanted cars. It was a mess of technology. So I decided to rewrite everything in a modern world. And so I did. From page one all over again. This time, however, I decided to write it in Microsoft Word. I’m not saying I like the program–it’s just that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write it in Google Docs–their export features weren’t that great back then. So Word it was.

The Second Ripple

Now in the modern world, several changes had to be made. CLIMA was no longer really “legal.” It became an acronym that wasn’t really functional, but the name stuck. I’ve almost backnoymed it to Coalition of Likeminded Auralites. Kidding. Agents now lived at home instead of in CLIMA’s secret fortress. CLIMA became secret. CLIMA now became a nice organization that did more than kill people. (In fact, it started out as a job search agency for auralites… that some smart person decided to request another person dead on.) Most importantly, auralites are now special people, born that way, in this world that we pass on the streets, every day, unnoticed by most.

Push

So, I decided to watch Twilight. And hey look, it’s a trailer advertising a… oh my. It was almost as if some movie had plucked an idea from my mind and ran. I had to see Push. During the wait before it came out, it spurred me to write Ripple faster. And it worked. Push was different enough to allow me to continue writing Ripple. Sure, there were a few changes I had to make, changes that I’m going to make now, to move Ripple farther away, but Ripple stayed, and it was now better than ever because of the shock that Push gave me.
Push wasn’t the only force that pushed me forward. My friends (the names Regina, Lauren, Liz, Tina, Eric, Solluna, Corey, Milachi, Melissa, Vivi, among many, many others come to mind) had urged me forward, telling me they looked foward to seeing Ripple, telling me what they thought about random passages I dumped into their IM windows, telling me not to give up. I even have to thank my parents, who’s relentless attempts at trying to get me to stop wasting my time spurned me to work harder and prove that I wasn’t wasting my time.

The Last Ripple

The future of Ripple? I’m not quite sure myself. I’ll probably try to find a way to publish it, but if I can’t manage that, there’s always the story that I can send to my friends. They’ll (hopefully) enjoy it.
Any more Ripples? That depends on the readers.

Jonathan Lenoor is your average sixteen year old teenage boy. He goes to school, has pimples, and kills people for a living. Life is all fun and games for him–until he receives a mission he can not execute without destroying all he holds dear.

Now… to wrap it up… how about a poll?

Dislike Button!

While I was researching for writing my post on getting notifications on Facebook profile pages, I came across an offer to add a Dislike Button to Facebook on the second of the two websites I mentioned, http://shadyhabit.com/get-it-now/ (if it wasn’t clear the last time, I’ve withheld the link to prevent people from going there before I finished explaining). I considered writing a short paragraph on it, but the post was already looking fairly long (and it was) so I decided to hold my mouth. You are now reading that unpublished section now.

The Dislike Button Link is featured as one of four buttons behind the pay wall. It is simply a link to a publicly visible cnet article. The conclusion? This website is trying to charge for other people’s content. Or rather it’s trying to get visitors to sign up for a subscription plan through an offer network that pays it. (Another blog post idea! Will I ever stop? ) The cnet article then points on to something I will bring up again at the end of this post (the suspense!).

I wouldn’t have posted this post if it wasn’t for a Spanish website that mentioned me. Google Translate claims that it called me some sort of technical analyzer and then quoted one of my reasons why the offers weren’t worth it–something I owe much to TechCrunch’s Scamville Posts. What I found interesting about the post, however, was the other half, which warned about the Dislike Button. After a bit more digging around, I realized that the post was really a translated version (yes, they did cite their source, so technically it’s fine) of an English post on Facebook Group Scams. This post states the following:

The group claims that by inviting all of your friends, becoming a fan, and installing their software, you can now have a “Dislike” feature on your pages. This is completely false, as it is impossible to add features to a website.

(I’m aware that the site probably has a Copyright policy, though there was none stated in a plainly visible space, so please let me know if this shouldn’t be here and I’ll remove it as soon as possible.)

