Words of Wood

Hello LJ. Let me share my exam paper from today with you, which I'm totally counting as #8 on my #100things list. (I would tell you to think of it as a birthday present, but I'm not quite that bad a friend.)

For context: You answer two questions in the three hours. This whole exam paper is brand-new: we're the lucky year who get to be guinea-pigs to see whether it works. As such, there were no mock papers, no one knew any guidelines, and we've been explicitely told that the examiners have no model answers to compare ours against. FUN.

1. Are all taxa successful?
2. What benefits will new technologies bring to our understanding of biology?
3. If life exists on other planets, what features would you expect it to share with life on Earth?
4. What is the most significant scientific challenge now facing biology, and why?
5. Will biology become more reductionist as knowledge increases?
6. What role do parasites and pathogens play in biology?
7. Is an understanding of statistical methods essential for biologists?
8. Are all species doomed to extinction?
9. How do organisms respond to stress and how are these responses similar across taxa?
10. Is homeostasis an essential attribute of living things?
11. Are organisms well-designed?
12. What is the evidence for evolution?

So yeah XD (I answered #4 and #8.)

Then I went and hung around in the botanic gardens with Conrad and Seb and Seb's brother where I did a lot less revision than they did and ate strawberries. So that was very nice and de-stressing :)

Only two days left. I CAN DO THIS.

Does anyone else do the thing where you start filling a prompt on a ficmeme and the whole time while you're writing it you keep on refreshing the page at intervals, being paranoid that someone'll have been faster than you and already filled it? /laughs at self

I'm currently interspersing fic-writing with revision, half an hour of each and then switching. It's going okay. Well, the end of last week and the weekend were a complete and utter loss, but I'm finally beginning to pick up again. However, when writing fic I'm even less inclined to come up with actual plots than usual. Expect continuing spam of contextless h/c.

(Speaking of which - is 'getting a bug' used in the context of having a cold in the US? Enquiring minds are unsure.)

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Book! I love this book. It's extremely funny and dark and witty. You should read it. It's... quite hard to sum up what it's about, but it mostly focuses around a soul-destroying shopping centre in Birmingham. Anyway, it's one of my favourites.

#7
She'd been staring at the words for so long, they were bled of meaning. Hobbies and Interests. What did it mean? Technically it wasn't actually a question, and it was only the two inches of white space below that would clue you into the fact that the words were supposed to elicit a response. Maybe she could just write something equally ambiguous as a response: 'Good', or 'Hello', or 'Yes'. It was a conundrum. Obviously she had no hobbies and interests, she was a duty manager... and yet there were those blank two inches, as if they wanted or expected you to have a life outside of work. It was a trap, but the thing with these traps was to act as if you didn't realise it was a trap. Lisa knew that writing, for example, 'I find hobbies and interests take up valuable time that could be better spent developing top-notch merchandising skills in store' would be too obvious. She also knew that even if she had any interests, to list them honestly would be disastrous, a clear compromise of her commitment.

After twenty-three minutes of staring at the three words, she had a flash of inspiration and wrote: 'Shopping and reading magazines.' So simple. And true! They would be delighted that her life truly was that small.

- Catherine O'Flynn, What Was Lost

I celebrated doing my viva by tidying my room. It's now immaculate. (Everyone who's ever been in my room is laughing/unbelieving right now, I know.) There's so much floor! Fran came into my room to ask me something and was literally stopped speechless.

It apparently amuses a lot of people how I'm obsessive about keeping kitchens clean and orderly, but happily live in rooms with clothes and paper all over the floor. SO MUCH PAPER.

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I've finally begun uploading my backlog of fic onto AO3. Because I don't want to annoy everyone by spamming, I decided to do two stories a day. This has already become "two stories on days when I remember". My organisational skills, let me show them to you. Okay, since I've just told you how I filed two terms' worth of lecture handouts on my bedroom floor, this probably isn't a surprise.

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Last night, for reasons which are beyond me, I made a spreadsheet of all the goods I own in Echo Bazaar and calculated out their values. Conclusion: I can comfortably afford an Overgoat. But I'd have to sell lots and lots of stuff to do that. I have an unreasonable attachment to stuff (even virtual stuff), so this is a Difficult Decision. I mean, I'm already sad that I can't have my Bifurcated Owl and Unfinished Hat equipped as pets at the same time. I kind of want them to both ride around on my Bengal Tigress.

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I've just handed in my viva powerpoint slides, and tomorrow I have a stats exam. But in five weeks it'll all be over.

I'm actually walking round the house in my black heels today because I pretty only wear heels as part of subfusc and I've forgotten how to walk in them :P I'm smooth. I also forgot to get a white carnation over the weekend - anyone know what time the covered market opens? I'm guessing 9, which would give me enough time to get one before the exam. Also, so glad I get to do my exams in a room by myself in college, rather than in Schools.

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I was wondering how to do the quotes from 100things which are from fiction books. I've decided that I'll do this by picking bits from near the beginnings of the books, and which don't give away plot spoilers. Is this an okay way to handle it, do you think?

This is nearly my favourite of his books. (Excession and Look To Windward narrowly beat it.) I love the way he puts little things in near the start, like this whole I was born in a water moon section, which you know are important, but you just can't quite figure out how until later.

Saw this on leesa_perrie's journal - it sounds fun, and like an excuse to spam everyone with things! My topic is going to 100 small piles of words I come across. So, you know, paragraphs or phrases or lyrics I like on that day.

Here is my first one, from my Viva reading I was doing earlier:

ANTS ON STILTS, YOU GUYS. I would love to know the thought process which led to that experiment. At any rate, it massively amused me, although it's not quite as wonderful as bee swarming experiments, where the queen is in a little cage and the swarm forms around her. Then when the swarm reaches a site consensus and starts to fly off, they get a little way and then are all "nuuuuu, where is our queen???? this is terrible :O" and then they go back and swarm because they won't leave her behind and don't understand why she isn't flying with them. Am I alone in finding this adorable and also feeling sad for the poor confused bees? :P

Anyway, that is the sort of strange things I'm signing up to spam you with :D