Newsletter

This is my contribution to the family newsletter:

I have had a busy but happy year. When it began, I was in the second semester of my junior year. Some of the classes I took were interesting, but all were challenging, with some beyond my ability to really keep afloat. At the start of the semester, I wrote a comedy skit about aliens, and directed it as part of a show called Evening of Scenes. It was a lot of work, but well worth it. Later in the semester, I accepted the position of Lighting Designer for a student rendition of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral going up in the Lydia Mendelssohn. For a week, I had no time to do my homework, but despite the stress, it was also well worth it. I took great pleasure in what I did.

For the summer, I took an internship with Amazon.com. They flew me out to Seattle, set me up in a downtown apartment, and paid me handsomely. Amazon.com is a nice place to work, and I also fell in with a very pleasant circle of friends, made forays in indoor rock climbing, and visited several sites of natural beauty. Amazon made me an offer of full-time employment in October, which I have accepted. I will be moving out to Seattle again in June, this time with no set plans for moving away. I am looking forward to it; even seeing my map of Seattle makes me happy.

Meanwhile in my penultimate semester at the University, I took a game development class. Thanks to it, I spent many long hours in the lab, but the results were worthwhile. I made a game called Potionworks which combined the best elements, (or perhaps the worst), of Tetris and Pipedream, for those who have heard of those games. After that, I made a fully textual adventure game, built around the story of a young farmer trying to marry a princess of the Faery. For a final project, my group made a strategy game we called Earthdust, which the Professor was very impressed with. If you want to take a look, it and all the other final projects by my class are available online.

You can also read the whole newsletter, if you're curious about the rest of my family.