This quote (and the site) is only half correct. (And I’ll admit, my other post is probably only half correct as well, but… erm… would anyone like to volunteer a $9.99 a month to help us find out? What if I say “Pweaaaaseeeee” in a really cutesy voice? Didn’t think so. Buy a deviantART subscription instead. It’s cheaper and… I digress.) The Facebook Group asks people to do manually what the notification group does automatically, and is therefore clearly even more unnecessary than the latter group. The group regains all of its lost honor, through its last step. It’s a bit.ly to… surprise, surprise! An actual Firefox plugin page! I have to admit that I haven’t actually tried the extension since I use Google Chrome and not Firefox, but it should be perfectly sound because even Lifehacker, a prominent blog (where I got the image for this post from, actually), wrote favorably about it.

And as most Firefox users should know (and if they don’t they can find out now! ^.^), addons can edit websites. This one does it by hosting lists of dislikes on each post item on some external server (or at least that’s what I gather). In fact, Firefox is so customizable that add ons can even edit the browser’s graphical functionality!

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for… (if you haven’t figured it out by now) Where does the cnet page link?

Facebook Dislike :: Add-ons for Firefox « I hear it’s good! And it’s a shiny, glowy blue link!

It's a Scam!

Okay, so apparently two of my friends have sent me a link advertising some application that claims to send you a Facebook notification visits your profile. Initially, I thought, “Oh! That sounds interesting!” So I clicked through to the Facebook group with directions.

It’s a scam. And an excuse to post a blog post.

Disclaimer: The two groups I was invited to were different, and so some things were worded differently. If I mention some things that are not mentioned by one of the groups (not linked here because that would simply be mean), it’s probably mentioned by the other, or paraphrased.

Upon arriving on the group page, I was greeted by the words “HOW TO GET:”. It made me flinch because of the disregard for English grammar. Colons are always preceded by an independent clause, and “HOW TO GET” (in all caps) can’t even stand on its own without the colon. This, of course, is excusable because this is the Internet and even I find some uses for all caps at times.

The first step was joining the group. Everyone knows that joining a group achieves nothing but adding a little more to the giant mass of group names in their Facebook profiles, but who cares because it’s what the directions say, right?

Oh, right, the second step requires me to click the share button to spam all my friends about the group. Okay, no wonder step one was there. But wait!

================================
Step 2: On the bottom left of this page there is a little button that says “Share”. Click it, and hit “Share+” when it pops up. Doing this will help the dislike button get out to your friends.
================================

================================
Step 3: After Step 2, Click the ‘Invite People to Join’ link on the left hand side of the page. (Required because this is a big part of what makes the dislike button work!)
================================

Okay, so… erm… what? Dislike button? I thought we were trying to find out when someone visits my profile!
It’s one thing that your readers might not read your directions, it’s entirely another that you don’t even read your own content before you put it online. (Yes, that was my first ever italic and bold on this blog. I know, thank you.)

Alright, whatever, let’s say you do it anyway, reasoning that the developer was probably too busy coding a brilliant app to proofread the directions. You move onto the next step. Oh, look, it wants you to paste javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}} into your address bar. (Go ahead and try that here, I bet you it won’t do anything.)

I stared at this snippet of code for a few moments. Here it is again, separated into pieces for easier reading.

elms = document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');
for(var fid in elms){
    if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){
        fs.click(elms[fid]);
    }
}

What does it do, you ask? In English…

Make a list of all the friends in the friends window and call it "elms"
For every friend in elms...
    If it's click-able..
        Click it.
    End If.
Go on to the next friend.

As we all know, clicking on a friend in the invite friends window selects him or her to be invited. So basically, all the snippet of code does is tell your browser to click on everything in the window.

If you do NOT complete this step, our application is programmed not to work for you. No cheating!

This statement is a blatant lie. Did you see anything saying “Tell so and so that we’ve run this bit of code” in the translated English version I typed up there? Neither did I.

