Procrastination and Examination

I'm about to sit 9 exams, spread from the 18th of this month to the 23rd of June. Despite that, I still haven't written a blog post, or completed any of the practice papers due in under 8 hours. I've managed to get a load of little tasks done, but nothing significant or important. Ze Frank had an excellent video on procrastination, but I'm sure I've already linked far too many people to it. 


"Psychologists often cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision" [wikipedia]


Interestingly, the above quote fails to mention the anxiety brought on by not completing the tasks required of you, hence discrediting the whole statement and making procrastination entirely acceptable and healthy from a psychological perspective. As if that stopped any of us anyway...

Just one of many ways in which you, too, can successfully procrastinate...

Side note - I'm interested to hear from anyone who's been affected by the PlayStation Network being down over the last couple of weeks. What does it actually stop people from doing? I know if it stopped me playing Portal 2 co-op I'd be pretty annoyed...

Now to bury myself in exam papers. Fun times.
Charlie

One of these days, I'll post *before* the deadline

Speaking of deadlines, as I write this, the clock's counting down to Portal 2:

http://aperturescience.com/glados@home/

Yes, it's 2011 and I'm still using XP. My Linux machine's taking a nap, and I didn't want to wake it.

I thought that was a pretty clever way of supporting the indie games industry. Major credit to Valve for this.

Onto the main body of the post: Scream 4 (Scre4m).

I ended up seeing Scream 4 on Saturday along with a group of friends. The film is centred around a masked, robed attacker with a fondness for large, sharp knives and the illicit use thereof. Several threatening phone calls, gratuitous stabbings, murders, worryingly-open windows and chases later, the film reaches a clever-but-not-entirely-unexpected-and-somewhat-but-not-entirely-predictable conclusion of sorts.

My feelings about the film were mixed - it felt well-made and genuinely entertaining, with a decent storyline and pacing, and some fairly amusing moments. It was pretty gore-heavy, but not un-watchably so. On the negative side, there weren't any moments which stood out as particularly tense or suspenseful either, and at no moment was I truly scared (unlike how I felt playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The first bit with the water. Seriously.) .

I can't comment on how it compares to the originals, since I haven't seen them, but can certainly recommend the film, not as an amazing or deep one, but as an entertaining one.

That's all for now folks. Expect more terrible pseudo-reviews and Portal 2 raving soon...

What's your favourite scary movie?
Charlie

Nine Days of Freedom

That's right, it's been nine days since school finished. To make myself feel slightly better, I decided to work out what I've done with my time instead of revising:

• L'artista
• RC car on the Heath
• Plenty of coding and database work (now fairly comfortable with JavaScript and AJAX, if by "comfortable" you read "no longer feel gut-wrenching terror at seeing statements like $('#element').load("somefile.htm").fadeIn(1000, new function(alert("BOO!");));" - that is a valid and "sensible" line of code AND grammar, by the way.)
• Writing a haiku to express my undying hatred for IE6
• Portal!
• Mathematics (sadly, unrelated to anything in the exams, but happily, related to my game)
• Benji's
• Extracting dustballs from my brother's laptop. 

I think that justifies spending no time on revision?

Under the sub-heading "Portal!" I was messing around with some screen recording software, and was pretty happy with this run-through. (shameless segway into my "rich media" of the week):

Click me, you know you want to?

T minus 8 days,

Charlie