A Wild Post Appears!

It’s (probably) not very effective…

So this whole blogging thing seems to have stopped for more than a while now, and yet everybody still seems to want to blog. I don’t get it. Maybe our lives are all too void of interesting things to warrant blogging more than once a year. With my gap year drawing to a close my life has recently been filled mostly with stressing over uni, housing and finance stuff and relaxing from said stress. Not that the rest of my gap year can’t be summed up with the word “relaxing”, but hey, I’ve explained why I needed it and it damn well worked. Over all, I’ve recently been in the best state of mine I’ve had for years and I’m raring to get going with university and living away from home. I’m shit scared, but massively excited too.

Some of you may remember my list of things I wanted to do during my gap year, and how it failed epically. Well, I’ve made a new one for uni. It contains two items, in order of importance:

  1. Don’t fail the course.
  2. Stay sane.

All else comes after. Physical health, social life and everything else I can’t think of right now will be taking a back seat when necessary. Considering how I screwed up my A levels and this course is kind of a lucky break, AND I’ll have a debt of a bit over £8000 per year (mostly in living costs), I’d rather go mad and pass than keep my sanity and fail. My brain can be fixed afterwards.

My moving in date has been set as the 6th of September. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to get the internet sorted out from this point, especially as Virgin don’t seem to know the flat exists. Hopefully it’ll be a simple case of sending a bloke over with the tools, confirming that the flat does actually exist and installing it straight away, in which case we should have internet pretty quickly. Just depends on how many days they take to send the bloke over. I just hope they don’t have to send a first bloke over to check the place out, then send another bloke at a later date to install it. I’ll probably contact them on the 6th, or maybe sooner if… I don’t really know what has to happen. Regardless, I won’t be around for an unknown number of days from the 6th onwards, other than when I go to the pub to steal their internet. Unless if I can find an unprotected wireless network, which may be possible. I’ll only be about 50 meters from a McDonald’s, so who knows. We’ll see. I also feel like the first few days without internet may actually be a bit of a blessing. It’ll help me start a new routine that’s not based around my PC, but rather fitting my PC in around it.

My course starts on the 19th of September, which gives me the best part of two weeks to settle in. Not sure what exactly happens after this date, as this is the date I just have to turn up at the uni, show them my student finance stuff and whatever else, they tell the finance people that they’re happy with it all and my loan comes through. I’m not sure when my actual course starts. Could be the next day, could be two weeks later. Guess I’ll just wait and see.

 

Today is my dad’s 50th birthday, and I spent the early afternoon in the conservatory with my parents, my dad’s parents and my dad’s sister’s family. Holy shit, I spent time with my family. This is unheard of. O_O My Grandpa and uncle wrote a comedic song about his life and recorded it with my uncle’s professional equipment, and oh god it was so funny. I missed half of it because everyone was laughing too loud. I’ll steal the CD and get a copy of it soon, just ask me if you want to hear it, but it won’t be half as funny because you sort of need to know the events of my dad’s life.

And now, a very different and also quite good song.

Just to clarify, “quite good” was an intentional astronomical understatement.

Portal 2

I was immensely tired the night before release, and ended up going to bed at 9pm. Whenever I do this I wake up sometime around 1am-3am, which low and behold happened right on cue. I checked the countdown timer for Portal 2 on my phone and apparently took note of the time but it didn’t go in. I listened to an audiobook for a bit, but couldn’t get back to sleep. Around 5am I decided to check the countdown again, but my phone had vanished. Totally vanished. I couldn’t've placed it further than within reach of my bed, but I just couldn’t find it. I later asked Shaun to phone it and it turned up underneath a hole in the bottom of the mattress. I think that, in my groggy state at 2-3am, I managed to put my phone inside my mattress. Anyway, I decided to boot up Jennifer and check the timer there out of frustration of not finding my phone. ONE HOUR. Sweet mother of God. I can’t even remember what I did in the following twenty minutes, but after that the game started slowly decrypting. It was done in ten minutes, allowing me access to Portal 2 30 minutes before it was due to release. By this time the GLaDOS@home counter said 707 people were already playing, so I guess plenty of people got early access. Happy to know that I was probably in the first 1000 or so.

The rest of this post will contain minor spoilers about Portal 2. None of them are story breaking and none of them should make the game more than a tiny bit less enjoyable, but I would still discourage anyone from continuing if they plan to play Portal 2 in the near future.

BEDA | Day 11 – Moar Moar Feil

This whole Blog Every Day in April thing really isn’t working out as I hoped. Instead of making me blog about the small things that happen to me in live, I’m just struggling to think of things to blog about and coming up with shit instead. So, uh, I’m going to stop. Next blog whenever I damn well feel like it. (Y)

BEDA | Day 10 – Wikifail

Y’know, I actually have plenty of stuff I could blog about each day. I could argue against the common misconceptions of Wikipedia and explain why I consider it the greatest place in the world for just about any research, I could explain why I agree with every single word in Brendan’s most recent blog, I could do as I said yesterday and talk about whatever random article Wiki cares to throw me. Hell, I could even give a critique of this man’s crazy dance. And actually, I was planning to talk about something other than these, but I’m going to do my Wikipedia challenge instead. Random article, here I come.

First result: Barry Capuano.
Uh… Nope. Let’s try another.

Second result: Kim Yong-ik.
In my ignorance of the spelling of his name, I first wondered if this guy is some relative of Kim Jong-il. But no, apparently not. I can’t talk about North Korea. :(
Looks as though this guy was just some South Korean who wrote in English. Maybe this idea of mine isn’t going to work, as I need something that I can actually have opinions on. >.>

Third result: Upolu Airport.
An airport in Hawaii. I see Wikipedia is reading what I’m writing, giving me something I can have an opinion on

Sixteenth result: The Thorn (EP).
Yeah, this isn’t working. Not going to try this again. >.>
However, this has given me something to end on. I’m actually kind of enjoying the music by the band who made this EP, Siouxsie and the Banshees, so let’s find a video I can embed.

Also, this song actually uses those infamous four chords.

BEDA | Day 9 – Exhausted, kthx

Went for another cycle today, same route as a couple days ago with Iain but by myself. When I cycle by myself I always find I push myself harder, and thus get far more tired out. My legs now feel crippled.

Graaaaaah. I don’t know what to blog about. >.>

Maybe tomorrow I could hit random page on Wikipedia and talk about whatever comes up. Or keep pressing it until I find something interesting to talk about. But not today, I’m done for today. I still feel exhausted from that cycle.