good morning! summer's over, it's canceled. i'm so sad now. but don't worry, because you guys are gonna see me spiral into depression again! stay tuned for more updates on that. anyways, school. it's back. no one asked for it to be back, but here it is anyway. and i guess the big question is- how was my first day? boring. at least my schedule's a lot better this year. no more journalism wasting space, no more honors chem to stress me out, no more... paschal mystery?? well, we're learning about sacraments now, so i guess there's that.
my mom was
nagging me to actually try and be "excited" for school this year, despite me constantly telling her that i'm just... not. even with a good schedule and friends this time around, i still feel very "meh" overall. as i expected, my mood has soured a little and i'm definitely more tired than usual. sadly, there's not much George 1.5 progress this month, but i have been working on another game. not a new one, but it's basically a remake at this point. more news on that soon. but for now, i guess i might as well tell you what my classes are this time around. i probably did this last year, but we'll just do it again!
first up is Theater Arts, which i really wish i'd taken this last year, but i wasn't into this kinda thing when it started. as for work? there is none! unless you count having to play games that loosely tie into theater-like themes. i mean, hey, i appreciate the break from writing useless religion notes. speaking of religion, next up is Honors US History. a pretty standard history class, and the teacher is only a
slight downgrade from the former, which definitely exceeds my expectations. unfortunately, he recently discovered how to put GIFs in a powerpoint, which will make lectures so much more enjoyable.
after that is Algebra II, which is literally just a re-hash of Algebra I but a bit faster. i'm not complaining, unlike my friend taking AP PreCalc. the teacher is pretty chill, although he seems like the guy who gets
pissed when he's angry, so i hope none of the guys in the back tick him off. then comes Web Design, the first of my back-to-back computer science classes. the class itself is fine enough (i already know the basics), but the teacher has a
thick chinese accent, making it hard to understand her sometimes. not much anyone can do about it, but some of the kids can be pretty rude about it. and half of them seem like they didn't actually want the class, but had no choice.
luckily, AP Computer Science Principles is not only a mouthful, but has 12 students that are somewhat engaged in the class! the tradeoff is that a few (including me) tend to fall asleep. i dunno, something about that teacher's lectures is just so... tedious. i and multiple others agree that she doesn't seem very fit to be a teacher. nothing against her, but she seems so scatterbrained and unfocused that it's hard to pay attention. her assignments are fine, but she has a noticeable tendency to lose track of them. and all of that was in just two weeks!
after that is the only real dud in my schedule, and it just so happens to be Theology, or 'Sacraments' as they call it. they change the name every year (some real knee-slappers include Christ Mission and Christian Morality), yet it's the same, repetitive content, just regurgitated in a different order. not to mention the teacher is the most uninteresting, standoffish person i've met. she didn't even freaking introduce herself on the first day of class! at least tell what your damn name is before asking me to list seven fun facts about the Sacraments. this is probably why no one on this planet knows how to pronounce that teacher's name. good going.
so if you couldn't tell, i don't like religion class. to be honest, i don't really like religion as a whole. it just feels like an extra long chore you have to do, and for what? i really just don't see the value in it. this one statement i found perfectly sums it up- i don't need a reason to not believe, i need a reason to believe. so then why the hell am i going to a Catholic school if i barely give a damn about the religion it's based on? well, public schools suck. my dad's a teacher at a public high school himself, and he frequently expresses his grievances with the job. i've been to Catholic schools and learned about its in's and out's all my life, yet it never stuck with me.
my family has Catholicism deep in its roots, but my parents and i rarely go to Mass or anything of the sort. recently, i've told my mom how i don't feel connected to my faith at all. she seemed really confused and even slightly upset, probably since she hoped i'd actually care because of my frequent exposure to it. yeah, i'm definitely turning atheist the second i graduate from high school. i don't need any kind of god to explain why we're here, and i don't see the benefit of getting on your hands and knees and "talking" to some guy you don't even know to ask him to cure your depression. personally, i don't believe in the whole "religion and science actually compliment each other" spiel, just seems like a lame excuse to be teaching religion to me.
maybe i just got unlucky and had the crappiest Theology classes, but i don't see a reason to believe. i'm fine the way i am, adding faith to the mix would just add unnecessary steps to life. and i know it's incredibly weird to just bring this all up out of the blue, but i've given it a lot of thought in the past couple weeks. despite all that, my mom still wants me to baptize my kids, which i won't say no to. i'll let them believe in whatever they want to believe in, but no cults. oh yeah, i forgot about English III. it exists.