Alright then! The final step! This is where the two groups differed… or they seemed to. One of the links was a tinyurl, and the other was a bit.ly. (Speaking of which, I like bitly more than tinyurl, and I promise I’ll never, ever try to scam any of you with a bitly link ever. ^.– Wondering if I really sent the link? Add a plus sign to the end of the link like so–http://bit.ly/6PCdSG+) The tinyurl routed me to a discomfortingly obscure page, http://www.tomoh.000a.biz/pvn1.html. It wanted my email. A inexperienced user would think that this was merely used to verify that he has a Facebook account… and so type in their real email. Therefore, I reasoned that it must be an attempt to get a user to willingly give up their real email. I typed lalala into the form and submitted.

Hurray for Incognito Mode!

It brought me to the second page, not even complaining that lalala looks nothing like an email address. (All email addresses tend to at least have a @, followed by some characters, followed by a ., followed by some letters.

The bit.ly link brought me to a blog post that then linked me to a less obscure and more modern URL, http://shadyhabit.com/get-it-now/. Even though the URL was less obscure, there was something that still told me that the webpage was a bit shady and should not be trusted.

Noes.

Being a bit concerned for my safety, I decided to look at the source of the page. I realized I could make the dark overlay mysteriously vanish by adding a display: none CSS attribute! As soon as I did it, however, a mean dialog popped up and refreshed my page. So I guess I couldn’t. I tried out the first of the offers, Take the IQ Challenge.

My first thought? “This looks familiar.”

Summary terms: This is an auto renewing subscription service that will continue until canceled anytime by texting STOP to short code 40684. Available to users over 18 for $9.99 per month charged on your wireless account or deducted from your prepaid balance for 3 alerts per week on T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Virgin Mobile USA, Cellular One, Cincinnati Bell, Centennial Wireless, and Unicel (5 alerts per week). US Cellular 5 alerts/wk. For $4.99 per month for 2 alerts per week on Cricket… By signing up for this service and entering your personal PIN Code delivered to the cell phone number supplied by you on this website, you acknowledge that you are agreeing to thee full Terms of Use.

So what? I do a little quiz, and get subscribed for something giving me ringtones and similar junk for the low price of $9.99? Fun! And all this to get notifications whenever someone visits? “Moar” fun! I closed my window, never to return.

But let’s think rationally now… do we even need this? How many people visit your profile page every day? Well… how often do you visit other people’s profile pages? Okay, fine, maybe more than me. Alright.

How many times have you logged into Facebook and gone “Aww, 32 notifications.” Yup, that feeling. Now imagine 10 people going to your profile every hour. “Aww, 272 notifications.”

If you really want to be able to be notified whenever someone visits your page, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to make you an app that can do that for you in a non intrusive way–that doesn’t make you go to shady websites.

And the best part? Facebook is deprecating notifications. Err, what, you ask? That means they’re going to remove the feature from applications within the next month.

Have fun everyone!

Yeah, I know these posts are getting more and more meaningless…

As soon as I’m done sorting through these essays and other things I have to do I’ll get right back to blogging, I promise!

Cornucopia

It’s Thanksgiving again! The time to eat and… well… eat some more! But we must all remember that it is also a time of thanks. So today this blog post is here for me to thank everyone. Hurray!

Of all the programs that I could be thankful for, I think I’m most thankful for Google Chrome. It’s the browser that I use to do everything that I do — from checking my email to writing this blog.

I am also thankful for Twitter, one of the two platforms I know of that can connect me to a bunch of people with skills that I don’t know, but would like to improve on. Another nice thing about how twitter works is that short messages are the norm — you can type a few quick messages and run by if you don’t have time. A lot of the time I feel bad not being more wordy, but I am thankful for Twitter’s limits.

I would also like to thank all my supporters in all the things I do — I have a nice cloud of fans who want to see Ripple on, spurring me forward to work some more. To these people I give a Tome of Thanks. I have some people who support me in my desires to draw, so I give these people a Tableau of Thanks. I have still others who support my love of coding and working on the computer, so I would like to give these people a Ton of Thanks (Yeah, sorry, I ran out of words that start with T). For the rest of you, you get a nice Turkey of Thanks. Enjoy your turkey dinners!

