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

The last 604,800 seconds

Give or take a few percent:

• In the last 200, I've probably pissed off 40% of the contents of the house by dropping heavy things great distances at 4AM. I hope they don't repay the favour.
• In the last 2,000, Osama Bin Laden is announced dead. Convenient that the announcement came around re-election time...
• In the last 20,000, I've written a good few hundred lines of code. Not much, but enough to not feel like an utter procrastinator either.
• In the last 200,000, I've watched Thor, but that's already been covered by Benji about ten times better than I ever could over here. I also finished a damn good book (more to follow).

And looking forward:

• In the next 200, I'll probably spend 100 of them staring at the screen proof-reading and feeling desperately inadequate, and guilty for not revising.
• In the next 2,000, I might even get some sleep.
• In the next 200,000 I need to do about 9 maths papers, give or take.
• In the next 2,000,000 we will begin sitting our exams, quite potentially altering our university options and deciding entire career paths.
• For the purposes of not going down a much darker, existential path, I'll gloss over the fact that 3 lines more is a lifespan, maybe 4 at maximum is everything we know of and can care about, and about 1.5 beyond that is the start of recorded history.

On a lighter note, I appear to have officially taken up reading again (having read 5 books in about 2-3 weeks). Yesterday, I read "Will Grayson, Will Grayson", a stunning collaboration between John Green (of whom I'm a massive fan) and David Levithan. 

It's all sparkly and pretty in real life. 

The book is an engaging read from start to finish, featuring a clever plot, genuine characters and relationships who change believably as the plot progresses. I personally loved its pace and twists, and pretty much everything about it. It isn't perfect by any stretch (what book is?), but it's definitely well worth picking up a copy and spending a few hours on, as is any John Green book (he's also a YouTuber, which is how I discovered his books - see here for more information).

Want to pick up a copy? If you know me, I'll lend you my copy, or pick one up from Amazon:

Forfeit vlog (would have been today except for an annoyance with the microphone) and 3D printer progress to follow in due time...

That is the reason why logarithmic scales could be considered depressing...

Charlie

Here be a vlog...?

The sun has kind-of risen, but I don't have anything much to say, and haven't been feeling too brilliant either, so I don't have a post prepared - I'm posting this as a place-holder for a vlog instead, to follow some time in the next few days. I hope that the prompt-ish provision of a vlog will compensate for my lack of an on-time post, and thus render my punishment null and void. Or something like that.

[Mother of all cop-out posts to be rectified in due course]

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

Happy Birthday!

... as of 4 hours ago, Benji is now 17. If you haven't checked out his blog yet, click here - it's quite simply awesome.

I'm afraid I'm a terrible person, and so this is going to be the mother of all cop-out posts.

Giant armed alien robots in New York? Standard

I'm going to put it simply - Crysis 2 is probably the best game of the year so far. Graphics are suitably epic - the game uses lighting and shading to an even greater extent, but also feels faster in terms of framerate - I've not checked the numbers yet though. Gameplay is much improved - the suit has been made simpler without losing any of its core functionality. My main complaint is that it feels more like a multiplayer game even in the campaign, with purchasable upgrades offering slight bonuses like reduced footstep sound or bullet traces. Useful but hardly game-changing, and all adding complexity. I'm currently in Grand Central station, struggling with a Pinger (which looks even better than in the pre-release picture above). More pictures will follow at some point later in the day. 

It still remains to be seen whether Portal 2 will steal the crown from Crysis 2 or not. Crysis will certainly take quite some beating... 

I'm feeling unoriginal...

... so I thought I'd introduce you to somebody else's originality instead. 5 years ago, a semi-famous internet personality known as Ze Frank decided to make a video every day for a year. The project ("the show") ran from March 2006 - 2007, and produced some pretty awesome and inspiring content. The best part of the show was not the show itself (although the show inspired the whole video-blogging genre as it stands today), or the layers of in-jokes, but the user-interaction, side projects, content creation and community he inspired. The only thing I regret is that I wasn't aware of it at the time.

For a taster of The Show, click here then check out the popular episodes.

In other news, I've decided on my next biggish project, provided I can get the glass bulbs and gas at a reasonable price:

Images from here

By adjusting the gases (mostly low-pressure noble gases) and pressures, some pretty awesome effects can be achieved. I've always been interested in HV and electronics in general, and have always thought that these were pretty much the coolest devices ever. The main issue with creating one is the glass bulb - having one implode on you wouldn't be much fun, and the wrong gas-mixture or pressure will create dim or invisible streamers. This won't be getting in the way of the 3D printer - that's for my end-of-term free time.

Yours hopefully-cutting-down-on-the-brain-crack,
Charlie