even though i have infinitely more friends in some of my classes now, i still rarely talk to them. hell, they could
sit down right BEHIND me and it'd take me an entire semester to actually engage in conversation. i do know these people, right? well, i certainly do
know them, but i haven't exactly kept in contact very much. after my trip to Europe, i was basically a corpse until school started up again, and even now i'm still not talking to anyone. but even with all that, i'm still auditioning for the fall production again. will i make more friends or lose the ones i already made? find out next month!
i didn't always have this problem. back in like, second grade, i was great at making friends! although, making friends was waaaay easier as a kid. you just walked up to them and two seconds later, you were playing tag with three other random kids. nowadays, i don't do that. and kids don't play tag anymore. problem is i don't talk to
anyone, and i'm sure some have written me off as a dick for not talking to them more often. even online, it's the exact same thing. do you know how many students follow me on Instagram? 45. how many did i ask to follow myself? 0. every so often, some kid i hardly know will request to follow me, and i'm like "yeah, sure" and follow back.
maybe i have some undiagnosed condition or something. something that prevents me from having any sort of social interactions. one of these days, i'm gonna leak my blog to the whole school, saying "i'm alone and somewhat depressed, feel sorry for me". i guess that's basically what i'm doing now to the four people who read these things (hi!). and yes, it is absolutely my fault for not having many friends, because i don't put in the effort to make more. i'm always talking about following more neocities sites or joining more discord servers, but i have to really achieve that.
my biggest worry going into september is getting into the fall production and turning into a sad sack of sh*t again. it's what happened last year with the musical, at least for most of it. i can't bear another year of missed opportunities and regret, and i don't want to go back to the person i was back in freshman year. if i keep letting my friendships die out, i'm headed right back to where i was two years ago. but i cannot bring myself to initiate or even greet anyone at all. sometimes i feel like i'm actively
avoiding others around me, even those i know pretty well. so maybe i am a bit of a dick.
but hey, other than that, school's been the same as it's always been. now it's time for the part of the blog post where i talk about my nonexistent games and
big ideas for the future. first up is Sid's Adventure, which semi-recently got a final update to both the Scratch and itch.io versions. to briefly summarize what i wrote in its devlog, the update acts as a sort of "farewell" to the game, since i don't plan to come back to it until George 1.5 has finished. i truly love Sid's Adventure and all its stupid characters, and it'll be very fun to come back and breathe new life into those silly shapes.
as for the silly triangle, he's definitely been seeing a lot more updates as of recent. if you check out the George Series channel on my discord, you'll find a decent amount of little updates i made over summer. stuff like a time/ranking system, new cutscenes, water physics, revamped text engine, etc. but you'll notice that updates took a screeching halt early into August. that's because i started work on a "new" project- a remaster of a collection of remasters. that's right, i'm updating
LG's Remastered Collection! uncommonly known as the game nobody talks about, the current release of this game is rather sh*t. blantantly unfinished games, boring gameplay, lack of achievements or even a damn saving system, there's no reason to play the game as of writing this.
but the next update (aka 'The Big Patch') fixes all of these issues and more. and to prove i'm putting in actual effort this time around, i'll tell you right now that v1.1 more than
doubles the asset count of the base game. it's a shame the project released in the state it did, since those games are actually quite fun to play now. and as a bonus- i might throw in some extra remasters for unlock all the achievements. but that's a story for a future devlog, more news on that soon.
i've actually been a bit more active on Scratch these past couple weeks, releasing a small
art dump and even a
stupid animation/art request thing. nothing groundbreaking, but i've released literally
nothing this year, so i'll take any chance to add to that empty list. a part of me misses making animations, but a certain project of mine will finally give me the chance to come back to that (hint hint).
last off is Labyrinths II, which has yet to receive its next alpha, unfortunately. i
would be working on it during school freetime, but those stupid guys in the IT department blocked the ENTIRETY of Dashnet on the network. you couldn't just stop at Cookie Clicker, could you? blocking my creative passion but not even allowing us to get a single adblocker on the wasteland that is the internet. eh, i'll come back to properly sometime. but the Remastered Collection has been chewing up much of time, and i'm feeling a bit drained right now. but i don't wanna cut any corners, lord knows i've done that plenty of times before.
i suppose that's it for this blog post. not a very memorable one, but i gotta write down
something this month.
see you all next month for a theater update, hopefully.
geometry dash addiction can't stop and probably won't in the near future
