The red line may not be zero, but effective amount of work I've done is pretty much zero, as I have been thinking solely about Badminton Varsity, and pretty much neglecting everything else at this point, including this blog, which is why this post is a day late!
Anyway, hopefully we can smash the scum, and then I can get back to focusing on work again.
4th Year Project - The Gantt chart says I'm actually only a few days behind schedule, surprisingly.
This should scare me, but for some reason, I'm just not hugely worried, despite the fact that exam timetables have been released and my first one is due on the 2nd May - that's only 2 and a half months away.
Shiiiitttt.
Having checked the time till exams in order to put it in this blog, I'm now thoroughly terrified. Expect to see the red line soaring over the coming week.
It's Valentine's weekend. Guaranteed, I assure you, to put a large percentage of the world's single people in a less than enthused state. Unless they live in Egypt, where they were and probably are busy dodging government cars:
Note: This video is a little horrific, so you've been warned.
Now, I have a pretty limited knowledge of world politics, which probably makes me one of the most ill-equipped to comment on the current Egypt situation, but since this is my blog, and it's my soapbox time, I'm going to throw in my uninformed 2 cents anyway.
So, I'm sure I'm not alone in this world when I ask whether it was really a good idea to now put the hands of the civilian government into military control. Mubarak no doubt still has plenty of links with the military - he wasn't going to be suppressing protestors and political rivals with his bare hands now was he?
I recall with great clarity a line spoken on the show Battlestar Galactica (of all places) which goes as follows:
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
It seems relevant. Maybe...
Anyway, as I was saying; Valentine's Day. Single people. Sad.
Unless, of course, they are in one of the many poor deprived countries around the world, which probably don't celebrate Valentine's day. Perhaps just having food for the night would be enough.
Puts things in perspective doesn't it...
Despite this, a quick search on google will reveal a wealth of Anti-Valentine's Day sites, most performing (or attempting to perform) crude Freudian based analysis, which is essentially babble, about the nature of love and how really, it's shit. Others try to argue from the point of commercialism and whatnot, and whilst Valentine's Day is rather over-commercialised, just like any other major holiday nowadays, I'm sure you won't find these people so vociferously opposing Christmas.
There's probably nothing worse than this sort of self-led deception, a pathetic attempt to rationalise and intellectualise away a fundamental tenet of human existence. All stemming from the fact that they couldn't hit someone up and got bitter about it. It's like the kid who didn't get picked for the football team subsequently going to deflate all the balls.
Here's a picture of some kittens to break up the rant:
Ready to carry on? Ok. Good.
At this point, I will hold my hands up and say I've been through the whole bitter lonely thing, more than once, and it's not a particularly pleasant experience. But you know, hope springs eternal, and so it must be because as a rather good quote on www.thinkexist.com says:
“Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.”
The only thing worse than the deceptionists are those who are so desperate to be included in this celebration of intimacy and love that they'll go and whore themselves out to anyone with a heartbeat and two legs. Some people are surprisingly self aware about this too, and it makes me a bit angry to be honest.
It's a perversion of the whole ethos of what the day is supposed to be about; I'm pretty sure that using a stranger (or even a "friend") for a quick pull or fuck, just so one can get a little boost to the self-esteem, is about as far removed from real love as you can get. But people are that selfish, aren't they?
Here are some different sorts of kittens:
Anyhow, to bring this rant to a close; I believe that even if a person doesn't have anything else, they should always have self respect, and if they put themselves on some desperate pull-streak just to get the ego-boost, well then they've taken that self respect and thrown it down the drain, along with my respect for them.
So, to all the happy Valentine's Day celebrating couples out there: have a good one.
To all the singletons: next year, next year!
To the Vortex Dynamics examples paper: You're getting drilled tonight.
And so, Week 3 ends, and well, surprisingly (or not), Week 4 begins.
During this week, I've managed to come up with a three phase plan for not doing work. It goes as follows:
Step 1: Get work out.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Don't get any work done.
For you see, even though the red line denoting Total Time spent on work seems to indicate I've spent quite a few hours doing that stuff, I have cheekily included procrastination time within that measure, seeing as it's time spent "trying" to do work.
How much time do I spend procrastinating? Well, that will be a mystery to be revealed at the end of week 8.
Once again, a dip in work at the weekend - Badminton training makes me tired and sleepy.
