The thread for flipping shits (and tables)

Such beauty, such compassion. Such ability to feel empathy for humans, or even pain for itself.

I hate summer I hate summer I hate summer so incredibly goddamn much. I can't sleep and I'm constantly sweaty and I can't wear my nice clothes unless I want to feel even hotter and there's not enough water in the goddamn world to keep me from being thirsty in winter so you can fucking imagine how I feel now. It's the season of mosquitoes and gnats and I'm not all that fond of swimming to be entirely honest and I like ice cream even when it's cold so that's hardly a bonus.

Fuck, I can't understand why people enjoy summer at all. Fuck, the Classic Summer Triad (lemonade, frozen treats and swimming) exist explicitly to escape the miserable soul-crushing heat. And even though I'm really happy about getting a summer job, between that and my internship I'm going to have to fucking trek through that heat daily for my commute, not that it's any better in my home with its busted air conditioner and shitty fans.

I swear to god that if I got three wishes from a genie I wouldn't fucking think twice about the first one being something along the lines of "switching to a three-season cycle with only spring, fall and winter, adapting all relevant organisms in such a way that they can survive without summer's involvement." I'd try to get some reversing global warming in there too if I could manage it but really I care about the losing summer thing more.

Fuck summer with a goddamn spetum made of icicles.

A third example: homo sapiens not having checks and causing over half of all land and marine species to go extinct by 2100 due to massive environmental change with things like ocean acidification, climate change, deforestation etc having occurred over such a short period of time.

humans are op pls nerf

@btp: I'm not berating Credit because he wailed on a hornet. I'm berating him because Wheat already summed it up:

That being said, "oh no a bug" is a bad attitude based on the Fear Of Unknown Things.

Namely, I'm criticising the fact he wailed on something he didn't know about. Honestly, I'm cool with a hornet dying! While we don't have hornets in New Zealand, introduced wasps disrupt beech forest ecosystems by monopolising the honeydew secreted by sapsucking scale insects. As well as depriving birds like the kaka of food required to successfully breed, they'll also kill and eat any available invertebrates.

We also have native wasps! They're solitary, burrow-dwelling insects that don't bother anybody.

What I keep getting at is that (if you could be bothered) you could learn and count the number of truly deadly arthropods in your region on one hand. Seriously. Insects that can bother you would likely number less than twenty species, which collectively do a horrendous job at misrepresenting all the other neat bugs.

Ultimately, what I am getting mad at is wilful ignorance. If you've got me handy, you've got no excuse to not learn more about bugs!

Fire ants literally almost murdered me when I was a kid and I've never stopped loving ants and being really interested in them. I've never been bitten by a spider that I know of and yet I used to be outright terrified of them and they still really unnerve me. Fear reactions are weird.

Car overheated, now no car

Woops

So I just lost 8000 USD worth of scholarships. I have enough college funds for a single year without them. I'm gonna need to use this single year to bring my GPA back up high enough to get them back. If I can get them back, I don't even know for sure if I can.

Even worse, this means my vague plans of taking a trip to Australia this year or the next are basically ruined.

All because I'm bad at math.

At least I passed fucking Calc.

Most scholarships I've seen have a grace period for GPA recovery since having a particularly bad semester is really common. Definitely look into it since I think you should be able to. Good luck <3

I thought Mehg said his cat overheated

I thought Mehg said his cat overheated

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Spoiler

I sure wish my parents wouldn’t be so penny wise and pound foolish about my education in CS. They simply don’t see why I should have loads of uninterrupted time to work on coding projects; to summarize things, they think that (1) I am a parasitic slave monkey and (2) working as many hours as possible at my current job (which does not involve developing software) is how I’m going to get employed once I graduate.

edit:
So I had a hook in my head last night and it was this crazy-meter syncopated thing and I didn’t think to write it down because I had it before and had already written it down, right? And in case I forgot it, I knew that part of it was similar to some other thing, just with strange rhythm.

Then I checked my file, and it turns out I hadn’t. Now I don’t remember enough of it or which other thing it was like, other than that mine had a descending triad in the second or third bar (it was the chord change that made it work). I’ve really got to get in the habit of recording these instead. May we meet again some day, sweet tune. (but if the Scott Adams theory of creativity is any good this isn’t necessarily a bad thing)

"All southbound trains are stopped in San Francisco."

