I'm bored and want people to chat to. I'm also not a fan of waiting ages for replies, I think if you're going to chat then do so. I'll talk about most things, though I'm not great at coming up with topics.

MSN: rakuen03forever[at]yahoo.co.uk
Yahoo: rakuen03forever

I had some IRC problems, which is similar to DC++, so here are some amusing extracts from my timeon DC++.

[10:46:00] <•Trivia•> Question 7 of 15. Misc:What is normal body temperature for an adult human?
[10:46:29] <•Trivia•> Here is a hint: 9••6
[10:46:58] <Magician> 97.6
[10:47:00] <•Trivia•> Here is a hint: 98.6
[10:47:00] <•Trivia•> Only 30 seconds left to get it!
[10:47:06] <Magician> 98,6
[10:47:17] <Magician> 97,6
[10:47:26] <Magician> 94.6
[10:47:30] <•Trivia•> No one got that. The correct answer is '98.6'

[15:38:15] <Postmanpat> does anyone have the new true blood S03E12? Cant find it
[15:38:40] <Rakuen> I have true blood. I imagine with fake blood you would die very quickly
[15:38:55] <[UC]InHumaN> i lol'd

[16:19:02] <...> dudes, nothing comes up when I search
[16:19:07] <...> how do i fix this?
[16:19:51] <blue_panda> [16:20:08] <Dazzle> noob is File -> Settings -> connection settings -> Passive (firewall, worst case)
[16:19:53] <Rakuen> make the search a small window and play porn in a larger window. that should get something up
[16:21:20] <L333ch> ....
[16:21:23] <...> blue_panda I love you
[16:21:36] <blue_panda> lol welcome
[16:21:58] <Rakuen> sure just ignore my help
[16:22:18] <...> i love you too rukuen, in a gay way
[16:22:52] <Rakuen> sigh... its spelled with an 'a'

I'm annoyed now. My department held a writing competition with R5000 prize money per category. I entered three essays in two categories and didn't win! I was mentioned as one of the best essays but there was only a first prize. Not only that but I've never even heard of the person who did win, and neither had some people I asked. Just as depressingly my supervisor, who thins I play too many games, wasn't there to hear me get a special mention.

so yes, I'm an excellent writer and I'm pissed off because I didn't win the competition and instead came second to some person no one has ever heard of.

I've been feeling rather patriotic today, strange because my aunt was held up at knife point this morning and I'm opposed to patriotism on principle. I also think one reason Americans know so little about the world is that they primarily export culture. So for your education and enjoyment I decided to link a few South African songs and movies for you to enjoy.

---

Colourful - The Parlotones
Quite a big band here in South Africa and I think people overseas will have heard of them, or maybe only the more well-listened. Either way here's one of their songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdllbXv4uEI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parlotones

6 Gun Quota - Seether
This band is more likely to be known by non-South Africans as they've moved over to America now. But they started in South Africa so it's getting linked anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo46Avis2E8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seether

Kaptein (Span Die Seile) - Kurt Darren
This one is almost certainly unknown. It's an Afrikaans singer, who's actually got some really catchy songs. The wikipedia page is also in Afrikaans, his page is only available in Afrikaans and Dutch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlIlJPTMkw
http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Darren

---

Tsotsi
I've never actually seen the movie but I've heard it's pretty good. It did win an award after all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsotsi

District 9
Well it's not made by South African's so much but it was filmed in and set in South Africa so it counts. I'm sure most people have heard of it, and perhaps watched it already. If you haven't it is really good, and in a style I hadn't seen before. I did find it a relief to hear familiar accents though. :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9

Cry Freedom
This is an older film and it seems had very little to actually do with South Africa itself, due to politics. Still if I remember it was quite emotional and is about South Africa. Then again it might be too slow for some people. Still I'll offer it anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Freedom

I should really find more South African movies to watch. >.>

---

Enjoy

Please, if you never listen to anything I say listen to this, if you come to South Africa do not get in a minibus taxi. I could go on and on about the stupidity and reckless driving but let's just look at the latest sterling example of driving.

A taxi driver, fully licensed and in working taxi, that's rare, overtook a line of stopped cars. Nothing special there, except they were waiting for a train to pass. The boom was down but the taxi just swerved around it and on to the tracks. One of the witnesses thought it was a suicide attempt but it was just stupidity and 9 school kids, cause that's what he was transporting, were killed in the crash.

If that's not bad enough just feel for one of the family of one of the girls. In 2007 the girl was raped and set on fire. Yeah some things just suck.

