Well, this week Halo 3 dropped, and for the video game community, that’s fairly significant. Progress pretty much ground to a halt at work as almost everyone dropped what they were doing to be at home (or at work, with the big-ass TV) to play Halo 3. I hadn’t quite clued into this fact, so when I arrived at the office on Tuesday and found very little by way of things for me to keep working on, I ended up watching James play Halo for quite a while, then played it myself for the rest of the day… consequently making me a bit late home as well. Oops! All in all, I rather liked Halo 3 – it wasn’t that much of a leap from Halo 2, just with some nicer graphics and the next chapter of the storyline, which is barely contained in the games. It doesn’t really push the Xbox 360 to any particular limits, but the multiplayer lobbying is done well and after all, it’s one of the biggest video game communities (or followings, I guess) in the history of… well, ever. There will be games with better graphics, there will be games with better gameplay… there will even be games with more variation in the multiplayer maps (come on, there aren’t that many to play). But Halo is Halo and has more than a cult following. Enough to spawn books, graphic novels and what appears to be a live action movie. Crazy, huh?

This week I also had a sick day, during which I watched the pilot episodes for Journeyman and Robin Hood. Ok, I’m more than a little behind the ball with the Robin Hood one, but hey, it’s good fun and I suspect I’ll end up buying the DVDs because I was able to download the first few episodes to see if I liked it. Bah to those that say it robs from the media companies – if I wasn’t able to see shows I missed on TV, I wouldn’t watch as many shows, which consequently means I wouldn’t buy nearly as many DVDs an other merchandise that feeds their corporate machine. Not onlyh that, but I’m one of those people that pushes shows I like onto my friends and family, so they’ll watch it, and then end up getting copies of the DVDs themselves. Although since Journeyman is being aired now, we’ll have to wait a bit before that comes out on DVD. It’s good to see Kevin McKidd in Journeyman as well, he was brilliant in Rome.

On Friday Anastasia and I went out to a Monty Python tribute being put on by the local theatre troupe with Lea, Jess, Cherona and a friend of Cherona’s whose name I have momentarily forgotten. I’d like to think that I’d remember later, but I’m pretty terrible with names. Faces yes, names no. Anyway, the Monty Python thing was brilliant! They opened with”Sit on my face and tell me that you love me”, and it all kind of went gloriously down hill from there. Plenty of skits from your favourite Monty Python films, all of which I adored. A good number of women in the cast, which reversed the gender of some of the roles in some of the skits, but it didn’t matter and was all one superbly. The later part of the skits involved a rather hefty amount of sexual innuendo (or blatant references), and there were a couple of families who left with their small children at that point. All in all a quality production and I’ll certainly have to keep an eye on them to see if there’s anything else they o that would be worth going to see while I’m in Gainesville.

This weekend was also another absolutely mad football weekend. Anastasia was in one of the sections a bit closer to the front, so we made up a couple of signs for her to take. My “neat handwriting” won me the dubious honour of doing all the letter outlining, so it would appear that typography pays off…. ^_~

Sadly the Gators lost, to Auburn, at home. This is apparently something of a travesty, although I’m still learning which rivalries I really need to pay attention to.

Other than that, it was bits and pieces of work and errands all week, watching anime with Anastasia and Lea and general household stuff like laundry and cleaning and so on. All in all, despite being sick, it was a good week.

Well, this week I started working at Artificial Studios. It looks like my job description is “do everything that we don’t want to or don’t have time for” in addition to learning some bits and pieces about the game development business. So far this week I got to know everyone’s names and roles, including the part time writer that comes in every now and again. They all seem like a good bunch of people and I’m looking forward to working with them. Apart from that, I’ve done a bunch of QA on the game they’re (we’re?) developing, learned the task management system that they use, taken inventory of all the computers and furniture in the office (and documented it, of course), put together a computer from bits and pieces lying around the office, written out a bunch of cheques an learned how to make a very, very basic gun turret in Unreal Engine 3, the development engine they use. Pretty varied, so far, but generally an administrative role.

Other than working at Artificial Studios, I’ve done a bunch of work for myself this week, as well as running errands (like posting off Steve’s knife). Anastasia an I set up her grill (got gas for it) and a ring of tiki torches out the back of our place. Now we can cook outside, hurrah! I watched some movies this week: Ice Age 2 (as funny as I thought it would be), Pan’s Labyrinth (very odd, but pretty cool), Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 (here’s hoping for a fourth one in a few years!). I also half-watched Accepted (still funny), The Shining (a very young Jack Nicholson… heeere’s Johnny!) and House on Haunted Hill (rubbish) while doing a bunch of other stuff, like writing some more back entries for my journal (the new version of which is now live and you’re probably reading it right now). Anastasia also had a departmental BBQ that we put in a late appearance at. I got to meet a few people that she talks about at home, but we pretty much just caught the tail end of it, so we weren’t there for a hugely long time.

Jess also made the trip up to Gainesville to visit Anastasia and I, which was pretty cool. Got to catch up with her a bit an just generally spend some time together, which is nice. I don’t get to do that very much… I didn’t do it a whole lot when we were in Tampa, but at least it was more often (and easier) than since we’ve moved up here.

