To-day I had my first, last, and only exam of the year. And now I am done. WHAT. MADNESS. By which I mean AWESOME.

Two essays (out of a choice of eight questions). I did one on NAGPRA and whether it has any implications for the Druids' claim on Stonehenge in the UK. Answer: lol, not really. Except in a more elaborate and sensitive way, including the facts a) that Druids are a really young religion and have no historical claim at all, besides, you know, being British, b) that they're not really oppressed, as far as I know, and c) that Stonehenge existed for thousands of years in various shapes and forms... which do the Druids think they built, again? Whereas Native Americans were, you know, THERE before anyone else, so their claim isn't particularly disputable.

And one on whether professional archaeology is needed even though film and literature already give people an image of the past. I FORGOT TO MENTION INDIANA JONES, YOU GUYS. I'm going to try to forgive myself for that and go on living, but it'll be a struggle.

I really wanted to do the one on reflexivity and the destruction by the Taliban of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, but I couldn't remember enough about the statues or proponents of reflexivity in Archaeology to fill a whole essay. God, that would make such an awesome researched essay. Why did you save all the good essay questions for the exam, Current Issues?

Anyway, now that I am done, I am making tea. Good tea. Sometime last week, while I was revising, I stopped to actually taste the strong-but-not-left-to-brew bag tea I'd been making myself for optimum caffeine delivery, and OH GOD IT TASTES OF ARSE. And padparadscha made a post about tea a while ago, which reminded me I still have tons of Adagio samples lying around, which I've never actually... sampled, so I'm going to taste my way through them.

To-day's candidate is Darjeeling #22. The Adagio website also lists Darjeelings number 1 and 2, but no 3 to 21. Highly suspicious, if you ask me. Perhaps 3-21 went haywire and killed their creators. Anyway.







I might just not have a subtle-enough pallet, but this didn't really taste of anything but basic black tea flavour, to me. >_> It was nice, you know, but nothing special. I'll try it again tomorrow with milk, and see if that brings out subtleties in the flavour at all.

The back of my throat feels like it's coated with tannin, but not in a bad way.

In other news, those little pots are impossible to get into with a spoon without spilling tea-leaves everywhere when they're full.


I'm also taking this opportunity to educate myself on tea, because I know nothing about it at all, really, with its first and second flushes and varieties and whatnot. I think this is knowledge I should acquire to help me in my ongoing quest to become a better and more rounded human being (and I was not encouraged by this at all).


Tomorrow I have a meeting with the professor who did the Ancient Near East module last term, who's going to give me some advice on universities to apply to for Masters, and then I'm going to see if I've got any games up here I want to trade in for the new Pokemon game. Because I'm a loser and I have a Pokemon craving. XD

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So, my dad just sent me a link to this Spiegel article (in German) about Visual-Kei's popularity in Germany, with a note saying he's going to call tomorrow for some trend advice. I know practically nothing about Visual-Kei, so we'll see how that goes, but this is a quote from the article:

Atsushi sagt, sie fühle sich im falschen Körper geboren. "Auch deswegen fühle ich mich in der Visual Kei-Szene aufgehoben, denn hier kann jeder so sein wie er will, und ich möchte als ein männliches Wesen betrachtet werden.

Rough translation: Atsushi says she feels she was born into the wrong body. "That's another reason I feel welcome in the Visual Kei scene, because everyone can be what they want to be, and I want to be seen as a male."

So you're going to use the (silly weaboish, imo, but whatever) Japanese name this person gave themselves, but you're still going to call them "she", even though THEY CLEARLY SAY they want to be seen as male.

Fuck offffff.

I mean, perhaps they identify as male but still use female pronouns in everyday life, I'm not saying that's impossible, but it seems more likely the journalist is just ignorant, or didn't bother to ask, especially since it's never mentioned. DX

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During the stressful eternity that was last term and the beginning of this one (Man, it already seems like months since I handed in my dissertation. Haven't gotten around to printing it out again and having it hard-bound, yet.), I was prettying up my website from this:


Ew, what is that dull and unenticing website.

to this:


Not quite done, but already much better

And then I realised that neither of them actually works on a screen with a resolution lower than my 1280x800. *headdesk*

Now I can either say screw it to the 43% of the internet that apparently has small screens,
or I can tweak it to work in 1024x768,
or I can just scrap this layout and design a totally new one of unequalled greatness.