The very small amount of work done on Wednesday can be attributed to an away match to Oxford. Although, that wasn't the real problem - it was rather the navigational errors committed by me as I lay in a motorway coma on the way back from the match that was the time stealing culprit.
Such was the magnitude of those errors that we managed to end up in Central London, driving past my house, and then in Cranfield, driving past someone elses house, and pretty much drove the length and breadth of South East England, before we finally wound our way into Cambridge, two hours late.
Right, time for the first update of this experiment.
In summary, all I can say is that I'm regretting not doing more work over the weekend. As now I am absolutely up to my neck in it. Stupid 4th Year Project. Stupid solar car with the wheels that won't fit inside the fairings.
Grr.
I'd also like to remark at how useless I get at things when I'm tired and hungry. Having spent all day in the department today, I came back to my room after a trip to Sainsburies. The plan was to make a quick egg fried rice for dinner using some leftover rice that I remembered making a day or two ago.
Well, I stopped in my bathroom to relieve myself, and my mind wandered to those stupid fairings I'd been working on all day. Then, I suddenly found myself brushing my teeth. I mean, what the eff?
After hastily putting an end to that, I went to the kitchen and fished out my rice. One sniff let me know that it probably wasn't edible anymore. After thinking back with some difficulty, it turns out that I had made the rice last Friday.
Time flies when you're having fun, eh?
Luckily, ingredients for Egg Fried Rice are mostly interchangeable with Carbonara, and that is what I'm sitting here eating whilst bashing out this post.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the graph (click for full size):
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the Windup Girl - the beautiful and enigmatic Emiko - now abandoned to the slums. She is one of the New People, bred to suit the whims of the rich. Engineered as slaves, soldiers and toys, they are the new underclass in a chilling near future where oil has run out, calorie companies dominate nations and bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.
And as Lake becomes increasingly obsessed with Emiko, conspiracies breed in the heat and political tensions threaten to spiral out of control. Businessmen and ministry officials, wealthy foreigners and landless refugees all have their own agendas. But no one anticipates the devastating influence of the Windup Girl.
I stumbled upon this book in Waterstones, with "The Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel." emblazoned across it's cover. I picked it up with high expectations, and after having read it, have to say that those expectations weren't entirely fulfilled.
The Windup Girl is a deeply complex book, set it in a dystopic Thailand where all sorts of machinations are going on. It does many things right - the world building is absolutely fantastic, and you can tell that Bacigalupi has done his research as the prose is crammed to the brim with bits of detail which really throw his vision of Thailand into sharp relief.
I am in awe of how immersed he makes the reader feel without burdening our minds with unnecessary technical detail - this is a Sci Fi with a focus on the characters after all, and not the scientific magickery which makes the world in which they live tick. This is not an easy task, given that there are mountains of technical detail which could have been delved into had he desired; how do kink-springs work? How does all the genehacking and generipping work? It's left as food for the imagination.
Another thing I ended up loving about the book is it's use of the present tense. I was initially skeptical, not having read too many books with such a narration and it felt a little odd. However, as I sank into the story, I realised that as a technique to deliver the story with, it lends an immediacy to the proceedings, which when coupled with his fantastic poetic use of language, makes the book an absolute treat to read.
So, what turned me off?
Well, for the most part, this book feels like an extended "slice of life" prose. It just didn't feel like it was going anywhere for the first half. The characters, whilst well defined and memorable in their own right, play around in the lovely sandbox world that Bacigalupi has created, and whilst this is entertaining to read, it seems for the most part the plot is missing a sense of purpose and only slowly gathers its wits as the story comes to a climax.
I think this is due to several factors - the complexity, for one. Having such an ensemble of characters to manipulate in the story inevitably leaves some of them under-developed and I definitely feel that some of the relationships between the characters should have been explored more deeply. In the end I found that although the visceral action scenes had great impact, I didn't for the most part feel emotionally connected to any of the character strands; with the exception of the Kanya/Jaidee subplot, which was quite well done. Instead, I made my way through the book rather like an impartial third-party observer. Whilst this was interesting in it's own right, sort of like people-watching, it's not the sort of experience I read books for.
Perhaps there is a case to be made here for making characters too grey.
To conclude, I feel that had Bacigalupi handled his characters with as much finesse as the world, this story could have been an absolute scorcher. As it is, I am left feeling a little cold, although the world will stay in my mind for some time to come.
On my once before used scale of ten, I give this book a 7.