Yeah well fuck you too, Caltrain.

hi I want to rant about exams this may be long and unintelligble to those not familiar with the intricacies of the British exam system

This summer, I am doing nothing but A-Level Mathematics modules (seven of the buggers, in fact; five exotic and brand new ones plus two resits). It was revealed a fortnight ago that a number of Edexcel's 18 modules had been compromised, and ever since I've been actively avoiding finding out which. Once a paper has been compromised, it is replaced by a Reserve Paper, and these standby papers are notoriously far trickier and more punishing than normal ones. And, last week, the poor, poor peeps sitting Core 3 found this out to their cost* (I was sat slashing my way through Statistics 3 at the side of the hall and could just tell people were suffering.)

Yesterday's Mechanics 4 paper was exhausting, though in retrospect not terrible; there were some leftfield questions, sure, and getting it done in 90 minutes was significantly arduous, but I have practised on worse. It did however follow unusually gruelling M1, M2 & M3 papers, so I tried to discover whether or not it had been compromised or if it were simply part of a trend of difficult Mechanics papers this year, in which case I'd put some extra grunt into M5. And then I accidentally read the whole list.

M4 was not one of the seven compromised exams, but both my clashing resits are. That means that, on Friday, I'll be sitting a reserve Further Pure 2 paper, followed immediately by Statistics 4 which I already know I'm not going to do well in - then, on Monday, a reserve Further Pure 3 followed by a Mechanics 5 which has the potential by extrapolation to be brutal.

This is not going to be pleasant.

...I pity the people who actually need to get good grades out of this summer's exam series. By rights, I shouldn't be panicking; my January resit results guarantee me my uni place, and at best this summer is mostly just to save me from the agonising bureaucratic rigmarole of re-certificating my Further Mathematics A-Level with a different set of modules. But bloody hell, lots of people were relying on a decent C3 resit after January's challenging paper, so they're completely screwed; likewise, many people had their one and only opportunity to take M2 and C4 this summer. If even one Further Pure paper turns out monstrous then I can foresee another student protest, and given the sort of peep who sits FP it'll probably be more serious than tacky "one does not simply show that tan x = (1/3)tan40**" memes on Twitter (bloody hell guys you're letting our generation down here.)

* for the record, the harshness of the paper is heavily exaggerated by students and heavily played down by the exam board - I'd say it was unfair. Questions gave you fewer marks than I'd have expected for doing reasonably tricky things. Many problems were non-standard and, yes, unfortunately required you to think, thus scuppering those who'd learnt only how to pass the exam based on what typically shows up. I'm all for awarding understanding over pattern-spotting, but for this paper there were two instances where without due care and calm thoroughness you'd have easily missed picky little details, both right at the end of your workings, and if these are harsly marked against then that really is unfair - that's not awarding understanding, but penalising those shaken by the high-pressure paper, and that's certainly what this was. It did not conform to the usual standard; consistency is really what this argument ought to be about...

Also question 8 will go down in infamy as the completely ridiculous mechanics question in a core paper a.k.a."why can't Kate just use her camera's zoom to take the photo rather than running out into the road in front of a frickin' marathon with a speed varying as a function of the reciprocal of a trigonometric function?"

seriously Kate get a grip and don't clumsily frame questions with bad context that wasn't separating wheat from chaff that was dealing with bright pink wheat that nobody wants to buy on account of it being bright bloody pink

...

I didn't even do this paper my C3 was two and a half years ago why the devil do I care so much (it's possible that I've spent too much time around the maths department this year because they give me tea in exchange for me teaching doing their jobs for them doing the papers their students just sat so they can see how bad the exam was without actually having to do it helping out)

** okay I concede that particular question was not simple and you deserved more than four measly marks for getting it but if yet another year 13 whines "how was I supposed to know that cos 40 = sin 50?" I will ram the Core 2 textbook they had last year right down their oesophagus whilst screaming "THAT WASN'T EVEN THE HARD PART"

Oh. Is that what was up with the C3 paper? That explains a lot.

*eyetwitch*

But anyway, good luck with your exams, Sruix! I really do not envy you at all.

Oh. Is that what was up with the C3 paper? That explains a lot.

*eyetwitch*

*nods understandingly*

(did C4 go alright for you, then? It was reasonably nice, I thought, certainly nowhere near as bad as C3 and within the typical deviation; I had to squint to see that it was a reserve, but then a lot of the questions read like they'd been plucked straight of a Solomon paper)

But anyway, good luck with your exams, Sruix! I really do not envy you at all.

I'd say good luck to you also, but then you're presumably done already. I really do hope you get the grades you need; if it's any consolation with the C3, the grade boundaries will be low and tight.

