So, when most people throw up on their twenty-first birthday, it's because they're having a hangover.  In my case, it was because my body decided that the stress was too much and I went to bed at two in the morning yesterday feeling awful only to wake up two hours later to empty my stomach of everything I'd eaten in the past eight hours (and again two hours later).  I then proceeded to attempt to go to class, only to skip half of them because I was feeling too miserable, and spent the next twelve hours sleeping on and off, interspersed with the consumption of weak tea, English muffins, and oatmeal.  So yes, I skipped two classes, an organization meeting, a department meeting, a meeting with my group for animation class, and my office hours for graphics.  But I got sleep and I'm actually feeling much better than I have in weeks right now, ignoring the pending mountain of work I have to attend to now.

Really, it was simultaneously the best and worst birthday ever.  I got sleep...which doesn't happen that often here...  I also got flowers...and a cake...which I could not eat at the time...but now can...  I also sufficiently managed to thoroughly wreck all of my boyfriend's plans for my birthday by being sick (although he was nice enough to take care of me almost all of yesterday and cover my office hours for graphics, so I was very grateful for that).  I must say though...of all days for my body to violently break down, yesterday was not the day to do it.

But I guess I'm twenty-one now and my consumption of alcohol is now legal.  In fact, I'm more enthusiastic about being able to keep cooking wine in my dorm room than anything (and rum, so I can flambe pineapple).  Mmmmm....flambeed pineapple with tasty coconut ice cream and caramel...

I swear, the workload here is deceiving.  The week that I don't have very much due is actually still horrendously busy with stuff that will be due.  This, countered with holding two jobs, one of which has a horrible deadline for this Thursday coming up, is not healthy.  I'm eating roughly 1.5 to 2 meals a day and getting about six hours of sleep per night on average.  Free time is...occasionally existent...but unproductive since I spend so much of it being lazy and burned out.

Also, everyone around me is being incredibly unsympathetic.  But that's college, I guess.  We're all busy.  We don't have time to worry about other people or do other things.  We can find time for the things we love, but there's so much we want to do that stuff inevitably gets shoved on the back burner.  Like writing my game...  Like writing an incredibly awesome fluid simulation...  Like pursuing things I care about...  Like having time to play a single game...

Unfortunately, the only thing that I can do is keep on struggling through it in the hopes that someday, it'll stop before finals.  Carnival is next week; guess who's going to be too busy to go and enjoy herself?  Oh, did I mention that last year, they had the most adorable plushies and I didn't get the chance to get one?  That orange lobster was so cuuuute.

I know I shouldn't be complaining, but I must say that everyone around me seems to be having fun.  I'm probably just being crazy, since it is 3:20 in the morning and I need to write up a project handout, start graph theory, and make a powerpoint all by tomorrow in the waking hours when I am not in lecture, not finding edible sustenance, and not in the graphics cluster fixing ray tracers (and telling the students that they need to debug their own code).  I guess I'll apologize for complaining now...night...?

Why hello there.  This is a welcome screen to look at, after staring at Maya for the past sixteen hours (it's more like nineteen, but I got some sleep in there.  There was a point when I thought that animation would be really fun, really.  I think I'll stick to programming the actual stuff and make animators do it for me because I am thoroughly convinced that animation assignments are tedious, obnoxious, and by far, the most painful of any art assignments I've had to do.  I've been locked away from the world for hours, madly modeling (since when does it take two hours to attach a character's leg to its body) and failing at animating, although I finally understand this inverse kinematics stuff they regally failed to explain adequately in class.

If you're wondering why I'm wasting my time updating, it's because I'm rendering a test sequence to figure out why the hell it looks like crap and then going to spend the rest of the day fixing it, minus some small errands.  Working in Maya will only make the program crawl right now, so I'm taking a break.

I think I need real food at some point, since living off of half of a package of Chessmen butter cookies, some apple cider, a can of soup, and small handfuls of semi-sweet chocolate chips is not healthy.  I keep telling myself that one of these weekends, I'll get to go shopping and do something fun, except every time I even harbor the thought, I get assigned something else to do.  Four classes, two jobs, an organization, internship applications, etc.  I think by the time spring rolls around, I'm going to be too drained to even think about all of the work that I need to do then.

Oh good, rendering done.  Now back to woooork...

I have decided that I am sick of being miserable.  I have also decided that I am sick of being a burden on people.  I am also very angry at people who act humble when they are actually good at things.  I am not included in this set of people because I am clearly not good at things.  I also hate arrogant people who tell me I'm good at math and I know they're lying between their teeth.  Also, Nash-Williams, I hate your theorems.  You and graph theory are making my life very sad, but I know if I continue whining, nothing will get done.

