University Course Selection

Over the course of the week, I've been stressing over possible elective courses I can take for my first year in university. With course selection starting tomorrow, I'm stressing even more than ever!

UTSC (University of Toronto Scarborough Campus)

The way my university does course selection is through an online program called ROSI (Repository of Student Information). Students are allowed to start their course selection on a certain date at a certain time, and these times and dates will differ for every student by years (1st year, 2nd year...).

When I went for an event called "Get Started" they stressed that students must immediately finalize and choose their courses right at their allotted time, but they didn't elaborate why. So I decided to converse with some current UTSC students. Well first off, if you don't take advantage of your allotted time, you risk the chance of not getting the courses and times you prefer, but most importantly, ROSI is notorious for being down due to an overload on its servers.

Okay, so I basically have to be really prompt for my scheduled time, but now for the courses themselves, albeit I only get 2 electives for my first year. The reason I'm stressing over these two courses is because of bell curving, something all University of Toronto campuses are infamous for, so I really want to take courses that wouldn't put a dent in my GPA while at the same time, hold my interest.

Right now, I have a few courses picked out such as EESA06 (Introduction to Planet Earth), GGRA02 (The Geography of Global Processes),  GGRA03 (Cities and Environments)

I do not own or take credit for all of the above images , if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.

Any suggestions?
How was your first year's studies for post-secondary institutions? What kind of courses did you take?

Wild Baby Critters

Following the recent news in my local area, there had been many reports of wild raccoons rampaging and tearing through houses. Luckily, I haven't seen any around the house I live in, but I have found other animals around my house, such as baby ducklings, and an adult hare, that comes around my backyard, around dinner time everyday. By chance, I also found a baby hare and I took pictures of it! Enjoy!

Camera shy

Bunneh go nom nom?


Have you found or seen and wild animals around your area?

Minecraft

Markus Persson, a.k.a "Notch" has been a long time Java game programmer, most known for the work of Minecraft. Personally, I've enjoyed some of his works before minecraft, such as L4KD which really excelled based on simplicity and size of the game (4kb).

An example of a user created city/town

Minecraft has been a very successful game, after selling over 2.5 million units, so chances are, you've already heard of it but if you haven't I really urge you to try it out.

Originally, when I heard that my friends were playing Minecraft, I thought it was one of the lamest time wasters out there. Harvesting wool, fighting 8 bit zombies, killing pigs, building houses out of 8bit blocks, what really is enticing you to this game? So, I just had to try it out, and I was hooked. Hooked by the shear simplicity and goal of the game, which doesn't exist. Minecraft is simply a pick up and go game, with no goal in mind, it becomes a creativity game. Like the title of the game ensues, mining is a huge part of the game. Players are able to mine minerals such as iron, coal, diamonds, each having their own uses, and each more rare than the other. Like the picture above, you can also build towns, cities and houses and role play if you'd like, but these are just a few possibilities of the infinite choices you can make.

I do not own or take credit for all of the above images , if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.

How did you get into Minecraft? What is your opinion of Minecraft?

Brain's Base Studio (2 of 2) - Durarara

Finally, the follow up and concluding post for the two part series on Brain's Base Studio brings us to Durarara. The anime is also based on the same writer for Baccano, Ryogo Narita and obviously the animation studio was the same, so I was expecting some quality material, and this did not disappoint.

A few of  many characters of Durarara
shown here

The plot, much like Baccano, revolves around a simple person or event, but we also get to view the adventures or misadventures of many other characters. The anime first premiered in January of 2010 and ended in August 2010 on a 26 episode series. Durarara revolves around Mikado Ryūgamine, a young boy who always longed for life in the big city and is given the chance to, in Ikebukura, Tokyo. He also meets up with his childhood friend Kida Masomi. Kida, already familiar with Ikebukura, shows Mikado around the city and some people such as the violent bartender, and the owner of the sushi shop. There is also an urban legend called the "Black Rider" within Ikebukura, and Mikado witnesses this legend the first day he arrives in the city.


Many more characters and plot elements come into play and in a way, all these events and characters will come together and intersect, forming a larger plot. As you can probably guess, I was very pleased with this series, much like Baccano.


I do not own or take credit for all of the above images , if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.


If you watched Durarara, what is your opinion on it? Any more anime by Brain's Base Studio or Ryogo Narita you can recommend?

Duke Nukem Forever Review (Finally)

Hey guys, I've taken some time off from blogging as I was doing two things. 1. Doing stuff related to post secondary school, as some of you know from a previous post, I will be attending University of Toronto in September! Yay, and there is much preparation, such as course selection. 2. DUKE NUKEM FOREVER (on PC)!

You'll be seeing this a lot,
loading screens that is

Yes, I've been spending the past week playing it out and so far, it has been a fair experience. The following will be my rant/review on DNF. I believe my opinion of it is a bit different from other people as I have not played previous versions of Duke Nukem so I have no idea what to expect in terms of the quality of gameplay, I simply judge what I played.

Well, in DNF, you start off immediately fighting a "boss" monster, only to find out that "you" are actually Duke Nukem, playing DNF (confusing?), and a joke immediate follows. Throughout the game, you'll encounter many odd jokes, some that are actually funny, some that are just lame.
Another thing that you'll encounter are loading screens, and the amount of them. When playing through the first few chapters, you'll be doing nothing more than just navigating through the DNF world, and probably after 5-9 mins of walking around, you'll be faced with a long ass loading screen. And within the loading screen (as you can see above) various tips will be displayed and I'm not sure if these tips are just jokes, or serious tips (see above). "When being shot, try to avoid bullets"...oh really?

That aside, the game really picks up when you get further into the chapters and it really plays out like HL2, in terms of being a puzzle game and a first person shooter at the same time. Your main arsenal consists of a rpg, shotgun, pistol, 2-3 alien guns, shrink ray, freeze ray; a good variety overall. (I've heard though, that these weapons aren't new, as they existed in previous versions, but again, I'm not considering this). The shrink ray is especially fun, as you can shrink your enemies and walk over them, thus squashing them.

Now I'm not sure what DNF is rated (in terms of, pg13, pg18+, adult...etc) but I'll have to give the game an adult rating. There is a chapter in DNF where you start out in Duke's stripper joint and you have to find various items such as a condom, popcorn and well, to keep this more friendly, a female massager toy. And as you navigate throughout the joint, you'll encounter many moments of full female frontal nudity, and scenes that are sexually suggestive.
The adult "moments" not only exists within this chapter though, in one of the starting chapters, (again, trying to make this more friendly), you can go into a bathroom stall, and explore a "hole" which is in the wall separating the two stalls. You can probably  guess what that "hole" is for, and it's not for peeping.

Overall, the game is decent as a fps, but many other things detract from the overall experience such as massive amounts of time spent on puzzles, loading screens with nonsensical tips. I will look forward in completing the game.

Also just a fun little fact about how I play any first person shooter's single player campaign. I like to play on the hardest setting available, because there is no reason to play it on easy modes. Reason being is that you'll probably finish the game in a flash on easy, and you won't replay it because it has no replay value anyways, so I rather play it on harder difficulties and spend more time on it.

I do not own or take credit for all of the above images, if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.


For the people that played DNF, how did you find it? What do you think of the harsh critiques of DNF?