Spring Break?

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I’m really confused. Here I am, a citizen of Texas, on the Thursday before spring break, out of school for a snow day. A quite large winter storm blasted us with around 5 inches of snow and ice last night, making this the 4th episode of winter weather in northern Texas since last Monday.
This time, however, I was not so unlucky as to be trapped in the house all day. In fact, despite the cancelation of school, my day started at 6 this morning, with a trip into the back yard to check out the left overs from last night’s storm. Against the common unwritten rules of being a teenager, I was neither tired or grumpy even though I went to bed just after two in the morning: these days, oh the few rare days when snow blankets the ground, are when “getting efficient rest” is the last thing on my to-do list. However, as I type this post, I reap the outcome of such a fun filled day of snow ball fights, sledding attempts, and no sleep.
Since the sun was out pretty much all day, most of that snow melted away, tipical for Texas. So, we’ll be going back to school tomorrow, but thankfully it’s only one day; next week is spring break, if you can call it that in light of recent weather patterns. 🙂
Moving on, I’ve officially entered week three of audio game development. Though it was very late last night, around midnight I think, I posted the audio demo for this week on the S Quad Racing Page. This reflects most of the changes I’ve talked about in the change log and blog post from the last week; the sound of the player’s car is noticeably quieter, the turning system far less flawed, and there are now opponents that can drive on the track as well, though that’s about all they can do.
As of yet I’ve not completed a fully functioning opponent intelligence. This is still being worked on, though, one step at a time. As I said in my last post, I began working on opponents on Sunday, and have only been making minor changes and additions since.
Moving on, my week has been relatively pieceful for the most part save the winter weather and asociated impacts. On a more negative note, amidst my normal routine of school, relaxing, gaming, programming, and reading, I was involved in a pressing matter that had to do with Reality Software, Danny’s game development company, for the first half of the week. Thankfully, it was finally resolved yesterday evening.
Aside from all of what’s been said, there’s not much to report, except that I’m really looking forward to this Spring break, regardless of what season and/or weather it happens to proceed.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. The following are pictures from the snow day.
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An Update

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I found this really cool, blind accessible Solitaire game for the IPhone. It’s $2.99 for the full version, but you will definitely get what you paid for. Here’s a very well done review of the game that I listened to, and if what I’ve already said about it won’t convince you to buy it, this surely will: http://applevis.com/podcast/episodes/blindfold-solitaire-audio-version-classic-card-game.
Speaking of games, I’m happy to say that I’m making a lot of progress on the racing game that I’ve been developing. It’s only been 10 days, and the player interface is complete. I performed several rounds of testing earlier to day and can’t seem to detect any bugs so far, so if any do exist they’ll likely be found once I create some opponents to race against.
Speaking of which, I’ve coded the structure for the opponents thus far, but as of yet haven’t done anything with it, and don’t think I will until tomorrow. The reason for this is that coding them will be far more complex than it was to program the player interface. The reasons for this are as follows:

  1. Unlike the player, the opponent can’t think about what decision it will make; if an obstacle appears in its path, it can’t decide it wants to move out of the way. While I could easily program it to automatically turn to avoid the obstacle, this would give it an unfair advantage over the player: one would be hard-pressed to win if the opponents that they raced against avoided every single obstacle while they hit at least one.
    Fortunately, I have an idea of how I could code the opponents’ intelligence in such a way that it’s not always perfect, though I’ll not say what it is until I’ve proven that it works.
  2. Player Interaction.
    In this game, I’d like it to be possible to slow ones opponents down temporarily by coming up behind them and bumping them. Of course, if an opponent were to intentionally bump into the player, I’d like it to have the same affect on him. In theory, coding this should be a piece of cake, but previous attempts to do similar things proved this to be falsehood. Nonetheless, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this can be accomplished.
  3. It will likely take a good chunk of time to program all necessary opponent actions. Despite the fact that I knew what I was doing and had very little trouble when coding the player interface, it still took a significant amount of experimentation and testing to get it fully operational. And now that I’m coding players that are out of my control during game play, it will be harder to notice smaller less significant bugs that occur.

