Jack's Blog

Well, my college semester is coming to a close, and the summer break is on it's way. Due to lack of funds, I won't really be going anywhere for summer this time. So, I will be back on BYOND for that time being. I have to catch up on all the changes and make more progress on two projects. The first being my near-exact remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, and the other being a massive RPG I've been working on for years in C++.

I'll make attempts to get back into the community, help out new developers, etc. The good ol' stuff I used to do. I just have one little question. What's the 'popular' chat program that's used now? Not long ago I remember there being 15+ different chat programs.

I'll write more when I get a chance, more college work to do.
~Jack Weldon

Just today I was offered a programming job that would last until the end of next semester. It would be data-mining for an organization here in WV. I would have to learn Java though. The pay is around $9/h and would be working approximately 10 hours a week. I already have 20 hours a week for classes, though, which might be reducing my current 5 hours of sleep to "sleeping whenever I get a chance". However, I wouldn't mind actually having a source of income for a change...

Well, it was finally time to start picking the watermelons, when I came across 4 of the most awesome watermelons I've yet to grow.


Yes... they're the size of oranges, heh. Pretty awesome, eh? The rest came out normal, about the size of a basketball.

I stumped Tiberath , Audeuro, and Mobius Evalon with a puzzle, which is in Tiberath's Game-in-a-Day entry. It's the 5th puzzle, currently the last one. Good luck. Hopefully I'll get to add more to the little puzzle game later. :D

Speaking of puzzles... why is there no BYOND Puzzles guild? I think we need one, and more puzzle games. Aaiko recently started on a very unique puzzle game, which will hopefully be out in public testing soon. It's a little confusing, but it's quite nifty.

Once I get time to add Texas Hold'em to the Iccusino, I plan on making Mahjong Solitaire with BYOND 4.0 as a fun little puzzle game, so keep your eye out for that. I'll try to make it very professional, but I don't have any artist to make a nice UI, unless Aaiko wants to help me on this non-Iccusion project, heh.

-Jack

Today in Phsychology we were talking about stress, managing it, and other pish-posh. The instructor actually brought in a Galvanic Skin-Response meter. The ideal reading is between 7 and 15, however no one in our 90-person class had that. Afterall, we're college students. A fair deal of the people were between 15 and 20, a fairly larger chunk was 20 to 30. Three people had 30 to 35. What did I have? 54. After a moment of relaxing, I was able to drop it to 47. There is some consolation for this high number though. Even though I was just in front of a group of 7 people at the time, I get extreme anxiety attacks when put in the spotlight. If I had the meter myself and measured it during my own free time, it would probably only be around 18 to 23.

Another thing is a 'Stress Vulnerability' thing she handed out. It's 20 questions that you rate 1 to 5, add it up, subtract 20. If you scored 30+ you're vulnerable. 50 to 75 is seriously vulnerable, and 75+ is extremely vulnerable. What did I score? 94, haha.

And finally, a 'How You Deal With Stress' thing, which you rate 1 to 4. It's another 20 questions you add up. 20 to 29 = Deals with stress well. 30 to 50 = Moderate. 51+ = Poorly, and at risk of heart disease. What did I score? No, I actually got a good score of 31.

Ok, here's another one of those "progress reports".

College Life
I was recently bombarded with 4 tests, which hindered progress on pretty much everything. The World Literature test was possibly the hardest, as I had to associate given passages of text with their author and what book it was from. We've been reading religious texts, including "The Old Testament" [Genesis], Ovid's "Metamorphoses" [book 1], Ahkenaten's "Hymn to the Sun", "Popul Vuh" [books 1-4], and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" [books 4-12]. I'm pretty sure it was a disaster, heh. Psychology, Physics, and Programming [The 3 P's] were easy stuff.

Final Fantasy Tactics [BYOND Remake]
As I mentioned above, I'm in college and was just bombarded with tests. However, I'm still in the extremely long and painstaking process of ripping the landscape art. Once I finally have the first battle field ready, I'll be able to do the easy stuff -- programming in the pseudo-3D engine. I also still need to rip character sprites. Basically, I have a lot of art to rip because I can start adding structure.

Iccusino
Yup, Aaiko brought back the Iccusino. I am adding Texas Hold'em to it, fixing up some odd bug that -just- recently showed up *cough*Aaiko-messing-with-my-code*cough*, and "rigging" Keno to make someone win the Jackpot 'eventually'. I'm thinking after the Jackpot reaches 20k, the odds that it'll "cheat" to make someone win will be significantly low, but exponentially grow with every 1k tokens over 20k. Last I heard, it was just over 96k.

Contests
Tiberath recently linked me to a C/C++ programming contest that simply wants you make a console app. Calculator. Pretty simple little program to do, so I figured I might as well participate.


Other News
Ry4n is Mr. Awesome. 'Nuff said. Also, I only have $32 to last me 2 weeks, heh. I guess that means no movie night or parties. :( Hooray for being a full-time student with no source of income. :/