October 16, 2015

 Today was not a very productive day. I did things but not anything I planned to do. Those things being finding Sociology books and working on my research paper. That is probably going to come back to bite me in the near future. I have fallen out of the school mode and I've still got two classes to worry about.

I emailed my metadata professor today to see if there was anything I could do to earn 0.05% to bring me up from an 'A-' to an 'A' and she said not to worry about it. She had already rounded my grade up to a 96% and even though it isn't reflected in the unofficial grades on Canvas it will show up as the final grade. That was good to hear. Now I can officially stop stressing about that class. It feels pretty good.

I called to cancel/renew my XM radio today. Every time I go into it fully prepared to cancel but then they give me a good deal and I keep it going. I'm a little afraid that if I cancel I'll immediately be back in the mood to listen to the radio again. I also want to see how far they'll go to keep me from canceling. I always stop when I get five months for five dollars a month but I wonder how much lower they go. My favorite part about calling is when the person on the phone reads me my email address because it always catches them by surprise. You can tell they start to read it and it hits them a split second later that it is ridiculous. The lady today had that moment of hesitation in the middle and then laughed a little and said it was a pretty good email address.

The sub-group of my collection development group, the one writing the collection development policy, sent out their finished policy for the rest of the group to look over. They sent out a rough draft earlier in the week maybe to me and one of the other group members to look over. I gave a little feedback on that version and on this one most of my feedback was just grammatical and formatting stuff, which they appreciated. Now I need to step up and finish my part of the project, selecting Sociology books.

I picked two new wallpapers for my monitors today. I kept the cupcake and typewriter ones and I would have kept the turtle one but it disappeared and I couldn't find where I saved it. I added a Halloween drawing that looks really cool and a Fall picture from the Rocky Mountain National Park that is beautiful. I put it on the top monitor and I spent a lot of time today just staring at it and pretending I was there, walking on the trail.

I listened to the new Coheed and Cambria CD several times today. Even as I write this entry. It is either their first non-concept album in a long time or their first one ever, which would also constitute as a long time. I like it. And it helps that I don't have to try and pay attention to the story being told across all the songs, like their previous albums. Although there could be a story, I guess, but I tune most of the lyrics anyway, so I wouldn't know. It's a good CD, though.

Tonight I played a little bit of Minecraft and then I downloaded Creativerse and tried that out for awhile. It is a game that is free to play this weekend and I didn't know anything about it until today. I was watching a video on YouTube that was a recording of a Minecraft livestream and the two guys briefly talked about one of the guys who used to play on their server but had recently switched over to playing Ark because he got in early on that and his YouTube channel exploded in popularity. That led them to a discussion of only playing one game, like Minecraft, or branching out and trying other things. And if you only played Minecraft, maybe adding mods in and not just playing the vanilla version of the game. Then one of the guys mentioned Creativerse being free this weekend so I looked into it. It looks like a fancy version of Minecraft in terms of graphics and they throw in some more hi-tech kind of stuff.

Despite looking pretty cool, I will admit I was little skeptical when I first got in the game. I really liked the look of it but I wasn't completely convinced. I'm kinda into it now though. It's better once you get the first death out of the way. And then the several after that. It also helps once you're able to start crafting more things. My goal now is to get the last few ingredients for the obsidian digging tool because that unlocks the hoe or plow tool so I can plant the lettuce and turnip seeds I found. Farms are usually one of my first goals when I create a new world in Minecraft and that seems to be the same case here. Eventually it would be cool to build a house but I've dug out a pretty cool little place in the side of a hill that I'm happy with at the moment. I will probably end up buying the game. Not only is it pretty fun but it is also 50% off this weekend. It seems to be one of the most polished early access games I have played, definitely more so than Minecraft was when I bought it way back in the day. I don't see Creativerse dethroning Minecraft as my go-to escape but I am sufficiently intrigued.

Tomorrow, school stuff. I need to pick out some Sociology books and I need to find some sources for my research paper. Those are the only two things I should be concerned with.