Well, hello, all you good people who've taken time out of their busy schedules to indulge the frantic scribbling, or rather typings, of someone wholly undeserving of it.
Well, this is a bit embarrassing, as you see, I'd been doing a lot of writing this week and was rather hoping to use this week's post to share a short story I was writing, but unfortunately I recently purchased the game "Minecraft" and thus have been robbed of all my free time. However, I hope to finish it tomorrow and so I will in all likelihood share it then. This post was primarily made so that I could sleep easy in the knowledge I was performing my one post per week quota.
Well, until tomorrow, goodnight.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Sunday, 17 October 2010
How Stumbleupon Freaked Me Out
Hello all, I trust we are feeling well. Indeed certainly you are at least well enough to access the internet and find your way to this blog, but then again with the ease at which one can do just that these days, it's not really a sure indicator of general health.
Well, what did I do this week. Well, the deadline for us returning our University applications is drawing ever closer and I'm starting to grow slightly on edge about the entire experience. I went to see a very well performed rendition of William Shakespeare's As You Like It performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse along with the rest of my drama group. Speaking of which my Drama work appears to be going well, but I'm still struggling to understand what my character should be like. In English Language I'm desperately searching for someone sufficiently interesting to conduct an interview with. In Biology I've just received my commented-on coursework that I need to redo. And in English Literature, we've just gotten into the swing of properly buckling down with this coursework now.
Right then, now that that's out of the way, I can get on with the meat of the discussion. But, that's the problem. There isn't any. I don't really have anything to talk about.
I suppose I could tell you about something that happened last week that I intended to write about before it got completely overshadowed by my AQA related minor emotional breakdown.
You see, the story goes that I like Stumbleupon. I think it's fantastic and amazing. It has always gelled with that part of me that was so utterly concerned with trivia. Next to TVTropes, it is one of the largest eaters of my time when sat at a computer, which considering my lifestyle is practically all the time. Hell, I'm stumbling as I write this, in fact, I have two tabs dedicated to it right now.
But you see, the other day I Stumbled Upon something, something terrible, something very, very, very disturbing. I can't show you what it was as when I first laid eyes upon it, I stared at it for 5 minutes then calmly logged off Stumbleupon, removed its toolbar from Firefox, turned off Firefox, shut down my computer and went to sit in a chair and think about the Universe and my place in it for half an hour, all meaning that I can no longer find the page even if I wanted to.
I've built this up quite a lot now, but you must understand how thoroughly creeped out I was. What was on this page you ask? Well I'll tell you.
It was a plain white screen, unremarkable in every respect except that in its upper left hand corner, written in Times New Roman, as I recall, was the following words, or thereabouts:
You are a male teenager.
You have above average intelligence.
You don't often get things done.
You are middle class.
You are slightly racist.
What. The. F*ck.
What sort of sick perverted freak would infect Stumbleupon with a meme of such terrible magnitude. Here it was, me, laid out. My demographic. My pigeon hole. I like to think of myself as being someone impossible to categorise, but there were my categories. They might not all be correct (Slightly racist!? When have I ever been even remotely racist!? And for that matter, I'm in denial about my middle class-ness, thank you very much), but enough of them were to shock me to my core.
It's strange, I thought incapable of being disturbed any more. The internet has numbed me to practically any and all forms of sexual content, acts of violence or terrible injustices. I thought myself above all that. But on that day, the internet presented me with the last thing that could disturb me: myself.
Not only did it creep me out in being a direct confrontation of my flaws, but also it made me aware of the disturbing surveillance aspect of Stumbleupon, that as while I observed it, it observed me. I had somehow thought that the Stumbleupon engine worked via individual tailored choices as opposed to working via demographics. I don't know why I thought this, as it would be a hell of a lot more difficult a program to write and would in fact be much creepier, implying as it does that they have your entire personality on record.
So there you have it. I stopped using Stumbleupon for about a week, but, hell, I thought, it's basically harmless. So now it's back to saying to myself "Just one more stumble..." the only difference now being that I don'e "Like" the pages that even remotely hint at racism.
Good night.
