Work work work...

The title may be a little misleading here in that I am still quite unemployed...but I am trying to keep myself occupied.

The new semester starts on the 1st of June (lots going on there - 18 total credits lined up for the semester!) and I have Anime Mid-Atlantic in the middle of June, soon followed by Otakon at the end of July.

Also, remember that webcomic thing I was threatening before? Well, I have done some work on it (gotta stay motivated and nose to the grindstone!) in that I have a few pages drawn, some dialog planned and some ideas that I only hope will continue to blossom. I also managed to figure out a working title: Arcanum Flux.

Other than the working title and the minimal progress I have made thusfar, I am wanting to keep the majority of the work under wraps.

Hope this ends well...

I just enrolled in 5 3-credit hour classes. Most of these are online courses which means that I won't even have to look at a classrooom. While this gives me more time to sit around and do nothing, it will pretty much force me to adopt some form of discipline with my schoolwork because it will be up to me to keep updated on what is going on and such because I won't have to drag my fat, lazy ass into said classroom.

There is also the minor fact that one of my earlier professors mentioned something along the lines of keeping oneself from becoming overburdened with coursework: For every credit hour that you have, consider that you will need to dedicate an additional 3 hours of time away from the classroom just to that class for homework, research assignments, reading, etc. per week.

This basically means that a typical 3 credit hour course will require a total of 12 hours of time (3 in the class, 9 out of class) for everything that is involved in that course per week. That said, three 3 credit hour courses means one needs to dedicate about 36 hours per week, which is pretty much a full-time job. 4 credit hours would be 48 hours and 5 is 60 hours!

While this is sound logic, my experience up to this point has been hardly that dramatic with time requirements. I am fairly certain that I can attribute this to the fact that at this moment I am taking fairly basic courses (need my cores and foundations after all!), and they are thus fairly easy and not all that demanding. With that in mind, I am sort of middle of the road on exactly how well this will work.

For the time being, my chosen courses are pretty much the basics, so I should be able to make it all work somehow with little trouble.

Some Heavy Thinking

So I've been doing bits of thinking off an don over the past couple of weeks.

...yes... this is quite dangerous, I know...

Part of my thoughts drift to tabletop gaming. While I have never actually billed myself as a GM of any sort, I am actually thinking about giving it a shot. The problem(s) that I am having are with what I want to run and with what game mechanic. I have several game systems and settings, some of which are malleable enough that I can create my own settings instead of having to use (and then modify) a default setting.

The questions for me are what do I want to run: Fantasy or Sci-Fi. I can do either, the question is which one can I get players for? That one's usually the hard one right there. Getting players and drumming up interest. This is easier said than done, let me tell you... and it is even harder to maintain interest once you get things started.

Other thoughts drift towards doing a webcomic. This suffers a similar problem as me wanting to run a game in that I would have to have a story and characters that people would actually want to read about. Another problem that I have is a matter of getting things done. I am reasonably confident that I could do parts of the art and/or writing but not all of it. I would want someone to collaborate with in this, and the problem with that is finding folks who have the time or are willing to ignore their ideas while they help me work on mine, integrate their ideas with mine, allow me integrate my ideas with their stuff...or some combination thereof.

Impossible? Hardly. Likely...that's a good bloody question that I don't have an answer to. Maybe I will figure it out, maybe I won't...at the moment I am more or less putting my thoughts onto paper (ok, not really, but close enough in this case).

Teh Blog... day 1

It's a slow process, but I am working on moving my mail stuff from AOL to GMail. It isn't that I dislike AOL mind you. It truly isn't.

It is just that given the way that the software works it is difficult to create a new account and attach it to a specific account.

So after so many years of having the same email address, why am I changing now? Quite simply, I don't feel that my old email address was, well, fitting anymore. I mean, when I tell people my handle and such, they see something other than AnimeFreak40K and it is a little confusing I think. Besides, it's about bloody time I had AF40K all the way on my stuff now.

Holy Crap

Yeah, I've officially entered the twentieth century and got myself a Blog.

This is it. Not much to see, but that may change in the future...

...I think...

...gotta figure all of this out and see how it is better than DeviantArt (if it IS better at that) and move on from there first.