LAST EDITED ON Oct-29-13 AT 09:13 PM (EDT)
 
I stumbled across one of my notebooks from WPI in the fall of 1991 today. It's... a peculiar experience. For one thing, though I have no memory of it now, it appears that I didn't keep separate notebooks for each class I was taking, but rather took notes in whatever one I happened to be carrying for whichever class I was in at the time. This notebook has notes in it that are obviously calculus, others are from FORTRAN class, still others clearly relate to the "Science and Scientists in Modern Literature" class I took, and yet still more appear to be from Professor Parkinson's history-of-military-technology class. One of those pages, in particular, contains a diagram labeled "HOW TO MAKE A FHUGE CANNON", and shows, well, how you make a fhuge cannon, which can only have been covered in Parkinson's class.

Worse still from an organizational standpoint, scattered in amongst the class notes are jottings from various non-academic projects, including Cyberpunk 2020 and Teenagers from Outer Space character sheets (some of them not in my handwriting - there's a TFOS character in here I'm reasonably sure was Derek's!), playlists for mix tapes, and even a few scene prototypes for early UF side stories, most of which were never written. There's a nearly complete outline in here for a version of Secrets that didn't get made and bears very little resemblance to the one that did, years later; not far from it is a scene from the "Yuri helps Gryphon escape" part of UF3 that was likewise not used.

The calculus notes make no sense to me now, which is not all that surprising, but interestingly, but they don't give the impression that they made a lot of sense to me then, either. There are little asides to that effect scattered throughout them. At one point there is a long equation that I believe involves some form of integration, and then underneath it, in quite large letters, 18-year-old me added the personal observation, "AURGH."

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.