Well, over the last couple of days Anastasia’s father, Steve, came to visit us. Really he came to use our couch so he could go to the football game, but it must have been a nice bonus to see us as well. ^_~ He was also kind enough to pick up Anastasia’s grill an tiki torches from Tampa on his way up, which we’ll no doubt be setting up this coming week.

We went out to dinner on Friday night at the Texas Steakhouse, which was somewhat novel. The thing that really threw me for a loop about that place was that there were buckets of peanuts on every table… and people shelled them, ate them, then threw the shells on the floor. As you can imagine, the floor was pretty much littered with peanut shells. Very odd. Good food, though. As with every American steakhouse that you go to, we also had some leftovers to take home, as well.

Anastasia also had a group meeting for one of her classes before the football game on Saturday, which meant her being up a bit earlier than she usually likes to be on a Saturday morning. Steve and Anastasia did football things for most of the day, including plenty of pre-game stuff. I spent pretty much the whole day migrating all my blog entries, categories, comments, etc to new blog software (WordPress) and tweaking the page templates to look like the rest of my site. I found out that my web host didn’t have the right database version, so the live version of my new blog (which is more of a journal) will be delayed until the new server has been updated. I also started writing in some back-entries into the local database on my computer, ready to migrate to the live version when the web host upgrades my database.

Anyway, after all was said and done, Steve didn’t stick around for another night. He drove back that night, although he forgot his pocket knife, which I’ll be mailing back to him tomorrow.

Today I was kind of zombie-ish. I ran a few errands, played some games and did a bit of general administrative crap on my computer, but nothing too taxing for my brain. Despite my zombie nature today, I’m pretty psyched – tomorrow I start at Artificial Studios. ^^

Well, not much to report for most of this week. I did some work, chilled out a bit, did cleaning and tidying around house, wrote a bunch of emails… things progressed as they do. The fan-subbed version of the Bleach movie also came out, so I watched that, too. Awesome.
I also arranged to meet up again with Jeremy from Artificial Studios, then today went in and talked to him again, this time about the Assistant Producer job that he had mentioned. After talking it over a bit, you are now reading about the newest addition to the Artificial Studios team!

I’m not exactly sure what my title is, but I think Assistant Producer sounds fancier, so I’m going to stick to that. ^^

Well, this week was certainly an interesting one. Tuesday started it off with me doing some game study (working on my C#, looking over XNA Studio, that kind of thing), then watching some Kyle XY later with Anastasia. I like that show. Draws on similar themes to John Doe and The Pretender, both of which I like very much. Lea also came over later an hung out.

Wednesday Anastasia left pretty early, leaving me to start a bit more groggily. I took Lea to her place to pick up some of her stuff, then to Uni to drop her off. After that I did some online reading, some emails, that kind of thing. Then I gave Artificial Studios a call to see if I couldn’t get some work with them while I was here (and could, you know, work). I actually managed to get a hold of Jeremy, the owner. (I would later find out that this was something of a miracle, given how many phone calls that guy fields in a day.) Anyway, I talked with him for a while, got him to dredge my resume out of the jobs emails and arranged a meeting for the next day. Feeling pretty good about myself, I set about cleaning up my computer and updating files, added a new firewall, fixing some other things. I also did some research into whether or not I’d be able to come back here in January and get a work visa (and just a work visa). The short version is: no.

Thursday started off with more ‘cleaning up’ of my computer and some research into game development. If this is a path I’m going to be taking more seriously, I’m going to need to do some study! After a bit of that, I left for my meeting at Artificial Studios. Well, more accurately I locked myself out of the house, had to get Lea to let me in, then left for my meeting. Continuing my comedy of errors, I then walked around the wrong building for a good 20 minutes before eventually going to the next building over and finding their offices – the address on the website was listed wrongly. Naturally. Anyway, I went in and had my meeting with Jeremy, outlining how long I would be in Gainesville, what I wanted to achieve, that kind of thing. Jeremy was pretty impressed with me (and my resume) and said that I was generally awesome but I wasn’t around long enough. He said if I was going to be here for longer, he’d hire me on the spot, but since I wasn’t going to be around for very long, it wasn’t worth the company’s time to train me up – just when I was trained up and starting to be productive, I would be leaving the country. Ah well. In any case, I got plenty of advice on what to develop between now and the next time I would be applying to a game studio for a position.

Friday was a fairly vegetative day for me – to give you some kind of indication as to the state of my brain, I watched Date Movie. It was funny, but utter rubbish of course. Apart from my vegetative state, I also had a call back from Jeremy (actually he left a message, my phone had died) saying that he had been really impressed with my proactivity and that while he couldn’t take me on as a programmer, he could take me on part-time as an assistant producer if I was interested in getting my foot in the door to see how things worked. Wohoo! The pay is rubbish, but it’s a foot in the door and will be a bunch of experience for me.

Today Anastasia and Lea went to the football while I stayed home and worked. After the game was over we had dinner with Lea. Not much else to report.