Which is why I am going to have the best, most awesome party ALONE in my dorm room tonight with my nice package of Chessmen butter cookies, apple cider, and my graph theory homework (after I visit the TA at eleven and figure out what the hell I'm doing wrong).  I will pull an all-nighter listening to loud music and singing (so long as my roommate does not come back early) and it will be great.  Then I will lock myself up in here for the weekend after Friday to do my animation project.  I will emerge from the quagmire on Sunday afternoon and feel great.

I decided a long time ago that I would endure four years of potential hell to become a better person when I got out of here.  That sentiment has not changed and obnoxious, intelligent, arrogant peers in graph theory will only steel my resolve to be better (and to give myself the chance to take them down, whether or not they're friends).

Adrien threw chalk at the class in graphics lecture just now (and nearly hit my friend Val)... 

Damn, I love my job TA-ing for him...

These past few days have been pretty emotional and hectic.  Out of the despair, the angst, and the self-hatred, I think that despite everything I've just done, I would gladly live it all through once more because the good it brought has certainly outweighed the bad.  And I finally think that I can clearly, honestly say that.  Thanks to everyone who spent hours trying to un-break me over the last week.  I love you all.

I also have decided that the solution to my sense of self-hatred can only be remedied by believing that I can be a much better person and acknowledging my own faults.  Seems pretty simple, but it's taken me a while to fully wrap my head around all the finer details.  The one thing I have resolved to do now is to become a better person so that I don't make the same mistakes I made last time.  And I believe I've found a reason that I want to better myself for (it's graphics...just kidding).  But that's an obvious secret...

It's an hour until I get to give my first lecture...  This mixture of apprehension, dread, and excitement is the only thing keeping me awake on five hours of sleep...  I can't tell if the stomach-hurting thing right now is just butterflies or actual pain from not getting enough sleep...  Mmm, graphics...  Yumyumyum.

...I am apparently crazy enough to pull an all-nighter, miss my first class of the semester, and nearly pull a second all-nighter...  Ah, graphics is going to drive me nuts this semester...

But as ridiculous as these past couple of days have been, I acknowledge that it's been fun...  I might just feel the slightest bit empty when I'm not stressed out about that class...

I don't know if I should be appalled or amused that I just pulled an all-nighter for a class that hasn't officially started yet.  Locking myself up in the graphics conference room for for seventeen hours was fun...in a sick and wonderful way.  I'm not a masochist and spending those seventeen hours thinking about nothing but implementing math was painful BUT TOTALLY, INCREDIBLY WORTH IT.

I promised myself that after all of the complaints that I heard about the class last semester that I'd do about anything to make it awesome.  And with three other equally awesome and competent TAs working to make it good as well, I think we can handle that.  So if you're taking 15-462 this spring, you're going to be in for some epic stuff.

 Even better, I get to the first half of the second lecture of this course in Wean 7500 on Thursday to the alleged one hundred students taking it.  Oh, and an additional one on the topic covered by the fourth assignment right after midsemester break.  This means that by the time I come out of this, I'll have TA'd one of the best courses ever and I'll be an expert on photon mapping.

Now, naptime for three hours...then it's back to work some fun plotting, then work.

Despite the fact that California is generally warmer than Pittsburgh during this time of year, my house is a freaking icebox.  That's probably because the heat in my dorm room is in the eighties thanks to a broken thermostat (or Morewood just being stupid) and I'm not used to the twenty degree drop.

So yeah, break.  Woot.  I passed all of my finals (even 451, wheee) and made it through what was probably the best semester gradewise that I've had so far.  Well, that's done.  I made it through the calculus, the Navier-Stokes equations, the proofs, and everything.  And I'm aiming higher.  Time to turn my attention to more pressing matters, like the actual work I have over break.  Yes, work for both actual job and school, but it's fun enough work that I'll be doing it gladly.

Especially when said schoolwork means rewriting the entire structure for the labs for computer graphics.  Oh, I'm a TA for that class (one of four) and it's going to be phenomenal next semester!  I'm really excited because enrollment next semester is high and all of the other TAs/professor are awesome.  So I intend to help make it awesome!  Even if this means writing code over break!  Because coding is fun!  (Ironically, job work involves modeling a bunch of stuff for said graphics professor, so that's pretty cool, too.)