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/N.....orror-20100826

These are the games I've been playing now.

Assassin's Creed
I was looking forward to this one, it was more assassin stuff and a friend really liked it. Then I played it and was mostly disappointed. Whoever designed the menus deserve a very painful death. To exit the game you have to go through about three or four options then sign back in because the main screen doesn't have an exit button!
In game looks really nice and running around is a lot of fun. It gets let down though with repetition and a lack of sense. Guards know who you are immediately, not surprising with the weapons out, unless you are in a group of scholars and just riding a horse will make them chase you. You can overcome that by walking the horse like a snail but I found it easier to just gallop around.
The game is also very buggy. It crashes when you go into Jerusalem without a bug fix. Though that might just be the crack.... However it has other annoyances and bugs. The in-game movies are unskippable and at certain times you are forced to walk. Once I made my way to a kill and the game decided it was a good time to force me to walk. I also happened to have come from the rooftops and was standing on a hanging board. Suddenly I couldn't jump off and had to restart!
Also the whole future thing just sucked. I was taken out of my killing spree to walk some loser into a bed. How fun.

Assassin's Creed II
I then turned to the sequel in the hopes that it had improved. It had in some areas and gone worse in others. It doesn't feel quite as repetitive but it seems too guided. I haven't tried rejecting any missions yet but I might just to see what happens.
The running and climbing is just as awesome as before but the fighting is less impressive. ACI made a nice sound when you killed people with your hidden blade and it had a certain feel. ACII lost the sound and now using the blade feels rather empty. Not to mention at one point they gave me two blades and I wound up killing a civilian next to the person I was meant to kill.
I'm glad to see I'm not dragged out of the animus to go sleep any more and the computer feel is much stronger now. The money aspect of the game seems unnecessary,especially when its so easy to pickpocket. ACII also has the random times were it forces your moves, something I hate. I had to charge down a guard, who escaped and was probably meant to, because the game wouldn't let me select my throwing knives!

Left4Dead2
L4D2's intro deserves a mention because I love it. It's probably one of the best game intros I've seen. The game itself is alright, though being a multiplayer game and me lacking anyone to play it with, I'm probably missing out on all it has to offer. It's also not the type of game I'm really in favour of, there's no sneaking and the enemies never run out. There's not too much to praise or criticise, everything feels pretty good and it's entertaining enough that I've been going back a few times but it doesn't have anything that really stands out.
my first L4D2 experience wasn't the best though, some weird zombie pushed me into a couch and I got stuck in it. I got free after I dropped a pipe bomb at my feet. Then the ai got trapped in a fire and died. If I had three people over though I'd love to give it a proper test.

Well for a few weeks now I've been posting articles up on Flayrah (http://www.flayrah.com/), a furry news site. Most of my articles are about animals, since they show up in the news feeds I'm already watching, but the site is full of news that furs might be interested in. I encourage you to go an subscribe. Unfortunately my latest article hasn't been approved yet. :( But it's about lolcats so keep an eye out for it.^^

Tomorrow and Sunday I'll be competing for the first time at a lan! It's kinda small though, just from my university. I'm the leader of my Counter Strike1.6 team. Yay me! On the downside all the people I asked to play either wouldn't, couldn't or ran away to Botswana -.- So it's me, one guy I wanted and 3 guys I've never met. On the plus side I've played games with one of them before. I'm not too confident about winning though. As I said, I've never met three of them so no idea how they will play (already a bad start for a team game) and I've, and my friend, not played CS in weeks. Still it might be fun so wish me luck.

30 September is Blasphemy Day!

I don't believe in god.
Jesus was not the son of god.
Mohammed was never visited by an angel.
There is no reincarnation.
We do not have a spirit.
There is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no afterlife of any kind.
Your ancestors are dead and gone, they not watching over you.
Thor, Jupiter, Shiva, Ra are all lies and none of the religions from where they come are any less correct than Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism, Paganism, Shamanism, ancestor worship etc. etc. etc.

I believe all ideas must be judged solely by the evidence for and against them, not by tradition, not by their implications, not by what you would prefer.
I believe all ideas must be open to criticism, no idea should be shielded and no law against blasphemy can ever be justified.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Let the sword of reason shine,
Let us be free of prayer and shrine,
God's face is hidden, turned way,
He never has a word to say,
He was never on your side,
God was never on your side,
Let right or wrong alone decide!
God was never on your side!
No, no, no!"
-Motorhead

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that I'm early. Second time this week I've mistook a month-ending date to mean the end of this month. I'll just crawl away now...

