Today, is the last day with this laptop. I've got to say, I've grown attached to it. I've gone through so much with it… a reformat, several blackouts, 3 hour long trips on the car… but it must go. I'll have to back up my 20GB worth of data on it, oh well. I'm trading it in for a new, shinier laptop, so this'll be the last blog I'll write in it. ;-;

Therefore, I'm going to write about stuff I just don't want to discuss again. This is mostly for me, but feel free to read it.

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Onto more serious stuff, where the hell I've been for the last… years?:

- Got a job, gf, and got into a sport.

Why I'm back:

- Got fired.

- Her breaking up with me.

- Lost motivation to keep at the sport.

Obviously, all the crap I got made me happy, and when I lost it all within a month… things weren't pretty. I had been programming useless crap at the time, which, for some reason, got met to be a better programmer. A pattern I've noticed in the years is that I program better when I'm depressed. Also draw better for some reason…

I'm not depressed anymore though, I lost it all back in January. It's April, and I've had plenty of time to get over it. I guess it was lucky that 64D was down, cause if I would have been able to blog I would have bitched to no end how crappy my life was going. It actually is still crap, but I've learned to deal with it, sorta. Meh.

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One thing I still like to do though, is piss off people that are in love with the 4th generation of Pokemon. Pokemon sucked from 3rd generation up, most of the designs started to look ridiculous (count how many spikes Lucario has, for example), more like Digimon than Pokemon. I swear, I've seen one of those damn 4th gens on Digimon once. However, I've learned to accept the fact that Game Freak isn't going to stop until it hits 1000 Pokemon, so I just look away when there's some idiot in school playing Platinum.

Another game Nintendo managed to ruin: Brawl. "But Brawl is AWESOME!!1" Depends on what you mean. As a party game, yes, it's freaking awesome. As a competitive game, it's full of inbalance. Meta Knight ALWAYS wins, at everything. Snake? Nope, Meta Knight wins. Falco? Nope. Wario? Game & Watch? Nevah. Probably the only character that has a good matchup with him at the moment is Yoshi, and Yoshi just happens to have a bad matchup with everybody, so he's not worth using.

So, to solve these two problems I've had with these two games, I've done the following:

Make my own Pokemon fangame. It'll never get finished, you say? Ha. I've been working on it since last year, and though I've only had about a month to work on it since October, it's still very much in progress. Most noticable things I've gotten done is a flawless battle system, perfect frame-by-frame animations of the opening screen, as well as a perfect textbox system. Sounds like little, but this is what makes up most of the Pokemon game, and it's finally done.

Mod Wii, install Brawl+. I said this in my previous blog, but I don't think anybody cared. Brawl+ is just freaking awesome in general. More competitive, the physics have been changed enough to make it faster, and more fun, but not enough to make it a different game. Combo-ing is back, as well as the godly Fox and Marth from Melee (minus wavedash… though it is a possibility to add wavedashing in Brawl+ if you want, though most don't use it), with every character to have an opportunity to be as good as them, because Brawl+ brings something that not too many fighting games have: Character balance. Everyone plays great. Are tier lists destroyed? No, they're just not that far apart now.

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Love is a beutiful thing when you have it, but a cruel thing when you don't. I have her for a class, so I'm forced to see her everyday, not that I don't try to avoid her. Ever since we've gone our seperate ways, I find myself in a bad mood most of the time (which, fortunately, I've gotten VERY good at hiding it from my friends), and finding myself useless at everything (this is how I lost my motivation to do my best in Gymnastics). Just a quick note: shit happens. I thought we were going to last together a long time, but we didn't, and I'm miserable because of it. Consider yourself lucky if you're not in love with someone.

Oh, did I sound like a depressed emo kid? Whoops. I didn't mean to, but I just can't find anything to be happy about. My life wasn't exactly good before this stuff happened to me, and all the things that had made me happy once were now making me miserable. But, oh well. Yeah, I've tried dating other people - that's not it. I'm still in love with the same person. Tried to forget her? Kind of hard since we have the same friends/classes. I'm also desperately looking for a job, but can't seem to find one. This alone makes me feel even more useless.

