In case any of you genuinely wanted that question answered, I can assure you that I have, in fact, been working hard.
Next week is my Comm Law midterm. A totally online exam, but one based on a class where the workload has been far larger and more time-consuming than I had expected going in.
The nicest thing about the exam is that my professor pretty much let us know it’s intended to be an open-note test — or at least she expects us to treat it as such. After all, most of it is going to be application of all the information we’ve learned rather than a definition-driven evaluation.
However, she added that she doesn’t want us to necessarily be flipping through our notebooks for the entire exam.
Because she knows just as well as we do that it can be a stressful experience.
Thus, to incentivize pre-studying we’ve been offered extra credit to create a single 8 1/2 x 11 cheat sheet, take a “selfie” with it (with as much creativity as we desire) and upload the picture to an online forum before taking the test.
My Featured Image of the day is that very selfie. Wearing my brand new Frog-in-a-Car T-shirt.
I figured what better way is there to represent myself than having a thick, detailed page of notes that I’m ignoring in lieu of some Tetris?
What’s that? You don’t believe that I have a full-page of detailed notes based on how far away it is in the perspective of the picture?
Well, you’re right.
Because it’s actually a front AND back page worth of detailed notes:
The front side was a bit off-the-cuff when I first put it together, which is why it looks so left-end dominant.
I tried to fix that more on the back side. It helped that there were less diagrams and more Supreme Court precedents to simply list off as we moved farther into the semester.
Some of you might not find the clean, clinical and small font pencil-only approach beneficial to a study guide very helpful. Personally, I really like to pack in as much detail as I can.
In fact, I essentially shoved every detail I could onto this page to the point that I might not ever have to open up the first half of my Comm Law notebook ever again.
A notebook with ~150 pages worth of notes that I packed into one, at that.
That’s a spicy-a notebook.
It may have taken me all afternoon to transfer all of this information over, but I’d say it was well worth it to have a condensed study aid tool.
Especially given that just the act of copying all of my written text a second time is as powerful a way to study as I can imagine.
That’s really all I’ve done today, so I figured the cheat sheet would make for as good a blog post as any. The project fits well enough into my narrative of enjoying the class as a whole that it seems appropriate.
I just wanted to end this off by giving an extra special shout-out to my photographer, Alyson. Because one good picture deserves another in return:
As promised earlier, my time to go radio silent for finals has come and (hopefully) gone. This weekend was just a bit too full of work for me to spend extra time coming up with blog post topics.
That said, it was a very productive weekend! I finished my nine page paper for Evolution and Creation:
Finally finished my last big research paper of the semester, so that’s 3/6 commitments done.
Which considering how much I was dreading the assignment, the fact that I banged it out in a day or two was wonderful — and I got a lovely talking point out of it.
Then on Sunday I took my online Visual Communications exam. Was a bit harder than I expected it to be, but still squeaked out with an 84 percent…
… That was immediately balanced out by an exceedingly curved 110 percent on Exam 2. Not sure how it happened, but it means I’ve retained a high A in the class.
I also spent time putting my study guides together for two Psych exams. One of which, Learning and Memory, is officially over and done!
I got an 82 percent, though I can’t complain because even that score retains my A in the class.
Thus, all I have left for the semester is my cumulative, non-curved Sensation and Perception exam and a presentation on my aforementioned paper.
Then I am free.
I’m going to try to do a blog post every day during finals, probably culminating with a semester-in-review sort of thing. I’ve found that having some distractions to keep the stress of exam season balanced out has been especially helpful during this semester’s class cycle.
In fact, the rest of this post will be talking about the media I consumed this weekend to break up all of my studying and writing woes. Hence the Thanos reference: Studying and fun in perfect harmony.
I have TV, Movie and Video Game stuff to talk about, so it should be (mostly) fun! Plus this keeps me from the existential dread of my next exam for a wee bit longer.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
I want to do a full-scale post all about Smash in the early days of Winter Break, so I’ll keep things brief right now.
Ultimate has been my ‘play a few hours a night’ de-stressor, and boy have I needed that. The process of unlocking every character one-by-one was a great experience of gradually forgetting and being reminded of how many fighters there are in the game.
Yet the biggest thing to discuss (especially with online servers still being kind of trashy) is the sheer amount of love and care that went into the game’s references. The Classic and Adventure modes are a joy to play through because each fighter and Spirit has their own thing to make them unique.
There’s too many nice things to say about this sequel. On top of being a gorgeous piece of animation (with special accolades to the mass-character physics of a plot-relevant spoiler toward the end of the movie), Ralph Breaks the Internet presents an interesting take on the digital world that has strong characters, ever-present metaphoric theming and super tight narrative structure.
The movie also exceeds due to a rare blend of reverential and reference-filled, self-defacing humor that I would have never expected Disney to approve. Especially for the Princesses — who I’m sure you think you know everything about thanks to the ads, but I assure you are a beyond wonderful mix of fan service and commentary.
It helps that my Dad worked for Disney, so we laughed a lot at the jokes they were putting down.
If you haven’t seen Ralph Breaks the Internet, do yourself a favor. It’s not as video game-heavy as the first, but what it offers instead is just as good if not better.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Talk about a movie with a great set-up and wasted potential.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a biopic about Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, but as my Dad aptly pointed out it winds up being more of a timeline on the success of the band than it is the trials and tribulations of Mercury’s life.