I definitely don't want to just put it up knowing it's not going to work properly. *sigh* I suppose I'll doodle and brainstorm until I come up with a brilliant new idea or a plan for compressing this one. Moving the navigation somewhere else would be the easiest solution, I guess, or getting rid of the octopus. But it'd be boring octopus-less! Bah.

And a new design would require an idea for a new image... or should I do a text-only layout for once? Maybe one that's full-screen to cut out these annoying resolution issues? *brainstorm brainstorm*


Of course, I'm also pretty sure no-one but me ever actually looks at my website, but I want to make it more, you know, useful. Syndicate my LJ and Tumblr and such to it, and when I have time to draw comics, I'll upload them to there, &c &c. AND I JUST LIKE HAVING A WEBSITE, OK. IT IS MY PERSONAL INTERNET TREEHOUSE.

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I DON'T THINK I CAN LIVE MY LIFE IF I DON'T GET THE ONE OF OLD!SPOCK SAYING "LIVE LONG AND PROSPER". AND THE ONES OF BONES AND SCOTTY. AND ALL THE OTHER ONES. AND, AND... IT WOULD BE A REALLY BAD IDEA TO EAT BURGER KING KIDS' MEALS FOR LUNCH EVERY DAY, WOULDN'T IT?


I'll just give the food to Tim.

:D

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I have two invite codes to the super secret blogging tree house! By which I mean Dreamwidth. Anyone want one?

The BNP really want me to vote them into the European Parliament so they can "put pensioners before asylum seekers" and give jobs to British workers "because WE'VE earned the right". Lol. No.


So, anyway. I handed in the illustrations Friday, which just leaves the Current Issues exam on the 28th. AND THEN I WILL BE DONE HOLY SHIT.

I really want to show you a picture of the first Current Issues exam from 2004, but I think it'd probably be against some rule or other. It features the question "What are typical viewing figures for Meet the Ancestors?" and "Match the archaeologist to the TV programme". Important issues facing my discipline, guys. (Well, media representation is an issue, true, but still.)

Not much else to report besides that. I only have 10-ish episodes of Battlestar left now, and it is very distressing. ;_;

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Illustration makes my brain melt so much. I enjoy it, really, but... retrospectively. When I disregard the workload and the stress and how annoying the professor is, and only remember the sense of achievement. And that it provides fun human interaction time.

While I'm there, that is, not when I get home exhausted and grumpy. XD


ANYWAY, I TOOK SOME PICTURES TO-DAY.


Idk what that pot is. Roman, maybe? The other two are prehistoric (the rough one) and Roman (the plain one).




I noticed earlier that if it wasn't for that one Faber-Castell brush pen, my Illustration stuff could basically be a big Staedtler Mars advertisement. XD


All done. \o/


Just have to glue them down now. :D Would have done that to-day, but we got kicked out at 6.

I'm really glad it's not my turn to cook to-day. *collapses somewhere soft*

PS: I watched Star Trek on Sunday and it was epic. More later, possibly.

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As I was waking up yesterday I heard the end of some radio discussion on whether We Were Happier Under Thatcher (idk, either). When I was starting to pay attention, they were just nostalgically going on about how people were less obsessed with wealth back then (wat?), and thus happier, and then one of them said something like "But of course there was a lot more homophobia and racism back then". Which all the other panellists immediately dismissed with a lot of "Well, yeah, but" and "that would have decreased with time as people got more used to living along-side black and Asian people...", and then they moved on to something else.

Which just made me think: Oh, I see, by "we" you meant "white heterosexual people". Good to know. Must have still been asleep during the bit where they defined their remit as that.