Well, what did I do this week. Well, the deadline for us returning our University applications is drawing ever closer and I'm starting to grow slightly on edge about the entire experience. I went to see a very well performed rendition of William Shakespeare's As You Like It performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse along with the rest of my drama group. Speaking of which my Drama work appears to be going well, but I'm still struggling to understand what my character should be like. In English Language I'm desperately searching for someone sufficiently interesting to conduct an interview with. In Biology I've just received my commented-on coursework that I need to redo. And in English Literature, we've just gotten into the swing of properly buckling down with this coursework now.
Right then, now that that's out of the way, I can get on with the meat of the discussion. But, that's the problem. There isn't any. I don't really have anything to talk about.
I suppose I could tell you about something that happened last week that I intended to write about before it got completely overshadowed by my AQA related minor emotional breakdown.
You see, the story goes that I like Stumbleupon. I think it's fantastic and amazing. It has always gelled with that part of me that was so utterly concerned with trivia. Next to TVTropes, it is one of the largest eaters of my time when sat at a computer, which considering my lifestyle is practically all the time. Hell, I'm stumbling as I write this, in fact, I have two tabs dedicated to it right now.
But you see, the other day I Stumbled Upon something, something terrible, something very, very, very disturbing. I can't show you what it was as when I first laid eyes upon it, I stared at it for 5 minutes then calmly logged off Stumbleupon, removed its toolbar from Firefox, turned off Firefox, shut down my computer and went to sit in a chair and think about the Universe and my place in it for half an hour, all meaning that I can no longer find the page even if I wanted to.
I've built this up quite a lot now, but you must understand how thoroughly creeped out I was. What was on this page you ask? Well I'll tell you.
It was a plain white screen, unremarkable in every respect except that in its upper left hand corner, written in Times New Roman, as I recall, was the following words, or thereabouts:
You are a male teenager.
You have above average intelligence.
You don't often get things done.
You are middle class.
You are slightly racist.
What. The. F*ck.
What sort of sick perverted freak would infect Stumbleupon with a meme of such terrible magnitude. Here it was, me, laid out. My demographic. My pigeon hole. I like to think of myself as being someone impossible to categorise, but there were my categories. They might not all be correct (Slightly racist!? When have I ever been even remotely racist!? And for that matter, I'm in denial about my middle class-ness, thank you very much), but enough of them were to shock me to my core.
It's strange, I thought incapable of being disturbed any more. The internet has numbed me to practically any and all forms of sexual content, acts of violence or terrible injustices. I thought myself above all that. But on that day, the internet presented me with the last thing that could disturb me: myself.
Not only did it creep me out in being a direct confrontation of my flaws, but also it made me aware of the disturbing surveillance aspect of Stumbleupon, that as while I observed it, it observed me. I had somehow thought that the Stumbleupon engine worked via individual tailored choices as opposed to working via demographics. I don't know why I thought this, as it would be a hell of a lot more difficult a program to write and would in fact be much creepier, implying as it does that they have your entire personality on record.
So there you have it. I stopped using Stumbleupon for about a week, but, hell, I thought, it's basically harmless. So now it's back to saying to myself "Just one more stumble..." the only difference now being that I don'e "Like" the pages that even remotely hint at racism.
Good night.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
AQA: Alarmingly Questionable Acceptability (I couldn't think of a better title, OK!)
Disclaimer: Throughout this piece I'm afraid I get quite vexed with a certain organisation and speak of it rather unkindly. Because I am a dreadful coward and don't have the money to get sued, I'm just want to point out that it was all in jest. Thank you.
Well, well, well. Good evening, everyone. How are you? I must say that I'm feeling much better than I once did with concerns to this blog. Updating once a week as opposed to once a day makes this entire enterprise significantly less stressful, although as you can see I'm still waiting until last thing on a Sunday evening before I actually get round to writing this darned thing.
Right then, let's see. What have I been up to? Well, as usual, very little. I've been getting on with the seeming endless amount of school work which always rests on my shoulders. I've gained a new found confidence in the piece I'm doing in drama since every time HSQ (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HolyShitQuotient) is comfortably in the "Kickass" section, if I do say so myself. I'm resitting both the English Exam I messed up and the Biology Exam.
I think that this image sums up the feel of my drama piece the best."But wait!" I hear you cry, "Wasn't that very English Literature result the offending grade that was one of among dozens if not hundreds of similar results that sullied the results pages of students throughout the school who had the ill fortune of taking that unfortunate examination?"
