101st Airborne Post

Yay, 101 of these things. That puts me way behind other, far more prolific, keepers of online compedums of useless information (like Wikipedia or Wesley Crusher).
Right, so right now I'm up to one of my upper, torso based, body parts in schoolwork. I just finished off the final work for my internet classes and now I need to finish up the project for my Game Creation / Engine Usage class. It has a technical term, but basically we're learning to use a 3D engine and make it do things. This has taught me 3 things:
1) I like building my own engines. It may be faster to use an off the shelf one, but I can do anything I want if I built my own. With an off the shelf I'm converting something else to try to approximate what I want.
2) I hate the Lisp programming language. It's all backwards and silly. For example, if I want to say this in Lisp:

if variable1 > variable2
Do Stuff
endif

It is written as:

(if ( > (variable1 variable 2)) (progn
Do stuff
))

...and I'm not sure if that is even correct. It gives me the rage.

3) I hate computers. Let me rephrase that, I hate my computer and by "my computer" I mean my graphics card. "Why?" you ask (I ask rhetorically. A "you" would mean that somebody is reading this, and that is just not the case - nobody reads this). It has to do with my Engine class. The Engine will not run on my computer, and neither will the editor. The reason it gave was the DirectX was configured incorrectly, so I went to the Microsoft site to get all updated. "Sorry," they say, "but according to our records you are a bloody pirate. Bad pirate, no update soup for you!" This of course came as a shock to me. I have a license taped to the bottom of the laptop...a license for XP Home, not the XP Pro installed. Dammit.
So yesterday I went ahead and found a redistribution of DirectX 9.0c thinking that not everybody has an internet connection to update with, so an offline installer must be available somewhere. Turns out I was right and I will have some update soup now. Installed, great and wonderful, and the engine still didn't work. Now, the drivers in the computer are old, and do not support DirectX 9. No worry, I'll just go to the Trident Graphics card website and...what's that? They don't exist? Right, so I'll go to the Toshiba website and...what's that? The last driver was written in 2003?
After running a few diagnostics both official (the damn 3D box spins in the tests) and unofficial (but the Engine, Spore Creature Creator and Microsoft Telescope don't) I came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to work. No soup after all.
The worst part is that I can't do anything about it. I have work to do and projects to finish and I can't do them. With the Thief Engine, there is always a solution. There is always something that I can do, I just have to think about it and be clever. Short of writing a new driver (which I do not know how to do) there is nothing I can do. There is no workaround, no way to do the work in a different way, there is no way to work period. So I'm going to class and I plan to try to finish while other people show their projects. It will suck, but I got to do what I got to do.

- Other classes make me worry to for a wide variety of reasons, most of them having to do with updates on grades not being as forthcoming as I would like. The not knowing is driving me mad. This is the last semester, and then I have my degrees, but I don't know what is going on. I know for a fact that my grades aren't decent this semester and I'm fighting for C's. I understand that. The 4th class that is The Thief's Tale almost guaranteed that at one point. I realize that's I'm not Superman, but now, no matter the outcome I will be bloodied by the conflict. I just need to win.

- In game news, the artist has found someone that is known only as "Ron." Or in keeping with naming conventions will be referred to as either The Modeler or if I'm feeling cheeky, The Ron. I'll probably end up meeting this person later and I'll have impressions then. According to the story I was told he decided he wanted in after playing the Demo. So that's pretty cool. The work being good enough for people to say, "Hey, that's an enjoyable/ not broken experience that I would like to be a part of in some way."

- For other goodness, I'm on page 3 for just "Indie Confessions" without quotes and the term "Star Frog Games" now comes up as a suggestion in Google, like "Bungie" or "Rockstar Games" or "Wesley Crusher."

- "Stress" noun English Root. Def : 1) To feel overwhelmed and under prepared. 2) Extreme anxiety. 3) Knowing that the next 7 hours will decide if the last year was even worth it. See also "Out, Freaking"