Ending Abandonment

so yeh...its been a while blogspot/blogger, how are you? well i hope. I can't remember the last time i posted on here (and yes i know i can check the date of my last post but wheres the fun in that?) quite a lot of stuff has gone down in my life and while i can't go into detail now due the more pressing concerns of exam revision that i am currently procrastinating against by writing this, i promise you a good story sometime soon, so prepare your coffee or milk & cookies or your prefered beverage of choice, i'll be right back....

B.E.D.A Day 30 - And So It Ends....

So today is the last day of B.E.D.A/V.E.D.A and seeing as this was the first time I had decided to attempt one of these challenges/events/whatevers I thought I might as well use the last post to talk about my feelings on this event and what it has meant to me. I learned of these type of events not long after joining Nerdfighteria and while I was intruigued at the idea itself, I was unsure as to whether I would be able to put the time or energy into such an event as I imagined my procrastination and general laziness would get in the way and prevent me from focusing myself into doing the necessary amount of writing each day for it to be considered a reasonable admission. However, I was happily proved wrong and was able to push myself past the point of apathy to write something meaningful. Admittedly I got a bit personal and ended up whinging about my own personal issues, but I have trouble talking about my feelings to other people, so expressing how I was feeling through text seemed a much easier avenue of release so I took as much advantage of it as I could.

While I would have liked to have had a little more confirmation that people were actually reading what I was writing through them answering the end of post questions I posed each day, I guess I just have to face facts that right now im not really important enough for people to waste their time replying to my silly little quibbles, which is fine, but still some commenting love would have been nice :) Ive also learnt alot about myself from these posts and what I have to do to focus and motivate myself into doing worthwhile things, so I guess in a way these posts were my way of doing my only little form of soul searching, just a lot more public than most people.

So overall im glad I did B.E.D.A and while I may not do something like this the next time around or at least will probably be more inclined to do some vlogging instead of blogging, I think it has been a worthwhile experiance and has taught me both about myself and how to go about improving my writing technique so that it actually makes more of a modicum of sense than it did before, something that will hopefully help in the future. Thank you if you have actually read these, I hope they have been informative, interesting or at least not too irritating, until next time, aveo amacus :)

Question: Did you do B.E.D.A? what did you learn?

DFTBA

B.E.D.A Day 29 - So That Just Happened...

So today was the Royal Wedding between William and Kate and while I didn't care too much for it personally, I watched it out of a sense of patriotic necessity and was suprised how amplified that patriotic feeling became and stayed while I was in the room where I had it on the TV. I guess it was because it was a chance for the world to watch Britain show off a little and seeing the crowds of people euphorically waving UK flags and cheering as the processions went passed made some of the problems we've suffered in recent months to fade away into the background a little for a while. As Philip DeFranco said in his latest DeFranco Show ( Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTdt9CSiScA ) it was this moment of happiness in a seastorm of worldly sadness that always seems to dominate the news headlines and it was just great to know that whoever was watching this around the world would be feeling the same way.

Obviously they're were moments of uninted interest and as such is the way of the internet community, who picked up and ran with it such as the flower girl who was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace when they were taking pictures and covered her ears as the RAF display happened while looking a little bit evil and already the internet community have zoomed to insert her into every photo imaginable, so glad to see that the people that like to do that sort of thing, got something out of it :)

Question: Did you watch the royal wedding? what did you think of it?

DFTBA

B.E.D.A Day 28 - Portal 2 Single Player: A Review

So yesterday I completed Portal 2's single player, which was unbelievably awesome, and seeing as i may have to wait a while to play co-op seeing as the PSN is down currently due to its "technical difficulties" :\ I thought I might as well review the single player now and talk about the co-op whenever it is i get to play it. So Portal 2's single player is of course a continuation of the Portal 1 storyline, which Valve amended shortly before announcing Portal 2 with a video, which showed Chell being captured and put into stasis instead of escaping. You are woken up an indefinate amount of time after your incarceration by the AI core Wheatley, who is superbably voiced by The Office's Steven Merchant, who then attempts to help you escape from the crumbling and decaying Aperture testing facility, which due to years of neglect is full of rusted metal and plants that have broken in and flourished.

Unfortuanatly due to Wheatley's bumbling, but hilarious, ineptitude you accidently reactivate GLaDOS, aslo superbly voiced by Ellen McLain, the maniacal AI antagonist from the first game with an obsession with testing you "in the name of science" and so starts your quest to bring down GLaDOS once again and finally escape the Aperture Science testing facilty once and for all. For what may intially seem like a simple physics based puzzler, it has an incredibly deep storyline and canon, and through the course of the game you come to learn the history of Aperture Science, mainly through the charming voice of Aperture founder and CEO Cave Johnson, who is also amazingly voiced by J.K Simmons. What makes this game though, aside from the unique gameplay, is the superb cast of supporting characters who take centre stage in the game due to the muteness of the series' mute protagonist Chell, with the comments made by GLaDOS and Wheatley being absolutly hilarious most of the time, amplified by their robotic voices and lack of emotion, also with a few key characters appearing at the end that are also epically funny (SPOILER: IM IN SPAAAAAAAAAACCCCCEEEEEEE!!! :D)

