Overall classes look pretty tough but let me give a quick breakdown of what I think of each class so far.

CS170: C++, yep just learning C++ and doing a bunch of assignments to make sure I understand C++. Just like in C the first function we use is also one of the more complex functions. Other than that this is my meat and potatoes class so this will probably get my most attention.

CS230: Using C++ to make games. This class is focused on showing us different ways of using our coding knowledge to make a video game. The class’ grade is based off four projects due throughout the semester. We will learn things like making a state machine and platformer physics (i.e. collision, gravity.)

MAT150: Calculus. This is just an intro to calculus class and will probably be a breeze for me. I took a more advanced class back in high school but that was years ago so I am not getting this waved. It’s an easy A so I might as well take it, that and I love calculus. But I do love how the book we are using is from 1988. Gotta' love how math doesn’t change.

A few of us decided to stack our math books next to each other.

SOS150: This is a sociology class titled, “Technology and Society.” We will learn about how technology affects society, if you couldn’t deduce it from the title. So far the class seems interesting. The professor knows what he’s talking about and is very enthusiastic which helps. 

COM150: Learn how to talk to people. I have taken tons of communications classes before and this one doesn’t seem too difficult. It is all about public speaking and whatnot, seeing as how I love public speaking this class will be fun for me. Of course I can’t wait to see a bunch of the socially awkward DigiPen nerds stumble, bwhahahaha.

GAM150: This semester’s project class. We have a build a game from the ground up. We are given a few basic functions to work with but nothing too exciting. My team and I already have plans for our game which I will detail a bit more in a later post. 

So that’s how my semester looks so far. Just like last it is going to be a ton of work but I actually enjoy it in an odd way. Hopefully I don’t have to eat my words later in the semester. 

Source: (Picture) Old Book Bindings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_bindings.jpg)

Going to enjoy my break and then get back to school. Next semester I actually have a posting plan set up to track the progress of my semester game. 

Just like everybody was saying at orientation the workload will suddenly ramp up and ramp up it has. After this week’s pant shitting math test and CS120 lab I think a lot more people are starting to understand the intensity of DigiPen, myself included.

This weekend is going to be filled with me hunched over my desk doing math homework and as a fun break I will hunch over my keyboard to mess around with some C. Pretty much I am stuffing myself in a giant while loop that looks like this.

1. int knowledge = 0, perfect = 50000, freetime = 0;
2. while (knowledge < perfect)
3. {
4. wakinghours = study;
5. freetime = 0;
6. knowledge++;
7. }

In other news my friend and I have secured our positions as RTIS Freshmen Student Association Representatives! There were three openings for our degree program but only he and I were elected to the positions. Sure there was only three people running and there was no way to lose but here is the kicker the third dude dropped out. Now I would like to say that this happened because my friend and I were so awesome that we scared him off but that’s not the truth. He told me that he didn’t think he would have the time to commit to SA, an honorable reason in my eyes.

Now of course what political campaign is complete without posters, and man did we have posters. 

Click to embiggen!

Of course the posted version has all the "vote for us" hoopla but I wanted a clean version to put on the internet. This wasn’t made by us but rather one of our BFA friends and man does she kick ass at Photoshop.

These posters gained a lot of momentum really quick and people started noticing us in the halls, which I have to say is pretty freakin’ awesome. People would come up to me and say hello or when I would meet somebody new they already knew my name and they always said it was because of these posters.

I asked almost all of the new people I met this week if it was good or bad that they knew me before I knew them, somebody retorted back with, “Hey if you have to ask you know it’s bad.” I just think they are jelly.

Unfortunately now is the time to be responsible and stop using this post as a procrastination tool and get my ass back to studying. 

This week was awesome. I started to see the side of DigiPen that involves staying well after class to get work done and I have to say I actually enjoy it. Sure we sit around talking about vectors and funny things Duba (CS100 Professor) does but we also get our work done. All that malarkey we heard at orientation about study groups turned out to not be malarkey. Go figure.

Outside of normal class shenanigans we had our first quiz this week in CS120 and I have to say it went better than expected. After finishing it, talking to other people about it, and face palming so hard I broke my forehead bone I think I did pretty well. Any points I miss on the quiz though will be made up through submission extra credit on this week’s assignment so I am not too worried.

