Some Recent Happenings.

Aloha, Konbanwa.
Yesterday, I found myself walking around five miles from the city centre to Joe's house. I don't tend to move that much in a day, so don't ask me why, I just sometimes do stupid things.

Though, something I'd noticed on the way was although massive music festival, Escape in the Park was blaring away in Singleton, no-one seemed to actually be inside, rather it became rapidly apparent Escapee's had chosen to sit in awkward places anywhere and everywhere, casually getting wrecked.
It was worrying to find that lunchtime had barely passed us by and people were already far from sober, highly intoxicated on various alcoholic beverages and the rare heat of the Sun. We were lucky enough to accidentally cause interaction with a trio of such people:

Picture the scene, myself and Joe are making our merry way to his house, but, behold!
Some tasty looking scones were scattered across the pathway, so I innocently kicked one, watching in trivial amusement as it rolled it's little way along the promenade. A voice bellowed from my left:

"Oh! Oh! Don't kick my scone!"

I looked over to see a can-clasping drunk, obviously angered at my scone abuse.
I was totally unaware that scones were a protected species, though I'm left asking myself if he didn't want the scone to be subjected to members of the general public, why did he throw it on the floor?
Why don't you come and eat it?

I laughed it off, hoping I wasn't about to be jumped for smacking a Scottish snack.
I carried on walking with Joe at a slightly increased speed, in the distance one of the others shouted:

"He's walking away! Make him acknowledge you!"

No, no, don't make me acknowledge you.

But pathway-dwelling, scone-throwing drunkards aside, Joe pointed out to me that along the route to Mumbles, various installments had been constructed to form an assault course. Obviously for some bizarre reason the City Council thought it would be a fantastic idea for those members of Swansea who just cannot curb their urges to exercise. Just like their brilliant idea to implement bending buses, causing the epic strangulation of the transport system - But that's another story.

Essentially, each little fun filled installation, has a different physical task to perform, depicted by a small plaque, I couldn't help but take a picture of this one, because I'm childish and found it hysterical:

Children passing by are graphically taught sexual acts.

After arriving at Joe's unharmed and dousing my stomach with iced drinks, I continued with my weekend in the usual fashion, waving at fluorescent pink clad lasses and pirates from the window aswell as fattening up with stolen goods from the kitchen, sleeping, actually attempting to finish Zelda and overseeing Joe's retro session of Pokemon on the surprisingly still functional Game Boy Color we dug out of the cupboard.

Good stuff.

***

Totally from topic, but I thought purely for the memory, this was worth an "Honourable Mention" - I recently had the wonderful pleasure of assisting in putting together Jonny's new desk.

You see, when I am invited to Jonny's house, it's never because we're good friends and he just wants someone to babble with, oh no. No, I'm invited to Jonny's to relieve boredom or to assist with secret tasks that I don't know I've entered myself into yet. It's like walking through his front door is a legally binding contract.

So, I'm called over and as I walk up the stairs my eyes caught a glimpse of some boxes, I shot a fleeting look at Jonny, I already knew what was coming.

"Sam! Seeing as you're here, want to put together a desk?"

It ends with a question mark, but it's actually a statement.
So, we took the boxes to the attic and our roles immediately assigned themselves.
I took control of logic, such as what fits into what, because if Jonny was left to his own devices to put the desk together himself, his new room would look like an art gallery installation with parts of shelving embedded a few inches into the walls.
Jonny armed himself with the power drill and a German accent.

Now, being the driving force behind logic for the day, I opened the first box, expecting the first couple of pieces and perhaps more importantly the instructions. However, I was greeted with a series of MDF slabs each with a small lettered sticker to identify them. There was no sign of a flimsy, pictorial coated guide which would somehow, through its poor English and ambiguous directions leave us with the finished desk, and for a terrifying moment, I thought that we were about to be left to put three large boxes worth of various sized MDF pieces together with only the two dimensional black outline of the completed product on the box as a guide.

But, we found the instructions - logically stored in the last box - and to be fair, they were much better than your regular IKEA instructions - Which are essentially, two dimensional black outlines of the product where the only hint of help is a confused looking comedic character smiling whilst clutching what appears to be a direct dedicated phone line to IKEA, which never seems to be included in the box within the midst of Allen Keys. Thank you, IKEA...

Progress on the desk was kept going with sheer determination because neither of us wanted to lose to a pile of lettered MDF fragments and after around three hours of Jonny shouting in German, trying to overpower my Russian accent, the desk was complete, minus one screw.

Another triumph.

