:)
June 17th, 2008
Regular
So, if an Englishman said to an American “We have regular trains here”, would the American think they meant they were standard/average trains? Let’s ignore context giving him cues and prompts as to the real meaning as well.
May 3rd, 2008
Midway through the finals…
I don’t think that very many students would be wishing they would never end… Now I’ve got the module which makes me angry out of the way (project management) I can sit back and enjoy the ride.
May 1st, 2008
last assignment for this course ever now handed in!
And it sucks, but never mind. I used to love 3d, I’m not too sure where it went wrong there. I think 3d is going to be my weakest module this year (ie, the one which I drop) in a crazy turnaround from last year where I’m pretty sure it was my strongest. I don’t think it’s quite clicked yet that that was the last ever assignment and there’ll never be any more. Oh I hate inelegant sentences like that (with “that that”). It’s weird how we contract it when we say it though - “th’t that”. It’s probably incorrect but whatever, I’m too tired to care. And why am I tired? Because my irresponsible good for nothing housemate had me up all night watching battlestar galactica AGAIN, and Rob if you’re reading this stop it and get back to your bloody revision.
Why do they ruin perfectly good delicious mushroom risottos by putting chicken in it? Microwaved chicken is a sin against god and should not exist on this earth.
April 23rd, 2008
The Wire
I watched the final season of The Wire a few weeks ago and I really wish I hadn’t. I keep hunting down youtube videos and listening to the OST a lot to try and get over it but I just can’t.
I think my favourite characters were Omar and Bubbles oh and Stringer Bell. I also started really liking Snoop in season 5 and Frank Sobotka was amazing too. McNulty was awesome, and Bunk. And Kima and Namond and Prez. If I continue I’m just going to list the whole cast actually, so I guess… The only character I really disliked was Ziggy, even Scott Templeton didn’t come close to him and boy was he ever a dick. Omar broke my heart into a million little pieces and whenever I think of Bubbles I can’t help but smile. I’m fascinated by Stringer and his complexities… Even when I was kind of annoyed with him and railing against him his faults rubbed me raw so when something flipped and I loved him again it was so painful and sweet. I got very attached to him I suppose. Oh the characters. The themes and ideas the show explores are great and stuff, the plots are wonderful don’t get me wrong, but it’s the characters that made this show for me. And I have to stop typing now because I want to hand my 3d in tomorrow.
Actually I take it back, even though I personally didn’t like Ziggy, I still think his character was really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody with that kind of detachment from the world and complete lack of responsibility but I suppose they must exist.
April 16th, 2008
Revision
Continues to not go well. The phrase “social sciences” makes me want to rip my own eyeballs out whenever I read it. I got exactly two paragraphs into some notes on project management and although I managed the first paragraph which talked about the ridiculous “scientific” conditions they conducted their precious little “experiments” under, it was finally the use of the word “astonishing” in describing the findings of the Hawthorne studies that made me punch the wall and hurt my wrist. Excuse the melodrama!! And the excessive exclamation marks!!! I can’t go on without venting!!!!!!!
Why does this stuff even exist. I am so not cut out to be a manager. It’s making me almost wince, the thought of having to spend hours and hours getting to know this material better.
April 10th, 2008
Lolita
Oh wow, I love this book so much. I’ve pretty much read it cover to cover with no breaks, just carried away by the amazing language. It made me laugh, at the end, Nabokov lamenting his “second-rate” brand of English (he’s Russian of course, I seem to have a weakness for these Russian writers).
If only 3D didn’t exist and I had, well, more money than I do now - I could buy all of his books and just indulge in them forever. So now I’ve been inside the head of a paedophile and inside the head of a murderer. I keep wanting to try and put down in this post a few of my favourite phrases that he uses, but as I go through a few randomly opened pages I’m just noting everything down which is of course no good at all. The imagery is so evocative, and of course I love him as well for in his notes (”On a book entitled Lolita”) asserting that Lolita has no moral in tow (yay! take that english teachers who make us pick at books ’till they fall apart at the seams). Nabokov says Lolita exists for the purpose of creating “aesthetic bliss” and oh it really really delivers.
Well anyway, random bit :
“She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the rubbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level…”
Edit: Although I’m never going to be able to read about Annabel Lee and her kingdom by the sea again without thinking of Humbert and paedophilia and Poe having a 13 year old wife…
March 25th, 2008
+1
It turns out I celebrate handing in my dissertation by boisterously throwing up all night.
I can’t tell if it’s because I hadn’t slept in 48 hours and even then I had been running on 4 hours of fitful napping, or if it was not eating anything then drinking a lot or whether the nandos I had really was dodgy. Ugh what an awful night though (apart from my lovely friends of course).
I feel very weird now it’s handed in. Bit scared of looking at it again in case I find some of the unedited yak I forgot to take out. But yes, hurrah, it’s over now apart from the presentation and stuff. Oh my god I wish I hadn’t included the rough pdf version of the project too. Why why why did I think that was a good idea?
March 14th, 2008
D-Day
It’s funny to think almost certainly every single person on the course will be awake right now, frantically working away.
March 12th, 2008
1 day till hand-in
Part of me is constantly delighted by discovering things like Umberto Eco’s essay “Opera Aperta” in the context of my artistic project based on the Impressionists under some of my research on art using new technology (I have long suspected that all the really cool talented people are somehow interconnected), and part of me is grabbing my brain and ramming it about my skull trying to extract one last drop of coherent writing from it and thinking “oh god let it please be over soon”. At the moment I’m on an upside, hurrah!
—
3am: My god, all of these authors reference each other. Nearly every single one mentions the other at least once in one of their books. I’m not really sure why I’m surprised by that as it should have become obvious to me by now that digital interactive art is an elite little nook that not many seem to know about, but still.
9.30am: Ack I seem to have 20 000 words instead of 10 000 in my report. How did this happen? Gah. Let the process of shoving as much as possible into appendices begin!
11:17am: When all this is over I intend to retire from society, a shattered broken woman. I shall be vague and delicate and whimper whenever I see particularly ugly things. Especially ugly colour combinations and bad typography; I feel very sensitive to them. And wistfulness, I shall cultivate wistfulness and a tragic air, and I shall be absent minded and forget what year it is and drink whisky from crystal decanters. Or maybe in fact I’ll make my millions by selling toasters to the masses and retire to a tropical beach to live my life surrounded by beautiful bronzed young men. They can fan me and bring me cold drinks and listen to me as I ramble on about complete rubbish like the inherent similarities between delicious strawberry sponge cakes and the current political climate.
March 11th, 2008