There are a lot of other things I can be thankful for, like computers, my parents, Second Life, so I’d like to them all at once in one big thank you.
So Thank You!
I would also like to thank all you readers for forgiving me for not spending enough time thanking every little thing into great detail of my life that you probably aren’t that interested in anyway.

at&t

This blog and a few of my sites have been down for the last four days (it was down since Saturday). Actually, I host my website on my own server at home so my internet has been down too, and I had to use my phone to connect to the internet.

The reason the internet failed was quite simple — an internet wire that was used outside was simply too old. It has been replaced and Surrealness is now back in fully operational form.

Disaster averted.

I finally have it!

I have Google Wave. I got my invite on October 23, 2009, and at first, I had no idea of what to do with it. I signed up for an invite to Google Wave a while ago, and when I wasn’t let into the first wave (no pun intended) of users, I was upset, but I decided I didn’t really need it after all. How do you test a communications platform with no one to test it with? It completely defeats the purpose of testing if the only person you can talk to on Wave is yourself.

And then finally, I get my Wave invite a week ago. I was completely at a loss as to what I should do — I had gotten a Wave invite, one of the most sought after things in the modern world, and I knew I didn’t need Wave. I probably wouldn’t even need it much. (Getting bored? Keep reading. You might end up with one of my 20 invites.)

First Impressions

Oh my God! I just got a wave invite! Okay, now how does this work… and what should I do now? These were probably the first words that ran through my mind as I found the invite email buried among my college invitation emails (those colleges never seem to want to give up, do they). The answer to the last question was obvious — write a blog post. But I was getting ahead of myself. First I needed to accept the invite.

I did so and saw, for the first time not through YouTube, the Wave Interface. It actually wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. It seemed almost too empty — nothing was happening, mostly because I logged onto Wave for the first time and did not yet have any open waves.

Interface

The interface was rather standard: the well known Google blue, three panels. The way the panels worked, however, was quite unusual: the the windows in the panels could be minimized into a bar on the top, closed, and even resized (though it wasn’t possible to actually move the panels around). There really wasn’t any reason to move them around; the interface was quite straightforward and easy to use.

Something that amazed me was how the scrollbars worked. It wasn’t the usual scrollbar that we’re all used to seeing. It was more of a two part scrollbar: a darker shadow that indicated how far down you were, and a actual solid clickable block. When the block was dragged, the shadow would smoothly move to follow it, with a slight delay, giving the panel a slick animated scrolling effect. There were also up and down buttons on the block, that moved the shadow, and the panel, but not the block.

Quite unusually, everything happens through a wave — the introductory video is in a wave, the settings are waves, and even the invite box is a wave.

First Waves

I remembered reading about a Lifehacker Readers Public Wave, so I searched for it. Chrome hung. I decided that it wasn’t worth trying again, so I went on Twitter and announced I was looking for a random stranger to talk to. Someone named Tim apparently was looking for someone to talk to as well, so I added him to my Google Contacts (Wave’s contacts are your Google Contacts) and we started to talk.

Wave was mostly a pain. It was laggy at times, and the keyboard shortcuts were not listed anywhere easy to find, but we did figure it out in the end and chatted there for a while.

The next day I quit Wave because I had no one to talk to about real things. Maybe in a year when more people I know get it…

Soo who wants a Wave invite? Preferably I want to invite someone I already know, want to talk to, and that I believe has a good reason to want to use it. If you don’t know me, and think you would make a good friend for me, please feel free to leave a comment. If you disagree with anything I said in this post, feel free to leave a comment too.

School. Pleh.

School is in full effect. My post was on the Thirtieth of August, and because of this almost-two-month period of inactivity a great number of readers have probably lost interest in me. Still, I shall continue to write, and maybe regain some of that lost faith.

