Time Strategies

Time Strategies

Time management is really important to me. Like any college student normally does, I've got my finger in multiple pies. Media student by day, MMA fighter by night and Abra Kebabra kebab chef on weekends. Without a car of my own to get me from point A to point B and on weekends point C I have to take the bus or cycle to wherever I want to be which gives me exact times I need to be out of the house or i'm just not making it.

This may seem like a detriment to my time management abilities but I feel like it actually enhances them as I have no way of procrastinating. In first year I'd procrastinate all the time and leave myself with no time at all to do anything. However I train MMA six times a week and I can't do that if I have to do college work, this means that I am actually getting ahead on college work quite regularly which is a new and exciting thing for me.

Having multiple ventures with my time leaves clear blocks in my schedule where nothing is happening and they are invaluable they also provide a sort of deadline to me that isn't the actual deadline. E.G "if I don't have this video done by six then I can't make it to jiu jitsu tonight" this makes me work harder and faster because of this artificial deadline. Sometimes less is more when it comes to time and having less time is funnily enough making me more productive, pretty zany stuff.

It is still early days this year in college but so far my time management seems to be on point and hopefully it holds up over the coming months because I do not want to give up any hobbies in the name of education because that'd be pretty lame and I wouldn't have a legal way of beating people up anymore.



https://media.4rgos.it/i/Argos/7378261_R_Z001A?w=750&h=440&qlt=70

Technology

Class Tools

The class has some interesting technological tools and I'm both excited and intimidated by them. Will I be the master of them and know how to use them intuitively? Or will i struggle to get the basics? Only time will tell.

So far I am quite enjoying blogger, getting my thoughts out into the world is nice and it feels good to not write something that has to be super serious all the time, I can just put my personality into the world and see what happens. In my last blog post I made an analogy about Hell's Kitchen which is something I normally would not be able to do in a formal college essay. Blogger is also easy to use and understand so blogger gets a big thumbs up from me.

Unity is the other major piece of software I'll be using in the coming couple of weeks, I haven't tangled with unity personally but I have read some of the tutorials and it seems like it could be hard but it something I feel I am up for. I've played a couple games made on unity and I know how different they are so unity truly is a sandbox for aspiring and established game developers. I am excited to get into unity and see what I can come up with.

Blogger and unity are both new to me and from where I am standing at the moment they both serve completely different purposes but accomplish a similar goal, they both allow me to be myself and create something that I can look back on in the future and hopefully be proud of. Or perhaps they will both result in things I look back on and cringe at how terrible they are, only time will tell and hopefully it is the former as opposed to the latter.



https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj2t92mjvfkAhVlThUIHc_LDfQQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Funity.com%2F&psig=AOvVaw19piyVZMeODjsBpMVpvXe4&ust=1569883603363706

Assignments

Assignments

At the time of writing this I haven't done too much strenuous work but from what I can tell it looks like making a good, functioning game could be quite difficult but I'm looking forward to a challenge. The main task ahead of me is creating a game and from looking at the tutorials it looks like quite a lot can go into making a game.I spoke to a friend of mine who has completed a game in unity before and he said that he had a very big idea and it didn't work out too well so I feel like I will need to keep my idea small. I need to have a simple idea and execute it well.

Making a game in unity can be like an episode of Hell's kitchen, one guy goes big and tries to use molecular gastronomy to create the world's first sushi flavoured ice cream then the guys in the hazmat suits bring it out and Gordon says "it's ambitious but bad" then the other contestant makes a roast chicken and Gordon loses his mind. A simple idea for a game executed well will always beat an overly ambitious massive game because it does it's job well.

So I don't have an exact idea of what game I'd like to make but I feel like the ideas are coming, I can take some inspiration from the games I play and condense it down to a simple, fun game. Perhaps some sort of silly combat game or maybe a game driven more by exploration and story, I'll see how I fair with unity. If I am hopeless with unity then I may need to make some new moves but if I'm unity rain man then I'm going to shoot and make some million dollar moves, we'll just have to wait and see.

Liam's Growth Mindset

My mindset on growth by Liam Jennings.

Growth is incredibly important in my opinion growth is necessary in all aspects of life. Growth can be achieved through learning, as you progress through college if you don't grow then you will completely fall behind, put a first year student in a first year class and they will be fine, put a first year student in a third year class and they will almost definitely fail because they have not had the first couple years to grow. I had to repeat a semester in first year because of dumb mistakes I made and then I passed everything easily on the second pass and will hopefully do the same in coming years because I believe I have grown as a person and a media student.

