Unfortunately though, my internet is getting shut off tomorrow, so I want to get this all out of the way before it happens…
Well, there’s alot to cover in this journal, so it will be divided up into sections, labeled by [bracketed words] in bold…. take a looksie if you want, there’s going to be alot of text, so I don’t expect many, if any of you to read it; but for the rare few that do, have fun…
[ Living & Financial Situation ]
Well, putting it lightly – we’re just above poverty, and by that I mean we’re living upstairs.
My stepdad lost his job and is now on unemployment, while my mom still gets SSI income for my disabled brother. My stepdad is in such a pissy mood that he refuses to get another job, yet instead he’s considering the military, which from what I understand might not take him since he’s got a damn warrant for his DUI from 16 years ago, smooth move idiot. My mom has been shopping around for a job as an apartment manager since she’s got about 3 years experience and it’s still technically a work-from-home job, so to speak. Recently, my stepdad’s unemployment had some internal processing errors and screwed us over out of a month’s worth of paychecks and now we’re behind on bills. The issue has since been resolved but now we’re playing catch up on trying to get the bills paid and don’t quite have enough yet, so we’re working on getting aid from assistance programs in the mean time to pay for SDG&E. Also, the cable, internet, and phone is getting shut off tomorrow, as previously stated above.
[ School & Unemployment Situation ]
The semester started up at Grossmont Community College and i’m now a full-time student taking 14 credits, and am still unemployed. Due to our current financial situation, I was able to get the “Board of Governors” waiver to pay for my registration / tuition fees, since our income is uber low at the moment.
I’m taking the following classes:
- Intro to Computer Graphics (3DS Max 2008)
- Japanese CCS (Cross Culture Studies)
- Japanese I
- Web Animation (Flash CS3)
Both of my Japanese classes i’m taking with a long time friend from high school, Stu (:iconoogzy:).
As for finding a job, that’s easier said than done. If anyone’s been paying attention to the current economic situation in the United States, the national unemployment rate is upto 7.4%, while the California state unemployment rate is at 7.6%, meaning that there are layoffs galore. I’ve applied to countless amount of jobs, including but not limited to Satan, Inc. (ie: Walmart), and still didn’t get hired. I did however get an interview at Startech Computers, but in the end I wasn’t hired, which sucked because that would’ve been a nice job to work at. Now that I’ve got my school schedule however, I’m able to make a decision based on current work load and what amount of time I’m going to be needing to reserve for homework, studying, or anything else school related. In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking for a job pretty much anywhere that’s hiring. I’ve heard from Stu that Gamestop is once again hiring for seasonal, and sure it’s shitty pay and the work is far from amazing, but it’s a job at this point. I just really hate how hundreds of companies have switched to impersonal online applications instead of sticking with in-person applications, so it’s all based on how well you answer their damn questionairre on their application site. I’ll be raiding all the local malls and shopping centers for applications to practically everywhere. Here’s to hoping that more stores will open up for seasonal, and keep me hired after seasonal if I can live through it…
[ Educational Goals ]
Unfortuantely, going to community college pretty much is a smack in the face when it comes to game art & design choices. All the art classes are tailored to being a fine artist that sells paintings that represent their mind and mood to a mueseum for $2 million per paint splatter. All the multimedia classes are tailored to working in the field of television, such as being a camera man for a newstation or the technical operator of media devices such as cameras, telepromptors, etc.
At this point, I have no idea what the hell my major is going to be at this school since they don’t have a major for what it is I’m interested in. The closest thing I could do to Game Art & Design would be to go through Computer Science Information Systems and focus on Web Design, which personally isn’t a bad idea since I love working with websites and maintaining them myselves, and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve got IIS installed on my computer with a fully functioning PHP, Perl, and CGI server technologies running a phpBB3 forum and soon to be a wiki. But my overall personal goal is to be in the artistic development of video games, it always has been and it always will be; but for the sake of trying to get out of this CC and moving on with life, I will have to temporarly suspend those ideals and focus on something else. I would certainly take as many 3D modeling classes as possible as well as any figure drawing classes to improve my skills at traditional and figure drawing; but the lack of classes in the field just screams different major.
Lately though, I have seriously considered staying here to get an associates degree in web design or even in Japanese. And after even more thinking, I figured that since I’ve wanted to learn Japanese for as long as I’ve wanted to do art in games, getting a degree in Japanese wouldn’t be a bad idea either; the world always needs translators and I would still be able to get a job at a game company, but I would be working in a different department this time around. Not entirely sure just what yet, I’ll have to get some information on the different majors and things offered at this college before I make any solid decisions though.
Before I go any further, I need to make a quick note about the Art Institute – I was there about 2-3 weeks ago, needing to get a copy of my transcripts and to get some fees cleared up, but I’ll elaborate on those further on in this journal post. After all was said and done, I made one final stop to the Academic Advisors at AI to find out what my situation would be if I we’re to make a successfull appeal for my Academic Termination. It turns out that in some special circumstances, ie: based on how many classes would be needed to make a recovery, your re-admission via the appeal would span across 2 quarters instead of the usual 1. In my case however, re-taking the 6 of 7 classes I had failed in my 6th quarter at AI (my evaluation quarter), I would need at least Bs to bring the GPA back up over the 2.0 requirement, which is do-able in my opinion, it’s just the ICR (classes completed against classes attempted) that would kill me, since you need a 66.67% ratio, and after that last quarter my ICR dropped down to about 45%. It pretty much means that if I we’re to make a successfull appeal and be given another period of Academic Probation to get my GPA and ICR up, I would have to take no less than 11 classes in the first quarter and 7 classes in the second quarter, just to bring the ICR back up. At that rate, while I do miss AI and want to really continue going there to reach my goals, realistically I may not come back specifically do to that fact.