Gymnastics was my drug. It drained me of all my energy, and helped my mind calm down - which is a good thing. I think too much all the time about stuff that isn't really important. It made me feel healthier, I haven't gotten sick once ever since I became athletic. I tried my best, because I had found something I had good at. Then, I found my limit. I'm not very flexible. This limits me so much, but I've gotten over it. I'm stretching everyday, and getting rid of my inflexibility.

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I hate how bad reputation Game Maker has because of all the bad fangames that get released on the GMC/YYG daily. How many expert users "move on" because, for some reason, need more power for something simple, like a game (see: Super Mario Bros. You don't need to be a resource hog to make a good game).

Game Maker is an excellent program. The possibilities are endless, yet few people fail to see this. A lot of users need the feel to make stuff like RPGs and platformers from scratch, only to quit halfway through the programming. Here's something that may seem shocking – you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Look for an example/engine already made. Chances are, that you'll be able to completely change it to fix your needs, because a lot of engine writers make their engines very flexible and commented. If you can't find one of these engines, keep looking. Look up some pixeling techniques, even though you're not the best artist, it's better than having sprites already included in Game Maker. If your game is good, you'll find that a lot of people will be willing to help you. Can't think of an original idea? Play flash games, game maker games, console games. Mix it up, get sleep (5 hours of sleep kills your creativity), etc. Why isn't any game on YYG any good? Because people can't seem to know what originality is.

That is, not to say, that fangames/clones are wrong. Some excellent games, like Super Mario Bros., would have been great, with, let's say, a level editor. Yet this was never possible because Nintendo never released their source code, and probably never will. Have a favorite game that isn't ridiculously complicated? Try to remake them. Chances are, that if you played this game as a kid, you always wanted to make your own levels for the same game and wanted everyone to play them. Now you can. Is it a Game Boy game? These are the easiest to duplicate. And heck, why stop with custom levels? Make a complete extension for it. Remaking Super Mario Land? Add more playable characters with different characteristics. Add a whole new area to explore with new levels and enemies, with a new story, all keeping the same old gameplay that made you love it. If you can't seem to make your own original game, try making a fangame. There are just so many badly made that these get put down all the time – change that.

You don't need to know C++ to do these things.

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Aren't feeling productive? Need to work on a game and just don't have the motivation to? These are problems with simple solutions, but almost nobody tries them (specifically in 64D).

- Kill your browser. This may come up as a surprise to you, but internet browsing is a perfect excuse to not do anything productive. Notice I didn't say "Kill your internet service," still check your email, continue your downloads to, ex, a 4GB Linux distribution, just dont' go to your favorite websites.

- Find the reason why you wanted to make your game. Did you begin because you had some brilliant sprites you wanted to use, but couldn't keep making them in the style that you love? Remake them, or try again. Look up some artbooks. This random flash game inspired you? Look it up, play it, speedrun it, become an expert on it, and make your own version with a twist. Were you just bored? You probably still are, keep working on it. One bad source of motivation is to impress a group of people (normally just to be an attention whore); don't use this. It may work for a while, but when the attention goes away, so will your motivation. Just find another source of motivation and find your masterpiece.

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I probably have a lot of grammar/spelling mistakes. I didn't look out too much for these (dyslexia, lol), don't bug me about them, please.

tl;dr version - I'm getting a new laptop, therefore I'm writing down all the crap that I've been wanting to write down for a while, as a going away thing to my old laptop that I'll probably never get to use again.

Note: I'm not depresesed or anything of the sort, so please don't make me go back to it by saying something about the first part of the blog that involves it. It was mainly for me to look back later on.

Edit: I misheard when I was getting this new laptop. I heard "Saturday," when the exact words were "a Saturday," mainly pointing to next week. I still have until then to use this laptop, whoo. ^-^