(oh and the past me who said I'm not going to do well in S4 is a total liar - turns out that I had never in the past sixth months put the S3 and S4 syllabi next to each other, mainly because I detest Statistics considerably and threw myself into Mechanics for the vast majority of this year, and bloody hell I can do a third of S4 by sticking Var( in front of everything in my notes for the first half of S3's Chapter 3 and I can do a second third by crossing out all the N's in the latter half and replacing them with t's why didn't I spot this four months ago i.e. not two days before the exam?)

my main impression of british exams was the satire in harry potter books

judging from what you've explained to me, that system seems to only exist to punish everybody for a poor decision made by those who do not care about the mental health of their community

what do they expect the honest, upright folks to do? it's not as if they sit across from the crooks at a metaphorical breakfast table, clearly aware of the machinations of actions they do not share in

i hope for clemency on your further trials

This is an example of a specific instance and I would not use it to draw a general picture

C4 was a reserve? That one was an absolute breeze. I think I got a little stuck on the very last question, but not for very long. Hopefully it'll average out at an A* because I really can't see that happening for any of my other subjects. :<

But yes! I'm all finished now. Which is excellent news, not least because I've had really weird nightmares for the past few nights now and I suspect exam stress was something to do with that.

when my sister is sassing at me for messing up tasks I would normally know how to do but it's a migraine day I just want to punch her in the goddamn face

the past me who said I'm not going to do well in S4 is a total liar

hahahahahahaha yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaah about that

only time I've ever felt like I'm still learning the course in the middle of the exam

good job my grade in it is of absolutely no consequence

(do you think I'll get extra marks for writing "SORRY I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING" under a whole page of crossed-out workings on the grounds that it'll likely brighten the examiner's day pfft hell no)
(on the other hand when I did figure it out it was soooooo gratifying just a pity I didn't have similar epiphanies concerning the other two ineffable questions)

Still, FP2 was a breeze. 'twould have been better if I didn't twig how to polish off the final question two seconds before the exam ended, but heh...

p.s. @whoosh! C4 was one of the seven, as listed here - so far C4, FP1 and FP2 have been okay, but M2, M3 and C3 have been significantly harder, though only the latter to the extreme. FP3 on Monday will swing the balance between good v.s bad...

So, i guess it's time to let you guys know why i've been a bit absent (a lot less as of now though).

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SpoilerThere are so many things i have to say, but i guess i'll just mention the important ones: First of all, my trip to the U.S. has been... postponed, it's not certain if i'll ever get to go but there is a small chance that i will go next year. It didn't sound so optimistic when i received the news though, in fact, i had the biggest breakdown ever, like a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum. But it was more like a sad man legitimately threatening to end his own life because finally, after so many years of emotional pain a wonderful escape seemed so easy to achieve and it all went into shit after a short period of blissful planning.
I won't go into details but simply put, i needed a considerable amount of money in a short period of time and my family, who previously said they were willing to support me, backed away even though they could've covered it. After that i had a long period of intense emotional pain, as i discovered or rather, realized, more shitty stuff about my family - on top of that, shortly before that happened, i decided to stop taking medication in order to save up for my trip and also because i couldn't take my mother's bullshit anymore every time i needed money. It was a miserable experience, but i'm glad it happened when i had the time to stay in bed all day, by this point by the way, i had quit my job because i couldn't muster the energy to stand up. After a while and thanks to the fact that i had some money saved and my therapist is a wonderful person and lowered the price for her services in half, i was able to sort through all my shit and get it together.

And i guess that was it, there's more detail to all of that but it can be summed up as "i realized my family psychologically abused me all my life and i felt really shitty about it but then i got better"

I still don't think i'll be around IRC or Skype that much since i still don't have a computer and when i get to use my mom's i want to play or draw.

Aw :c you have my sympathies, Ed *hug*

Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

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Spoiler

As a consequence of your results in Semester 1, 2013, you have been warned under the Enrolment and Academic Progression Rules because you are at risk of making unsatisfactory progress toward the completion of your program. You have received this warning because in your most recent semester of study your grade point average (GPA) was below 3.5 and/or you failed 50% or more of the units in which you were enrolled.

Your faculty (or school, for students enrolled in a program in the Faculty of Health Sciences) will contact you shortly by email to arrange an interview or attendance at a workshop.

You must take immediate action to improve your academic performance.

:(

hugs

There's still time to fix it, at least! If they're sending you a warning, it means you're not out of the running yet.