I got some new games so some new reviews and re-looking at some previous reviews, though all in a much shorter style. Also I got drawn! http://www.furaffinity.net/view/4199046

Battlefield Bad Company 2
I finished this game now. It wasn't bad, although the ending isn't satisfying. Why can't games have a proper ending instead of always setting up fora seqeal? In any case if you want to know what playing this game is like just imagine this.
You go into a combat situation. The designers decided the most exciting weapon is the rpg and so there are at least 4 or 5 of these per group. You duck behind cover. Rpg 1 destroys cover, rpg 2 kills you. Repeat per encounter.
And just this annoying bit. The first enemy you kill is by stealth. Enjoy it. That's the last time you will ever use stealth in the game.

Dead Space
I've only played this twice now, and admittedly not got that far. It just hasn't interested me. The controls are horrible! I don't think I'll be able to stand this game when I'm probably going to die more from unresponsive controls than dangerous monsters.

Dragon Age Origins
This is a weird one for me. I don't like controlling parties (thankfully the party doesn't need me to give commands) and the only rpg's I've played in recent times are Morrowind and Oblivion. I also haven't played third person in a while so this game feels very strange to me. That said I am finding it fairly enjoyable. There's nothing I don't like, so I'm playing it every now and then.

Crysis
I got this to test my graphics and found them wanting. :( I can run the game okay but not at maximum settings, I drop into the teens for frame rates, but it goes mostly okay on high graphics. Although there is occasional lag, particularly when turning fast. I can't say the graphics stood out for me that much. It does look good but not spectacular, except for the water which looks better than in any other game I've seen. Love the water effect on your helmet when you surface.
The guns seem quite weak to me and it's appalling how pathetic your melee abilities are. I found it quite tough at first before I learned a simple trick. Find cover, shoot someone, go invisible, shoot guys that get close, repeat. You can take out whole bases without any major damage.

Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2
This is probably the best modern game I've played. I think it looks amazing, better than Crysis, and surprisingly it has a better frame rate than both Crysis and Bad Company. On of the things I loved was the variety of actions you could do. I know they were staged but climbing up walls of ice and rappelling down to kill guys was incredibly fun.
MW2 also feels good. In Bad Company the weapons feel odd and Crysis they feel ineffective. In MW2 they felt good. Everything actually felt good and it was great to fight guys that didn't have a million rpgs. The only downside was the way enemies appeared on rooftops all around you.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2
I got this game because I finally had a computer that could play games. The last time I had a decent gaming computer was a 486 way back when everyone was using DOS and one computer was pretty much like every other computer.
For a start the game looks very good. The environments are almost completely destructible, very nice to see in a game, although finding cover is a lot harder when an RPG will totally destroy the wall you're hiding behind and perhaps bring a building falling down on you. It took me a little while to get used to controlling the character but once I had that down things went fairly well. Of course it was then that I ran into what would later become my major annoyance with the game; what role do I play?
You are a part of squad and appear to be the only one vulnerable to fire. Obviously this is important to keep the story going but when your team-mate gets hit five times by a tank and just picks himself up with no problem you have some immersion issues. With immortal team-mates you can pretty much hang back and let them take care of business, something I did a number of times when I couldn't see the enemies. As nice as it looks with snow and sand blowing around makes it impossible to see where you're going. The enemies apparently can see through it and still fire accurately. This led to me becoming a little disillusioned as I tagged along feeling like a fifth wheel in team. To counteract this the game massively overcompensates at key points.
At one stage in the game you are attacking an enemy base when two helicopters fly in and start firing at you. My captain shouts at me to get a rocket launcher, which I do (as well as killing all enemy soldiers in the area). Now the game decides I can switch from being mostly a spectator in the battle to the key person. The helicopters target me exclusively. No matter where I go both of them keep shooting at me, completely neglecting my team-mates. This makes it extremely hard to try shoot either of them as aiming at one leaves me open to the other. All this time my team-mates sit around idly while two other rocket launchers and two or three mounted rocket launchers lie right next to them. After dying about 50 times I was just about to rage quit forever when I managed to beat them.
I haven't gone much further but I really hope the game manages to feel more consistent in the future.
On a side note it only seems to have multiplayer capabilities when connected to the internet. I haven't done much looking into this but I certainly hope that's not true as I'd only really play with others at a lan.
6/10