Plus, January marks the start of an interesting new adventure: the start of actual development of Aphelion's Radiance, the game that's been in plotting for a long time and is now finally getting done.  The team so far is made up of some seriously talented people and we're not going to settle for making a half-hearted semester-long game.  Nope, we're going all out with a serious, intelligently-designed 3-D engine, level editor, motion-captured animations, and as much computer graphics magic as we can possibly cram in for the next year and a half.  It's time to see how much of this computer graphics stuff that I've learned so far will pay off.

In the process of developing a proper simulator for particle-based explosions, I have managed to invent my own temperature system where 0 degrees roughly corresponds to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.   Well, ignoring the fact that half of the parameters I'm using are probably very off and the fact that my explosions look more like four-leafed clovers, I think I am in perfectly painful shape for an all-nighter tomorrow...or is it today already?

It has occurred to me that I've never felt this busy during a last-week-of-classes before.  This semester has been excruciatingly frustrating in that I am constantly busy, have developed a horrific sleeping pattern, eat about one meal a day, and spend all decent gaps between lectures (where I could be eating) at work only to find out that I apparently suck at my job despite the ridiculous amount of effort I'm throwing into it.

Honestly, the only thing that keeps me going is some sort of ridiculous motivation that these are absurd challenges and that the rewards will be great should I surpass them all.

Also, it would be nice if I officially knew whether or not I get to TA the computer graphics class next semester?  I'd rather not find out when I get back that I get to spend an entire semester debugging Open GL code; I am not particularly adverse to this, but I would like to mitigate the pain by at least getting friendly with the online red book over winter break.  I like graphics enough to spend my entire break brushing up, but there are all of the things that I haven't been able to do this semester for reasons above that I would also like to do as well.

It seems I have acquired a mild addiction for nurikabe.  I have also confirmed that  9x9 grids are tasty, but too easy; I demand grids that are at least 20x20.

I must say, it is terribly distracting to find one's homework being interrupted by the sounds of sirens and screaming college students, even more so when you realize that a veritable mob of people is running up the street screaming "Obama" at the top of their lungs.  And yes, there are police cars.  Lots of them.  The flashing lights are rather pretty, if not somewhat schizophrenic with the alternating red and blue thing going on.  Kind of like this whole election thing that I have successfully managed to ignore for the past month thanks to work.

For that matter, I am terribly jealous of the people running up and down Morewood Avenue right now.  This is not because I would like to be amidst a mob of hysterical college students celebrating the results of the election, but because these people actually have the time (or can actually find excuses to make time) to do such silly things.

Remember when I said things were going to get busy?  Well, I wasn't lying.  Guess who got stuck writing the first draft of the proposal project for technical communications class at the last minute?

That said, I'm going to need a lot of caffiene to stay awake in class tomorrow.  Well, that and stabbing myself in the arm with my pen to keep me awake...  I hope you can't get ink poisoning.  That sort of thing would be most unfortunate.

Well, I survived post-midsemester madness (namely those darling Navier Stokes equations).  The workload has cooled off a little and believe it or not, I found myself rather confused last night when I realized that I didn't have a mountain of work to do.  I know I'm going to regret saying this, especially since it's going to pick up significantly after Monday night with four presentations, a psuedo-research project, a quiz (really more like a mini-exam), and two writing projects due before finals.  Balancing that, my job, and my project with GCS this semester is going to be...unpleasant, but the results will be worth it, I swear.

There is the possibility that I will be a teaching assistant for 15-462: Computer Graphics next semester.  One of my professors this semester is teaching it and hopefully I'll get the position, since I won't know until registration rolls around and our advisor takes into account the number of people taking the course.  I really want to TA the course because I love the subject, but also because I want to help other people enjoy it as well.  The TAs that I had could have been better; in fact, a lot of things about the course could be better and I want the opportunity to change that.  I want to help people taking the course find it to be as challenging (in my case, painfully at first) and enjoyable as I did.  Haha, I must sound so silly and cliche saying this, but it's true.

Next semester's classes will not be as epic as I had hoped they will be, especially since Game Programming isn't being taught and the graduate course in graphics overlaps with one of the undergraduate courses (so of the three graphics courses I had planned, I only get to take one, boo).  On the positive side, it means I get to knock off more of my required courses (like those two blasted science courses I still have left).

On a side note: it is approximately 60 days until the seven months projected for the second (and actual development) stage of Project AR begins. I've waited a year and a half to formally begin working on it; it feels like a lot longer than that, but I'm excited because I'm finally started to feel like I'm ready to start.  Exactly a year ago, I only had the faintest inkling of what computer graphics meant and it's been a good year's worth of learning to get here.  Project AR is meant to take everything I've learned and implement it.  I promise you, it will be epic!

