»17th May 2006

Exam Week 1

After another lengthy gap between blog updates, here I am updating this thing. Last week was revision week, as with last year, no revision was done, now it's the wednesday of the first week of exams, my exams don't start until friday and it goes without saying that still, very little revision has been done. Besides, I have better things to be doing than revision, like... Dungeon Keeper. Well maybe there aren't that many better things for me to be doing, but revision sucks. What have I been up to recently? I rather worryingly got promoted to officer in my guild on Guild Wars which resulted in me making a guild website which you can look at here. To avoid having to push the envelope of my limited web designing skills I managed to salvage a lot of the stuff from the cube, yep, the same long-suffering CSS stylesheet can be found there too. I bet you're not wondering how I've managed to find things to do on Dungeon Keeper which I've been playing on and off since I was in year 8, well I only recently realised I could actually complete The Deeper Dungeons, which I'm coming very close to achieving now.

There's a bunch of things I've been thinking about putting into a blog update for a while, but I haven't got round to them until now, hopefully I'll remember most of them.

The M&M Tower

After one of the trips to the cinema on wednesday with Mark History (I really hope he doesn't mind me calling him that) I decided that I was going to keep the tubs of M&Ms I buy to munch throughout the variety of films we see. I started this before christmas, which shows you how long I've been planning on talking about this. The Tower started off as a pile of tubs on top of my wardrobe but soon I had enough (probably about four or so) to start stacking them up ontop of my bookshelf. Soon the Tower grew to ten tubs high, a height at which it frequently falls over whenever someone opens the door, opens the window, breathes. Obviously, this quickly became quite impractical so I've been forced to split the tubs into two slightly less impressive five-tub-high towers.

Still, when Parklane brought people round to view the house before they gave up because the house was shit, you could see the awe... the fear in people's eyes when they saw the tower. I'd stand there just looking at them proud. The warm glow from the christmas lights, the skylight, the heavy metal, the huge Scarface poster and the array of guitar stuff, they could see that 'this guy is cool', that 'this guy has style and knows where it's at'. However, for some reason they haven't been round for a while. I'm thinking it might be due to the red lights on the stairs. I may have said this before, but it was a good day when I heard someone visiting with Parklane coming up the stairs to my room remark that 'it looks like a brothel'. I was hoping they'd think it looks like a nuclear submarine or a Harkonen palace, but brothel I can settle for.

Family Guy

Thanks to Sam, last week I didn't go outside for three days. Well, I can't actually blame Sam for that really. What I can blame Sam for is lending me a DVD with the first third or so of Family Guy season one and most of season 2. You see I spent the best part of last saturday watching them all and drinking the bottles of Budweiser which are comparatively cheap from the Co-op. Mark came up to my room, asked me if I was going to head off to the library and work on improving my Nationalism in the Modern World essay, I stood in front of him with a bottle of Bud, wearing my jorts and said 'I can't be arsed, I'm watching Family Guy and getting drunk, you know I haven't been outside for three days?'. Mark noticed the altar of Strongbow I'd erected over by the TV and thought it best to leave. I think I broke my three day stint of not going out by heading off to the Co-op to get more Bud and Tiger Power. Needless to say, it was a good day.


4th May Scholar Meeting

On 4th May, which was really hot if you can't remember that far back, I had this preliminary meeting for this scheme the people who run my Myrtle Boultwood (crazy name indeed) Scholarship. The basic idea is that us year two and year three scholars organise meetings with new scholars, giving them an opportunity to meet people and stuff. The scholarship team tell us that this will look good on our CVs, and I have a feeling it might be quite entertaining. The first meeting we had was designed to get us to meet the other scholars (I've only ever met two scholars, I thought we were a rare breed, turns out there are at least thirty of us). This meeting was really bizarre at first, the first thing they had us do was try to arrange ourselves in a line sorted in Horoscope order, so Aries would be at one end, and the other star sign would be at the other end. This was a complete fuck-up on Pisces part, I managed to find the Pisces group, but we managed to get ourselves next to the Scorpios. I really don't know much about stupid star signs, but I know that Scorpios being next to Pisces is pretty wrong. After this bizarre ritual, a further 'ice-breaking' exercise involved everyone standing in a circle and throwing a roll of toilet paper at each other. This sounds a lot like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, doesn't it?

'Hi everyone.'
'Hello Carl.'
'I'm... I'm a history student, and I- I-'
'It's okay Carl, we understand, go on.'
'I'm a scholar, I've been a scholar for two years now... I, I don't know who else to turn to, it's taking over my life.'

Of course, this was no AA meeting, and when I said "throwing a roll of toilet paper at each other" I meant we had to tear a few pieces off and then throw it to someone without any toilet paper already. This is still sounding pretty bizarre but bear with me. After everyone had a few pieces of toilet paper we were told to tell everyone one thing about ourself for each piece of toilet paper we had. I had four, which wasn't too bad, but some unfortunate guy ended up with about seven pieces. Oh he left feeling ashamed.
After this ritual humiliation we were granted access to the huge buffet, which normally I would have enjoyed, there was so much stuff, it was a great buffet. Unfortunately, I wanted to stay sharp and focused, I might have needed to kill someone with my bare hands, so I just taken a few Doritos, an apple and some lemonade. The buffet told me a few things about the scholarship team. Firstly, this buffet was huge, far bigger than what thirty hungry people could have managed, and most of us didn't get that much stuff anyway. This tells me that the scholarship team can pull some strings in the university kitchens, if such a place exists, or that they taken over the room which was going to be used for some larger event and held the event organisers hostage, either way, that got my respect. Secondly, they had Schweppes Lemonade, I really like that lemonade, it's pretty expensive though. They could have easily gone with Morrisons fizzy water with a cube of lemon flavour floating in it, but they didn't. This either reinforces my theory that they taken over the room which was later to be used by a larger, better funded event, or simply that they have good taste. Either way, they garnered more of my respect. The apple and lemonade was great, the Doritos less so, I'd eaten a massive bag of Original Flavour Doritos the night before watching Matrix Revolutions (which wasn't any better than when I seen it at the cinema), I'd had enough of Doritos, I should have steered clear of such snacks and gone for the peanuts or the biscuits.

