Hi... I'm back. :) (arrow keys or tap the left or right side of the screen to move through the project, once it gets to the slideshow, fullscreen recommended) I explain in the project what happened, and give a quick life recap for you guys who're curious what I've been up to - I know it's been a while. If you don't want to sit through the project (it's not long, though), I explain it a bit more down here. ⬇️ Basically, it all started when I went camping. I always go camping, but this time, something was different. I was getting popular on Scratch, and when I got back after a week, I had thousands upon thousands of messages. I got overwhelmed, and didn't respond to them. I kind of stuck around on Scratch, checking out projects and keeping in touch with the community, but I couldn't keep up with everything, and eventually, I just stopped. This wasn't the only reason - I had a lot going on in my life. My maths teacher was terrible, and not only bullied me, but wouldn't let me extend in maths, and marked me completely untruthfully. Examples; 0% (I should have got 100%) because I "must have cheated" and he "didn't believe me", 0% (should've been 80%, I didn't do about a fifth of it) for "not engaging", 0% (should've been close to 50%, he wouldn't let me finish in the time he gave me) and said I "wasn't ready to go to Year 11", and finally gave me 94% on my exam the other week (even though it should have been 98%) and caved, saying he'd pass me into Year 11. This really let down my spirit this year, but now that I'm getting through to VCE, I can stop stressing. Aside from school, which was terrible, I've had lots of stuff that, despite taking up my time, has been pretty awesome. I was selected for the Australian U/19s roller hockey squad, though not the team yet. We travel to train together every month or two to train, next week I'm flying up to QLD to prepare them for the Asian (and Pacific) Games in South Korea (even though I won't be going this year, I'm hoping for Paraguay 2026). We also have our local league's grand final this weekend, which is exciting! I've spent a heap of my downtime this year learning languages - that's my passion. My native language is English, and I've managed to get to the low end of fluency in German (B2+ by the CEFR language scale), intermediate in Spanish and Latin (both B1), beginner level in French and Japanese (A1), and learning to read Arabic, Korean and Russian, so that I can tackle the languages later down the track. I'm also practising Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and trying to learn Woi Wurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the traditional owners of my land for over 65,000 years. I've tried not to be too busy to neglect myself and the people in my community, on the other hand. The other week, we had our annual lantern parade and festival, on the shortest day of the year. Thousands of people turned up on the main street of our small town, and paraded down the street with their lanterns - dancing, fire twirling, dressed up and representing their cultures, enjoying the night. With all of this done and dusted, the onset of the holidays and the new resolve of my maths teacher not to ruin my life, I'm ready to come back to Scratch. I've missed you all so much - I'm sorry I left. I'm also going to try and go through my messages now… I have about 4,000 from Scratch, 1,000 from the big blue site (- that's censored, really?), 400 from YouTube and another 400 in my emails. Feel free to leave a comment, I look forward to getting back into the community and catching up with you all again! :D Also, I'm getting back into game development, hopefully I'll have something ready for you guys soon, so keep an eye out! ;)