Despite the challenges outlined above, I’m optimistic about this game. As I stated on the audiogames.net forum, I’m programming it because that is something I love to do, and I enjoy playing audio games very much.
For those of you who want to stay informed of how the development process is going, I recommend that you visit the S Quad Racing Game Page. It is where I post the daily change log, and weekly audio progress demos.
Off the topic of game creation, I had a great rest of my week. The snow storm that came in early Wednesday morning didn’t give us another day off of school, though I hardly expected it to. In fact, all of what actually fell as snow melted right after the event was finished; much of the precipitation was sleet and rain anyway.
Yesterday, though, was a completely different story. Temperatures, as they did on Monday, didn’t rise above freezing, and it snowed all day. I still had to go to school because the snow didn’t even start to fall until around 9 in the morning though. Today, while I’m sure the roads were quite treacherous, it didn’t affect me at all, that is to say, none of my plans were affected. I don’t think we’re done with winter weather yet; we could get some sleet on Wednesday. I wonder, will it actually happen?
Aside from what’s already been written here, there hasn’t been much else to talk about, though I got my 6-weeks report card and discovered that I made all A’s except for algebra, but I still made a B in that class.
Well, I’m signing off now. Have a good rest of your weekend, I’ll blog again some time next week.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Programming and Winter Storms

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Wow. A lot has happened in the last 4 days, as you can tell by reading the title of this post.
Yes, we got a direct hit from an ice storm. I’d known about this possible storm since about Thursday, but didn’t think it worth posting about as all other winter events that were possible this season missed us. This one, however, did the exact opposite.
As a result of the 1 and a half inch sleet accumulations we received this morning and a sustained temperature in the middle 20s, school was canceled today and will be tomorrow as well.
Though temperatures are expected to rise above freezing tomorrow afternoon, a second winter storm is possible tomorrow night, which could bring up to 3 inches of snow to the area. This one depends on some key factors, however, unlike the ice storm that just hit. for 1, the storm system that will be the catalyst for this second bout of precipitation must move directly over us in order for the precipitation to fall as wet snow. If it doesn’t, we could end up with just rain, or no precipitation at all. Secondly, the high temperatures on Wednesday will exceed 40, turning what accumulates in the morning into slush by the afternoon. Knowing Texas and it’s erratic weather patterns, though, this could very well change for better or worse.
In other news, I’ve once again had an active programming week. For now, I’ve set aside the word pad application that I was working on, as it is very low priority and has most of the features I was planning to implement. However, I have an actual audio game in the works now, something I’ve only attempted once before and discontinued due to lack of new ideas.
The current game I’m working on is a racing game. There’s nothing too special about it: turns, obstacles to make the game more challenging… that’s basically it. I’ve been building it for about 4 days now, and was only able to compile a half-working version tonight. Even still, this has a significant number of bugs, and lacks several features that are to be included in the actual release.
Since I’ve never worked on such a project before, the hardest part has been fine-tuning it: the opponents have to have just the right amount of speed, because we don’t want them to fall too far behind, but then again we don’t want them to go as fast as the player, as that could cause some problems, especially if obstacles are present on the map. In addition, I’m still experimenting with other things such as sound (panning, volume), initial placement of opponents, and track size.
At any rate, I’m making considerable progress on this game. It will definitely be addicting once I finish coding it.
That concludes this post. I’ll blog some time this weekend.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

A slightly depressing week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Well yes. It was a pretty miserable week, at least last week it was. Well remember last Monday’s post, how I said I was no longer sick? Turns out I still was. I didn’t actually start feeling better until this most recent Sunday… so yes. last week was quite miserable.
This week, although by far a better week than last, wasn’t the happiest I’ve seen either. Some personal matters made this week sort of a bit of a downer if you will.
The recent times haven’t been all that bad, however, in fact I’d say I profited some. Because of the lengthy stretch of days I was stressed out or bummed out, I’ve done a lot of praying, of course–because that’s what people do in hard times. Also, I’ve been looking forward to church a lot recently, because every time I went the message was always something I needed to hear. On Sunday, for instance, on the umpteenth day that I felt sick, the message was this: be faithful and patient; it’s only temporary. God didn’t forget about me. It was so weird, because my preacher had inadvertently told me exactly what I needed to hear! So as you can imagine, that put me in a great mood.
And just yesterday, I was feeling upset about something else that had happened, but after going to church I was filled with joy and piece, exactly what I’d been praying for.
Needless to say, mainly due to church, this week has definitely been on the up. It’s already almost Friday, and tomorrow will be a not-too-stressful B Day. And, with that sickness completely gone, I think life is returning to normal. What a blessing!
Moving on, you’ll notice I haven’t done the podcast. Here’s why: I tried to record it, heck I even saved the file and opened my feed to update, and that was when I realized that a good 35 minutes of the podcast were gone! Due to that recording trouble, I’ll wait until tomorrow to do the episode. But since it’s over Alter Aeon, a fantasy game that’s been around since before my time but is still being updated, you are going to enjoy it.
As for books, I’m not finished with the Ender Wiggin series yet, I’m only on book 3, in fact, which I just recently learned is over 500 pages long. I’m serious, this author doesn’t cease to amaze me. His level of creativity and amount of thought he puts into these books is astounding.
Looking at an introduction he wrote for this installment I’m reading, this book wasn’t even planned! Isn’t it weird that the only reason he went ahead and wrote this in the first place, was that the publisher he’d been working with had published the Ender Wiggin series as a 3 book series, rather than just 2 books, which it was originally supposed to be, but our clever author was still able to produce such a great 3rd book?
Aside from my rambling rants about my recent readings, the weather here has well and truly gone crazy on us. Last weekend was very cold, with temps in the lower 50s and upper 40s… and Monday it was in the lower 40s. Tuesday, however, it began to warm up–and kept that up for all of two days! By Wednesday, the high temperatures reached 60 degrees, but guess what the high was today? 37! To top it off, it is expected to be nearly 80 on Saturday!
As for rain, the last time we had that was Sunday, and I don’t know when we’ll get more. I’m thinking we could get some next Wednesday, but not too sure about that yet.
Well, I guess that wraps up tonight’s post. I’ll blog you all later.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. Goal ball started up again, and I’m really enjoying it!