The last time this blog has been left fallow (quite depressingly, only two posts ago — sorry readers I’ll try to post more!) the reason was because of the art website deviantART. As great as a website it is, and as wonderful a time waster it is, I can’t blame deviantART for neglecting Demonic Angelicism this time. Instead, I was distracted by a much more evil organization — school. This year is my last year of High School, and I have to say I have started it off with a very bad start. You can read about it all the way at the bottom of this post. Before I get to school though, I’m going to elaborate on a few (mis)adventures I’ve gone on. Feel free to skip right to the school section.

deviantART

Unlike the last time I neglected my blog, this time I’ve barely spent any time on deviantART. I’ve gone on to deviantART maybe around twenty times to check on my messages and comment on the first or second most popular deviation of the last eight hours, but nothing major. I’ve posted almost no new deviations, with the newest few being fairly short writing pieces. My favorite is probably a section of an paper I wrote for school, wherein I compared John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany to Binders.

iPod

Skip past this part if you’re an apple fan or don’t want to read a lengthy rant / review about the new iPod.

Some of you may know I have an iPod. Others (well, actually, all of you, now that you’ve read that warning) may know I have the new iPod. That’s right — the shinier, smoother one with the bigger screen and video camera.

All the shininess aside, I actually have a rather negative review of it. There are some features of it I can’t live without right now (namely, VoiceOver and the speaker) but there are some other things that I didn’t really like about it. For one, the iPod feels a lot laggier in general. The old iPod was much more responsive than this one. I even borrowed someone else’s iPod (I put away my old one) and shook the two at the same time. The old one started playing immediately, but mine made me wait almost an additional second. This delay is also noticeable when viewing the lyrics of a song that you have lyrics for. The most annoying part of that is that if you don’t want to view the lyrics and just want to get back to the volume slider from the seek page in the rotation, you have to wait through all the clicks, and then wait for the lyrics to load to switch back out of it. Speaking of switching from the seek page, that’s the only way you can access VoiceOver — by pressing the center button. When you want to listen to the title of the song, the song fades out to near silence so a really quiet voice can read to you what it is. Most of the time, I can’t even hear what it’s saying, and again, I have to flip through all the other “pages” to get back to being able to change the volume, and then listen to VoiceOver again.

It has a radio that I don’t really use (I find showing it off to be pretty fun though), a pedometer that’s okay in accuracy — that I also don’t use, and a video camera I like catching people unaware with. (Though, I swear that Apple put the camera behind where most people hold the iPod so that everyone else would know when you’re recording them…)

School

Ah, the topic I was avoiding. I was going to write about something originally, but the things that happened really should be kept kind of private… They’re definitely not things to show off about on a public blog. Sorry. So I’ll just tell you this instead.

The first grading period this year was the first time at Lowell I have gotten a GPA above 3.5. I’m really happy about that. I think I’m getting smarter.

Maybe after I forgive myself for my accidents I’ll post it up. But not until then.

It's HaWT!

Somehow, on August 23, 2009 (yes, the day before school), I got it into my head that I wanted to make a webcomic. I don’t draw very well, but I thought that maybe the regular practice would help me improve, since I would probably never run out of things to draw. Webcomics also allow browsing back in time, which would mean I get to see my art skills improve as I browse through time. Perfect!

As a writer, this is probably one of my less bloodcurdling stories (I’m going more for ‘funny’ and ‘random’ for this work), since it’s a slow paced rambling narrative about mystery, boats, technology, computers, action, and steampunk. I’m not even sure if I can draw all of those things. But everyone, even myself, will have to wait to see how things will end up, since I myself don’t know what I might decide to do after the first few chapters.

Of course, since I’m in school and have a ton of other stuff to worry about (remember, I’m still writing Ripple and do design websites from time to time) I’ll probably start out publishing one page a week, or even slower, though I don’t plan to start publishing for a while, so I have enough ready in case I get a large assignment. (Next year, maybe?)

So keep your eyes peeled.