Good evening, fellow TGC forumites! I have returned, never to leave again!
I will now proceed to read through the >1000 posts in the various threads I'm subscribed to, and mark that folder in my email as
read (finally!).
First, some opening exclamations:
I'm still vice president??!
Yodaman Jer is BANNED??!
TheComet is BANN- oh well not such a surprise really...
jk hope you're back soon haha!
The Slayer is ALSO vice president??! We have TWO vice presidents??!
Second, I will explain my absence, then I will describe what exactly I have been up to, and finally I will continue with replies to every post in this thread since my last post on December 31st 2015, just before midnight.
So. I've been busy. At the time of my last post I believe I doing some casual seasonal work (where I've worked many years previously). That's probably the main reason for the lack of posts around that time. For some reason or other, the work continued past Christmas longer than expected. It was pretty uninteresting (and often somewhat unpleasant) work (although at that point I was in a different area than normal, doing the printing for sticker production), just standing for 7.5 hours in front of a printer, instructing it to print the correct jobs then cutting off the paper and feeding it into a cutter machine (which never wanted to work properly).
One day (around the 24th Jan, probably) one of the IT guys I knew and some furry-faced dude I didn't recognise came up to me while I was working and straight up asked if I'd be interested in a job in IT. You have to understand that from the first day I started working at that factory back in 2011 I wanted to work in their IT department. I love computers and sitting at a desk doing
anything would
have to be better than standing up and making mugs or Christmas decorations for 8 hours. I'd always tried to show that I wanted that job, and always was the first to volunteer to fix a computer or a barcode scanner that wasn't working (even though it was outside my job scope - the team leader at that time was a properly good boss). I think my first break was probably when I was offered a job doing the printing for the entire Gifts section.
Anyway, I was naturally pretty excited. I mean, I was definitely excited, but at the same time I hated working three days a week, and the prospect of working full time (as I assumed it would be) somewhat tempered my excitement. But since I couldn't sensibly turn down the offer (we all need to work), I eventually convinced myself it would be fine because I would be in an office all day.
Long story short, I've been working full time in IT since the 28th of January 2016. It's been amazing. Not the full-time working per se (which, I'll have you know, took me a long time to get used to, given I'd been homeschooled all my life and free to do what I wanted every day from about lunch time if I did my schoolwork fast enough), but having money and not having to worry about where my life was going quite so much. So that's why I've been away for so long. Getting full-time work changed my life so much I needed to take time off from everything else just to get adjusted to it. Now I'm very happy with where I am and I'm ready to come back to TGC and catch up on my old life.
Now on to what I've been up to. Well, I bought my first car (hooray!). It's a 2004 Holden Astra, manual, in black, with a dealer-fitted bodykit (not generally a massive fan of bodykits but this one looks good). It cost $3800 and I still haven't paid off the personal loan I got to buy it
What else... oh, I've taken up skateboarding! It's great fun. For years I've wanted to learn to skateboard, and when I got this job I realised I could just buy a skateboard and try it, so I did. Took me a long time to get used to riding around with other people watching me and seeing how crap I was. I never realised just how hard it is, when you first start skateboarding, to simply stay on the board! :S Well after several months of skating pretty much every day in my lunch break (at first just on footpaths because other people at the skatepark freaked me out too much), every day at lunchtime (unless it's raining) I leave work and go straight to the skatepark and just mess about on my board, and I can confidently ride on most surfaces (even rough, stick-covered footpaths), kick-turn at any height on quarterpipes and steep banks, drop in on short banks (although I have dropped in on a tiny quarterpipe, but I fell off too many times and decided to get more confident first) and I can I actually ollie, while moving at a decent speed, moderately reliably.
So... oh year, I've started learning to play the electric guitar! It's also very fun. I've played the accoustic guitar before but never really learned that well and could only do chords. So far I can kinda do the intro to Sweet Child of Mine...
Something else I've been doing is learning a tonne more web programming, since my job is basically managing the products and a lot of website setup for a few different brands. I can now easily write JS (incl jQuery), HTML and some PHP, though CSS is still confusing and stupid sometimes.
Oh of course! I haven't said yet... I own an HTC Vive!!
I bought one (as did my brother) brand new as soon as the orders went live. We woke up at 2.30am to do that!
It was hugely expensive, but very, very cool!
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And now, the replies.
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Quote: "Sea mints would probably taste awful, imagine the taste of minty squid in your mouth.
- Yodaman Jer, Jan 2016"
Dark Java Dude 64 wrote: "Over the past couple days, I have developed a basic instruction set of my own. Just got finished (roughly) drawing a block diagram for the processor:"
Now that looks cool!
TheComet wrote: "Also, if you think you can connect two diodes in parallel to "double the current", you are terribly mistaken. I will laugh at you as you watch the first diode explode, promptly followed by the second."
ROFL xD
@Randomness 128: Your Mega Drive raycasting is freaking amazing! That reminds me of something I saw a while back that I can't remember much about where someone was remaking Wolfenstein 3D for the Mega Drive.
Dark Java Dude 64 wrote: "I have finally graduated from high school. This calls for carrot!"
Noice, well done!
budokaiman wrote: "Doom looks pretty good. Anyone here played it yet?"
Certainly have! The singleplayer is surprisingly good!
Dark Java Dude 64 wrote: "Well, rather, a video of me stupidly spinning a cast aluminum disc up to 35,000 RPM until it disintegrates; the specific lodging of shrapnel is out of view."
Official reminder. EDIT: Oh right,
I'm blind 
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Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. That's good, though, I've been dreading having to go through the 1000+ messages and reply to all appropriate. I've actually thoroughly enjoyed reading all the posts in the PC. So many very interesting topics. I'm particularly interested in Randomness 128's Mega Drive projects. They're so cool.
Right now I'm super excited for my new i7 4790k to arrive
Hopefully it'll help run some of my VR games a bit more smoothly. Also very excited to get enough money to buy a brand new HTC 10 (in gold, obviously)
Hopefully I got the formatting right first go...
