#sidenote i scrolled down a little more on this post and i didnt know what a constructor really was until like

[edge-lorde]

hp update: its been a long time, boys. ud think that with this plague outbreak id have more time for shitty phone games, and ud be right! however, the time i normally might use to make tumblr posts has been taken up by reading lotr orc fanfiction non-stop for at least 1 full month. id still be in the thick of that obsession even now if only the fics would update. that is how i find you today folks, for the first time in many weeks i am staring at a screen with nothing to do. so come with me friends, theres no better way to fill the soulless void we are all in than reading a nice long tumbler post. 

disclaimer, first of all, a lot has happened, i prefer to keep these updates as plot spoiler free as possible but do to extenuating circumstances i feel like it is necessary to say, [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER BELOW]

that rowan fucking died,

i wont say exactly how, but i will say that her death was animated as were animations of myself and a few others reacting to our friend fresh corpse. obviously meant to be serious moments but the animations made it seem almost comical. 

i saw at least one post going around right after this update that was like ‘how could the game devs do this to us..... how could they hate rowan so.... this is punishment from on high’ and its like.... u guys do know what a story is right? the events of  a story are not typically done to punish less faithful fans, im pretty sure they were planning to kill rowan off from the beginning. this isnt disney im pretty sure the writers are not writing each chapter the night before its released by popular vote. 

that little “are we drifting away..?” scene with rowan makes more sense now. there was a bit in one of the scenes where the kids all reminisce on rowans life and the mc talks about it being the last real one on one time they had with rowan. a nice bitter sweet moment. i dont hate this turn of events. its a good reminder that actions have consequences and we are way past they days of “should i wear a hat or scarf?” its YA time now. 

i did manage to take 1 screenshot from this time, i had commented that before that when rowan said she didnt have many friedns that barnaby seemed to be hanging out with her without be there as a friend buffer and here was his reaction to her death:

;_;

the funniest part in all of this however, was of course cedericks reaction to rowans death “but she was so young....” LOL fuckin RIP.

lets see... what else.... i forget a lot of what happened but i think there was a time sensitive quidditch event in there somewhere? if so i  dont remember it. what i do remember of the quidditch pals is that im gonna play beater now, skye is being weird and cagey about it, andre is involved.... the others are there.....

sidenote, i love the shitty b characters they throw in to be like yes you know this person but no they are not cool enough for u to even think about befriending. the first one of those is face paint kid, and now we have another, who is a former beater girl with horrible bangs named bean who didnt go to any classes for a whole season so she could just play ball 24/7 and got kicked off the team.  this is a character who only exists to provide an explanation as to why there would be a beater position open but i love them on principle. 

right now im in the midst of another time sensitive event, this one is a bother-your-brother-at-work-day event where recent hogwarts graduate bill weasley is bullied by myself and his younger brother charlie into letting us go with him on one of his curse breaking jobs. 

so for those unfamiliar, bill works for the magical bank of england.... and his job seems to be “retrieving treasure” for said bank. in the books, there is a bit where he takes his family on one of his trips to egypt, where his job seemed to have been tomb plundering indiana jones style for the posterity of the english bank :X. i wont explain here why thats bad but its bad. 

the game devs however in this instance, at least SEEM to be doing what jkr couldnt do by attempting to salvage what is left of gringotts bank and form it into not a super shitty implications factory run by horrible jewish caricatures. bills mission is to retrieve a goblin made artifact that was taken by dragons, so no going to foreign countries to steal things from other people! only going to a dragon reserve to rifle through animal nests. they even appear to be providing us with a likable goblin character, egad!  

my hope for this event is that we get a plotline about how maybe, goblins arent shifty human haters for no reason, and in fact they hate magic humans for very understandable reasons, like being forced to go into hiding with the rest of the magical world even though only the humans wanted to do that, and maybe despite running the bank in england they still dont have a lot of political sway in the world of wizards and witches, and have to rely on the faith that said wizards and witches wont fuck them over at every turn, even as they see how they treat other non-humans, such as house elves, which they desperately dont want to end up like. and maybe they DONT only care about gold... maybe thats a human stereotype based on the fact that theres a long history of humans not respecting goblin ownership customs.... which i could get into..... but i wont.... i just....... very badly dont want them to suck ;__________;

i know i said its ok to still like a piece of media as long as you recognize the problems with it, and i do, but once this game is done im gonna stop hp posting all together. ive been feeling more and more uncomfortable making these posts lately.  

