May 16, 2014

The fourth grade teacher was gone today so my cutout spent the whole day in the gym. It didn't scare anyone but it did confuse the professor who came to give a physics demonstration. Apparently as he was walking into the gym he said hello to the cutout before he realized it wasn't a person. Then before the assembly started, all the kids were seated and the music teacher was up talking to him when I walked in, and he mentioned that I looked a lot like the cutout. After the assembly when I was putting away chairs he came up to me and shook my hand, to make sure I was the real one, and told me everything that had happened. I also learned that the gym teacher had been frightened yesterday when the cutout was in his office.

I didn't have a lot going on with my day. I cleaned up my computer a little bit, deleting a bunch of stuff off the desktop and then going through all my folders and copying important stuff to Dropbox. Everything should still be on the drives next year but just in case, I wanted examples of everything so I don't have to come up with stuff from scratch.

Other than that, I had classes in the lab, I increased my vocabulary with a game on FreeRice, I edited some pictures for the slideshow, and took a picture of one of the sixth graders. I realized today that he didn't make it into the yearbook when I was looking for his portrait. He is one of three kids who didn't turn in baby pictures so I was going to put each of their portraits together on a slide, but I couldn't find his portrait. And then I checked my yearbook preview and he wasn't there. And now I feel bad. I thought I had done a better job this year by sending it out to all the teachers to check everything and this year rather than misnaming a kid (which may still have happened), I completely forgot a kid. I don't know how he didn't make it onto my list of needed pictures. Maybe because I only had new kids on my mind, not thinking of a kid who has been here all year but must have missed the first picture day. So I am annoyed at myself. As well as with his teacher and the principal and anyone else who looked at the book and didn't notice him missing. It's frustrating. But at least I got his picture for the slideshow, even though he refused to smile.

The physics assembly this afternoon was pretty good. He had some new demonstrations this year which were interesting. It is hard to bring a lot of that stuff down to the level where a kid can understand it, or even most adults without a physics background, but everyone can enjoy a good physics demonstration. Stuff flying across the room or knocking stuff over or making a loud bang. And once again, it all ended with everyone going outside and a liquid nitrogen bomb in a giant trash can of water. Last year it was a bit underwhelming but this year there was a much bigger boom and the geyser of water was a lot more impressive.

After school I went and picked up my brother's prints from the frame show and they look really good. Way better than I thought they would. There is just something about professional framing that can make anything look really good. I don't have enough room for the pictures and framed things I already have, but I kind of want to keep the stuff I had framed for my brother.

Tonight was the end-of-the-year barbecue at one of the kindergarten teacher's house. Last year it was in his backyard and it was supposed to be there this year too but it was drizzling off and on all day and it was somewhere in the 50s, so the party was moved inside, much like the Christmas party. Before going I ate a bunch of carrots and peanuts and that turned out to be a wise choice because I ended up only eating a few chips and a deviled egg. I need to be a better vegetarian and start taking a vegetarian dish to parties. Not only participate in the event but also guarantee myself something to eat.

We only stayed for a couple hours and I spent most of that time sitting on a couch with the library aide and her husband, talking about books and movies and other random things. I generally just kind of sit or stand in one place at parties and not really engage in conversation. So the seating arrangement kind of worked out because the library aide is very talkative so she pretty much kept the conversation going the whole time. I didn't really get to talk with anyone else (not that I would have) but it was kind of nice actually talking to someone at a social gathering.

When I got home I tried out the Wildstar BETA and I was instantly disappointed. The look of the game is so cool, the story seems fairly interesting, and it has a good sense of humor. But I hate the controls. I don't know if it has typical MMORPG controls (probably) but it feels nothing like Tera, which feels much more intuitive. In that game the mouse moves the camera and WASD move the character. In Wildstar, WASD still moves the character but the mouse just moves the mouse cursor around the screen (and off the screen and to another monitor if you go too far), unless you hold down the right mouse button. So almost the whole time I was running around I had to hold down the right mouse button. This also presented a problem with combat. I decided to be a warrior with a big sword and to attack people I had to right-click on them repeatedly. Not left-click. And it is hard to move around, move the camera, and try to right-click on a bad guy at the same time. I spent so much time clicking right next to a guy or ending up with a really odd camera angle because I was inadvertently moving it all over the place every time I clicked to attack an enemy. It just wasn't fun. The one benefit I could see to this system was that the mouse cursor is always active so I could click on whatever I needed to on the screen. In Tera you have to open something or hit the ALT or ESC key to show the cursor, which can be annoying but is way better than the Wildstar system. I didn't check to see if there was a way to switch it so it was more like Tera, mainly because I was trying to fight through it and see if it would become intuitive. But I don't think it will. I'll dive into some menus tomorrow and see if there are some settings I can change. I hope so because I do really like the look of the game. Not that I plan on buying it, or paying a monthly subscription, but like a lot of games it will probably go free-to-play at some point and it would be fun to jump into it, if I could wrap my head around the controls.