Maybe one day I’ll keep my word of making posts monthly. My college classes have become quite busy as of late. Who knew taking the maximum amount of credit hours allowed could backfire on me? Anywho, this is a summary of what I’ve done in September, October, November, and December.
New Laptop
I used my financial aid refund from this school semester to buy a gaming laptop. It’s an older version of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (because I didn’t want Windows 11), which is a major upgrade to my Asus Vivobook. The main reasons I bought it were to be able to run both Unreal Engine 5 (I need to for class) and more hardware-intensive games like Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’ve barely left Act 1, but am really enjoying it so far). I’ve never felt as privileged to be able to run games as fast and not set to the lowest graphics available. I’m quite happy with my purchase.
Marigold Town and BMOA
A small hosting project by the lovely Xandra called Marigold Town had its grand opening on October 10th. Because I have no self-control, I joined as one of the Early Adopters and spent the second half of September working on my site.
The Biswas Museum of Art (BMOA) is my Marigold site. It’s a site meant to showcase different “local” artists. The goal is to switch out exhibits every month on the 10th. I’ve already found issues with this goal, though: I’m horrible at marketing. Who knew people have to know about my site to actually apply to it? I’m going to have to pull myself together on this one and actually talk about my site in different places. I’ll probably make a new thread about it on the Melonland Forums and bring it up more often in the 32-Bit Café Discord server. Furthermore, I have to make the time and build up the motivation to keep it updated each month.
Status
On November 15th, I was looking into an old GitHub repo I had with a bunch of practice Python programming files. One of them lets you update a text file journal via answering prompts in a Terminal. Reading through the file sparked inspiration for me. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about coding my own personal status updater site, like status.cafe and imood, so I decided to write one incorporating Python for updating it locally.
And with that, my Rodrick’s Status was born. If you want to see the full setup of it, you can go to its git repo, but in short: I can run a batch file that runs a Python file for me to update my status (with theme and image options) and then pushes the changes to the git repo which then gets auto deployed by Netlify. It took me 3 hours of intense concentration to get it programmed and set up properly. I’d say it’s worth it. The main question is whether I’ll actually update it or not. Hopefully, the ease of just running a single file helps with my monkey brain’s tendency to forget things or get distracted halfway through a task.
Steampunk November
I went to Steampunk November for the first time in my life and got to see one of my favorite musicians play live, Aurelio Voltaire. I even got a selfie with him (no you can’t see it), a signed poster, and got to go on stage during two of his songs with a bunch of others. It was the first ever concert I’ve gone to for a music artist I like. It was the last show of his The King of Villains Tour. You know, I had gone to his merch booth before the performance started, which is when I got my signed poster. Of course, he asked my name to sign it to me. What surprised me though is that later, on my way off the stage, he was shaking people’s hands and thanking them. When he shook my hand, he said my name. It kinda shocked me a bit (plus warmed my heart) that he’d even remember it. Maybe he just has a better memory than me, but there’s no way I’d remember someone I talked to for two minutes name after performing an over an hour show. I will say, though, that I’m usually shocked in general when people actually remember my name. If I barely interact with someone, I don’t expect them to remember my name. I don’t see myself as someone important enough to have their name remembered honestly. That’s probably something I’ll reflect on more later.
It was a really fun experience overall. There were multiple performances I got to see. There were tons of little shops set up. I spent at least a good $200 there. If I wasn’t so broke, I would’ve spent more. There was such nice stuff being sold. That’s my issue with going to any time of con or festival, I want to buy everything. I have to have some sort of self-control to not spend all my money. I’m too much of a broke college student to be spending much money.
My Newsletter
Even though I’ve only posted to it once, I’ve decided to put my newsletter on hiatus. I realized that while I’m still a student, I won’t have much time to work on projects nor will I have the energy to properly keep up with it when I do work on things. You can still subscribe to it if you want but don’t expect any emails for a few months.
School
Most of what I’ve been doing over these past couple of months is doing schoolwork. I eat, sleep, and breathe schoolwork. I do art. I code game. I question my past choices. I play video games and DnD to try to keep my sanity. I do more art and code more games. I haven’t been in much of a writing mood as of late, though I still had to write for my Creative Writing class. I’ve spent most of my mental energy on school work, so I haven’t had the will or energy to spend time writing things like this blog post.
I’m hoping once I finally graduate and start working a regular job, I’ll have a bit more time and energy since I shouldn’t need to be working on things outside the job hours, unlike school. I have to do school work even during this break due to my knowing I won’t have time to finish a lot of it unless I get some of it done now.
Right now, I’m on Winter Break. This upcoming Spring semester, my last semester, will be starting before the month is over. I’m hoping that it’s not as tiring and time-consuming as this last one has been. Wish me luck.