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Saturday, January 28, 2012

At Break's End

One of my least favorite times of the year are the days leading up to a return to school.  I tremble at the very thought of having to do homework or worry about projects, especially when they're already stacking up before the semester even starts.  This semester sees me driving to school five days a week, something I've never done, and honestly I have no idea how I'm paying for gas for so many trips out to Towson.  Plus this means waking up early and traffic and well, you can see how this might make my head feel.

So I've decided to do something I haven't before and hope to turn into a tradition.  I'm going to summarize my break and pretty much list all of the things I've done during it with a little bit of commentary.  Maybe even worse than actually going back to school is the revelation that I didn't actually do anything over break.  That usually is never true, and herein I'm going to prove it.  I have done  a bunch of things over break, and while they haven't translated into anything, they sure are something.  So here we go.

Right out of the gate I made a 20 minute Christmas Special that eventually required a bit of video-editing on my part.  I managed to make it pretty awesome, honestly, and I definitely consider it one of my cooler vlogs.

My break included the recording of eight episodes (actually 12, since I did 3 more a day after this was posted) of my Fire Emblem LP, and the posting of nine (actually ten) new episodes on my YouTube page.  This number was only not larger because my father has been home sleeping over the past week, and I quite honestly just couldn't be myself without worrying about waking him up.  My college schedule mostly allows for me to record every day if need me, so my Fire Emblem LP will be continuing pretty well as long as my Dad's erratic work schedule permits.  While no episode has garnered record highs, it's nice to know I'm still working on something.  I also gained a total of 4 subscribers in January.

Where will the future take us?
My fiction writing was pretty slow over break, and I'll admit, I'm pretty disappointed about that.  I wrote a few snippets of my space series, and a mock-up first page of an entry in my large series, MageBoy.  My biggest success was a short story inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.  It was an 11 page climactic battle scene that featured two characters with more backstory than the one-shot showed.  I hope to continue the series as time goes on, since I love the Pregnant Badass protagonist and an underlying idea I came up with. 

On the gaming front, I beat Skyward Sword, and reviewed it, which was a bonus.  I also bought a 3DS, which is cool.  I wish I'd have played a little more instead of having watched so many LPs.  Of course, I've been trying to pick up a new habit of watching LPs while I'm on a treadmill, but it isn't sticking quite so well as I'd like.  I'd love to starting doing it more consistently though, since that's a good way to multitask. I have to learn some consistency with my activities.

Of course, I did do that in some places.  About a week and a half ago, I constituted to post a blog every day until break ended in order to break the record for how many posts I could do in a month, and here I am posting the one that will put me over.  This will make the 15th post I've made over break, which is cool.  I figure there are about 30 days in a month, so it's kind of pathetic I can only post on 8 of them or whatever, so I challenged myself, and I did it. 

While the quality of posts varied, I'm quite proud of myself, and proud of this blog, even though it's mostly viewed by Russian robots.  It's good to write and it's good to talk.  I'd have to say my favorite posts were My Skyward Sword Review, for the amount of detail I put into it, My Psychological look at Let's Plays, because it was interesting, My musings on Media Darling, since they're a fun topic in my history, and The Two-Part Across the Sea Epic, because Lauren's story is one of the biggest and most potent in my life thus far, and telling that story was a very worthy ending of my blog challenge.  Call it a season finale, so to speak. 

This is, of course, without mentioning the highlight of my trip, the oh so epic Adventure to MagFest! which was basically the impetus to a good portion of the things I ended up doing over break.  To follow up on it, I did eventually cameo in a Breaking NCS video (below), and that got me 3 subscribers on YouTube, which is pretty nice.  And of course, I got to meet NintendoCapriSun, which was exciting, but could've been made better through planning.  Planning is just what I'm already starting to do.  MagFest 11 has been announced for January 3-6, 2013, so provided the world doesn't end before then, you can bet I'll be mustering up my Spiral Power for another trip to National Harbor, most likely with a full party of friends in tow, and possibly for multiple days so I can actually hang out with NCS and play games and stuff.  Next year I can actually play Mario Kart with all of them too, since I bought a 3DS.  Like I said, everything has history...including my 3DS' color.  I got it in Flame Red to represent the fires of adventure that burned in my soul when I went to MagFest and saw all of those 3DSs there.



Speaking of that fire, I'm hoping it doesn't go out any time soon.  One of the best things I did over break was keeping up with Gurren Lagann, a show that really does raise my fighting spirit.  Indeed, I believe I'll have to watch a highlight reel or something tomorrow so that I can face the coming of school with the unprecedented bravery I showed several times over break.  The fact that I've stuck with Gurren Lagann for this long is pretty impressive, considering my phases generally last about two weeks or so.  I can only hope it can continue to inspire me in the future (even my resolve to make milkshakes over break was fueled in part by Gurren Lagann, and now I'm on this quest to invent a flavor called "The Spiral Shake").

So honestly, that's about it.  I didn't do as much as I could have, I admit, but what I did do can't be counted as nothing.  January is a month of beginnings anyway, being the first month of the year and all.  If this is the first month, I want the rest to be increasingly better.  I want to do at least 10 blog posts a month, keep going with my LP, and increasing the amount I'm writing, even as school goes on.  Every time school approaches, I play with the notion of quitting, and only don't because I don't have anything else going on in my life, even though my school life is pretty scattered and riddled with amilessness. So really I think my goal is just to get myself to a point where I'm at least working on my own devices enough to where dedicating all my time to it actually means I'm dedicating all my time to it.  That's a ways off though, honestly...but if I use January as a starting point and continue to do better than this month, I'll definitely find myself getting closer.

See...my life is much like a drill...little by little, I evolve past who I was before.  Little by little, I dig my tunnel, and invite those who wish to follow it to come with me.  It may take a while to reach the surface...but when I do, the whole world will be opened up to me, and that's when I can aim my drill towards the heavens.

JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM?

-Eric

1/28/2012

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