So on to the awesome front. I got my nick name.

Most badass lion ever pretty much.

Soak it in ladies and gentlemen. I. Am. Mufasa.

Now I could sit here and make up this grand tale of how I am seen as a wise sage like peer of unmatchable kindness and love whom everybody looks up to, even the giraffe, but alas that is not how it happened.

Instead today in CS120 Lab one of my friends yelled out, “Mufasa!” and I turned to look. He gave me a dumb smile and said, “That’s it! That’s your nickname!” Next thing I know people are calling me Mufasa and I am even introducing myself as, “Hey my name is Samir, but you can just call me Mufasa!”

In other news I and my new super-awesome-happy-fun-time friend have decided to run for Student Association together. Our degree program is going to have 3 representatives for this year and we totally want to be two of those three.

To be placed in the running we had to get ten endorsements from our fellow students so in glorious Spinal Tap style that clearly wasn’t enough for us so our endorsements went up to eleven.

"Yeah we are so rockin' we just had to turn it up to eleven."

We are currently in the process of finishing up our ad campaign posters (which technically have to be two separate posters but we found a clever way around this problem) and once it is done I shall unleash it on the interwebs. Many tears of joy shall be shed because of its beauty.

So as I roll into the weekend I am going face first into a pile of studying and self-inflicted homework. Yeah it will be busy and dry but hey I can finally say something I never thought I would ever say, looking forward to class on Monday. 

There are a ton of things to write about but I am going to skip over a lot of them because if I didn’t this post would be just long enough for people to not want to read it. So I just want to touch on a few topics; my hopeful posting habits for the semester, my professors, and my first program.

So since the start of the semester at DigiPen I have been feeling out what my schedule will end up being like for the next few months. I can say with the utmost confidence that free time will be a precious commodity but this will hopefully not influence my planned posting habits. I want to be able to write one or two entries a week and they will range. I will probably end up talking about school a lot but I will sneak in the occasional post that somebody will actually want to read.

As far as talking about my classmates go I will only refer to them by their nicknames to ensure some level of privacy. Sure other DigiPen students will know who I am talking about but then again we are a small school and everybody (should) know everybody.  

Moving onto my next topic my professors, all I can say is holy crap. I will be honest I came to DigiPen with semi-low expectations for my professors, and I can gladly say that they completely obliterated my mental image of them. I have had two weeks of classes now and I have not had a single lecture that was boring, dry, or confusing. All the material has been presented to me in an organized fashion by a person who knows what they are doing.

On top of having intelligent professors they are also human. They actually give a crap about the students and will go above and beyond to help. The best part about my professors though is that all of them understand one important concept a lot of educators just seem to not pay very much attention to; they know the best way to teach us, is to entertain us.

All of the professors are like clowns!

Through the guidance of my super-awesome professors today I was able to do something I never thought I would ever do. Write and run a program from nothing in C and have it work. Now I know this doesn’t sound amazing but to me it is. I am a person who knows next to nothing about computer programming and how things work on the software level, so to be able to see my work in command prompt was an amazing feeling.

The program itself was not anything amazing it just ate some numbers and spat out a table but doing this simple exercise taught me so much. I was able to better understand a basic command like “printf” and “scanf.” Not to mention that getting things to align properly can be a pain in the ass. Along with that I also realized just how important it is to keep your code organized while working on it. Sure it was only eighteen lines long but I saw some people writing well over 30 lines of code to accomplish the same thing.

It does math... I think.

I would post a picture of my actual code but this assignment is still not due and I don’t want to go around posting the answers to school work all over the interwebs.

The weekend is finally here and I am happy to report I am going into it with a huge sense of accomplishment. I will probably end up spending a lot of it with my C programming book and my math notes instead of playing video games and having awesome parties (note: I don’t have awesome parties.)

Source: (Image) File:Scary clown.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scary_clown.jpg) by Graeme Maclean

This website (originally known as “Learning to Fly: The Stories and Opinions of Arukemos”) was actually the bastard child of my Twitter account @Arukemos (10 points if you follow me) and the result of me wanting to be on the EVE Blog Pack list back when I first got seriously into EVE Online, well that and it seemed like fun to have a blog dedicated to a video game I really enjoyed.