Sam.
Mood of the Day: Deskily-Tired
Listening To: Before - Vicious Delicious
Current Theory: Desk Building Is More Time Consuming Than Previously Thought.
Quote of the Moment: "Hey Agitha, why don't you come up here and meet my Dominion Rod?"
Joe Quality Assurance Rating: 9/8 [Super-Epic]*

* Whether Joe is too afraid to rate this blog with anything lower than a seven, or if the blog is actually pretty good is up to you.

A Window Of Opportunity.

Aloha, Konbanwa.
Just thought I'd share my latest epic acheivement...
I call it entering without breaking...
After finding myself locked out from my own home, I climbed through the smallest window on the house to avoid the situation beating me.

And who says that I'm eating too much crap? I think I'd be brilliant in a heist.

I will never lose to a locked door.
That is all.
Sam.

A Brief Insight Into The College Work Ethic...

Aloha, Konnichiwa...
Y'know, I nearly thought that come last September, I was going to get it together and actually do some work. I even pondered how the world would be if I did my projects and portfolios during the day rendering myself actually able to sleep, the required number of hours of sleep in the night.

Though, it was never going to happen.
And we all knew it.

...I dropped Computer Science to avoid what I genuinely thought as a long-winded waste of my time and energy for a piece of paper that would only be misunderstood by an employer as "Can use the spellchecking function on Microsoft Word and add up his weekly shopping list of muffins and other tasty treats on Microsoft Excel."

...Maths was like a reunion, with ex-Comprehensive Student Cai joining myself, Lisa, Chris, Ashley and Dan in a classroom that resembled Woodall's GCSE Math classes by the day.

The tutors had changed,
The work had changed,
But we certainly hadn't...
We spent most of our lectures babbling loudly, arguing, reminiscing in our Secondary School stories, hurling sweets at each-other, insulting and demoralizing Chris, cunningly stealing and hiding Ashley's stationary and generally not doing any work, while probably distracting and entertaining other members of the class.

...And then there's the Media BTEC; where I don't do any of my design portfolios in classtime, leaving it all for the night before the due date where my body automatically prepares itself for a long night of Sam-Work, a method where tasks are slowly completed whilst multitasking on MSN, iTunes, various websites and the TV. This slow pace provides maximum quality from one long, concentrated session of effort. The current record is around fifteen hours with my final Photography piece being uploaded on time at 9:35am on a Saturday.
It's exhausting, but totally worth it.

***

Introductory aside, the depressive storm that is "The Summer Exam Season" has blown over the college once more, having completed its task of swallowing up social lives, happiness, inducing a generic atmosphere of life-ruining-fear and wasting what precious sunlight we have here.

I, was one of the "lucky ones" escaping with just three Maths exams to sit; whilst other people I know had nearly ten or twelve, sometimes up to four in the same day. I'd rather them than me.

Though, you'd think that having just the three exams would allow me plenty of time to get full marks in all of my papers and to be honest, if we were talking about any other student, you'd probably be right. Unfortunately for my results sheet, I spent my time either calming the nerves of stressed out exam students or totally wasting my time around the house doing next-to-nothing, a particular favourite pastime of mine.

Lisa's evidence photo to prove to Pure Maths lecturer Jo that work was actually done at our Starbucks trip.

After a short revision session at the Borders-Starbucks-Combo-Store with Lisa, I did infact attempt to revise the evening before the three-hour-double-exam-session by spreading Math notes over my bed and taking a temporary bout of unconsciousness whilst lying on top of them in the hope I could absorb some of the notes via osmosis...

Please note to yourself for future reference this is NOT, repeat NOT an effective revision method.

The first exam of the two was fine, I could have done better, but I definitely hadn't failed, so I was feeling pretty upbeat and confident, and rightly so, surely the next exam would be on a similar level of difficulty, right?

WRONG.

Let's run by that again.

WRONG.

I'm not even sure what it was about the paper, everyone agreed it was hard and much more complex than most questions we had seen in the past papers for sure - Though our lecturers seemed relatively unphazed by it.

Put it this way, if an exam makes seven people you know burst into tears, something, has gone wrong. Perhaps the writer of the questions got a little bored with the stream of news reports claiming that British Students are doing "too well" so the exams must be getting easier and wanted to create a challenge, a plan which obviously escalated.
Or perhaps he was in his garden shed, lighting up a converted bubble pipe to smoke a friendly flowering plant... For "medicinal" purposes of course, to soothe the arthritis in his soul-wrecking pen-wielding hand.

Creating exam questions whilst under the influence? Batting away hallucinations of integral signs and oversized cheesegraters so you can break students down with your crazed Mathematics?
Shameful.