Don’t get me wrong, Rami Malek is wonderful as the lead character, surprisingly so considering how used to him as a psychopathic introvert from Mr. Robot.
The rest of the cast is good too, and the cinematography is very pretty. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong with a soundtrack composed of Queen songs.
But the narrative of the film falls really flat because it glosses over so much of the potential personal drama in favor of the band’s story. I swear, there are a number of scenes missing between Mercury and his father that would make a pay-off scene toward the end that much more impactful.
Bohemian Rhapsody is far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year. It’s kind of perfectly average, disappointingly so.
But the worst thing I’ve seen this year probably goes to:
Venom
Wow. What a hot mess.
You know it’s bad when the best part of the movie is a totally irrelevant post-credit scene previewing another movie that I would have had much more fun watching.
The only thing Venom has going for it is Tom Hardy as the titular character’s host, Eddie Brock — but even then he’s given nothing to work with. Half of this movie feels like it was left on the cutting room floor. It literally meanders until a relationship between the two that had APPARENTLYbeen developed without us knowing about it arrives.
Then we’ve immediately got the unearned climax to hit.
The whole experience is also generally unpleasant because of clear editing issues like awkward jump cuts. Maybe if the dialogue was better and the characters were likable I wouldn’t have noticed so readily, but because we got things like this:
It was hard to stay engaged.
Venom has been beaten to death so I won’t abuse the poor horse. Instead I’ll just say… Go watch Nando V. Movies’ fix for it instead.
Big Mouth
I can’t give you all a full review of this one. I only watched a chunk of the second season with my sister, so I’m working entirely off that.
That said, Netflix’s Big Mouth is an… Interesting experience. It’s a show all about young teenagers going through life changes, with puberty given physical form as “hormone monsters” that work off of them in a variety of cliché coming-of-age scenarios.
The premise of a physical embodiment of puberty is interesting enough to work through all the clichés in what might otherwise be a typical school-age comedy — alongside a heaping helping of gross-out and mature humor. There were about as many moments where I said, “damn that’s pretty accurate” as I cringed at something uncomfortable (like most of the musical numbers).
If you think you would enjoy a Family Guy-esque adult comedy, but a little smarter and more fresh, Big Mouth is worth checking out. I’ll probably go back and finish season 1 before season 3 comes out.
I’ve come to really appreciate the gym as a solid source of stress relief on days like today.
Life can’t all be fun and polling places after all. I may have gotten an initial high by doing my civic duty and voting, but that was a very small fraction of the day right when the polls opened at 7:00 a.m.
Yeah, I finally got to pull out this joke I’ve been sitting on for a few months. Yeah, I’m proud of myself for deciding to actually do it. And yeah, I’m glad the Tweet and my identical post on Facebook got a good number of likes more than usual.
Not that it matters how much my things are liked, I just appreciate knowing that a number of my followers here and there have solid meme sensibilities.
I’m getting sidetracked.
Voting was cool, acknowledged. But after I did that I still had to go to school.
Which leads me to my next point: School kind of sucked today.
I went in for what amounted to a 20-minute long Sensation and Perception class where we reviewed for our upcoming test, but because my late class and study date were cancelled I had no reason to stick around.
Always a pleasure to drive around for a couple of hours so I can be in class for 20 minutes.
See we’re smack in the middle of midterm season 2 in Cal State Fullerton’s Psychology department. Tomorrow I have an exam in Learning and Memory, then on Thursday I have an exam in Sensation and Perception.
Plus, on the back-burner is the early deadline for my Learning and Memory research paper: Friday.
That theoretically matters less than the rest, but if I get the paper in before Friday I’ll have 4 points extra credit applied. Considering those points are the difference between a ‘C,’ where my rough draft stood, and an ‘A,’ I’m pretty eager to get it in.
It just so happens that I have no idea whether or not the professor is going to be on-campus Thursday or Friday. Which is why I’m pushing myself to finish the paper by tomorrow.
While also hoping to study for the exam in that same class tomorrow.
See why I’m getting on-edge?
Well hold your horses folks, because it gets more frustrating somehow.
My professor left tons of notes on the rough draft I turned in because he’s anal as hell and basically wanted us to write his essay, not our essay — even if something made more sense to us the way we wrote it.
… So I’ve heard from a friend.
When I sat down with the guy during his office hours to get clarification on the chicken scratch notes, the general take-away was that he wanted the early portion of the paper to have clear definitions, examples and statements on how those examples prove the definitions. It wasn’t good enough to have a definition followed by a “, for example xxx.”
That’s all fine and well… Until you remember that the paper as a whole has a page limit.
So the man basically strong-armed me into adding dozens of paragraphs and extended examples throughout the paper, and now expects me to cut down all of the extra space that came into the piece as a result.
It’s a Tantalus-level torture straight out of Hades if I’ve ever seen one.
That’s about where my headline today comes from, my resignation to the fact that I’ll be sitting here with my mom snipping off words and sentences from this paper where applicable to hit a page limit, despite the fact that I’m already sick of looking at it after nearly five hours of editing his comments yesterday.
Not the emotional place I want to be in while knowing I have to move into exam studying after for the same man that’s currently ruining my life.
But like I started this post off with, at least I had the gym to blow off some steam.
Even if not I feel like I’m passing out on the couch while working on my paper.
Because everything needs a trade-off, doesn’t it life?
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 