Note to self: Always gotta be outgoing and believe I'm outgoing, and try to be outgoing, no matter what I actually turn out to be relative to other people. Or else I and other people suffer.
What?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Looking back = good. 4 year cycles.
Back before I went to high school, I used to pretend like I was really interested in making games and participated in the "klik" or "click" community that made games using software published by the British company Clickteam, including Jamagic (dunno if they ever continued making that, or if ANYONE really used that) and the program I used, Multimedia Fusion (MMF). These were meant as a kind of WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get; back then EVERYONE knew what that acronym meant) tool for creating applications, or, more specifically, games. Instead of wading through lines and lines of code and testing it out all the time to see whether what you coded really did what you thought it did, MMF provided you in a somewhat Powerpoint fashion with a frame for each level (or different screen, as it may be in something that isn't a game), and you would input the "code" on a separate screen, where basically everything would be written out for you in English. This opened up doors for many people who just weren't enough into the coding part to put the time into it necessary to get all the way to making a game (seriously, with MMF you can make a Pong game in about 3 minutes from scratch if you're really fast).
Anyway, I never really made that many games. I started a decent amount, but in some of these I never got past the menu screen, and by the time my hard drive crashed and I lost all my files, I didn't really care enough to get them back and just decided that maybe some other time I'd try to recover them. Then my PC, with apparently that hard drive (?? it was physically damaged, worn out; probably I had two hard drives and just moved all the stuff that could be salvaged to the other one), and probably newly wiped (ok then that other hard drive was probably wiped), was sent to the Philippines to be used by my relatives in probably Calbayog. Lord knows if it's still there.
But yeah, I pretended like I was really interested in making games. In reality, the social community is what amused me the most. I was the number-one poster on the "Total Klik" forum, where I had 1500+ posts, until someone else somehow bypassed me later on, and he actually made games a decent amount. That was probably back in 2002, if not earlier. I liked that forum, packed with elitists as it was, but yeah. I learned never to insult or criticize the elitists, because that was sure social death, and the social part was all I cared about, even though this was just the Internet. (They're real people, you know!) Bad games would come out that were great graphically but stupidly hard with pixel jumping in platform games (e.g. you better land on this pixel or else you lose) or... well, the problem was generally the difficulty, and if you criticize that then your skill gets criticized and no one listens to you. I just wouldn't review those ones. Also, graphics were overvalued and the people who made them the best generally got the best reviews. I, myself, never had graphical talent and stuck to my guns of not making anything anyway.
Man, that was a great time I had in that community. Making games and/or talking about it for, well, about 4 years. And then I got into DDR.
That's the community I'm currently in now, but in case you haven't noticed, DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, if you didn't know) is fading into obscurity as Rock Band and Guitar Hero take over. More specifically the community I'm in is one where you make DDR steps for whatever song you like, and play such DDR files by other people. It's been a lot of fun, but it's getting a little old. Especially since I'm not really an active DDR player, since a really good DDR game hasn't been released since two years ago. A lot of people will disagree with me on what I just said, too. Communities of people who just play DDR are very hard to find whereas a few years ago they were all over the place.
But playing DDR was my main hobby during high school. I didn't have as much time to do so as I would have now (if only I could do so with my metal pads at college), so I didn't really consider it my main hobby. But then I started really getting into making my own DDR steps. This isn't as simple as it seems. It involves cutting songs to a shorter length, using math knowledge to do that and other things, and decent musicality, as well as an eye for visual aesthetics on the graphics that accompany your file when you present it to other people to be played. And of course you have to be fit enough to play the steps you put down.
Wow, what a great thing to write about!
But alas, I didn't realize that before I had my college applications come in. It's seriously something I had to learn basically from scratch on my own, as no really good tutorials were out there, and though it's easy once you get the hang of it, it's not really clear to the observer how to do it, or to some people (especially professional dancers) what on earth the aesthetic is. But there is an aesthetic to it, and it's a very unique aesthetic. It's an art, and if it weren't I and so many other people wouldn't have ever been so into it.
Why didn't I write about that when I wanted to get into Columbia?
I didn't recognize the hobby for what it was at the time. Truly something unique, hard to explain but man, at that time DDR was still a growing trend, and one that made its mark in schools all around the country who implemented it as part of their phys-ed curriculums. That was great. Er, that would've been great had I stopped and thought about how much it suited me. But nah, I wrote about piano instead of this, something I had gotten into pretty much myself. And yet it was my relatives from the Philippines who for some reason sent me a (bootleg) copy of DDR 3rd Mix along with two crappy pads from all the way over there, and that was the start of something I couldn't have foreseen, no way no how. What a lovely hobby.
But you know why I didn't write about that? I hadn't discovered myself yet. That's it, really.
And so things go like this:
4 years (5th-8th grade) - click
4 years (high school) - DDR
4 years (college) - my own DDR files
What will the next 4 years bring? What do I have to recognize, now, so that I don't mess up a college admissions process?
Haha, probably nothing. That's the great thing about graduate school. And furthermore, even if this were a different world where grad school admissions were as bizarre as undergrad admissions, I think I've come to understand myself a lot better since being free of high school. Yeah, "free of high school." I said it.