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
A friend showed me this game a while back and I thought it looked amazing. Unfortunately I had to settle for playing Morrowind, which was brilliant as well, as my computer couldn't handle it. Now I've finally had a chance to play.
It had a similar look and feel to Morrowind, although better, and despite the laborious tutorial section in the beginning I thought it was going pretty well. Once I got outside though I found a lot of my ground was ugly and purple. This was solved by turning off the 'Draw distant land' option. I'm glad it was easy to fix but I also would have liked to see far into the distance.
Most of the game has kept the good parts of morrowind with some areas made better and a few others worse. Talking to people and trying to make them like you is much better than in Morrowind. The penalty in Oblivion isn't so steep and it relies on your decisions rather than blind luck (and is actually quite fun). Lock-picking has also been changed to use your skill and is again an improvement. What has become worse, though, is the profile system. In Morrowind everything was at your fingertips, in Oblivion there too many menus to go through. The same problem occurs when buying and selling. You can only (as far as I know) sell items individually. In this respect Morrwoind did far better.
The ability to become a journeyman, novice etc in different skills is a nice new feature, although it would be nice to have an area to see what bonuses your skill level is giving you.
Despite some flaws and annoyances I do find the game to be enjoyable and richer than its predecessor.
8/10


Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers
I rather like the Magic card game and the opportunity to play it on my PC seemed quite exciting. Everything looked great when I started up but it wasn't long (about three duels in) before my enthusiasm began to fade. I couldn't beat the second campaign battle with either of my starting decks (which I didn't get to choose) because I had nearly no flying monsters and so all their attacks went straight over my blockers. I tried to balance my deck a bit and discovered that there is no deck building ability whatsoever. Considering even the Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon games on the Gameboy have this feature I found this to be unacceptable. The idea of a trading card game is to build your own deck. I hurriedly uninstalled the game and was thankful that it was only a pirate copy.
Short review: If you see this game lying in the gutter, leave it there. Even free it's not worth it.
1/10

Portal
I finally got to play Portal, something everyone who plays games has been telling me to do. I finished it in one afternoon but I already knew it wasn't going to be a lengthy game.
My first thought was that it was a bit slow and boring but after they gave me my own portal gun and I started making portals I really began to enjoy. It might just be a concept test but there is something amazingly satisfying creating portals and watching gun turrets fall from the ceiling. Glados was great as well and her comments kept me constantly entertained. "The companion cube will never threaten to stab you." On that note I was quite sad when I was forced to euthanise my faithful companion cube.
The game has a great mood and never seems to loose it even as it switches from a test to an escape attempt. My only problem with the game was that it was too short.
10/10

For those who noticed, though you probably didn't, I've not been on most sites for the past few days. This is a combination of installing Linux and having some teething issues and the Seacom cable not working and isolating me from the internet. Luckily my phone can still get through, obviously not a Seacom route. Seacom is sort of up now though and hopefully will maintain some connectivity, but if I disappear that's why.

Now to sort through the 96 new submissions....

I got an awesome computer!! A big thank you to  dracius for building it for me.

AMD Phenom 2 x4 945, Quad Core, Socket AM3, 3.0Ghz, 8.5Mb Cache, 45nm
2X Dynet 2GB DDR3 Memory, 1333Mhz, CL9, 240-Pin
Asus M4A785TD-M EVO, AMD 785G/SB710 Chipset
Sapphire ATI 5750 Game Edition, 512MB DDR5
Art of Colours 2436Vwh 23.6" LCD Screen, 1920 × 1080, 5MS, HDMI
Seagate 500GB HDD, 7200 RPM, 16MB Cache, SATA 3G
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The sucky bit for now is that I don't have anything to put on the PC and all the software I have is 32bit. I need to get some games that can take advantage of all the power. I put Oblivion on though, set all the graphics up to maximum and it plays perfectly. ^^ Well there is something wrong with one of the textures :/ But I think that was from installing expansions and such.

Then I also got a car. It's an old Mazda 323. It's not the nicest thing to drive though, but it's kinda cool having my own car.

South Africa has been in the media a lot lately. We won the Rugby World Cup (last year?) and then the film District 9 was released, filmed and set in South Africa. Now we are hosting the Soccer World Cup and National Geographic just did an article on the country (Mandela's Children, June 2010) which was fairly interesting to read. Then again I could be biased.

Most interestingly in the article was a page which had a few crime stats, comparing South Africa to the US. Looking at them makes me amazed to have lived so long and I wonder how relaxing it must actually be to live the US. If you didn't know South African society is one of the most violent, if not the most, and I think has the highest murder and rape stats.