a good but slightly tiring week

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
For the most part, it’s been a good week, the exception to that being school, of course. Though it’s not been too stressful, I could gladly take another break. I was pretty tired last week, though I can’t really complain because that’s mostly my fault. Despite the three day weekend we had, I’ve been tired all day, and my head’s been hurrting a little.
With the exception of those minor obstacles, my last week went by fast, and was quite enjoyable. To start off, I’ve read some pretty awesome books. As I said I would in my last post, I read Cress, the 3rd book in the Lunor Chronicals by Marisa Meyer. Since it was so long, and I’m a bit of a slow reader, I just finished it yesterday, and have now began the Ender Wiggin series. For some reason, this is the 3rd consecutive science fiction book I’ve read, and they’ve all had the same theme–outer space. I’m not speciffically looking for this type of book to read, though the ones I’ve so happened to stumble upon have immediately got my attention. When I finish this one, I’ll check out the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, because Danny has been quoting it, and told me that I would love it. And from some of the quotes he’s shared with me, I think I will. I don’t think this one’s a book, but an audio drama and/or a movie. Either way, I’ll subject myself to that story, whatever form of media it’s in.
Moving on, my friend from church came over this weekend, which is precisely the reason why I was unable to record my podcast, for those of you who follow that.
On a sort of related note, I’ve been learning Bach’s Minuet in G Major, and for the most part have the song memorised. There are still a few parts I need to work out, but I think that I might be able to let you hear me play it in Sunday’s podcast.
As for weather, it’s not really been too harsh on us lately. Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were cold and rainy, but after the sun came out on Thursday, it improved. Today, in fact, it got up to 70, something it hasn’t done since… well I can’t remember. But tomorrow it will be 10 degrees cooler, and another 10 degrees cooler on Thursday with rain. So much for pleasant weather…
On the technical side of things, I haven’t done much in the way of programming, except a small text to speech application. This application has actually enspired me to create some audio productions with the all to famous microsoft Sam, that good old low quality text to speech voice that came with the long discontinued windows XP. Perhaps I’ll air a few of them in future podcast episodes.
Speaking of the podcast, I know it’s been 2 days since Sunday, when I was supposed to record, but I wasn’t about to podcast while I had a friend over. Though he went home late yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t yet downloaded the game I was going to demonstrate, so I had to download and familiarise myself with it. I’ll record the episode and have it up tonight, though.
That concludes tonight post. I’ll blog you later.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