I sincerely hate midterms week(s).  The past two weeks have been abysmal to the point where I've seriously wanted to do nothing more than curl into a little ball and cry at how incredibly awful and not fun everything has been.  Somehow, I'd care a lot more about the stuff I was doing if it were fun.

Like writing a fluid simulator.  Ok, so it's not that awful and I know it will look amazing even though it will be a pain to implement.  But somehow, getting all cozy with the Navier-Stokes equations sounds like the worst way to spend midsemester break this Friday.  However, I don't really have a choice.  I'm going to get this thing done by the 22nd (yes I know it's due on the 27th) and then screw around with it for five days to make it better.  The particle system officially broke a good portion of my brain along with my sanity and I ended up not making it cool, so this time around, I'm not taking any risks.  I'll just keep telling myself that this is a necessary hurdle to jump over in order to get one step closer to reaching the pinnacle of computer graphics, SIGGRAPH, and everything that I want to do with my career.

There are so many things I want to do.  Like write a really good ray tracer.  Having one on hand will be useful for next semester.  In fact, having one now would be even more useful.  But unfortunately, I simply don't have the time to write one.  Learning Maya right now would be wonderful.  Unfortunately, it isn't going to happen.  I'd like to draw the character designs for the project next semester, but that won't be happening either.  Work just keeps getting enqueued on the priority queue and I can't dequeue it fast enough.

What I really would like is just to have one day where I can curl myself up in my room and do everything I've wanted to do for the past month.  Having this much work is seriously starting to get unhealthy and I'm also slightly sick.  Great.

Also, Scaife Hall has really nice classrooms (and I like the lattices over the windows) , but it's so far from anything that there's no way I can hold GCS meetings in here.  Boo.

Classes have begun to settle into a routine now that my graphics course has finally started (it's now in its second week after starting a full two weeks after my other courses).  It is by far the most fascinating class I am taking this semester and is entirely project based with really interesting projects coming up.  The best part is the total absence of exam-based assessment.  I tend to like classes like that.  I also tend to like classes where all of the papers I've been reading so far have been written by scientists working for Pixar.

At this point, I am thoroughly convinced that computer graphics is going to be my focus for the next two years and that I will be scrabbling to take every class I possibly can on the subject.  I want to be good enough so that next semester, I can try and see if I can TA the basic undergraduate course, even if that means I have to re-teach myself all of the matrix algebra and calculus that has gleefully leaked out of my head after not doing it for a year.  Honestly, almost everyone I know is TA-ing a class this semester.  I kind of don't want to be left out of the loop.

But I've got a long way to go.  It's kind of scary realizing that there's so much I don't know and how little I do know.  A year ago, I had no idea what splines, raytracers, and octtrees were (or why any of them were useful).  I want to keep soaking all of this up as fast as I can.  There's too much stuff out there that I don't want to miss and yet two years doesn't really seem like enough time to take it all in.

In all, it's really good to be back here.  Algorithms is going to give me a headache only because I can't do math at the speed of light.  Graphics is going to give me even more of headache because differential equations are involved.  Art history will be tedious because there is a research paper.  Statistics is statistics.  And technical communications will be...interesting.  Could be worse, could be better.  But either way, there's nowhere else I'd rather be.

I am once again reminded that California has amazing weather, made even more amazing by the fact that it is August and that it is not over 90 degrees outside.  Good weather is mostly subverted by the fact that I am miserable since I cannot consume anything but soft food because they took out my wisdom teeth.  Oh, and the fact THAT I AM NOT GOING TO SIGGRAPH, which is a major letdown because I reeeeeeeeally wanted to go...but couldn't thanks to the teeth thing.

I said goodbye to Seattle/Redmond about a week ago.  That was depressing, although made up for by the amazing amount of last-minute awesomeness that happened.  Internship was amazing, hands down, nothing else to say.  If I am to take anything besides the amazing amount of memories, learning, and free stuff from it, I certainly want to add that I am now filled with a delicious resolve to do great things with the remainder of my undergraduate education and that I now have a significant amount of confidence that I can do so.

In other news, the dev box arrived in the mail today.  How I'm going to get it back to CMU so I can make games on it, I have no idea.  But that aside, it is black, it has 120 GB of space, and it is the first game console I have ever paid for on my own.  And I still find it hard to believe that it's actually mine.  Hopefully, this will prompt me to make more games and stop playing games.  I briefly pondered if I should leave my DS at home when I go back...and then I remembered I need it to play the new Castlevania and the new Fire Emblem...  Yep, still addicted.