Violent Crime (per 100 000 people)
Rape (of females in 2007)
SA - 76 (In a survey I've mentioned before 1/4 of SA men have admitted to rape)
US - 30
Murder (2008)
SA - 37
US - 5

In 2007 SA also had 17% of all AIDS cases in the world.

My laptop has been a little sluggish lately. I don't know why. Then this morning I am sitting around and decide to load a game from an iso. I start up magicdisk and load the image. Nothing good happened. I try close the programme. Nope, not even through system monitor. Then I decide to restart my computer. Usual start-up then at the password screen... it goes blank. I try again. Same thing. Then I give up and start Ubuntu, thank god for dual booting.

Back at home this afternoon I run the weird windows check thing. It says it can't fix anything and there's some unknown change to the system registry that is stopping windows from starting. Then I back everything up and am ready to do a system restore. There are no restore points available....

Either I can use my restore disks, ie erase the last 2+ years of updates and tweaks to Vista or just give up and convert the whole laptop to Ubuntu. What should I do?

Growlithe. Rakuen Growlithe, licensed to kill. Just kidding. But that's what I was told when I got my certificate. "Here, now you can kill animals."In reality, it's just a certificate to say that I attended the Animal Ethics Committee's polyclonal antibody workshop and passed a knowledge assessment test.
(I hot 90%) I'm not even sure if it lets me do animal experiments. :/ But that's not really important since my project is looking at plants.

Remaining on studies I've got to do a presentation to the whole department tomorrow. I think I'm ready though. And for my literature review I got 73%.

Other random news. I finished reading The Man Who Lives With Wolves, it was quite interesting and now I want to see his shows. I've also started working on a new story, which should be pretty good. It might get delayed though if I get involved in this other weird project, but enough about that. I still haven't got my car, hopefully this weekend...

I found a few things I want to get off my chest. Little rage points. (This is what happens when you read blogs that point you to people's stupidity.)

The Catholic church is paying off paedophile priests: http://www.modbee.com/2010/06/04/11.....ex-priest.html

Some idiots still believe in prayer: http://zenoferox.blogspot.com/2010/.....and-press.html

Racists: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/06/the_rot_beneath_the_sunny_faca.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scienceblogs%2Fpharyngula+%28Pharyngula%29

Most people at university are now at holiday, but not postgrads. :( This also means the file-sharing and game servers might go down and even they don't they'll certainly be very empty. It's going to be so boring....

On the plus side I should get a car tomorrow or the next day. It's some old mazda, which I haven't ever seen. I'll tell you more when I know more. Is it really odd to be a bit suspicious when your mother turns to you out of the blue and asks, "How would you like a car?"

Well I was incredibly sick today. Woke up at 3am in pain then wound up staying in bed till about 3pm. I'll spare you all the icky details but yeah, I've had seven tablets today. I got quite a bit of reading done at least. I'm still reading "The Man Who Lives With Wolves." Interestingly enough he seems to think dogs and wolves are psychologically similar. There's also plenty of contradictory evidence though, but it should make for interesting reading.

Well I also should have some free time which I can devote to art now. Let's all forget that I'm meant to be an author and art was just a side-project. I will get back to writing, it's just art is so much quicker. :p

Anyone who wants a free picture must reply to this journal with their character name, description (also preferably a link) and what sort of situation they want to be in.

There no guarantees I'll draw you or in your ideal situation but I'll probably be trying to pair people up. Also if you normally comment on my work you're likely to get done first.

In Florida they tried to make bestiality illegal. Luckily it never got passed. This wasn't due to particularly good arguments however, rather that they didn't want to discuss the topic. The most astounding part of the story is that if you listen to the comments made about bestiality and why they want the law passed it becomes obvious that they can't find a problem with the act other than that they don't like it!

Currently to punish someone for bestiality they have to prove that they harmed the animal. A perfectly reasonablee thing to do. But bestiality is not usually harmful to the animal! And they know this. They know that they can't show it as harmful.

Two different atorneys had these gems to say.
``Obviously it is not as easy to prove that it [the sexual act] tormented the animal as it would be as easy to say, `it is illegal to have sex with an animal,' ''
and
``We often have to prove injury or repeated inflictions of pain that we are not always able to do with these kinds of cases,''

So pretty much they don't like it and want it to be illegal because they can't prove that it's abusive!

Story: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/.....goes-back.html

PS: My internet is so screwed up lately. I feel like I'm on dial-up again.