A great week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
So far, that is for the last 12 days, 2015 has been quite a good year. I’ve been pretty good about sticking to my goals for this year–consistent podcast schedule, a good blogging routine, piano practice ETC.
There have also been several other factors that made the last week and a half such a good time for me. Firstly, I received a report card last week, where I learned that my lowest grade (that includes 3rd six weeks, semester averages, and semester exams that I wasn’t exempt from) was a, 90. Not that I was really worried; I try to be responsible with my school work most of the time, but I still wasn’t expecting that.
Also, last week wasn’t very stressful. Contrary to what I previously thought, the first week back at school did not come as a harsh slap in the face; waking up bright and early once again wasn’t all that difficult, though I was pretty tired the first few days I had to do so. The work wasn’t too hard, though I suspect it’s because it was the first week of a new semester. And between practicing my piano, doing some here-and-there programming, talking to my friends, reading, and recording pod cast episodes, I haven’t had much time for boredom.
Speaking of reading, I’ve started a new book. Recently I’ve been reading later installments of book series, because either the service I use to get audiobooks doesn’t have the title I want to read in their listing, or I procrastinate too much to read it when it comes out. But anyways, after finishing the final installment to the heroes of Olympus series, I read Day 21, the sequel to the 100 by Kass Morgan. Now, I’m reading Cress, the third installment in the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. As good as these books are, I kind of wish I’d read them sooner, because even now I’m still remembering details from previous books in the series.
Moving on, as you might have noticed, I never again mentioned the winter weather event that was possible for New Years Eve and New Years Day. For one, I forgot to mention that, and secondly it wasn’t worth talking about, because it all ended up being just rain. Even on New Years Eve, there was still a 70% chance of winter precipitation in the forecast, and a winter weather advisory had been issued. However, by midnight, the forecast had changed, and only a slight chance of freezing rain remained, and even that never came to pass, making the whole event just a couple days of cold rain. So as you can see, definitely nothing to get excited about.
On the technical side of things, I’ve done quite a bit in the way of coding and gaming over the past 10 days. To start off, Paladin of the sky (found at http://www.vgstorm.com), was the center of my gaming world for 3 days, before I finally reached the end of the demo. Whether or not I will buy the game is still under heavy consideration–as much as I like the game, and the story, there are some parts (namely the combat system and room sizes) that I don’t like. But I really, really like the story, so who knows; that actually might inspire me to purchase it.
Also, park boss has been another recent favorite of mine, though after playing that a lot for a week or so, I kind of lost interest in it. I haven’t even opened the game in a week now.
Speaking of games, Danny has released another installment to the death match series. it’s called Death Match: a new beginning. I’m not sure of all the features it has thus far, though I know that the last time I played it, you could fly ships, and explore planets. Danny told me of another feature he’d added, but I cannot remember what it was.
Also, if you haven’t played death match: project alpha yet, you definitely should. great story, awesome style of game play. Both of these games can be found at his website: http://realitygaming.usa.cc
or the audio games.net forum.
And Finally, I’ve been dabbling a bit in pure basic again, as was briefly mentioned earlier in this post. Though I haven’t produced anything useful, resourceful, or even enjoyable, I’ve been messing around with things such as text to speech support and the basics of game creation. Just today, in fact, I learned that for some reason, the Pure Text to Speech library does not like the idea of compiling Unicode executable files; every time I’d try to run an Unicode executable that used text to speech, I was greeted by an application crash and invalid memory access error. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, because I don’t know what that error means either). Luckily, with the configuration of some compiler options, I was able to finally resolve the issue. This means I can actually move forward and begin to bring a game idea I have into reality. We’ll just have to see though.
Well, I guess that about wraps up tonight’s post. I hope you all enjoyed it. I’ll blog you all later.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Holiday updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Wow. It’s been nearly two months since anything, and that includes blog posts, pod casts, audio files… etc was posted here. One might think that I’ve settled into a once-a-month blogging routine, which, in a way, I have. However, with the coming of the new year, I plan to change that. In fact, I have the next two episodes of the podcast planned out, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the games I plan to demonstrate, as they were picked by listeners of the podcast.
Since my last post, life has gone on, for the most part, as it always does–school, concerts, breaks and the like. But as you know, Christmas was yesterday, and that brought about a couple of interesting things:
for one, I got a piano. I’ve actually been wanting to learn piano for a while, and have recently found a visually impaired teacher who is pretty good. That being said, if I stay dedicated, which will more than likely be the case, I am pretty much set up to learn. I’m really looking forward to it.
also, at long last, Aprone has released version 3.4 of swamp, something I’ve been excited about for quite some time now. To my satisfaction, the new update comes with an extensive list of bug fixes and new features such as fully customizable crate missions and the fixing of some incredibly annoying sound bugs, among other things. Unfortunately, the new version is in upwards of 660 megabytes, and downloading it will be a real pain.
In other news, it is expected to get bitterly cold next week. Tomorrow, in fact, the temperature will likely fail to exceed 50, and Sunday will come without change. After it warms into the low to middle 50s on Monday, the temperatures will plunge into the 30s Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with the possibility of some wintery precipitation. As winter weather events, especially those that occur in Texas are so unpredictable, I’ll keep you up to date on the situation.
That concludes tonight’s post, but expect another one in a few days. Also, if you have the time, be sure to check out Episode 26 of the Steven D podcast, which is scheduled for Sunday, December 28. And finally, happy holidays to you all.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
P.S. Happy national Pajama day… hopefully you celebrated accordingly. 😀