GENERAL GAME NOTES; theres been some new layout changes and such. 

most notably the stairs screen has been changed from a bulleted list of all locations to a screen with tiles picturing an image of each location along with the name + icons of all classes at each place. there is one additional location that is new and yet to be unlocked, and the dragon reservation is appearing temporarily as its own tile as well. i prefer this method of getting in and out of a temporary location to how they did it with car during the last christmas special. the stairs icon also now stays in the corner when you scroll through locations, allowing you to open the stairs menu without scrolling all the way back to the left. 

they also moved a few of the buttons down into the lower left corner rather than the left side & combined the story button and sidequest button. they added a little camera button as well, just like in the dormitory, that makes all the icons in a location disappear and look better for screenshots. 

the daily special add offer thing now has its own button in the top right corner of the screen, and idk if i mentioned it before but now there are daily challenges that appear in the sidequest screen that offer small rewards for completing 3 tasks per day + a better one if u get all 3. the prizes are things like 4 energy, 75 coins, 3 monster food. the better rewards are usually either more coins, 8 energy, 3 gems, or 1 notebook. i think that it does all the different color notebooks but i cant remember for sure if i ever saw the gold one up as a reward. i like this addition in any case. if you dont pick up ur reward by the end of the day, the next time u log on it will force u to stop and accept them, and if one of the rewards is energy and ur energy bar is full, it does not seem to stack beyond the bar so watch out.

 the character stats page is now more zoomed out so you can see your full character instead of just from the waist up. no change to the leaderboard. rowans face in the friendship roster is now a still black and white image that says ur friend may be gone but friendship is forever u-u. 

rowan has been removed from all classes. in the classes where the minigames involved her, those minigames have passed the mantle onto other friends in the class. in potions that person is now liz helping u find stuff off the shelves and in tranfiguration that person is badeea. bless these girls for helping mc get through it. touched my heart. 

theres been a few fun little “i know u have more free time now so uhhhh have some energy” prizes like they do sometimes when they dont update on schedule so thats been nice. just a few days ago they gifted us 3 gold notebooks the same way. :O. 

theres also been a few instances of a energy happy hour where for a limited time energy takes less time to refresh. normally it takes 4 mins for 1 energy to do this but during happy hour its like 2:30 mins. :U its all very interesting.

and that will have to do it for tonight my friends, ill do a post for the dragon event when its done because i do like it so far and i do like getting to bully bill with charlie. 

until next time, remember.......

[thisnerdsadventures]

a couple notes on the semester

It is 8:30am on a Sunday - why am I up this early. Well the answer to that question is that I woke up with a splitting headache resulting from dehydration at around 6 and then spent two hours on Youtube watching food videos and deciding where to eat today for dinner. Really though, I’ve been on a rough schedule this semester, so maybe this weird sleep schedule is a result of night after night after night of late nights and coffee-dependent days.

I sometimes wake up in the morning and ask myself, “how did I end up here?” Not in a bad way, but more in a “how did I fail to get sleep again” way. I somehow ended up with a horrific weekday schedule, tryna cram around 50-60 hours of work/class/psetting into 4.5 days and then attempting to leave weekends freer for recovery, but I also end up doing too many fun things on the weekends (I know, the horror)

For instance, here are some of the fun things I’ve done this semester:

hike at crane beach! the nicest sand and clearest water within 50 miles of boston, guaranteed. although the hike was actually way harder than I thought it would be

biked to the potato memorial

went on the Maseeh boat cruise!

kayaked in the charles. <- This was particularly terrifying because when we tried to turn around, we kept on going around in circles and there was an honest fifteen minutes we thought we would be stuck in the river, but we made it back! Also we got yelled at by a guy whose boat we kept running into

Got lunch with my old team at googz. good to see them :’), counting down the days i can finally go full time LOL

house gov retreat, where we also attempted to go kayaking but then ended up going to tosci’s instead

went back to the aquarium for disorientation

caught up with a BU friend over sushi and visited my friend in Random

a couple of frat parties

there was one sunday morning we cleaned the exec closet which was a ridiculous endeavor in which we found a sports illustrated issue from 2008. this is definitely just one of those weird things that happen when you’re on exec for clubs

saw michelle wolf live for fallfest!

there was this one weird day that we ended up playing quidditch with the MSA and then ended up at the galleria and then i dropped $40 on a blazer at H&M

i can’t believe this many fun things happened in one month. and there’s only more to comE!!!!!

