This week included March 14th, or 3/14, the holiday in commemoration of a certain special number celebrated by geeks and nerds everywhere. The homophony with pie provides instructions on how said day should be observed. Our Pi Day party featured a spread of six delicious pies: Blueberry, apple, peach praline, key lime, chocolate pudding, and pumpkin. Some of them were even homemade—three by Rachel and J the night before, and an apple one my classmate Chris managed to whip together from start to finish in the few hours between our last class and the party. Impressive.
This week was also exam week, wrapping up my second quarter at Loma Linda. At this point, I’m trying not to think too much about the exams and am simply hoping I passed. The one-week spring break is going to give me some time to catch up on all the lab work I neglected in favor of studying. Also this week, a special package arrived for me: A preorder of Dragon Age 2 (thanks Mom!). I forced myself not to install it until after exams were over to keep at least one potential distraction from rearing its head. Now, however, I’m ready to lead a character through their Rise to Power! Which, if the past is any guide, means I’ll make some decent progress and then get too busy with other things to continue for a few months. Naturally, I’ve already started collecting screenshots and mods.
The lack of a toolset means I can’t spend the hours out-of-game tweaking my character model by adjusting numerical values, instead being reduced to sliders and the in-game character creator. Summer can launch the game pretty quickly, but it’s still a lot of extra effort to go through to make minor changes. I don’t understand why they don’t just use dropdowns or some kind of label of what each position on the slider represents. Sure, sliders look better, but it’s unnecessarily hard to compare two options when you can’t jump directly to the position you want.
Update: I thought I was being cool by using Markdown, but apparently that means Posterous thinks it can simply ignore the images attached to my email. /facepalm