I sat amongst the rest of the hall, who, at the time, all seemed to be coping, scribbling at a rate that would hurt your eyes if you stared for too long, while my mind attempted to create alternate ways to answer questions, dig up methods from October, ignore songs that were stuck in my head and remember how to add and subtract correctly. It was intellectually-numbing to flick through and realize I couldn't answer most of the paper, but I did plough through, attempting a couple of low mark questions here and there, picking up a few little marks to at least reach an E, which, after some time became futile.

So, I sat back and took some time out to stare at the questions that baffled me before deciding to change tact on the exam. I think I was looking at it the wrong way, it seemed like the sort of exam I should be doing "outside the box", by say, not doing it at all.

Perhaps the examiner isn't looking for answers to these questions?
Perhaps, our good friends at the WJEC are looking for an irrelevant essay relating to "Observations Of An Exam Hall Through The Eyes Of An AS Mathematics Student".
At least, that is what they'll find at the back of my paper this year.

I was somehow - as Mira; a totally chilled out Math lecturer put it - "inspired by the situation" to write about what I could see around me, the little habits people have in an exam. Literally just a page of floating thought mixed with some Sam-type-humour as well as general distaste at the current educational system which is nothing new.

"It's funny how people tap on their calculators in the hope it'll magically unlock some auto-answer function to gain the answer they're after. The thing is, I paid seven pounds for my calculator and was expecting it to help me in some shape or form. It hasn't, I've just tried tapping it and it doesn't work... That's seven pounds I could have spent on something else... Like cake, or some other tasty food."

[...]

"It's okay though, I'll resit the exam in January. I'll be there along with the Oxbridge candidates who didn't achieve a "high enough A", because obviously the best grade someone can be awarded doesn't really count anymore, we'll just have to invent a new alphabet to map the "Just A's" and "High A's" onto."

[...]

"Ah well. One out of two isn't half bad... Well, technically it is. But still."

Sam and Lisa celebrate a spectacular practice exam failure. We saw it coming.*

I figured, if I was going to fail.
I may aswell fail epicly.

But regardless, I've just returned from another college-related Friday, at a location, none other than, the college. A good day in all I'd say, a little bit of Statistics revision in the morning, followed by an early brunch of chips before it had even turned eleven - Don't give me that look, I can eat whatever the hell I like, whenever I like, you're not my mother**.
Myself, Lisa, Vicki and Jess then did a little spot of revision before I disappeared to annoy surrounding college go-ers and "Fellow Stats Fiend" Nadine.

By this point I was excitedly anticipating the the wonderful Statistics Exam, I'm the type of person who enjoys the challenge of exams, which I'm pleased to report, didn't follow the same mathematical-massacre of the second Pure Math exam, and went perfectly.

Happy days.
Drinks Muffins on me!

Sam.
Mood of the Day: Statistically-Proud
Listening To: Flame (Instrumental) - Crustation
Current Theory: P(Good Stats Grade) = 0.9
Quote of the Moment: "I Learnt It Off Casualty" - Sophie.
Joe Quality Assurance Rating: 8/8 [Epic]

* Though, in our defence. We'd actually got full marks in the questions we'd completed, it just took us the entire lecture to get those questions done. I think this is just a case of two brilliant minds and a mishap of time management.

** Mum, if you are reading, for your mental stability and safety, I'd suggest not coming back to this blog.

Another Comeback.

Aloha, Konbanwa.
Faint cheering echoes in the distance. The few who are left appreciate the great return of Sam to the empty world that is the Revived Realm of Babbling, which, by now, should really be the Re-Revived Realm of Babbling. But if you came here to moan about technicalities, perhaps you'd rather check out any other blog than mine. Your hit has already been counted, it's up to you.

It's once again been a long time since my last post, the blog seems to be a seasonal thing, with more blog-time going on during Summer:

Now of course, I don't want to bore you with every tiny happening since last year because we've all got better things to do, I have toast to make, TV to watch, college work to pretend to complete and fat to gain sitting in my chair basking in nothingness.

So I'll keep it - as Joe advised me - "short and sweet".
Which, as cliche it is to say, I've always thought as an odd saying... Short and sweet...
This is useful when I'm catering posts and other textual work to an audience of dictionary-eaters.
Because their complex diet includes words and wow, they should stop eating them, because they're "Oh so sweet." On the other hand, I could stop typing and they'd be thin. Another world problem solved? Tough.

Edit: Though, Joe, who has been temporarily appointed as my Quality Controller has just told me the post isn't long or detailed enough. So I apologize if this has become a full blown life story sized post.

