Chemistry feelings on a graph

You may have noticed that I haven't been on this blog for a while. You can have three guesses for why, but only if all of them amount to "third year chemistry."

Ah, third year chemistry. I could write odes to you. But then again, I could stab you in the eye. I could take you on a nice picnic! But I could also poison your drink when you're not looking.

Suffice to say, I have conflicted feelings about chemistry. Since it now takes up a majority of my time and brainspace, perhaps it isn't so strange that my feelings about chemistry are largely dependent on what time of day it is. To best illustrate this progress of feeling over the course of an average day, I have helpfully constructed a graph. But before I let you see it, I'd like to give you some background so that you can best understand this graph:

1) I'm doing a research project in chemistry this semester in place of a more academic unit. It involves doing real research work under a supervisor.

2) This research project, intended to replace a single unit out of the four we do per semester, probably takes up about the same amount of time as all of the other three combined. My day is therefore generally centred around being in the lab.

3) The project I'm doing involves slow reactions that are left alone for about 3 days before I can even check whether they've worked or not.

4) Out of 10 reactions I've put on to date, I've had two successes and eight failures. Ergo, failure is common.

5) Research work is never done. Whenever you think that you're done for the day, something else will come up.

And now you're caught up. Enjoy the graph.

Paint 2: Revenge of the Paint

As all those of you who follow me on Twitter (@Silbena, for those who don't know,  extremely surprisingly) will know that last Sunday,  I got my paws on a new phone. I've replaced my ages-old, much-loved-and-hated iPhone 4 with a Samsung Galaxy Note II. The most prevalent and important features of this phone,  as far as I have discovered,  are 1) it has a fantastic inbuilt stylus and 2) it's probably bigger than your face.

As followers of this blog know,  I have this weird obsession with creating or editing pictures with Paint. 

These people may also begin to guess at the sort of childish delight the possession of a piece of hardware which can turn my freehand scribblings into a paint-like format would produce in me. A whole new realm of possibilities has been opened to me! Wherever inspiration strikes,  I can turn my most obscure of ideas into a hastily scribbled format! Oh,  the joy!

With this preamble,  I would like to present the first work of art I have produced with this wondrous device. I call this one "Air Conditioning." Lo and behold!

Confused? Here, let me give you a hint: Pavlov's dog.

Birth of social lives disguised as death

Stop me if you've heard any of these before:

• "We're more connected now than we've ever been, and yet drifting ever further apart."
• "Nowadays kids just sit inside playing around on the computer instead of playing with their friends outside."
• "Today's children grow up without learning proper social communication due to spending less time with their peers face-to-face."
• "It's ironic that social networks make us less social"
• "Technology stops us from connecting with the world around us"

Now raise your hand if you've ever seen stock photos like this before, used in stories about any of the above topics:

It's most likely that most of us will either have said some of these things or heard it from their friends. Hell, it's likely that most of you will even agree that this sort of easily accessible technology has made our collective social lives stale, our attention spans shorter, and our lives just generally worse off for it, since we no longer connect with the outside world as we once did when we didn't have all sorts of gadgets to distract us.

I'd just like to give you a friendly neighbourhood reminder of what it's like on the other side of the fence.

I suffer from social anxiety. Although I've almost always had some trouble connecting to people especially my own age, the problem only became increasingly problematic when I moved from high school to university. I put it down to the very structured life kids generally lead, compared to the unstructured, build-your-own sort of life that university thrusts at you -- but that isn't really the point. The point is that at pretty much every given time in my life, I've felt somehow isolated. There are a million and one things that I've blamed for that feeling of isolation, not the least of them being myself, but they aren't important to this post.

The exception to this rule of isolation is the internet. As a preteen, I got fiercely into text-based roleplaying games, the types one sets up on a forum (offline) and in chat rooms (online). Alongside the in-game part, I also became strongly integrated in the off-game communities the most successful of these games nurtured. The funny thing is that though I was part of a competitive sports team for six or seven years of my life, these online communities were the ones I felt that I belonged most strongly in. I could talk to people who had the same love for creative writing and fantasy as I did, and who seemed to have shared in my experience of isolation.