The gameplay is relativly unchanged from Portal 1, though there is a lot more variaty this time around due to the inclusion of new devices such as Aerial Fath Plates, which catapult you through the air, and various gels in the later levels, that add a completly new twists to the game and how you "think with portals"

Overall Portal 2 is an absolutly superb game in almost every aspect and I would encourage anyone who has even a slight inkling to take a look at the game to go out an buy it, if you are a serious gamer you won't regret the purchase :)

Score: 10/10

Question: have you played Portal 2? what did you think of it?

DFTBA

B.E.D.A Day 27 - Burning Fragile Bridges

I hate it when people you know act like complete dicks and you know they're not. Most of the time its unintentional and they don't even realise they're doing it, but that doesn't stop it from being irriating to me and wanting to intervene when they go too far. The most obvious example of this are my two friends who act like complete trolls on internet forums and youtube comments because they think its funny, I take a dim view to this on the other hand because I think that it is extremly childish and completly pointless because I think that unless you can offer constructive criticism in a comment then you shouldn't post at all.

I know im preaching to the choir here because mostly sensible people read this thing and will know where im coming from, but it still needs to be said otherwise nothing will be done about it. Today for example, my mate posts a link in a completly random comment thread that we had reserved for specific work and then when i redirect it and delete his original message, he gets a trollish on me. I know he was doing it in jest and pretending to be annoyed, but I found it extremly annoying and tedious to deal with as he should have jsut accepted he was wrong and moved on instead of prolonging the situation. I may sound like a prude because of this but the carefully mandated order of things must be maintained in my mind, otherwise chaos will reign (overdramatic i know, but oh well) and i cannot allow that to happen.

Question: How do you deal with trolls?

DFTBA

B.E.D.A Day 26 - Returning Nerves

So today was my first day back at college after my two weeks off at Easter, this week isn't a proper return tho because we are only in for the next few days and then we get friday off due to the Royal Wedding and monday off because of the Bank Holiday, meaning that overall I have only spent 9 days in college for the whole of april, which is just wierd when you think about it.

Now during the holidays the stress and focus of my upcoming exams slipped past me rather easily because it wasn't really my focus, however now that im back at college, that pressure has hit me like a frieght train and has pretty much got me freaking out now as i don't feel at all prepared to do these exams, which make up the key second half of my AS levels. The first day back i had both a mock exam and a strenous going over of the facts of exam question answering in another class and this combined with the fact that im not too sure how to go about revising for both my upcoming exams and also the resits that im supposed to be taking, particulary in Physics, where i have trouble maintaining focus on the equations im supposed to know, let alone remembering a series of other equations from the previous topics, luckily both exams cover most topics, so the cross-over should help.

Now im not very academically inclined as ive previously mentioned, i can absorb info like a sponge, but then have trouble putting that information down in words because of the way my mind codifiys and recalls information. I guess I'll just have to knuckle down and focus as thats what education is all about right?

Question: how do you prepare for exams?

DFTBA

B.E.D.A Day 25 - Dissatisfied Shopper

So today my mum took me and my brother to our local large shopping centre to get us some clothes for the summer and also to buy us an "Easter gift" as my mum calls it, which is essentially my mums way of saying she'll play for something for us if we ask her to. Now as we were trawling round the various shops, first of all through my personal favourites, Game and Waterstones, before moving onto areas that were of more interest to my brother than to me such as Next, Repulic and Superdry (or Superwet as I insisted on calling it :P) It was at this point that the fact that I really despise clothes shopping hit home to me, I had known it before of course, due to years of ingrained hatred from being pulled unwillingly around clothes shops by my mum when I was younger. However I was suprised to find how much I stil disliked it, i've grown to appreciate it in certain areas such as T-Shirts of course, but for the majority of clothing I still had little to no interest.

Now seeing as im now rapidly approaching the age where you are expected to step out of your parents shadow and make your mark on the world as they say, I was slightly alarmed at the amount of things I had not yet learnt to do that due to either being used to my parents doing it for me or because simply I was not aware of it until recently. Things like, to go back to the blogs original topic, buying clothes, eventually im going to end up growning out of my current clothing and will need to see about getting new things myself, now I know little of my bodys own measurements, so i don't know what waist width I am or what my chest size is and its things like this that I will probably need to know at some point in the future. Also is the idea of various taxes and payments that need to be made for various things in life, that ive only recently become aware of and realised that i have little to no finanacial planning skills, which makes dealing with tasks like that a little daunting.

Im sure it will end up fine in the end, but here at the tipping point into those things, its a very large element of unknowns and if there's one thing I hate, its unknowns....

Question: How did you/are you preparing for life beyond your parents?

DFTBA