Whilst we were eating the stuff we'd picked up at the buffet, they gave us more detail on what we were supposed to be doing at these 'mentoring sessions'. I wasn't listening, I was assessing the state of the people around me, my potential enemies. Thankfully, they seemed to be okay, so I relaxed and left my mini-crossbow in my bag. After this short talk they got us into groups again and told us to try and find two things we all shared in common with the people in our group. We started off in twos and I ended up with this pretty good looking girl which I had absolutely nothing in common with, we ended up being similar in that we could both roll our tongues and were both second years, pretty rubbish I know. Then we were put into threes, and could come up with even less, again we had rolling tongues, I can't remember what the other similarity was, I don't think we got one. Then we went into fours, at this point I realised that the guy who was talking to me was a bit creepy, he reminded me of Stephen Padget who was at my infant school, Stephen Padget cried a lot and shouted, I didn't like him. I didn't like this Padget-doppelganger either, he told me about how he does a lot of mountain-climbing and is studying aeronautical engineering or something equally impressive. I looked at the floor and mumbled something about doing history. Weird-mountain-climbing-guy went off to another group when everyone else turned on him because of his adventuring lifestlye.

Finally the groups were sat down at tables to fill out some psychological test questionaire things to determine for example, what aspects of our life were important to us judging from the order we listed a bunch of animals like tigers and cows. My top two were tiger and pig, which apparently means pride and money are very important in my life, perhaps I should become an investment banker or a futures trader, perhaps not. After this we got down to business and had to fill out some forms to join the mentoring programme, or super-soldier programme, after such rigourous psychological profiling I thought they were trying to select us for some black-ops/espionage programme. Whilst filling out the forms I realised that I had found a bond with the guy sitting opposite me, I couldn't quite put my finger on it, I just knew we both shared an unspoken understanding. When I expressed a desire to go to the Leeds Festival, specifically on the friday the guy immediately looked up and said 'Slayer, right?'. I knew it! Such a feeling of respect and understanding can only exist between Slayer fans. We both looked at eachother, we knew... we knew that we could deal. This just goes to show that Slayer fans are everywhere, looking out for their fellow Slayer fans, like an international brotherhood. If you're ever in trouble, if the shit's hitting the fan, there'll be a Slayer fan in the background, and he/she'll be doing their best to help you out, because that's what we're here to do, help eachother out. This is song called WAAAARRR ENNNSEEEMMBLEEE!

BNP Rant

Ahem, not sure what came over me then, anyway, I left this meeting quite pleased with myself. I immediately set off from the uni to the bus station to get back to Heckmondwike to vote in the local elections, I planned to do a bit of tactical voting. The Lib Dems were coming second in the area to the BNP and I hoped that by voting Lib Dem I could stall the march of fascism or whatever exactly the BNP claim to stand for. Annoyingly, it turned out that the BNP councillor in our ward won with a majority of a thousand. Which is fucking huge when you consider how low turn-out is for local elections, usually around 25%-30%. There's only a few thousand in Heckmondwike ward, so a majority of a thousand with turn-out well under 30% says to me that a great percentage of the people who turned out to vote were a bunch of white closet-racists. Hey, if you vote BNP, even if you're not a racist, you're pledging your support to a party of racists. How many other political parties who can win seats at elections have had their leadership facing serious charges of race hate crimes. Even if they were innocent, what does that say about the party? Even if the party itself claims not to stand for racism, I'd say the majority of people who vote BNP do so because they support many of the anti-immigration, pro-white policies, so what does that make the party? Hey, if the Conservatives can say they support renewable energy and green policies...

It's ultimately the voters themselves that shape a political party, and I'm sorry, but if racists vote your party, there isn't much you can do to stop the party becoming a racist party itself. It really worries and annoys me that the people who vote BNP now probably used to vote Conversatives and Labour, that there's so many people who vote like it's a knee-jerk reaction, who vote based on prejudices and ignorance. All the people who I know voted BNP have told me that they did so because the 'don't like pakis' and that they 'don't like immigrants'. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? WHAT don't you like about pakistanis? That they have large families, drive taxis and that pakistani youths mug people? So no one's ever been mugged by a bunch of chavs off Dale Lane estate? These people are xenophobes and bigots and it shows you how things like Apartheid can come about. A lot of pakistanis are in low-income areas. There are Pakistanis who commit crimes. These problems aren't caused by Pakistanis, they are caused by poverty. Crime and social degradation was going on in West Yorkshire before the Pakistani population moved over here. The people who vote the BNP are too short-sighted to see that though.
Politics rant over.


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!