See, I mentioned that I was in a sports team. Unlike the stereotype, I did actively try to engage in the social community around me. However, I didn't always feel like the community around me tried to engage with me. These people on the internet, they got me. I felt like I was in a place where I could truly be understood, where people were on the same wavelength as I was. And even when this was not the case, for there were of course people on the internet, too, who did not share the same experiences as I did, somehow it was simply easier to communicate via instant messaging or forum posts. Despite what a lot of people, especially adults, around me said, there are definite ways of expressing the nuances of tone and intent just by using writing, by the use of punctuation and emoticons and simply by careful word choices. Similarly, communication over the internet allowed a sort of grace period, a pause in conversation longer than that  in face-to-face communication, in which I could think about exactly the right thing to say.

The internet was an important communication tool for me even outside friends I knew only over the internet. When I moved into a new country and thus an entirely new social environment, for a long time I depended on the internet to share thoughts and feelings I didn't dare to share with new friends face-to-face. I have since learnt to be more brave and outright about expressing myself, but were it not for the internet, I may never have been able to show any desire in expressing myself in the first place. In fact, I could go so far as to say that in some ways, being able to communicate with people on the internet has been like training wheels for me in terms of communicating with people in person. I've had a safe environment in which to experiment in -- an environment where I could instantly back away if I felt uncomfortable. I will go so far as to say that I don't think I would be able to talk to people the way I do if it weren't for the internet, as well as some very patient people who would listen to what I had to say where I had the courage to say it.

So the next time someone tells you that advancements in technology are sure to kill our social lives, remember that all they mean is social lives as they know. Remember that there are flocks and flocks of people like me who, were it not for the ability to communicate over the internet, IM, twitter, facebook, e-mail, even text message, may have ended up very depressed and alone.

Perhaps the only thing that this scaremongering is all about is that increasingly, people are learning to communicate like us.

Success Sometime In The Future

Today, I would like to share with you my award-winning* formula for Good Grades, Getting Things Done and General Success.

You see, I have spent most of my academic career, spanning all the way back to the beginning of primary school in 1999, attempting to work out the Best Method for Studying. I have always been that little kid who has to be absolutely perfect at everything. My parents are to this date somewhat puzzled about my obsession with grades, for they insist that they never enforced this attitude. In fact, toward the latter years of my compulsory schooling, their attitude had taken a steady turn toward "oh, another A? Cool." I have never been scolded for receiving occasional bad marks, even that one D that I once received for a history exam, for there have always been very good reasons for any of my failings.

As I began university, my study routine was merciless. I would take notes in class, and later transcribe the notes into Scrivener, giving them key words and sometimes adding graphics; even going to the effort of linking related lectures to each other via internal document links. In the study period before exams, I would then re-write these notes by hand, since I knew that the slower pace of writing by hand would force me to absorb the information more effectively.

For the first year and a half of my university career, I burnt out at least once a semester. Most of the time, I would manage to push this burnout toward the end of semester, just beyond exams, but at the beginning of this year, I burnt out halfway through semester. I even started having strange symptoms like sudden onset of dizziness and nausea that was never really properly explained.

That's when I decided that something had to change. I had suffered the physical symptoms of stress before, during my last year of high school, and they took me almost a year to fully recover from. I decided that I did not want to go down that road again, and so I set about re-evaluating my method of studying.

Despite my consistent efforts of not studying, I failed once more to obtain bad marks.

Hence, I can guarantee that the following method has been rigorously tested and subsequently judged to be functional. It has been approved by a panel of judges consisting only of myself for succeeding in upholding a pre-existing standard of excellence. Behold, this is the secret method by which good marks can be obtained, displayed in the most effective method of a flow chart:

Please note that this blog is not responsible for any destruction of property or harm to persons or grades caused by this flowchart.

Happy studying, everybody.

*Awards for best grades in my class for Literature and Chemistry at the end of high school, as well as some awards for achievement in the laboratory during my university studies etc.

