I'm alive!

[hmpf]

And not a student anymore!

Well, officially still a student, I guess. But, I'm done. As of today. Many, many things went horribly, horribly wrong. I lost my nerve before the written exams. I got really sick for several weeks before the oral exams - lie-in-bed, cough-up-a-lung sick. I forgot to prepare for one half of one of my oral exams. (Yes, completely. As in: you enter the room and the prof says, 'We have two topics...', and you go, '... Wait, what?' My powers of repression are obviously prodigious. Seriously, anybody here ever *forgot* to prepare for an exam? I think that kind of puts me in a league of my own...)

But. Despite all that crap, it went better, way, way better than expected - all of it. Even the exam I forgot to prepare for went well (2-, for you Germans) - it probably helped that the topic I hadn't prepared for was one I'd done a heap of papers on over the years, so I still had some general idea of the main points. The thesis got a 1.0, which is basically as good as it gets.

The final average, for those who care (and know the German grading system), is a 1.4. I was a bit shocked to hear that, mainly because apparently I can't do even basic maths anymore - four of the five components of the final grade have been known to me since last week, but I must have added them up wrong, because I thought the range of possibility extended from 1.7 through 1.5. Good thing I'm not studying maths!

***

In other, more important news: I'm building a computer game.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration, really. I'm not building much myself, I'm just applying graphics (not made by myself) via an editor (also not made by myself) - but I hope I'm applying them in an aesthetically pleasing, and perhaps at least occasionally somewhat original way.

I downloaded this game, Knytt Stories, a few months ago. It's a platformer, a genre I'm not usually fond of, because I have the reflexes of a geriatric sloth, but I needed something to take my mind off uni for at least twenty minutes or so per day while I stayed at my parents' - something that didn't require an internet connection. So, eventually, I actually tried playing this game that had been sitting on my disk for a while, and liked it quite a bit. Unlike many platformers, it focused less on evading Death by Spikes or Death by Monsters or whatever, and more on exploring a fairly large and frequently quite pretty world. (Pretty in a 2D, stylised way.)

So, for a while Knytt Stories and its predecessor, Knytt, kept me entertained. But they're not that large, and sooner than I liked I had I finished them. Looking for something similar on one of my increasingly rare online forays I found user-made levels for Knytt Stories, and downloaded a few of those. But many of those are *really* short, and a lot are impossibly difficult and therefore do not appeal to sloth-like me, so that was a limited source of relaxation. So eventually, in between studying, I started playing around with the editor that Nifflas, the creator of the game, has generously included in the download package... and it turned out to be one of the greatest toys I've ever been given.

I'll post some images soon, when I'm back home with a normal internet connection (Friday, probably.)

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