If you havent yet looked through the special achievement awards section yet, Ill save you the trouble: RDR won almost every category it was entered in, including Best Story, Best Writing/Dialogue, Best Voice Acting, Best Ending and Best New Character. The people, on the other hand, have spoken out and have named their own winners:

Best Story: ME2

Best Writing/Dialogue: ME2

Best Voice Acting: ME2

Best Ending: RDR

Best New Character: RDR

RDR also won a few "less important" awards such as Best Atmosphere, Best Original Music, and Most Improved Sequel. I dont know if Rockstar payed off Gamespot or what, but almost every comment under each award RDR wins expresses an utter disbelief in the huge bias Gamespot has towards "GTA IV set in the wild west". Personally I dont see any way that RDR could win Best Story or Best Writing/Dialogue over Mass Effect 2, and I think Mordon Solus alone should win Best Voice acting for ME2 as well.

The only reason I can see Gamespot giving so many of these "minor" awards to RDR is to set the stage for them to give GOTY to someone else *cough cough Mass Effect 2 cough* without an uproar from the Read Dead fanboys. Still, Gamespot should treat each award as its own independent event instead of having a bias for or against a certain game.

...but ill just hand it in on thursday. MY bad marky mark.

So today my professor just posted the grades for our differential equations midterm, and I did very VERY poorly. I'm fairly confident that there must be some kind of mistake, as I'm confident I got every question right except for 1 or 2, and with partial credit the lowest possible grade I could have reasonably gotten was still 20% higher than what I got. Idk, the midterm is only worth 15% of the final grade, but I would prefer to get my grade "correct", assuming I did as well as I thought I did.

Well my stats professor decided that it's ok to have 2 problem sets due this week because we didnt have one due last week. While that logic is questionable already, I forgot to mention that the reason that we didnt have one due last week was that we had a midterm instead. So now I have 40+ problems due this week (20 due Tuesday, 20 due Friday), which is gonna take me probably 8-10 hours to do not because the problems are difficult, but because he demands that we follow his archaic process for every problem:

Step 1:
Rewrite the problem in your own words.

Step 2:

Define any and all variables that you're going to use.

Step 3:
State what is given by the problem

Step 4:

List any and all mathematical relationships you think might be useful in solving the problem.

Step 5:

Solve the problem using the correct probability expressions from step 4.

At least I have a buddy to do the problems with, but we couldnt stick to our usual routine of interspercing rounds of Halo: Reach or SSBB every half dozen or so problems because he has a midterm on Tuesday that he has to study for.

The moral of the story is that whining about how much work you have doesnt make you have any less, but it does make you feel a little better about it.

So today was pretty good, but could have been better (mostly how it ended).

***This is the full story, feel free to skip ahead to the next starred area for the "moral"***

I had a differential equations test that I think I did pretty well in, especially considering how it could have gone much worse. I'd like to get an A in the course, but usually I'm deficient with the proofs aspect of the course, which is about 20% of the work. On the test I lucked out and the proof was one that I had gone over the night before, but I messed up on at least one other problem anyway.

My friend said that he was gonna start drinking later that night and go to a comedy show after, so I waited until an appropriate time to contact him and swung by for a bit, but nothing was really going on. A bunch of his friends were there too, but his friends are kinda weird in their composition - he's friends with a couple of guys who are pretty chill that I really like, but then the rest of his friends are whiney losers and girls that are average at best. His girlfriend was also visiting for the weekend. I really wanted to get drunk after my two back to back math midterms (statistics and the differential equations I already mentioned) and he said they were gonna start drinking after the comedy show, so I told him to text me when they got out and I left there and went over to my friends at one of the frats that I usually go to on the weekends. I had a few drinks and played a few rounds of original smash bros with some of his frat brothers, which was surprisingly fun (smash is usually fun, but i think his friends were aleady drunk which made hanging out a lot easier). After a bit I started to head back to the first friend's but they werent back yet, but I was already a little buzzed so I wandered around. Somehow I found a piano and started to teach myself the theme song to Halo 3, which was surprisingly entertaining. Then I headed back, assuming my friend would be back by now.