Fa has new rules for posting (http://forums.furaffinity.net/forumdisplay.php?f=72) so to be on the safe side I've moved my two FMA copy-pics and all my plushie photos to scraps. So if you're looking for them, that's where they are.

Small typo that really is consequential from my last journal. I said I got 70.5% for the exam but then I checked the mark again and it was actually 70.4%. But yeah, that's barely even noticeable.

Today I'm seeing where the people on my IM contact lists are from.

Australia (2)
Canada(1)
France (1)
Germany (2)
Norway (Thinking again this might have been Finland) (1)
Slovenia (1)
South Africa (17)
Sweden (1)
UK (4)
USA (7)

Unknown (Either I didn't know or recognise the address or I hardly ever talk to them and have forgotten about them) (4)

Some of the people on my list I haven't actually spoken to in a while. I should probably make a point to say hi next time I see them on. And if there are any Asian or South American furs wanting to expand my list into those areas then add me.

For my techniques course exam I got 70.5%. It's also the fourth highest mark in the class.

Over the years I've offered to draw a lot of people, but never got around to it. :p So I was thinking perhaps I'll get people to volunteer for a few pics and then I'll pair them up and do some drawings. Would anyone be interested? After all my last attempt at this sort of thing fell rather flat.

Exams next week. Good luck to me. On the bright side apparently no ones failed in a few years so they shouldn't be a problem. After that I'll be spending the rest of the year doing a research project in one of the university labs. The best part about that is that my supervisor has already said that she views honours projects as the first part of a masters degree, meaning if things go well I know what I'll be doing next year.

Here are the SEM pics I talked about last time (not yesterday >.<):

-This one is part of a plant (haven't done botany in a while and I didn't feel like looking up the name) with a few pollen grains attached. I think I took this photo. I can't remember as the group took turns playing with the SEM.
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/.....uenG/G5-02.jpg

-This is the same sort of thing but taken by another group. They got a better picture :(
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/.....uenG/G4-20.jpg

-This last photo is the foot of some bug we caught. I was amazed first at how hairy a bug is and secondly by the size of its claws. It's got a scary foot.
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/.....uenG/G5-04.jpg

Today has been a bad day. There hasn't been any one thing that has been particularly bad but just in general it's been a bad day. There were even highlights today. One of our exams got cancelled and so will just be a small question in one of the other exam papers, I got a second bursary (although I need to check that I can accept both) and I got to use a SEM.

SEM is a scanning electron microscope. It's pretty cool 'cause it lets you go from 10X magnification a few thousands times. That's from seeing an object (beetle and a flower for me) to zooming in to see individual cells. I should get my pics back sometime and then I'll try post one or two to show you.

I did the Frozen Chicken challenge at university. I don't think that's actually it's name but it was relevant to what we were doing at the time. For the challenge a number of people are closed inside the -20 freezer (Celsius, none of those antiquated measurements) and the last one to stay in wins. It isn't done in special clothing either, so it's pretty much jeans, a T-shirt and your lab coat. I stayed in for 5 minutes before deciding there were better places to be. Partly my decision came from my lips starting to sting and that one of my ears had gone numb. In my defence I was one of the first in and wound up standing right next to the cooling fans and so had an icy wind blowing over me. The two winners stayed in for just under 30mins, setting a new record (the previous one was 24mins by someone in shorts and a T-shirt, who apparently got hypothermia from it).

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It was last year I believe when I was reading some of the Sherlock Holmes books. It also happened to coincide with the release of a film based on said books. I've now had the opportunity to watch the film. It's one which I have rather mixed feelings about.

At first I was extremely disappointed. The characters did not seem to match their literary counterparts and it seemed as though it was a horrible use of a beloved character to stimulate attention. A number of those complaints still remain, mainly that the characters do not behave as they would in the book, particularly being far more violent now. In addition it was horrible to see how the books theme of observation and deduction had been made inferior to the supernatural.

The end, however, practically changed my entire view of the film. At the climax, Holmes explained the entire case and revealed what had appeared to be magic was in fact clever illusion. This scene I felt really fitted with the ethos of the books and made up for most of the rest of the film.

Understandably there was a certain mood to keep but at times everything seemed too dark and grey. That said there was quite a nice feel to the appearance.

As a final word from me, there were a number of disappointments, but I do feel as if the story later made up for it with a masterful conclusion. It's not exactly like the book,s focussing too much on action and not enough on the thinking and mystery that the books contained. So while it has a shaky start and some questionable choices in the end it is a decent film.