Well, my verbose reader, yes, that is the very same one that I speak of. Unfortunately the good people at the AQA Examination board, despite a record number of under-marked students all across the country in their exams (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11468265), have decided, in their no doubt infinite wisdom, that of the ten papers we sent as a sample for them to remark (ten that would, if remarked up, represent a rise in all our results), only one of them was deserving of such honour.
The paper in question was one of the very few (three, as I recall) in our entire year that received an A.
A low A.
One that is now a high A.
(Incidentally, I genuinely bare no grudge to the individual in question, my grudge lies entirely with AQA).
The only picture I could find of the head of AQA.Now, it is completely beyond my station to speak ill of a major examining board, so I won't.
I could go on about how repeatedly publicly announcing that errors in the marking such as this are extremely rare does not go any way to making anyone feel any better about the fact that you made a mistake and we are paying the consequences of that mistake.
I might talk about how if one suddenly finds that one area of exams seem to be under-marked due to error and another area of exams seem to contain students scoring a good three grades beneath their coursework marks, that it is surely a matter of common sense to assume that similar negligent marking errors are present in those exams instead of assuring students that the the former marks were errors that will be rectified, yet somehow the ones latter aren't and won't.
Why, I might even imply that if he above sentiments were correct the company in question may be adamantly standing by the ridiculously low marks that they gave out not because they genuinely don't believe that an error that occurred in the marking of one of their exams may have continued into another, but because they didn't want the media exposer of more incorrect markings, effectively putting their own public image before the the future University prospects of literally hundreds of students around the country.
I could talk about that, but I won't.
Hmm, I was planning on using this paragraph to assure readers that I wasn't just being a petulant child, bawling and crying about how his grades weren't quite as good as he expected when it's clear that if this issue didn't effect him, he wouldn't give a toss about it. Well, although I do genuinely believe that if this had happened in another subject, it still would annoy me, it is true that I am being petulant and I think that I should be.
Had this happened to anyone, I would have been annoyed, and probably blogged about it. But, yes, since it happened to me, it has added another layer of emotion to it. They had to make it personal by not only making it happen to me, but in English, the subject I have the deepest passion for (No offence Drama, Biology you should have probably seen this coming).
To form a metaphor, it would like seeing a man strike someone in an alley. If I didn't know the person, I like to think I'd rush in and intervene. But if it was someone I knew, close friend, than I would rush in and attempt to physically help.
A visual representation. That's me on the far right, AQA in the middle and on the left is... er... English? I don't know, I've sort of lost track of this metaphor and where it is going.So there you have it, why I currently hate AQA. But don't worry, I'm sure that they'll soon send all our grades back soon, properly remarked and filled with as much heartfelt regret as this sentence is in sarcasm.
Good night.
Saturday, 2 October 2010
I Can't be Doing With Illnesses
Well, good evening my friends. My, my the time seems to have simply flown by, hasn't it? Of course I imagine that currently you are all frothing at the mouth waiting to hear of my thoughts and exploits.
Unfortunately, over the last few days I've been struck with a sudden cold. It's been fairly irritating, I can tell you. I very rarely get illnesses but when I do I simply can't put up with them, especially considering that when I do get a cold I seem to be assaulted with every single possible symptom imaginable, most of which I'm fairly sure aren't actually symptoms of cold. Which is probably why if anything can possibly be done to counter the illness, I will jump at the opportunity. For instance now I'm writing this in a cloud of Vicks VapoRub steam, with a cough sweet in my mouth, alcohol-based throat medicine in my gullet, a cold/flu tablet slowly dissolving in my stomach and some home-brew ear-ache medicine in my ear (consisting of a dab of tea-tree oil, olbas oil and hot whiskey on a piece of tissue paper).
(Please note that I do not endorse the use of such quantities of pharmaceutical drugs used to all at once and that such a combination may induce worse symptoms, such as death. Please note that the only reason I can stand this stems my semi-alien biology).
Yes, I'm afraid that I'm as far as it is possible to be from what is expected of the quintessential gentleman when faced with illness, which involves a lot of taking it on the chin, retaining a stiff upper-lip, battling manfully on and grinning and bearing it (though I have been arrested on several occasions for performing the that one).