On the other hand, I mentioned that this semester has been a hell of a grind for some unknown reason compared to past semesters, but my running explanation for this is that my operating systems class ended up being 2.5x the amount of work and emotional toil that I thought it would be, and I already thought it would be pretty bad. The running joke is that I see this other GRA in my dorm way more than my actual GRA because she works on the same floor as this class’s office hours, and I live in office hours. Additionally, I’m pouring a lot of hours into my research (maybe like 2x what I was putting in last semester, when I was just writing the paper). And then there’s like clubs, and the ballerz, and interviews, and working out, and house gov exec, and model UN stuff, and other weird commitments I get myself involved with during the week, and then before you know it, you’re running around for 10-11 hours a day before you can finally come home and DO HOMEWORK.

Here are some slightly concerning things I have pulled in the last four weeks for my commitments - 

Last week, I was working on making all my figures in vector format for paper revisions, so basically sat myself down at 7pm and worked until 2:30am in the athena cluster on adobe illustrator without looking at my phone or facebook or anything. i had oreos, three computer screens open and coffee, I must’ve looked like I had lost it or something

the week before that, there was a 18 (10pm Wed -> 4pm Thurs) hour period where I had spent 14 hours working on a pset. This was also kind of bad

Oh, and in this 18 hour period, my friend and I had gone to the student center to buy coffee at 2:30am but (thankfully) verdes was closed, so we ended up sitting on the floor of the stud and screaming profanity

there was this one 48 hour period in september where I spent like five hours on Monday working on a pset, had a crisis at 3am, emailed my advisor like “i need to meet you i am having a crisis”, continued to work on the pset the next day for 6 hours, went to the meeting with my advisor, dropped the class from grad to undergrad status, and then stayed up until 3am again doing this other class’s pset from start to finish.

;_; you HATE TO SEE IT. anyways

some good things have been happening, and some good things are coming. For example, i just got this really awesome externship position and just got a potential match for next summer in NYC, so that’s all exciting! My friends and I also got accepted to hack Princeton, so we’ll be going there in November, and we’re planning this fairly extensive party for house gov, happening in 2 weeks. Model UN is going to Rhode island also in November! Ballerz games are starting next weekend and we’ll likely be putting up a blog post about it too, so I’m super excited to contribute to that.

Well. That was enough spouting thoughts. I think I’m going to go work out now, but a final note is I really liked this blog post from my friend. It’s all about brutal honesty here and how people here just love to do everything. and that’s probably one of the biggest “flaws”, but also the most beautiful thing about lots of people on this campus. Also can we just talk about the couple paragraphs: 

“Some people call Course 6’s sellouts. I don’t really think they are. You have a higher chance of job security, although not fully guaranteed, in pursuing Course 6. It has one of the highest average job salary when looking at first jobs post graduation. And, there’s a special program called M.Eng that gives you both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in five years, as opposed to the typical six. It is…pretty tempting.

But of course there are downsides, like the previously stated fact that there ARE a lot of Course 6’s and it’s probably going to be really competitive to get internships. Or that people are going to think you’re selling out, when in reality you do have a genuine passion for computer science. Or maybe you are doing it for the perks, but even then, that’s understandable since MIT really, really gives Course 6 some big perks.”

People close to me used to give me shit about being Course 6, and it took me many many moons to overcome it. I used to think about whether I was really maximizing the worth of my degree, whether I could be doing more, whether I could be in a more high-impact position or major. But at the end of the day, SWE stuff like what I was doing this summer, maybe it’s not going to cure cancer, but the work and the product were fucking cool. and it was fulfilling! Turns out I actually like coding and thinking about computer systems. And the people? so. awesome. and you know what? that should be enough.