We’re about two months late, but it’s finally the start of the school year.

The semester’s been delayed repeatedly because of… well, yknow, the war going on, with the hope that maybe it would somehow end, or at the very least we’d have less people being enlisted and sent to gaza. That turned out to be the opposite of the case, with about 50% of the people in my year currently being forced to be in uniform, and despite that the school year must start at some point. Not sure how I feel about that frankly - we’re screwing over a lot of people - but hey, I also have a life to life and get on with, and the sooner I finish this degree the sooner I can get a plane ticket to literally anywhere else with a decent game dev job.

I’ve spent this extra time off… productively, I’d say. It feels wrong to say, probably because of the standards imposed on me when I grew up to either get 100 or get 0, but I’m happy with what I did this far: I’ve been going to the gym somewhat regularly and no longer look like a science class skeleton, I’ve read two books on the practice of game design¹, I’ve made a cute little board game² and playtested it with friends, I got into and out of a relationship… Not doing so bad, gotta say.

My main concern is if I’ll manage the onslaught of classes this year. I had to pick a lot of optional classes, and ended up frontloading the first semester with a lot of courses at once. Hopefully I’ll manage to balance all of that along with my job while also not breaking down into a nervous mess, but who can say.

The more I look to the future the more I stress myself out, so better just plan the next week ahead and just keep doing that until I’ve reached my goal.

So, goals for next week:

• Figure out whether to get an omg.lol domain. It looks really cool and is very affordable, but the concern is whether I’ll actually end up using it. I’ll ask some friends and decide on that.

• Make a territory-control board game prototype. It’s my current game dev exercise, and I realized I don’t really have too much knowledge of this genre, so I’m planning to go to a board game store and just play a bunch of shit they have to get inspiration. Hoping for the best.

• Read more Sherlock Holmes. I keep putting it off.

• Survive the first week back in uni.

Let’s hope for the best.