I'm back, at long last

Hey guys,
Steve here.
At long last, I have returned from my extended break from this blog, and it is definitely good to be back. Though I’m sure you agree with the preceding statement, You are undoubtedly wondering why I was gone for so long.
This time, the main reason I was gone for such an extensive amount of time wasn’t “lack of motivation,” which seams to be the primary excuse most bloggers use for inconsistent writing. Instead, the primary factor in this most recent absence was my highly addictive gaming habits. Just recently, in fact it was around the time of my last post, I got really addicted to Quentin C’s game room, that social platform featuring a wide variety of card and board games that I demonstrated in an episode of my podcast. Since Quentin C’s game room has so many games, as soon as I would lose interest in one game, another would take it’s place. That being said, I had no inclination to sit down and write a post, as it would’ve given me less time to play games. On the bright side, however, I posted the Road to Rage podcast, and it turned out to be quite awesome, as Danny and I played while talking over Skype resulting in a near half hour of constant joking, laughter, and battle; 3 things that normally don’t go together.
aside from that, though I still find Quentin C’s playroom quite addictive, I’ve remembered the truth–my blog is much more important than my games.
Besides spending a lot of time on Quentin C’s game room, my life over the past month has been dotted with the occasional significant event. First of all, there was sports extravaganza, which took place the week after my last post. Since I have attended this event every year since I had this blog, I will not go into an in-depth explanation. But to summarize it, for those who don’t know, there was a goal ball tournament on Friday night, then on Saturday there were track and field events all day such as races and other competitions.
Besides Sports Extravaganza, my church also had its annual fall festival last week. Not much to say about that–it was quite fun, and I spent the day with someone significant to me. On a related note, I also got to spend this past Sunday with the previously mentioned individual.
As life would have it, unfortunately not every day was as good as those I just talked about. There was still that struggle called school, but on the bright side today was an early release day. There was also another early release day last month, after my last blog post, and I must say that was a lot funner than today. While there were still only 4 hours of school today like the last time, and there wasn’t too much work to do in my classes, it was still unlike last month when I had the extremely rare luxury of sitting in one classroom all day long, having absolutely no work to do, and spending the whole time reading and playing cards.
On a completely unrelated note, the weather the past couple days has been unseasonably cold, thanks to an arctic blast that is affecting a lot of the United States. Fortunately, though the high temperatures here in Texas are not in the single digits, as they were in places such as Denver, and our lo temperatures aren’t -21 degrees below 0 as they were in places such as Casper, Wyoming, our high temperatures didn’t even hit 40, and the lo this morning was in the 20s.
In addition, there is also a, slight, chance of snow Sunday night. Since that is far away, it’s impossible to determine if we will get any accumulating snowfall yet. However, I will closely monitor that situation, however since it is so early in the season I’m not very optimistic.
Well, I guess this wraps up tonight’s post. Thank you for reading, and as I previously said, I am very glad to be back.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. My cat turned 10 today. I cannot believe he is already that old!