Update: Epic Reading Quest

ETA: There are yet again links in this post that my theme swallows up for whatever reason. Anything italicised contains a link.

As some of you may remember, last year I embarked upon the Epic Reading Quest in order to cut down on my backlog of books. It's been a little over a year since I set upon this quest, so it's a good time as any to give a little update on how I'm going. To those of you who have visited my blog frequently over the past year, you would've possibly seen the "currently reading" books in my Goodreads page, shown in the gadget type thing on the right, changing over this past year.

You may also have seen a million "want to read" books popping up, but we don't talk about those.

Since the beginning of this quest in late August 2011 (though I didn't make the blog post on it until a month later), I've read 17 different books, of which almost all of these, excepting two, were in series of some sort. The unfortunate thing about this is that only four of these books were books that I have never read before!

Imagine that -- I somehow managed to turn a quest to cut down on my "not yet read" list to a "ooh I haven't read this book in a while and I remember how much I loved it"-fest. Oops?

Besides this, five of these books were even books that weren't on the list at all, but somehow managed to wrangle their way in, partially courtesy to my significant other and partially courtesy to my own short attention span.

13 of these books were in English, and four in Finnish.

Additionally, there are two books on this list that I began reading but couldn't finish (they're not listed in the totals, because that's hardly the point). One of these is Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay. I liked The Hunger Games, and I survived Catching Fire, though this survival was with considerable difficulty. By the time I got to Mockingjay, I just couldn't inflict that upon myself anymore -- not when there are better and more interesting books on my list. I won't lie -- it did grate on me a little to give up on a series when I got so, so close to the end; but that's my perfectionism speaking, and my love of lists, instead of any real desire to read that book. The other book that I began but couldn't get through was Robin Hobb's Fool's Errand, the first book in The Tawny Man trilogy. I've read this trilogy before, so not getting through this one wasn't a particularly huge tragedy when it comes to the Epic Reading Quest. I was a bit surprised not to get through it, though, because years ago, I loved these books. This time, I just felt annoyed and deflated by Fitz's constant angst, and in the end, decided to put the book down.

Tastes change, huh?

I'm currently reading Tolkien's The Hobbit in preparation for the upcoming film. After that, I'm yet again deviating from my list of upcoming books on my Epic Reading Quest to read Raymond E. Feist's Silverthorn. I blame my significant other for this -- we made a deal that involved him reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy if I read The Riftwar trilogy. It was a fruitful deal, and I'm hooked.

Perhaps after this, I will actually go back to my actual Epic Reading Quest list. I think that I'm going to have to clean it up a bit, perhaps taking some old favourites out and adding a few more new arrivals in, ones that were left out from the initial list. After I clean it up, I might post the list on here in its entirety, and maybe that will finally encourage me not to deviate from it overmuch.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my progress. True, I haven't managed to read that many new books in this year. However, I've managed to establish to myself that I can read almost 20 books a year, even with university and work and all of those other things that take up my time nowadays. I've gotten used to reading again, and I think that's more important than anything else at this point. Besides, it's not like I've been buying more books, which is part of the pact that I made with myself until I finish this quest. I'm happy.

Covering new developments

Remember that novel I posted about a few days ago that had evolved rather radically over the course of a week? Well, the planning and brainstorming for that novel continues, and recent developments include conspiracies inside conspiracies inside conspiracies, as well as angels and demons. At one point, I was actually worried that the plot that I was creating was going to displace the entire romance that I was building it around, but I'm relatively certain that I'm going to be able to keep it as it is.

The only interesting thing about it is going to be that the guy gets the girl before the main plot of the novel even starts. That's going to be kinda tough to pull off, but since the conflict after that point is going to involve this fact rather heavily, I reckon it'll be alright. In either case, at least I don't have to worry that I'm pandering to any sort of cliché, eh?
Not that that would actually worry me in the least. I'm not one to be worried about writing clichéd things. I think that if you're true to your own voice and your own style, you can make any ol' cliché appear as interesting as anything else you could come up with that hasn't been done yet.