But yeah, and if I were to think the above were just simple 4-year cycles independent of all other influences in my life, that'd be dead wrong. Pretty soon the cycle system is gonna break. Still it's bizarre how we basically divide everything into 4 years up until this point (dude, 5th-8th grade were on the floor above 1st-4th grade at my school) and expect people to work in an environment free of this arbitrary organization immediately after... it's weird.
I guess it's why the Catholics were so determined about free will.
Anyway, I never really made that many games. I started a decent amount, but in some of these I never got past the menu screen, and by the time my hard drive crashed and I lost all my files, I didn't really care enough to get them back and just decided that maybe some other time I'd try to recover them. Then my PC, with apparently that hard drive (?? it was physically damaged, worn out; probably I had two hard drives and just moved all the stuff that could be salvaged to the other one), and probably newly wiped (ok then that other hard drive was probably wiped), was sent to the Philippines to be used by my relatives in probably Calbayog. Lord knows if it's still there.
But yeah, I pretended like I was really interested in making games. In reality, the social community is what amused me the most. I was the number-one poster on the "Total Klik" forum, where I had 1500+ posts, until someone else somehow bypassed me later on, and he actually made games a decent amount. That was probably back in 2002, if not earlier. I liked that forum, packed with elitists as it was, but yeah. I learned never to insult or criticize the elitists, because that was sure social death, and the social part was all I cared about, even though this was just the Internet. (They're real people, you know!) Bad games would come out that were great graphically but stupidly hard with pixel jumping in platform games (e.g. you better land on this pixel or else you lose) or... well, the problem was generally the difficulty, and if you criticize that then your skill gets criticized and no one listens to you. I just wouldn't review those ones. Also, graphics were overvalued and the people who made them the best generally got the best reviews. I, myself, never had graphical talent and stuck to my guns of not making anything anyway.
Man, that was a great time I had in that community. Making games and/or talking about it for, well, about 4 years. And then I got into DDR.
That's the community I'm currently in now, but in case you haven't noticed, DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, if you didn't know) is fading into obscurity as Rock Band and Guitar Hero take over. More specifically the community I'm in is one where you make DDR steps for whatever song you like, and play such DDR files by other people. It's been a lot of fun, but it's getting a little old. Especially since I'm not really an active DDR player, since a really good DDR game hasn't been released since two years ago. A lot of people will disagree with me on what I just said, too. Communities of people who just play DDR are very hard to find whereas a few years ago they were all over the place.
But playing DDR was my main hobby during high school. I didn't have as much time to do so as I would have now (if only I could do so with my metal pads at college), so I didn't really consider it my main hobby. But then I started really getting into making my own DDR steps. This isn't as simple as it seems. It involves cutting songs to a shorter length, using math knowledge to do that and other things, and decent musicality, as well as an eye for visual aesthetics on the graphics that accompany your file when you present it to other people to be played. And of course you have to be fit enough to play the steps you put down.
Wow, what a great thing to write about!
But alas, I didn't realize that before I had my college applications come in. It's seriously something I had to learn basically from scratch on my own, as no really good tutorials were out there, and though it's easy once you get the hang of it, it's not really clear to the observer how to do it, or to some people (especially professional dancers) what on earth the aesthetic is. But there is an aesthetic to it, and it's a very unique aesthetic. It's an art, and if it weren't I and so many other people wouldn't have ever been so into it.
Why didn't I write about that when I wanted to get into Columbia?
I didn't recognize the hobby for what it was at the time. Truly something unique, hard to explain but man, at that time DDR was still a growing trend, and one that made its mark in schools all around the country who implemented it as part of their phys-ed curriculums. That was great. Er, that would've been great had I stopped and thought about how much it suited me. But nah, I wrote about piano instead of this, something I had gotten into pretty much myself. And yet it was my relatives from the Philippines who for some reason sent me a (bootleg) copy of DDR 3rd Mix along with two crappy pads from all the way over there, and that was the start of something I couldn't have foreseen, no way no how. What a lovely hobby.
But you know why I didn't write about that? I hadn't discovered myself yet. That's it, really.
And so things go like this:
4 years (5th-8th grade) - click
4 years (high school) - DDR
4 years (college) - my own DDR files
What will the next 4 years bring? What do I have to recognize, now, so that I don't mess up a college admissions process?
Haha, probably nothing. That's the great thing about graduate school. And furthermore, even if this were a different world where grad school admissions were as bizarre as undergrad admissions, I think I've come to understand myself a lot better since being free of high school. Yeah, "free of high school." I said it.
But yeah, and if I were to think the above were just simple 4-year cycles independent of all other influences in my life, that'd be dead wrong. Pretty soon the cycle system is gonna break. Still it's bizarre how we basically divide everything into 4 years up until this point (dude, 5th-8th grade were on the floor above 1st-4th grade at my school) and expect people to work in an environment free of this arbitrary organization immediately after... it's weird.
I guess it's why the Catholics were so determined about free will.
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