It always interests me to see how people can talk at cross purposes in a discussion like that. I, and possibly the guy who said it, too, took it as an argument that there was obviously a proportion of the population that was less happy, while all the others seemed to see it as something that didn't really figure into their/the average person's/"our" happiness.

In conclusion: Oh, Radio 4.


I went to a life-drawing class on Wednesday! Apparently it's a fairly new society running them every week; I saw one of their posters in Elvett Riverside a few days before when I was looking for a free scanner.

It was somuchfun. :D It's been about three years since the last time I did it, so I wasn't amazingly brilliant at it, but it was still awesome. Man, I love life-drawing. I hope I can find somewhere to do it back in Cobham.


ETA: Oh, Photobucket, you are such a loser. they are only scribbly charcoal boobs, ffs. *uploads somewhere else*


Warming up.








Faces are hard. ¬_¬

I'm definitely going back next week. And I'll bring my sketchbook to do them in, so I can scan the results.


In other news, why is it always the nights before days on which the lab is only reserved for Illustration in the morning that I can't get to sleep. (No, that sentence wasn't convoluted at all.) I mean, I tried yesterday! I went to bed at a perfectly reasonable time, I just couldn't. Get. To. Sleep. In the end I gave up and watched most of the end of BSG Season 3 on my Zune. Akdhsjkdlhjadha so good. ♥ I don't even know why I stopped watching it. When I was doubting whether I should start watching again, why did you never tell me there was pseudo-space!Marxism to look forward to, you guys? Seriously. All the social and politics stuff completely makes up for Starbuck's weird and slightly creepy storyline.

I still have the last two episodes to watch, though, so no spoilers!

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When I was waiting for the train at King's Cross before Eastercon, I bought an A5 sketchbook, because those are fun to carry around for spontaneous doodling. Have a collection of stuff from it:



I think if I'm going to keep drawing the blue king I should actually, you know, learn some monkey/ape anatomy. That might be a good plan.


And some separate pages:


U-POW™ are trying to re-invent themselves as not purely laser-gun focused. The only problem is that I can't think of anything but guns that could be powered by laser cartridges. (Like printer cartridges but MORE AWESOME) I think this may be due to the fact that "laser cartridges" is sort of a silly idea.



I think the unexciting-ness of this page can be excused by the fact that I handed in my dissertation earlier that day. It does have a whale-shark, though.



I couldn't sleep. XD



WIP.


And, so this post isn't all doodles, an anime rec: Time of Eve/Eve no Jikan. It's set in a near-ish future where realistically humanoid robots are widely used as household servants/tools, but treating them like people is seen as weird and immoral. The action (such as it is - it's mostly character-driven) takes place mainly in a small underground café, where the house rule is "no discrimination between humans and robots".

It. Is. Amazing. (I want that café to exist sobad.)

There's only going to be six episodes, and they're only 15 minutes long, but the art is superb.



Go! Watch it! Now! You will thank me later! (Or not, since the next episode is something like two months away. D:)

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Hey hey internet-rangers! I don't talk to very many people on IM anymore, which I think is quite tragic, since talking is what the internet is for (apart from porn, that is). So, if I tell you mine, will you tell me yours?

MSN/Live: breakfastspoon@therandomplanet.com
AIM: chairman w00t

I also promise not to add you and then never actually talk to you out of noobish internet shyness. XD

Well, now that we've got that out of the way, guess what this is!



That is a finished dissertation being printed out. Oh yeah, I am badass.



I only have a cheaply-bound copy at the moment, but the DSU offers hard-binding as well, so I'm thinking about that. I thought it was a waste of money, at first, but Tim suggested it might be nice to have a show-off copy that'll last a while, and I guess he has a point. I mean, it's only an undergraduate dissertation, and I've spent most of this year looking forward to the time when I can study what I'm really interested in, There Are Greater Things To Come, and what not... but a dissertation is a milestone, too.