That plot is going to keep on evolving on its own, and for once, I'm going to let it run as very crazy as I want it to. I don't feel an obligation to a specific, rigid concept as I usually do when I begin a novel, and it's actually a wonderfully liberating experience for me. Not being tied down to just one thing that has to happen or has to be told in the course of this novel, I'm free to let it run free in my imagination. It's a therapeutic experience, really; I haven't had this much of an effortless time creating anything in a very long time.

Either way, it's going to keep evolving and changing, and I'll just enjoy the ride and see what I end up with in the end. I'm very excited.

Now, you know how news segments have that um... mood-y-lift-y-upp-y thingy (I AM A WRITER CAN YOU TELL) usually involving puppies at the end of it? Well, I have something just like that for you! Inspired by my tweep Alison (@_budgie on twitter), I have devised a cover for my novel. Feast your eyes and enjoy.

p.s. I feel no remorse
p.p.s. Except for the terrible pun in the title of this post. I am so very sorry you had to bear that. I truly am.

Chasing genres

Well, it's getting to NaNoWriMo season again. For those of you who have mercifully forgotten what that means, it means that sometime during November, I'm going to have a mental breakdown regarding how I cannot possibly write anymore, am absolutely terrible at creative writing and why would anyone want to do this to oneself anyway, perhaps accompanied by a list of reasons as to why I couldn't possibly expected reach the goal of 50,000 words or a huffy declaration of "I QUIT."

In reality, National Novel Writing Month is an absolutely fantastic experience, but it has its ups and downs. Everyone, even seasoned veterans, are often brought down by a bout of "I suck". Additionally, it can be fairly brutal when combined with an exam period which spans half of November. This year, my exam period is going to be much lighter than last year, what with one of my units not having an exam, and another of my units not actually teaching us anything at all and then expecting us to sit an exam on it (in short: either it'll be very easy or we'll all fail, so why worry).

Core units. Gotta love 'em.

As such, I can tentatively say at this point that this is the first year since 2009 when I'm actually going to be trying this out again for real -- for real in that I'm going to be aiming to win.

I have had plans for my novel for about a week now. During this week, they have... well, let's just say that my plans are quite fluid and keep changing. Radically. Let me run you through on the timeline of my past week.

How the idea for Silbena's NaNovel of 2012 has evolved to date

Seven days ago: Silbena decides that she is going to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. She begins brainstorming for ideas.

Three days ago: Silbena decides that since she hasn't done any substantial creative writing since her failed NaNoWriMo in 2011, she is going to write something relatively light on plot that would just get her writing something down before attempting anything involving more planning and world development.
Two minutes later: Silbena decides to write erotica.

Two days ago: Silbena realises that she wants to write something with a little more plot than erotica. She also admits to herself that she would probably not show her writing to anyone at all, and that she really wants to be able to show her writing to as many willing people as possible. Silbena decides not to write erotica, but to develop something out of the story ideas she has already had.
Fifteen minutes later: Silbena is frustrated by her story ideas and remembers why she decided to write erotica instead. Knowing that it can be basically erotica with some more plot, she decides to write romance.

Yesterday: Silbena has created a romance plot with a definitive beginning that is just advancing toward the middle. She is satisfied with her beginning, and begins thinking about the middle.
Two hours later: Silbena realises that she solved the only conflict she had in her story by the end of the beginning. She has character development and the development of the characters' relationship that will serve to fill the middle, but she realises that because there is no real substance to the middle, there is going to be no clear indication for the end, either.
Twenty seconds later: Silbena begins brainstorming about circumstances that would create additional conflict for the middle of her current plot.
Half an hour later: Silbena realises that the setting that she has created for the book allows for no more plot development. Frustrated, she begins brainstorming about ways to fit more plot around the plot she already has. She posts about this on the NaNoWriMo forums, but doesn't actually heed any of the advice anyone there has (oops).

Today: Silbena has an epiphany and decides to write a steampunky mystery-driven adventure novel which is fitted around the romance she created previously.

In other news: YAY AIRSHIPS