I eventually made it onto the list and in turn became the cats pajamas! After a few months though I went dark due to real life issues and eventually was bumped off the list (I was actually surprised how long it took to actually get bumped off.) When I came back to blogging about EVE I was extremely surprised at just how happy members of the #tweetfleet were to hear my angelic voice words again.

Over the past few months I have been super active on Twitter but this site lay dormant mostly because I swore off of video games until I got my life back on track so my EVE related blog kind of was starved for material. I tried to post as much as I could but I could only do so much as an outside observer.

Eventually I decided that I was going to end my old EVE blog and start a new site that will focus on myself as I go through college, get a job as a video game programmer, and beyond. Yes, it is a fancy way to say that this is now a personal blog.

So to those of you who are in the #tweetfleet who came here for EVE related posts I am sorry to say they will no longer be a frequent event here at Arukemos.com but that is not to say I won't post about EVE, which I will, because I freakin' love that game, unless they break it, Aurum, walking in space cabins, monocle.

Hurm do I want a new fleet of ships, or this?

The people in the #tweetfleet are some of the most awesome people I have ever come across online. Even though we are all cut throat when it comes to the game all of us share a genuine concern for each other. It really is an amazing group of people and the best part is that anybody can join, everybody is welcome with open arms, all you have to do to join is ask. 

It goes without saying my gratitude towards my old visitors (who I hope become regular readers of my new blog) is immeasurable. I honestly consider a lot of the EVE players I interact with as friends and I hope that I will continue to receive their love in the form of missiles and laser beams as I have in the past.  

For those of you who are coming here for my the EVE Online blog, "Learning to Fly" I regret to inform you that it no longer exists as it once did due to a few changes in my life that have nothing to do with the game. 

At the start of this year I had a life changing experience, it was rough, intense, horrifying, exhilarating, but most of all enlightening. Now I am not saying I was struck by some divine grace and am now one with the universe (even though that would be pretty cool) but instead I had a revelation about my life and what I want to do with it.

I will admit it, I was lost; I had no clear cut path and I lacked the motivation and I was very lackadaisical, and because of my nature I accomplished far less than a redwood did in the same amount of time.

Believe it or not this tree got a PhD in theoretical mathematics while I did nothing.

Over the past few months I have done nothing but focus on me, peeling back the layers that made me who I was and seeing what rot had infested my very essence. I was out of shape, disconnected with my family and friends, but most horrifying of all I lead myself to believe that I was doing nothing wrong.

2011 to me has not just been another year but rather the year that marks rebirth of the new me. I have lost a significant amount of weight (with no end in sight) and have become more conscious of my nutrition and fitness. I have started to change how I behave towards others, shedding the arrogance I once had and replacing it with humility. Most importantly though I have stopped lying to myself, admitting my mistakes and pitfalls and slowly I am starting to see that this hole I have dug myself into isn’t as beautiful as I once thought it was.

My hole was so deep Spartans would often kick Persian messengers into it.

It has been about half a year since I have turned my life around and I am rapidly approaching a very pivotal time in my life, college. Yes I am 23 and I am an incoming freshman in college but thankfully this is one of those, “better late than never” things.

So what is it exactly that I am trying to accomplish? Well, to put it simply I will be great and there is no stopping me. To elaborate a bit, I want to make video games, and I want everybody to know who made that game, and I want that game to define the industry in some way.

I know the road ahead of me is a road many have attempted to travel and have failed, skeletons lay in the gutters and blood stains the path. Every step I take from this point forward has to be strong, I will not waver in my commitment because I know, no, I have lived, what it is like to be unsure of your next step and I will not fall prey to it again.

So the next four years of my life are going to be my mad dash forward in an attempt to stand where I should have been standing if I didn’t waste so much time being a coward.

That is where this website comes into play. It is here to give myself personal accountability, for those times where nobody has me in check I can keep myself in check (well, me and the internet.) Yes, that means this is a glorified diary journal but it will also serve as a measurement of my progress. When I look back days, months, years into the past will I see what I had set out to accomplish? Only time will tell me and here goes my last shot of making my aspirations into my reality.