I may sound like I don't care, but I am actually really proud of it. when I was re-writing my introduction and writing my conclusion last week, the whole thing started to come together and make sense, and I belatedly got really excited about the subject again. (Teach me to be introduction- and conclusion-phobic. Next big project I have, I'm going to write them first and keep updating them as I go.) The interest in ancient trade and travel is definitely going to stay with me. I'm also really aware of how much it could be extended if I had twice the time and word-count to do it in. Maybe I'll keep working on it; extend it into the areas I'm more interested in. Though I must say, the medieval Mediterranean has grown on me more than I thought it would. XD

It's taught me a lot, too, about essay-writing in general, and all that. I remember when I wrote the IB Extended Essay of 4000 words, and it took me alllllll summer, because, you know, what were essays in high school? Essays in high school were 4 sides hand-written in class, not 4000 words with a bibliography. After that I got to uni, and it was still different, but 2000-word essays seemed easily feasible. Researching and writing 12000 words was difficult and intimidating, because I'd never done it before and didn't really know what I was doing. Now I have that experience, though, I feel like I'm ready for the next... level of academia, or something like that.

So it may sound like I don't care, but I s'pose it's really just that the actual essay isn't the most important thing that I got out of this. Sure, I've learned a lot about archaeology in the last 3 years, but I've also gained a lot of academic skills and experience, which I think are at least equally important.

And maybe someday I'll get a project so huge it'll terrify me into not leaving everything to the last minute. You never know, it could happen. I'm already better than I was, I did most of my work for this on schedule.


So, what else has been going on? I've been hearing about Dreamwidth everywhere, and it got me curious, so I lurked on the #dreamwidth tag on Twitter until someone posted a code and grabbed myself an account. It's quite nice. Not massively different from LJ, as expected, but some subtle improvements - distinction between adding someone's journal to your reading list and giving them access to read yours (which makes no difference to me, as I hardly lock entries, but it's a smart idea), a more polished interface, and it seems to be aiming for greater integration to other websites. It definitely has a better shot at replacing LJ than any of the other straight clones, like GreatestJournal or InsaneJournal. I can definitely see it becoming very popular when it comes out of beta.

Of course it'll eventually have to make the choice between being a small site with paid-access only, or a large site with ads. And then if they go for ads a bunch of knee-jerk anti-capitalists who don't think they should have to pay for anything ever will get irrationally annoyed, but if it's got enough other pluses besides "no ads", it should do well.

I won't uproot all my blogging and move it over there, but I'll probably poke around occasionally to see how the beta is getting along, so if you have an account, too, feel free to friend me, or add me to your circle, or whatever the new jargon is. :3


Also, Left 4 Dead was free to play on Steam to-day, so I FINALLY got over myself and gave it a go. I've been sort of vaguely pining after it for a while, seeing how much fun everyone was having, but somehow I got it into my head that I was irrevocably terrible at FPSs, and that I would be terrible at L4D, and that if I even tried I would feel frustrated and inferior and miserable.

Basically, I was a complete and utter idiot. L4D is AWESOME fun, and completely easy to get into. It did take me about 5 tries to get up the first ladder I encountered, but apparently that happens to a lot of FPS noobs, so I'm not going to feel discouraged over that. (Though Tim did come stand behind me going "Wow, I've never seen someone have so much trouble getting up a ladder before!" >_< >_<)

I really, really don't know why I've been holding myself back from games I want to try so much. Surely I understand by now that people who don't try things for fear of failure are idiots? I guess I was hindered by the urge to look skilled and cool in front of my boyfriend, idk.

Anyway, L4D is awesome, and you should try it, too! I won't be playing online until I'm better at single-player, but eventually!


I've also been following two amaaaazing comics on daily_yuri, and I've found some sexy sci-fi anime to watch to replace the epicness that was the last season, (Even though my favourite is only going to be 6 episodes long. I CRY BITTER TEARS.) but this post is probably long enough as it is, so I'll write about that tomorrow.

PS: Look, it's a picture of anyana13x5 and me her mum took of us while waiting for the bus back to the hotel at Eastercon. I need to actually take pictures next time. XD

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