»25th January 2005

Day 2

Lectures resumed with a violent pace. It seems that 2005 is the year of the regional dialect, a lesser known year on the Chinese calender. The suspiciously jovial British Politics lecturer hails from the distant realm of Scotland. The lecture was in the conference auditorium, which is huge and worryingly steep. Though I believe it to have more resemblance to Ziggurat Vertigo from Quake 1 it does have the advantage of allowing me to have an increased distance between me and social-science asstards, which is always appreciated. The lecturer managed a number of rather insightful and convenient sound bites which were quite obviously geared towards the social-fasc... social-scientists to furiously write down. Overall, it looks like the lectures should be okay, but the real test of a politics subject is how infuriatingly shit the seminars are. I'll have to wait until Thursday for that delight.

ALERT!

What is that I hear? I hear semi-accoustic rattling! I hear a series of random non-chords, often dischordant, always ridiculous. What is wrong with normal chords? What is wrong with having a rhythm? What is wrong with having a noticeable song structure? WHY MUST I LISTEN TO THIS SHIT!?
Semi-accoustics, a popular instrument notable for their versatility. I wouldn't be so bothered with semi-accoustics if they were not the chosen weapon of mass sonic destruction of Liberals. I say Liberals, perhaps I should just say 'Fucking Students'. Not your average student! Fucking Students really take the biscuit when it comes to clichés and unoriginality. Why bother making up your own mind? When you can just subscribe to the Fucking Student Programme, making all life's difficult and not so difficult choices for you.
The complete non-style which is so prevalent amongst semi-accoustic players is unfortunately not confined to the hybrid semi-accoustic. NO! This horrible mish-mash of noises can quite easily be translated to electrics, resulting in a louder, noisier and thus MORE annoying 'style'. To simulate this non-style, grab your favorite guitar lick from a tune you happen to enjoy. Actually, its better to grab a riff from a song you don't enjoy. Now, simply play this riff at the same time as annother completely different guitar riff. What you have is a horrible sound, and a terriffic new take on guitar playing! If you have access to a sound editing suite such as the feature packed Windows Sound Recorder, you can make an even more authentic shit-noise by reversing guitar riffs, adding echoes, basically trying your best to make the sound unrecognisable as music.



Now that we have that out the way, back to what happened earlier today. The second lecture in today's schedule was Modern History. Ah, what a comforting sound... Modern History. Feeling that this semester might actually make sense, might actually have a little continuity I felt this lecture couldn't go wrong. It mostly didn't. After the equally suspiciously jovial history professor had finished his stand-up routine, I was met with the fact that Modern History would start from about 1650... So that only makes 350 years to think about, as opposed to 1000+ in Medieval History. However, the annoying tendency of the 'Modern era' is that lots of things tend to happen. Which fucks things up.

All that high intensity learning aside, annother feature of the day was rain. No, not the Mortal Kombat 3 character, the weather phenomenon. Purple clad ninjas jumping around would be quite a notable feature in a day. Sadly not a notable feature of this day.

Tommorow's 9am start isn't the most exciting prospect. The fact it is a fucking tutorial instead of a lecture, where zombie-like catatonia is tolerated, takes the piss. I currently have two plans.
A) Drink the last can of Energy Drink and make it through the night on Lidl Coffee and Coffee Mate. Thus turning up to the tutorial twitching, jittering and exuding an air of fatigue.
B) Actually go to bed, running the risk of sleeping in, and turning up to the tutorial in zombie-like catatonic state.
Hmmm tough choices. The situation is further complicated by the fact I want to see Blue Velvet, because it's a David Lynch film, and Lost Highway rocked, which is also a David Lynch film.

Well, this update has exceeded it's time budget and frankly I'm getting bored of typing ad lib in Notepad, so it is time I go. If you really care about whether I choose A) or B), firstly, you shouldn't care and secondly you'll have to wait until tommorow.

Extar, over, out.

TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!