Yeah... classes-wise this week was pretty empty (no Astronomy homework all week, no new painting assignments.) We had to order supplies in watercolor class, which for me meant a new 50-sheet pad of paper and about a dozen new colors of paint to add on to the 12 or so that I've been using. Which turned out to be around $10 short of the $75 limit we had put on us, so I've got an extra 10 bucks left over to spent on... something later on, I guess. Maybe more paper if I somehow run out, though I doubt that'll happen (I have 4 sheets of the same paper left from my last pad, plus 50 new, so... I'd need to do a whopping 27 paintings in both Advanced Watercolor and Senior Show to use them all up. And that's... probably not gonna happen. XD)
For once, the weekend actually had more stuff going on than the week for me. First, someone actually ended up contacting me on that online dating site that I've been on since last spring. Oddly, when I saw that she'd viewed my profile and I looked through hers, I thought for sure that she wouldn't message me, that she'd be one of those people who just gets put off by something I said and wouldn't want anything to do with me. Not sure why, just a feeling I got from things here and there. Turns out that, as usual, online profiles and text-only communication don't really match up with actually talking to someone--while her profile was making me say "I dunno...", things went a lot better after she sent me a message and we got into talking about some stuff. Three messages later we end up exchanging Skype contact info, and later that night (after I got back from a really long walk to the far corners of Buena Vista, where I found such odd things as an incomplete wooden foundation built into the side of a hill, the front of a tractor trailer truck, and a schoolbus) we ended up talking over Skype video chat... for an hour and a half. That's happened with people I've met in real life before (I think my record is around 2 hours of talking with someone I'd just met), but never anyone from online. We seem to get along really well, telling each other weird stories from our lives and laughing about things and just generally goofing off and getting to know each other. Didn't hear from her yesterday, but found another message from her in my inbox this morning when I got up, apparently sent at 2 AM (right after she got home from somewhere she had been earlier.) Which led into us talking over Skype again after I got home from going out to eat with my dad and sister, only stopping around the 45 minute mark because some of her family members had shown up and she had to go.
She seems really nice, an interesting person who's fun to talk to, and we've gotten along pretty well so far. She lives pretty far away (in Richmond or nearby, I think), but that's seriously the only problem I've seen so far. And even then, Richmond is a whole lot closer than Illinois or North Carolina or someplace halfway across the country, so...
Also, yesterday I ended up going to one of the General Conference sessions with a few of my Mormon friends. It was okay I guess. There was some of the usual talk about missionary work that I just kind of zone out on because it does not apply to me at all, and a few parts that had me going "well, you kind of have a few good points here, but there's better ways to word it than that." And a whole talk where the guy kept emphasizing how guys and girls are sooooo different (...supposedly) and that society is trying to make them less different in the name of equality (...again, supposedly.) Except, y'know, about the whole "society is the whole reason why there appear to be so many differences in the first place" thing. Religious people tend to conveniently forget about that when they're levitating somewhere high above the clouds on their "in the world, but not of the world" high horse--guess what, Mormons? A lot of the things you think are innate features of male and female are actually molded into us at a young age by--gasp!--society. Oh, and guess what else? Religions are part of society too! Religious influences on kids growing up ARE society's influences! You are not some unquestionable "other," you are very much a product of the society you developed in (and that's both the form of society that the religion was originally founded in, and the forms of society that its current members grew up in. All kinds of influences going around there.)
Oddly enough it was this talk that had the "good point, but needs improvement on the wording" bits, hidden among all the "no really, we really do see women as equals, honest, I swear! you know, separate but equal!" stuff that made up the rest of it. One good bit: equality shouldn't mean "women can ALSO go crazy with the promiscuity just like men are currently expected to by society." Of course, the point derailed a bit after that when it skewed to the other extreme (basically "men should be super-ultra-virgins forever until marriage and be held to unrealistic standards, too, just like women are now what with the whole 'anyone who has sex before marriage must be a slut' thing.") But the original point, that equality between the sexes shouldn't just mean "oh, you can go be just like how society expects men to be now," is definitely a good one. What society (and, if you trim out the sex-crazed bits, that includes religions like the LDS church too) expects men to be like now is pretty much horrible. Guys should not be overcompetitive, sex-crazed, self-control-lacking douchebags who simultaneously see themselves as being better/tougher/etc. than anyone less "manly" than them and able to get away with things by virtue of the old "just boys being boys" excuse. Guys are not naturally like that, not any more than girls are; it's society teaching us that kind of crap since shortly after birth that encourages a lot of guys to go down that path. When "be a man" means "be an arrogant douche," of course you're going to have a lot of male kids growing up to be arrogant douches and thinking "that's the way things are." The less of this "this is how guys should be" mentality we have, the better off we'll be, and that applies to both males and females.
There was also another good point in that talk, but unfortunately I can't remember what it was. I think that one was legitimately a 100% good point, and it didn't even derail off into some one-extreme-or-the-other craziness like the one above did shortly after making the good part of its point, so it kinda sucks that I can't remember it now. I guess that's one good thing I can say about those people who take notes on these sorts of things--when they hear something and think "hey, that's actually kind of a good point!", they won't forget them because they'll have them written down. XD
I've also been working on finishing up Okédoké! La Leyenda Mexicana lately. So far I've gotten a huge chunk of Chapter 6's final dungeon done, compared to where I was before the semester started. The basement floors and the first two aboveground floors of the secret Alaskan base are completely finished, and you can fight Darth Cheney, Dubya (in both normal and "Ultimate Dubya" forms), and the last of the game's many optional bosses, "Ghost of Racist." Who is, of course, the ghost of the now-dead Chapter 5 boss Captain Racist. That means there is literally just one boss battle left. As far as mapping goes, I've also got two of the three maps for the third floor done; I still need maptiles for the final boss's room, but other than that I have everything done maptile-wise. Graphics for the final boss are not started yet; that's another big thing I still need to get done. And of course, there's a few more scripts to go before the game's completely done (one when Señor Death explains what's been going on upon reaching a certain room on the 3rd floor, one introducing the final boss, and one last script for the escape from the Alaskan base at the very end of the game.) Once all that's done, all that's left is to make the ending. And when that's done, Okédoké will be my first true completed game since freaking Frankfurter's Quest for Soap back in 2003. It's about time! It'll be great to finally get this thing done. Maybe then I can finally get a demo release of Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School done, or come out with a new version of Puckamon. I dunno. Better to not think about that so far in advance, and just focus on getting Okédoké done instead.
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