Growth is important outside college too. You can grow as a person, a friend, a father or whatever else you want. Growth is important to me outside college in my MMA training. If I don't grow and improve every day then I'm going to get beat up. That's what drives me to do things I don't want to do such as go to training with an injury, do a college project I don't want to do or read a book when I'd rather play video games. Growth is really important in every aspect of life for me and I strive for it in every field.



image from https://optimiseandgrowonline.com.

Introduction to Liam

Introduction by Liam Jennings

In this blog post I'm going to detail a bunch of stuff about myself and it's going to be really cool and fun.

The basic details are: My name is Liam Jennings, I am 20 years old, I am a second year student in creative digital media in ITB/TU Dublin. I'm about 6 feet tall and blondish. I also work part time in an Abra Kebabra but it's only 4 hours a week so it doesn't really have any effect on my schedule. Also fun fact, despite getting free food, I have never eaten anything from Abra Kebabra, the food looks really gross and greasy so it's a no from me.

 I'm a huge MMA fan and train MMA 6 times a week, assuming I didn't have to take a day off to do college work or something. when I am not in college or doing college work I am normally watching or training MMA. I train Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, K1, wrestling and MMA. I only started training all of these this year but I hope to compete in all of these at some point starting with either Muay Thai or K1 (kickboxing). After competing in those for a while I hope to transition and fight bare-shin kickboxing fights and MMA with the eventual goal of going pro, hopefully in MMA because there is not much money in pro kickboxing and your body gets absolutely destroyed by it, still fun though.

Other than college and MMA I don't really have much time for anything else but I do normally find some time to play some video games, Borderlands, Skyrim, Minecraft, dark souls and the WWE games are the main ones. The outlier there is probably the WWE games, they are so stupid that they are perfect. I just play online with custom characters with friends, Thanos Vs Green Goblin Vs Yoda Vs White Goodman (bad guy from Dodgeball) Vs Steve Urkel Vs Yugi Moto is a typical match, so stupid but so good simultaneously.

That's pretty much it, this time in a few years catch me doing digital media or in the UFCor maybe I'll use my culinary expertise to do something else. That's basically it. Also my shoulders are pretty flexible.



Picture taken from SBG Tallaght Facebook, still not sure if that's how you credit an image, gonna ask about it soon.

Workshop 01

Workshop review

In our workshop we were tasked with explaining exactly how traffic lights function. This initially seemed like a simple task however after forming groups and having to explain how they work in a clear manner. My first thought was just have them all take turns being green while the others remain red but then we discovered we could have 2 opposing lanes green at the same time to improve traffic flow. At the end we remembered that we forgot to make the lights turn orange ever. such a simple yet important thing that was simply overlooked.

What I learned from this is that the perspective of others on something very simple can change how I look at things. I learned that simple tasks can be far more difficult than they may seem initially. This taught me that thinking before any simple task could help me far more than I may have thought. If I thought about the traffic lights for just another minute or two longer than I did then I may have remembered that the orange light is just as important as the red and green are.

Overall the workshop was brilliant in its simplicity, just back from summer, early in the morning I wouldn't have been ready for anything advanced so a simple traffic light conundrum was just simple enough to get the brain working and to teach me a little bit about how to communicate ideas and thoughts with a team, a skill that will certainly come in useful in the coming months.

Image credit goes to the good people of 123RF.com

Favourite game

My favourite game of all time is Dark Souls. Dark souls is an open world RPG developed by a japanese company named From Software. It is a spiritual successor to Demon souls which set the stage for Dark souls.

Dark souls is renown for its difficulty  which creates a unique dynamic when traversing the world. Players will often die repeatedly before making it to the next checkpoint (known as bonfires) however they will do slightly better every time which creates a feeling of accomplishment when making any progress.

Dark souls is also known for its unique storytelling. Players will often complete the whole game and have no idea what has taken place, players need to read clues in the landscape and item descriptions to piece together the lore of the world which is something I have never seen before or since. It allows players to create their own story which leads to theories which range from thought provoking to completely ridiculous.

The level design is some of the best I have ever seen, the world is full of short cuts you can unlock upon completing and area or defeating a boss, all of which reveal that the world folds in on itself and you haven't gone as far as you thought. The world is huge but is put into such a tiny space because the level designers were able to make it all fit together perfectly, this is something I wish more developers would implement.

The range of classes in dark souls is quite interesting. The player can utilize any number of weapons and spells in order to play the game the way they want to, some examples are a mage which shoots magic from a distance while wearing light armour, a knight with a big sword and heavy armour or simply the surprisingly popular naked man with a big stick.

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