So, casting your mind back, we left off in August of last year with GCSE Predictions flying around in all directions and everyone in a general panic of imminent failure - Where at the moment they receive their results, a vortex would appear and swallow them into a permanent crummy job where they will spend their time attempting to make ends meet and shouting at a dodgy sky box whilst their children will play outside like the other kids, enjoying favoured UK pastimes such committing arson, terrorizing old people, heavily drinking Red-Bull-White-Lightning-Combo's and creating more spawn.

Though... Surprise Surprise, no-one failed. The world didn't end.

And obviously, myself and Bev kept our promise and hit Starbucks before heading for our grades half an hour late, clutching our still warm beverages and muffins - Dedicated 'til the end.
Although, the very reason I like to spend time at Starbucks may JUST be the very reason my bank account is empty, but hey, who's pointing fingers?*

The Starbucks Resultees... Resulting.

You may or may not be interested in the final grades but this is my blog and I can do what I like. So, here they are incase you were running some sort of worldwide sweepstake in which case, I'm expecting a share in profits - and best of luck to you, here we go:

English Language: A
English Literature: A
Maths: A
Science: A\A
Geography: A
French: B
IT: A*
Drama: A*

I'd somehow managed to get away with using literally, three or four totally made up quotes in the Literature exam on the basis of "...that sounds like something that character would say."
Aswell as passing off some terrible Rollercoaster-Related story and a rushed magazine article feigning enthusiasm in exercise for teenagers as A-grade material.

I spent about ten minutes or so dancing in circles around my Drama teacher waving some jazz hands of glory as just weeks before she'd told everyone in "Team Fish's" "Fish! The Musical"** would fail due to our obvious lack of effort.
Which, thinking back may have been a fair enough comment... We spent the first few months of the given time to create our final piece making up fake scenes that we'd never actually use in our play whilst at the same time entertaining ourselves such as the lovingly named "Mental Home Scene" where Tom and myself rocked back and forth on chairs muttering past wives names and insulting passers by, or the "Audition Scene, Version One" where we got James to sing the line

"I feel pretty... Oh so pretty... I feel pretty and witty... And gay."

We were entertained.
It's impressive we managed it, considering our script was written just over a week before the final piece was due onstage and we thought all hope was lost after we never actually completed a full run through of the script before the exam.
However; we pulled it off, received a standing ovation on the Open Evening and managed to pull nearly 100minutes of unique Studio8-Style comedy out of the air.

And I achieved the A grade in Maths required to shout back "Who's On Track For A C Now?".
My Math teacher is still using me as an example of how not to treat the course... Handing in coursework the day it was due, sleeping during class, hiding under tables, attempting to steal cooling fans, shouting out the window, talking to Russians hiding in the ceiling and so on...

French was probably the biggest surprise though, the pass grade percentiles must have been a joke... I mean c'mon, I threatened to leave the Oral Exam, it was THAT bad - The horror of which, is revisitable here.

All in all, pretty good for someone who spent each morning of his terminal year oversleeping and running in casually late, by an hour.

***

After a short few weeks spent at the beach or at Joe's; continuing my duties of eating all of his food and screaming random words with the "Mc" prefix out of his McWindow, the college fiasco began... With forms, interviews, tests, more forms, too much walking around and the loss of my record file causing the whole process to repeat again, with more walking I was in college, taking Interactive Media, Computing and Maths.
Though, I later dropped Computing because the amount of coursework for 30% of the course was mindblowingly stupid and at the pace I like to work, it was not a viable option to stay on all three courses. I spent the next three months avoiding my Ex-Computing-Lecturer, who I didn't actually speak to since dropping the course, this type of impressive avoiding-ninjary involved diving under tables, jumping down stairwells, hiding behind coke machines and other overly pointless cover operations.

Though as it stands; college as a place to hang out has turned out to be pretty amazing, with a whole bunch of new people to generally embarrass myself infront of:

Sam fights Matt for his shoe infront of the terrified common room onlookers.

College, as a place to work however... Is for another day.
I'll leave the world sink in.

Sam.
Mood of the Day: Return-ful?
Listening To: General Sounds of an Open Window
Current Theory: Summer = Blogging.
Quote of the Moment: "I think the world leader has no friends" - Joe, on the thirteen second time at the top of the Mario Kart leaderboard
Joe Quality Assurance Rating: 7/8 [Enjoyable]

* I am. Damn Starbucks and their overly priced but damn tasty choice of iced and hot beverages including their tasty range of cakes to eat in or out on the street in front of tramps and onlooking urban-birds.

** For those wondering by the way, Fish! The Musical, despite the name, was not a musical. But I'll leave the long explanation for another post. It really is a long, bizarre story.