I called him and he let me inside. A handful of his/my friends were there, as well as his girlfriend and some other, for lack of a better word, fodder. I was expecting some drinking but nothing was really going on. They were talking about people from their high school (him, his girlfriend and one of the kids all went to the same one), then eventually his girlfriend suggested some SSBB. I was pissed off that I wasnt gonna get wasted so I decided to take it out on her (in game) when she berated me for picking pikachu (when she was Ike). I crushed her and my two other friends in a FFA - i think i went 9/2 and won with 3 lives left. We played a second game where I let them pick my character, so I played as Diddy Kong against Ike (again), Dedede and Rob, and I was too buzzed to finesse my way around the larger characters so I came in second. They decided to call it a night early, so I walked home from there, still pissed at the drinking that never happened.

***end long story***

Long story short, I wanted to get wasted after a tough week, and now I'm sitting here with a rapidly fading buzz because my friend is friends with losers. Not to say that people who dont want to drink are losers, just that these people are. I dont think his girlfriend likes me, but I really couldnt care less. He cheats on her anyway when he gets really drunk, and I'm not gonna take the side of some "random" **** over someone who's rapidly becoming one of my better friends.

On an unrelated note, I got a small self esteem boost when I got home. One of my good friends, who's drop dead gorgeous, apparently tried to facebook search me but typed my name in her status instead. I'm not necessarily saying it means she's interested in me, but it's nice to know that she was thinking about me, especially since I havent seen her in a few weeks.

So ive been trying to push myself to write for a while, but ever since i got to school I havent been able to work on my pet project. I guess I perceive it as work instead of something recreational, and since I now have other, more time sensitive work to deal with I dont want to spend my precious free time on something that feels like more work. I'll try to push out a bit tonight just to get the ball rolling again, but it's hard because I know part of the reason I havent been writing is that I wasnt really sure where I was planning on going from where I left off, and it's also a difficult scene to write about.

In more real world news, I lost some respect for a friend the other day. Turns out hes been selling his extra painkillers (or at least I hope they're his, it would be much worse if he bought/stole them), which is, well...disappointing. I considered him somewhat a kindred spirit in the way we shared a lot of views that arent necessarily mainstream, but now I feel as though I have to reevaluate both our friendship and my ability to read people.

On the lighter side, I have a test wednesday, and my friend told me we only had to read a lil over a hundred pages in our macroeconomics textbook to prepare, but it turns out it's a little more than that... it's more in the range of 175. I'll just be skimming it anyway, but it's kinda annoying having to do more work than you thought you had to.

Oh, and I have no idea why I chose that title.

...like no one ever was...

to catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause.

I will travel across the land, searching far and wide,

each pokemon to understand the power that's inside.

I remember waking up at 7AM on school days to watch pokemon reruns on Kids WB. Great stuff, looking back the plots are so formulaic it's almost painful to watch...that is, if it wasnt pokemon.

you never really appreciate something until it's gone, especially sleep (and sanity, but that's a topic for another day).

So im gonna try to salvage however many hours of the night that are left. night

Ive got to manage my time well tomorrow to get all my work done AND go to my friend's birthday dinner/party. Part of managing my time means going to bed instead of writing a long post.

G'night.

...and I wasnt that hungry so I just ate a sandwich. Today was kinda boring because I slept in and just played Modern Warfare 2 most of the afternoon till dinner. Then I met up with some girl friends (not girlfriends heh) on the street on the way to dinner and they bought some drinks to bring back and then hung out with me while I ate, which was nice because they've been too busy to hang out with me recently. Then we went back to their house (since they live in a house, not a dorm) and we mixed the drinks for our friend's birthday party on monday. They invited me to a pre-party dinner on the monday that I didnt know about already (since they didnt want to just put that out there on the facebook invitation, since it's more private/intimate), which was also nice just because it's always nice to have the strength of a friendship reaffirmed if it ever gets put into question, and since I'm moderately paranoid I always question things like that anyway.

So I'm playing Modern Warfare 2 again, there are still a lot of hackers but it's still pretty fun. I'm still a wicked sniper, though I think ive lost some accuracy with the regular assault rifle (but I think it's just my mousepad). There was a concert today that I bought a ticket for, but I didnt feel like going out to pick it up so I didn't end up going. There was also a party that I was gonna go to, but then I didn't feel like going so I stayed in tonight, which I think is fair since ive been out with friends pretty much every friday and saturday so far this semester.

On a semi-related note, I really need a girlfriend, and I'm too shy to go out and "get" someone and too oblivious to know if/when someone's trying to "get" me. Well we'll see what happens I guess, the year is still young.