No, if I am faced with even a minor discomfort for any length of time, I nearly immediately begin attacking it bodily with as many treatments as a can possibly dream up. It's a failing of mine that I regret, that I am not able to deal with discomfort in a manful way, but rather take it pathetically affronted. I like to think of myself as a gentleman who can shoulder adversity and deal with discomfort in a quiet and cheery way. But no, I pack myself up with chemicals until the point where either the illness or my liver will be annihilated and spend the intervening time moaning at loved ones for how ill I feel and how they shall be very sympathetic.
In this case, however, I feel I am somewhat more justified than usual, in that this illness is disrupting my sleep and woe betide anything that gets between me and my sleep, be it man, beast or machine. Incidentally, it's also been interfering with my already severely stunted ability to form coherent thoughts, so I must ask you to be forgiving if this post doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I suppose that I have moaned at you guys more than those I communicate with on a daily basis now about my illnesses, so I suppose I can say goodbye. I'd rather intended to tackle all the hubbub been caused by this new, potentially life-harbouring planet astronomers have discovered recently and I've frequently encountered reports on through Stumbleupon but now that it's come to it I can't really think of anything to write about. It's there, spinning around its star within the Goldilocks Zone and we're not sure if it harbours life or not yet so, yeah, cool. I think my regaling, mucus-ridden moaning on my illness should keep you satisfied, however, if you were expecting more you can always check out the story if you wish at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11444022
So, until next week, take care and goodbye.
Unfortunately, over the last few days I've been struck with a sudden cold. It's been fairly irritating, I can tell you. I very rarely get illnesses but when I do I simply can't put up with them, especially considering that when I do get a cold I seem to be assaulted with every single possible symptom imaginable, most of which I'm fairly sure aren't actually symptoms of cold. Which is probably why if anything can possibly be done to counter the illness, I will jump at the opportunity. For instance now I'm writing this in a cloud of Vicks VapoRub steam, with a cough sweet in my mouth, alcohol-based throat medicine in my gullet, a cold/flu tablet slowly dissolving in my stomach and some home-brew ear-ache medicine in my ear (consisting of a dab of tea-tree oil, olbas oil and hot whiskey on a piece of tissue paper).
(Please note that I do not endorse the use of such quantities of pharmaceutical drugs used to all at once and that such a combination may induce worse symptoms, such as death. Please note that the only reason I can stand this stems my semi-alien biology).
Yes, I'm afraid that I'm as far as it is possible to be from what is expected of the quintessential gentleman when faced with illness, which involves a lot of taking it on the chin, retaining a stiff upper-lip, battling manfully on and grinning and bearing it (though I have been arrested on several occasions for performing the that one).
No, if I am faced with even a minor discomfort for any length of time, I nearly immediately begin attacking it bodily with as many treatments as a can possibly dream up. It's a failing of mine that I regret, that I am not able to deal with discomfort in a manful way, but rather take it pathetically affronted. I like to think of myself as a gentleman who can shoulder adversity and deal with discomfort in a quiet and cheery way. But no, I pack myself up with chemicals until the point where either the illness or my liver will be annihilated and spend the intervening time moaning at loved ones for how ill I feel and how they shall be very sympathetic.
In this case, however, I feel I am somewhat more justified than usual, in that this illness is disrupting my sleep and woe betide anything that gets between me and my sleep, be it man, beast or machine. Incidentally, it's also been interfering with my already severely stunted ability to form coherent thoughts, so I must ask you to be forgiving if this post doesn't make sense.
Anyway, I suppose that I have moaned at you guys more than those I communicate with on a daily basis now about my illnesses, so I suppose I can say goodbye. I'd rather intended to tackle all the hubbub been caused by this new, potentially life-harbouring planet astronomers have discovered recently and I've frequently encountered reports on through Stumbleupon but now that it's come to it I can't really think of anything to write about. It's there, spinning around its star within the Goldilocks Zone and we're not sure if it harbours life or not yet so, yeah, cool. I think my regaling, mucus-ridden moaning on my illness should keep you satisfied, however, if you were expecting more you can always check out the story if you wish at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11444022
So, until next week, take care and goodbye.
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