gaming and podcast updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Alright, I have to admit something. I’ve been slacking off, quite majorly, especially in the pod cast department. I had a very good chance to record the Road To Rage Episode last week, as a quite horiffic battle took place between my friend and I and two other players, who not only seamed to have an unlimited supply of health, but also some wickedly awesome guns, some of which were capable of putting someone down in 3 quick shots. All of that resulted in a 15 minute streak of epicly loud gun fire, frustrated screams of agony over the chat system, and people dieing left and right. Although my ratio of kills to deaths was something along the lines of 2 to 6, I still had quite a good time and wish I’d recorded it. I suppose one of the main reasons I didn’t record it was that I was on a time crunch, and it can take a good minute after a podcast is recorded before I can officially say it’s online, and also that was on Wednesday, not Sunday.
But anyways, I’ll be sure to definitely record it this time, even if it means recording it before Sunday and waiting until then to post it. Either way, expect podcast Episode 25 this Sunday, and I promise, for real this time, not to let you down.
Besides slacking off the pod casts, I’ve done quite a bit of swamping over the past two weeks. I haven’t updated you guys on my swamp progress in a while, so I suppose I’ll do that now
-I’m level 84 now. If I’d become level 84 in a previous version of the game, such as 3.1 or below, I could’ve become a hard core character, something I’ve been wanting to try out. But no, I have to get to level 150… so I still have quite a few more levels to go. On the bright side, I’m over half way!
-Since Christmas day, I’ve spent 1 week, 1 day, and about 2 hours, playing the game. All that, plus the time I played on my old computer, and I’m still not even level 100 yet?
-I have some pretty nifty armor at the moment. I’m still able to move fast, but get >70% protection.
Also, I have a long bow, and a very powerful machine gun, so I shouldn’t be dieing any time soon. I suppose that’s something to be excited about.
Anyway, off the topic of gaming, my last couple weeks have been more or less uneventful, besides school, doing a bit of technical work with my friend’s website, and as previously mentioned, playing games. Very early this morning, I managed to catch a rather epic storm recording, the result of a pretty good hail storm that came through, dumping a whole bunch of what appears to be nickle to quarter sized hail. (yeah, leave it up to Severe Storm Steve to get up at 4:00 in the morning to record a thunderstorm). Anyhow, here’s the recording:
download and listen on your pc
or here’s the imbedded player:

To me, that sounds a lot like the ice storm I recorded back in December of last year.
Moving on to the future, I have a choir concert next week. Apparently we have to wear a tuxedo, and I still don’t have one. I really need to get on that though, because I’m not going to get a poor grade because I wasn’t in propper clothes.. Also, report cards are coming out this week. I feel confident that I’ve passed all my classes–last time I checked, I had a 92 in algebra, a 98 in business information management, and I don’t know what the exact grade is, but I’m passing English. As for History and Spanish, I really have no reason to be failing those classes, so I’m pretty sure I’m passing them.
Well, it’s kind of late, so I should be getting in bed right about now. I hope you enjoyed this post, and I look forward to writing another. Also, stay in tune for the podcast next Sunday.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

Getting back into it… hopefully

Hey guys,
Steve here.
As you might already know, this blog hasn’t been updated much over the past 20 days. The reason for this isn’t that I’m losing intrest in blogging, but that there hasn’t been much worth blogging about over the past several days. As of yet, nothing extremely interesting has happened, however I felt the need to end the extreme blog post deprivation I was putting you guys through.
One year prior to today, a tornado outbreak broke out across north Texas. Though more states might have been involved, I performed little if any research on the outbreak. But as far as I know, there were 18 tornadoes (judging by the last post I posted about it last year), leaving 6 people dead. And I recall, that on that day, there was a low tornado threat. Makes me think that though meteorology has greatly improved over the past centry, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. Because after all, I don’t think anyone could’ve guessed that there would be 18 tornadoes; and come to think of it, the next week when there was a huge outbreak predicted, the storms were hardly even severe.
Changing topics, I finally got the 22nd podcast done, though some of you might already know that, judging by the fact that it’s already been downloaded. As for how many times, I unfortunately can’t check that, but I know that it’s in the top clicks widget. This podcast episode was a bit different; instead of having several segments, I featured a game review. This might occur sometimes, since it seems more sinsible to do game reviews in podcasts, since not only is it hard to muster up the motivation to do a game review at random, but a podcast seems the most likely place for people to look for one.
While still on the topic of game reviews, Danny wants to do a let’s play of Dead Space, and would like for me to join in. If this occurs, I will blog about it and put it on the audio game reviews and demonstrations page.
Moving on, I have some pretty big school related things coming up. First of all, my choir concert, the last one of the year, will be on Tuesday, May 20. Also, there will be an orchestra concert, also the final one, on May 29.
But there’s one more daunting task looming ahead, one which I know I’ll have to prey really hard about. It’s the Spanish 1 final exam, which is going to take place next Thursday. And if I don’t pass it, that will be one whole year of assignment after assignment, and memorizing vocabulary and grammar of another language, wasted. Because should my grade fall short of 70, I will have failed the class and will have to take it again next year.
While still on the subject of school, there are only 15 days left, two of which are half days. It’s hard to believe that I only have 15 days left in middle school–exciting, oh so exciting, but very hard to believe. But of course, there will still be more checkpoints and test in the last couple weeks of school. Though unlike the Spanish exam, these tests don’t really worry me; they’re just more obstacles on the path to freedom, from middle school that is.
Well, I guess that about wraps up tonight’s post. I hope to get back into a regular blogging routine.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.