[ Issues at The Art Institute & Grossmont College ]
Expanding upon my last paragraph mentioning the Art Institute, I was there about 2-3 weeks ago needing to get a copy of my transcripts and clear up some fees that I’ve been charged with AFTER I had left the school and was no longer a student. Now, before going to far, let me clarify a few things.
I have applied to Grossmont College and am now a full time student. I was able to get my tuition and registration fees waived via the “Board of Governors” waiver, but I still need other financial aid for books, supplies, and to help pay the bills so we can continue living. To get financial aid, I need to do the following, 1 – Fill out the FAFSA; 2 – Turn in copies of official transcripts from any previous college to the Admissions & Records office; and 3 – Take their little “Financial Aid & Counseling Workshop” thingy. Well, I filled out the FAFSA, and their Financial Aid workshop thingy was broken. As for the Transcripts, thats why I went to AI.
At AI, I went to request my transcripts only to find out that any and all fees on my student account need to be cleared before I can get them. So, that leads me to the clearing of fees that AI had charged me after I was no longer a student. It turns out that in my last quarter when I had to take 7 classes to save my ass, I had to take out additional loans, which wasn’t a problem. Because of that however, I had no money remaining for that quarter that would cover the fees I would later receive. At the end of my sixth quarter when I was given my Academic Termination, I was also forced to move out of Student Housing, and in the process of doing so I technically broke the lease of the apartment, which was about $1200, and it went straight to my student account, which had no remaining loans to pay off with. Also, at the same time, there we’re 2 other seperate charges for about $250-300 each, of which I still don’t know what they are for.
Totaled, I have a $1800 fee that I have to pay off before I can pay $10 to get a copy of my transcripts so I can get my financial aid at Grossmont College. Isn’t life just great?
[ Wrath of the Lich King ]
Once it came to about a month until school started, I started to take a break from looking for a job, as it would be pointless to get a job then with certain hours only to have to quit or change my ours drastically because of school. During this time I started to focus on classes I would take, the entire registration process, so on and so forth. But that’s what I’ve been doing as it could be done. Obviously once I had submitted certain things, I had to wait for it to be processed and done with, leaving me with spare time. Same could also be said for when I was waiting for classes to start a full 2-3 weeks later.
Anyway, in my recent spare time, I’ve been whoring myself out to a certain game, a certain game that pretty much everyone and their mother plays; you know, World of Warcraft. Before I even logged in for the first time though, I realised that playing my Horde characters has become so damn boring that I couldn’t really stand it. All I would do is login, say something along the lines of Hi or Sup, sit there for like 15 minutes, and then log out. The PvE in The Burning Crusade is god awful compared to Vanilla WoW, and the PvP went to hell back when they released patch 1.5 back in 2005. It doesn’t help that most of my friends (who play WoW, go figure), have either quit, switched guilds, or switched servers altogether; so our core group has pretty much been shattered.
In the light of this though, I was able to find some actual fun in returning to play my Alliance characters on Ner’Zhul. My first character, Asukalakusa, a female human mage; was still sitting there at level 62, having not been played since January 2007 when The Burning Crusade first went live. I eventually leveled her upto 70, and soon after I did, I was invited into the closed beta for the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. For the first few weeks of the beta (during Comic Con), I was going back and forth between beta and live servers, just giving out infos as guildies wanted it, but didn’t play seriously because of how tiring Comic Con was.
My alliance guild had always been full of mature, respectable players; which most people would say the exact opposite about for alliance players, believing them to be only 13 year old kids while the Horde is full of adults. I must say though, that after playing both Alliance and Horde for 2 years straight; that comment was only usable until The Burning Crusade expansion, because as soon as Blood Elves became a playable Horde faction, all those little kids flocked to play a Blood Elf named Sephiroth or any other anime character they could think of, leaving the Alliance full of more mature players than ever before. Having interacted with my guild, I find that they are a group of people I could expect to have a good time with. I expect that upon release of Wrath of the Lich King, I will be playing my Alliance alot more often than not. That doesn’t mean I’ll quit playing my Horde characters, it’s just that I don’t see much motivation to do so when my group of friends on Horde has pretty much shattered into oblivion.
[ Project Zodiac - Update #1 ]
Not much to say here really, ever since Comic Con and my invitation to the Wrath of the Lich King closed beta, I’ve been whoring myself out. Though, whenever there was server downtime, or having a small burnout from playing for over 8 hours straight, I would take a break, grab something to eat, pop open winamp and listen to some music. During this time, I would also muster up enough motivation to some some work on Project Zodiac.
Not much has really evolved since Comic Con though, but I was able to complete one crucial detail, the calendar system. Let me be not the first nor the last to say, that attempting to learn and study the Lunisolar Calendar is a horrible idea. My brain literally turned into jello after only like 30 minutes of trying to figure it all out. After a few weeks of these little 2-4 hour sessions though, I was able to finally figure it all out and implement it successfully into my project.
In the coming days, weeks, and even months; I’ll be having alot of things to do for school, such as projects and studying; but with the advent of a lack of internet coming very soon, I’ll have some even more spare time to get some ideas down and try to implement them as best as possible as long as they don’t screw anything up or dilute the story and make it horrible…
~Anshinritsumai