So for the next week and a half, I plan to do everything that I cannot do when I get back to school, so that when I do get back, I can concentrate on 1) academics, 2) finding a research job, 3) making games, and 4) not wasting the next two years I have left because I can't change the things I managed to screw up during the first two.

Also, I made flan yesterday.  Mmm, tasty custard for the win.

It's a mildly depressing thought that in exactly a week, I will be on a plane headed back for California, at this exact time no less.  It's really quite sad, since I've come to like Redmond a lot and I certainly wouldn't mind coming back here next year, although that all depends on if I can stay up to par for another internship with Microsoft.  I think this summer's done wonders for my confidence, which I suppose I should enjoy now before I head back to school and see all my ambitions brutally crushed upon realizing that my classes are going to be tougher than before.

You know how they tell you it gets easier after freshman year?  Well, it's a LIE.  Either that or I'm unintentionally being a masochist and breaking the standard paradigm.

The summer's been filtering away like mist and I feel like I haven't done that much work.  My novel's gone nowhere, although 3.5 of the 12 characters I made  a promise to draw for it are done.  And the main heroine took two weeks to draw (two blasted weeks), although she undoubtedly looks the best of them.  I haven't done as much work on my game as I would have liked; heck, it doesn't even have a spec yet and I don't know if it will until I get back to school.

But I have made progress.  My art got better over the summer and I managed to catch up on some anime, a luxury I haven't had in a long time.  No seriously, watching the entire series of Saiunkoku Monogatari was awesome.  I haven't beaten a single video game (I suppose this because all of the ones that I've attempted take a while and I get bored easily).

Well, I suppose I could spend my last Sunday here doing something cool instead of moping around.  I'll probably take the rental car I have out  and maybe find a Peet's coffee or something, along with finishing the rest of the main heroine's twin brother's fiancee that I'm currently in the middle of drawing, although I'm having a debate over whether or not her dress should have lace or ruffles (but not both).  Then I guess I'll fire up XNA and start building my prototype.  Battle engine for my RPG, here we gooooo!

Another day in the office with less work than normal, thanks to some nice events that kept me out of the office (OOF) for a bit.  It's been a pretty busy week with lots of events on hand, so I've probably done less work this week than normal.

More importantly, rest in peace, Randy Pausch.  I've been blasted in the face with news of his death all day long (even a post on the Microsoft interns mailing list) and I've got to say, it's terribly depressing.  It hurts even more because I'm shooting to go to the ETC that he was responsible for co-founding while knowing that I'll never get to take a class with him or even meet him.

The ETC...  It would be worth staying (and paying to stay) in academia just to go there; in fact, it would be worth staying in academia regardless of what happens as long as I get to pursue my passion with computer graphics.  It's times like these, especially this summer, when I'm reminded that I'm surrounded by very intelligent people, but that I'm starting to carve a path that makes me different from other people.  I'm reminded that while my forte in CS isn't theory or systems, there's still a place for me and I'm going to do everything to hang onto the dream of reaching that place no matter where I go..

At this point, I'm not too sure what I want to accomplish.  I know I want to see my senior game project built and I know I'll cry when it comes together.  But even beyond that, I want to share the beauty that I've found in CS and more specifically in computer graphics with everyone I can.  How I intend to do that, well I'm not sure, but I've found something so wonderful that I'm so passionate about that it would be a waste if I couldn't share the happiness I've found with other people....

I really hope that if you haven't had that moment of euphoria when you realize that you've found something so wonderful that you don't ever want to let it go, that you'll find it soon...

In other news, Etrian Odyssey II has now officially taken precendence over all other video games and is managing to sufficiently frustrate me to a shivering, nerve-wracked mess with its difficultly level.  Hahaha, that's an overstatement, I guess.  But that game is haaaard.  Too bad I...oh noooo...that hair on my latest sketch looks soo icky.  Better go fix it...

I'm not sure exactly why I continue to watch Monochorme Factor because each episode keeps getting progressively worse.  I'm always hoping that there will be some shred of incredibly awesome action (like the really kickass fight scene from the second book).  Or at the very least, an interesting twist.


I probably could go on about why this series is now full of epic fail, but I'm going to bed, since I think there's a meeting tomorrow and I'm really bad at staying awake...

But before I go, In more interesting news: Star Ocean 4 is coming to the XBox 360 next year!  Hurrah!  One less reason to buy a PS3!  The trailer shown off at the Microsoft conference in Japan looks absolutely gorgeous and it was one of four RPGs (Infinite Undiscovery, Last Remnant, and Tales of Vesperia) shown off that day (the other three of which I really want to play as well).