It's been so long since you and I had a nice chat. I feel like you've changed before my very eyes. No, no, it's a compliment -- no need to shield your face. So, hey... How's it been going? Things going good? Yeah, well, I suppose they would be good now that you're seeing someone else. I can't believe you'd ever do that to me! You tore my heart out, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it with those hideous steel-toed boots you're always goin' on about. -- What's that? You want to know... How I am still alive without a heart? Oh... Uh...

Yeah, so it actually has been a decent amount of time since I wrote a nice, real entry up on this here site. Everything else lately has just been all business, stories, and games. There just hasn't been time in between writing, gaming, watching TV and movies, and exercising to really have any us time. Thankfully, or not depending on your viewpoint, things are settling back into their school-time routine:

• Waking up and showering.
• FinishingStarting homework due later that day.
• Class.
• Catching up on one or two episodes of 24, Related, Gilmore Girls, Scrubs, House, The Shield, Lost, Smallville, The O.C., The Office, or Battlestar Galactica. And, currently, Arrested Development.
• Go run a nice 5k on the track behind the local gym, then lift depending on whether or not my day's allotted masochistic tendencies have been used up or not.
• A dull, boring Subway sammich. Or chips and salsa from a local Mexican place. Or cereal of some assortment. Cooking is so overrated.
• Work on homework for the following day.
• Play whatever the game of the week is, write a new site entry, or read whatever the book of the week is.
• Play with kitty and then smeep. Rinse and repeat.

Word on the street is that all blogs are just about the day-to-day happenings of their authors. I've never done this before... Nor will I ever again. Though, yeah, that's pretty much the general weekday schedule. It's dull, but it works for getting things done while not remaining completely bored. The running and writing, in particular, are fun. With the exception of the recent vacation, I think I've managed to run almost every day (with the exception of three or four days) since January 10th. It's been kind of a nice little daily goal to maintain.

Quick entertainment bit. One of my friends recently praised Arrested Development to the point where I felt obligated to watch it. Before actually giving the show a fair shake all I had seen were the commercials that aired on Fox during the shows I actually enjoyed. All I could determine was that the show looked stupid; not even the continual praise of every person I came in contact with could usher me into a position of legitimate interest. Eventually, though, I caved, and have since watched the first season in its entirety. I'm almost done with the second season as well. It truly is one of the best comedy shows I have ever seen. It's especially nice to see a comedy that isn't really based on punch lines so much as it on its characters and the situations that they end up in. Even the show's narrator (voiced by Ron Howard, which surprised me) has a lot of very well-timed humorous lines. The most laughs I get from the show all revolve around the very dryly-spoken sarcasm of the main character, played by Jason Bateman. His reactions simply make the show for me.

Also, Walk the Line is simply amazing. I was a Johnny Cash fan to begin with, but this movie even surpassed the fairly high expectations I had for it. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon both came through with spectacular performances; they also sang remarkably close to Johnny and June Carter Cash. A great movie that I'm looking forward to rewatching as soon as I get the opportunity.

In case you missed it, or you're reading this from another source, I made my around to upgrading and adding to some of the features of Polycat.net. Of the upgrades I redid some simple site code to be a bitter more reliable, created a simple "stats" page, and some other administration tools for myself. My pride and joy of the upgrades was the creation of a fiction page where I posted all of my fictional stories that I had written in the last year or so in DOC, PDF, and HTML forms. So go check it out if that's your thing. I'm also starting to redo some of the entry categories to better reflect the nature of each entry; eventually, I will work on a main page filter so that people that only come to the site for certain types of articles can filter out the unwanted riff-raff type of entries. I had planned to upgrade the Gallery to Gallery 2.0, but after going through about five-six hours of effort in upgrading and going through any site entries written in the last month (... there are a lot) to cohere with the ridiculous linking system I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. The new Gallery seemed to suffer from a major case of feature bloat, which isn't an issue on its own until I realized they lost a lot of the simplicity and ease-of-use which attracted me to the system in the first place. Oh well.

In closing, I'd like to say that I'm becoming all sorts of reflective in my old age (I turn 21 on Saturday, March 11). I've been running Polycat.net for a bit more than three years now and it's been a whole lot of fun. I've written a fairly extensive collection of blogjournal entries -- some of which I'd prefer to be wiped off the face of the earth (though I've never gone back and deleted an entry). I've gone from 3D programming author, to gaming journalist, to aerospace engineering programmer (not as fancy as it sounds), to English/Creative Writing major (formerly a Computer Science Engineer) slowly approaching on my senior year here at U of M. It's been a fun and crazy time since I started this site at home in early spring of 2003 (I think?) and one of the coolest things is seeing some of the people that have stuck with me the whole way, and then some of the really cool people I've met throughout the time. It's only been three years, sure, but when you're this young it still seems like a decent chunk of time. So, whether you're reading this from my site, JoeUser, or my GDNet journal: thanks for all the support, fun, and awesomeness. I probably won't ever stop doing this kind of thing for any long-term span of time... Well, save for something like a Cease and Desist order. But, even then...

I'll probably write an even more sappy entry on my actual birthday, but this sounded fun for tonight.