»18th July 2007

The State of the Union/All Is Not Well In Happy Land

You've probably not been wondering where I've been, what I've been doing instead of updating this. You're more likely to have actually spoken to me in some form or other, seeing as I seem to be on a first-name basis with the majority of my fanbase, that's right, I'm speaking to both of you.
In this update I intend to try and fill in the big blank since whenever I last did this thing. I know you're disappointed with the Big Music Roundup, I'm sure we all are deep down.


Admire the beautiful architecture of the Parkinson Library...

I'll get the actual newsworthy stuff out of the way then I can tangent and lose your interest. First, third year is over taking uni with it, graduation is on thursday. Second, Download was awesome, there are photos. Third, I am almost rid of Rent Me and the goatmen of Klalthor, I'm out of the flat, all is due is the return of the deposit, they will not miss the final chance to fuck me over. So that's good for you as there'll surely be only one more Rent Me update if you're unlucky.


Before descending to the unrelenting dungeon of toil and sorrow beneath. Imagine it with the lights off and that's more like how I experienced it if you bear in mind the time stamps on the graph below.

Now we can forge ahead with the mind-bile I can cough up. All is not well in happyland? 'the fuck? It was a picture I did on Paint when I was sat in the kitchen bored and doing a good job of stopping Mark doing any work. Do I think that sums up anything? No, these things don't hang together so neatly any more. I'm just scraping the barrel for these things, Paint pictures have a history on here as well, and it's in colour! Enjoy the imaginative pastoral setting.



What other things have I got in My Pictures? These rhetorical questions wear thin. Anyway, these curious little images are what I used to track progress when I was writing essays. Seeing the progress like that helped. They were also time consuming and something fiddly I could do, looking busy, wasting time. My methods of recording progress became ever more elaborate during the dissertation. Sat there in the library, worrying, panicking, playing RRRRRPG, looking at Facebook, brooding. I really dislike Facebook, with its photos, full of trendy people, happy, happy times. And I was sat in the library, in the fucking dungeon with useless books trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing and then worrying about doing it. Fun times.



The progress measurements start off simply, looking at wordcount on Word, keeping a mental note. In second year on the thursday when I discovered I had a 2,000 word for the Italian Renaissance module due for the next day, the progress measurement became more elaborate with a little tally on some paper for the word count. However, the dissertation brought new levels of statistical diversion. I have graphs. I have running time-stamped updates on words and footnotes with notes next to key moments of success, such as completing a difficult section or finding a useful source that wasn't in fucking French. From this data I derived the now eponymous WPF, or Words Per Footnote. A lower WPF means I'm getting in more footnotes per sentence, which means I'm doing what Burrows (the personal tutor whom I had three meetings with across the year) wants, which is bumming the sources and footnoting every other word which I referenced from my wide and deep survey of the entire historiographic landscape on Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign. On a side note, that great campaign had only one book directly addressing it in the Brotherton Library, a book which had been hidden, stolen or just lost, making it unavailable. Doom's data files were called WADs, which is an acronym for 'Where's all the data?', the backups for my dissertation had the file extension .WAS, which stands for 'Where's all the sources?'.



Armed with my WPFs I was able to reassure myself over the two weeks when I actually wrote the dissertation that it was actually possible to complete it. It also helped me to actually footnote more, which if you've not done that before is a fucking chore.



WPFs also brought me to another conclusion, you may know of my dislike of Baseball. At school I disliked cricket so much that I used my music lesson excuse to not go to a single cricket lesson in year nine, resulting in a conspicuous absence of a grade on my report, which strangely had no recriminations, skive games kids. I sucked at cricket, I'd be put on fucking deep field, the one time over the 90 minutes when the ball would come my way I'd of course be nowhere near catching it, batting was an endurance test of how long I can stand in the defensive position before the school team bowlers take me out. Surprisingly that was a long time, I just stood there and never attempted a swing unless I was really trying to get out, they couldn't deal at all. Anyway, I finally got into cricket (on TV at least) during the Ashes when England won in 2005? Well after that during a late night drinking session with the usually elusive-at-hardcore-drinking-sessions JK we watched a baseball match through and couldn't follow it at all. We came to the conclusion that it's a stupid game no one understands, not even the players, with the exception of the stream-of-stats-commentators. Baseball hides rounders-for-men girls behind arcane rules and even more arcane and meaningless stats. Your APG is only 0.9 yet you're landing 300PHRs across the season which is your best performance since the '89-90 season? Shame on you! Anyway, I used a WPF to put a friendly face over my hideous dissertation, to make the bane of my life somehow tolerable. The stats in baseball do the same.

04:44 16/07/2007


The worryingly true-to-life Slayer Family from Sims 2

With all this spare time I've been able to settle into a routine, quite an idle routine, but a routine nonetheless. So it's about 2 in the afternoon, I'll probably have just got out of bed having slept through my hifi's attempts to rouse me with metal two hours ago. What should I do? How about put the guitar on and piss everyone off with my new lower tuning to accomodate my equally unwelcome voice. There's lots of things on my drum machine that need practicing and also I must indulge my need for a near constant stream of noise and 'innovation'. Around two hours will pass. It is now time for breakfast at four in the afternoon, this will usually take the form of either cereals or Pop Tarts. It'll be at this point that the millstone around my neck will be weighing heavy. By millstone I mean my position as leader of the Dragon Slayer Guild on Guild Wars. I'll have to go online and say hi to everyone, I'll have to single-handedly recruit some more people to maintain the illusion of a growing, cohesive guild playing an active part in the alliance. This will continue for perhaps a few hours interspersed with the wondrous boon of cooked meals courtesy of mum. It'll be mid evening after Channel 4 news has finished. If I've not hit the port, or the beer then I'll probably have gone back to the PC to indulge in Diablo II, Dwarf Fortress, Sims 2? Who knows. This will continue for several more hours. Around 3am it'll be time to hit the Sopranos. I've been borrowing the first five seasons off Rory and I'm nearing the end of four. During Sopranos I will eat more cereals and will get through two or three episodes on a usual night. It'll now be between 5am and 6am and I will finally go to bed. That huge paragraph gives the impression I'm busy, as you can see, I am not.

This update is suitably huge now, I will bid you farewell now that you know everything is as it should be.

23:38 18/07/2007



Extar, over, out.

This was a long time coming