Really not a whole lot going on recently in my life, I went jobhunting and got an interview, waiting to hear back from them , been out a few times for lunch/dinner, went to collect my mum from the airport this morning (she’s been in HK for the past 2 weeks), uhh…. drove to the supermarket today to buy lots of food?…

Really, really nothing much happening.

Oh, i did complete Red Dead Redemption (main story), and its really good, like.. everything about that game is awesome. (oh. aside from one of the challenges having to be to kill 2 cougars with melee knife, that shit is infuriating because they just knock you down and kill you instantly pretty much)
Aside from the red dead, ive been getting in some practice on SSF4 , but im still really bad with the arcade stick, cant get off ultras and stuff consistently yet.
Ive also been playing Monkey Island 2 : Lechucks Revenge (SE), and thats pretty amazing. The great voice acting really helps add to the already brilliant script in the game.
And then theres League of Legends obviously,we’re all around level 15 now and ive played ~90 games, which probably average at around 30-40mins each. Crazy timesink but its still alot of fun – i cant actually work out why its still so much fun, we usually play the same chars and they have the same 4 skills and buy the same items each game, there is pretty much only 1 map with 2 colour choices…. I dunno. Still fun though.

Also, its hot as hell recently, hard to even sleep without a fan blowing in your face constantly

And so, year 2 of university finishes.

Packing yesterday took bloody forever, I had no idea I had so much junk.
The ride home was long, about 2.5 hours. But now im back, and i celebrated by playing some SSFIV and Red Dead Redemption ( which looks fantastic on our HDTV, compared to the SDTV at unihouse – yay for being able to read the text)

Id like to say that now i can relax more and stuff, but the reality is probably the opposite.
I need to get out there and find a job
I need to hope i havent failed my degree
I need to get a few driving lessons before my driving test mid august
And probably a bunch of other shit which i can’t think of right now.

On the plus side, should still have lots of time for late night League of legends (of which we still could use 2 good players to make an arranged group of 5) , and im going on holiday to New York at the end of August, which should be awesome.

So, just woke up. At like 12 something. Good stuff.

Since the holiday period has started ive essentially been doing nothing but playing games – league of legends in particular with cross and leetfella.
my housemate yesterday got Red Dead Redemption though so ive had a chance to play that some, i actually bought it myself but ordered it back to my house in Essex, figured id get the full experience with the big HD tv and surround sound. The mexican standoff thing at the start of the team deathmatches should be in every game from now on, its amazing.

Stuff planned:
Today – Nothing
Tomorrow – Alton Towers
Friday – Epic cleanup of the house and then Pizza hut buffet
Saturday – Go home

So we did a pub golf thing last night, which is basically 9 (watering) holes, You do one drink at each bar, a set drink, and have a par, and have to finish the drink in that many attempts.

uh.. i think the drinks were like…

- pint of guiness (skipped)
- Pint of lager/Cider (par 2 / Me 2)
- Shot of baileys [wuddufuk £3 hell no] (skipped)
- glass of wine (par 2 / Me 1)
- Strawpedo [bottle drink - smirnoff ice] (par 1 / me 1)
- Rhey and Nephews [which is a 65% shot, the strongest one they have] (par-1 / me-blackhole)
- Vodka redbull (par ? / me 1)
- Sex on the beach [cocktail] (par 1 / me 1)
- Pint of ‘eliminator’ [which is a bunch of crazy shit, i know it has lambrini in there and a bunch of shots]

After the 65% shot i was pretty fucking wasted.
Wasted enough to not know when to stop, and then downed the vodbull, sex on the beach and tried downing the eliminator.

Couldnt walk straight, couldnt see straight, couldnt SIT straight, couldnt talk intelligently

I actually feel kinda drunk now – the morning after. C’mon liver/kidneys, stop lettin the team down.

So I still havent finished exams yet as of writing this, and i’ll be sure to update it accordingly if something under one of these categories occurs, but for now…

The exams ‘Good , bad and the ugly’!

The good:
Cell Signalling lecturer ‘Davey’ gave the most blatent hints as to what the essay questions in this years exam was going to be, everyone wrote down what he said during the lectures, everyone powerrevised for those questions, praying that they would actually be there. Exam time, and lo and behold- there they were, both of them, in the exact same wording he said ‘might’ be in the exam. I have never written so much for one essay question ever, i think i wrote about 4 pages (including a diagram) on phosphorylation in signalling pathways – which will hopefully give me a decent mark…

The Bad:
I think it was ‘Enviromental Health Microbiology’, one of the questions worth 3 marks were ‘name the reservoirs for the following diseases’ (In English – disease is commonly found in…… ) and then went on to list a bunch of diseases (tuberculosis, salmonella… etc) , I…. had no idea, didn’t revise it, didnt even see it in the lecture notes. I wrote ‘cows’ for tuberculosis and moved on. I usually come back to check that i’ve written something for every answer after i finish doing the questions but I ended up using up all of the time in the exam writing on the essay questions.
After they announced to stop writing, i noticed I had essentially left the front 2 pages of the answer booklet empty. I peeked up to see where the invigilators were, and without skipping a beat went down the list of 6 diseases and wrote ‘birds’ ‘birds’ ‘birds’ ‘birds’ (cows) ‘birds’. Closed the booklet, handed it in. Why birds? I have no idea. Will i get any marks? well… one of them has to be birds surely.

The Ugly:
The first exam we had, the essay question came up (we get a choice of 2), one of them… I didnt really know in much depth at all – “discuss repeating regions” or something. The other one I sort of knew, but the question threw me off…. “Discuss phase variation, relate it to one pathogen”
Now… I had revised phase variation in a fair bit of detail, thinking it might come up, its basically when the organism is able to flip around abit of its DNA, letting it make a different protein (letting it do different shit [variation between phases] ), the example we had studied it in was ‘Salmonella’ – I looked at the exam question again, I don’t know this, i thought to myself.
“or well.. i know what phase variation is, but we didnt study any pathogens that use it, I only that it happens in Salmon”
……….
That was my genuine thought process.
Thats right, I did not answer the essay question I knew the answer to because I thought I had learnt about something which occurs in Salmon instead of Salmonella.
Fuck. Sake.

Just a heads up, my exams are starting this week (or.. tomorow rather) so don’t expect many blog updates for a fortnight.

Will still be updating via twitter or facebook though so feel free to follow me there

http://twitter.com/mengplex

[and i imagine everyone who would want to find me on facebook already has me added, but if not - its pretty easy to find me....]

Exam layout..
10th – 1 exam
14th – 2 exams
16th – 2 exams
18th – 1 exam
19th – 3 exams :<
23rd – 1 exam
25th – 2 exams

So yesterday was a good day, mainly because there wasn’t a huge amount of revision done. In the morning we went to a summer fete, which had odds and ends to buy, nothing particuarly useful that we wanted though. We played the tombola (raffle thing) and our house won a bunch of crap:- set of glasses, fitness set, car worklight, china cups and probably more shit i cant remember.

We also found the game ‘pass out’ (RRP around £8-15) for 50p. Bargain!

later on in the day we decided to go to the local fair, where we went on the ol’ dodgems a waltzer and… the monster beneath.

Now im no stranger to extreme rides, a few of you may recall my myspace blog when i went to Florida in 2007 where I rode some of the most intense rollercoasters in the world (looking at you shiekra in busch gardens). Why in the fuck then, did i feel like i was going to die whilst riding on that spinny spin spin thing above (in case you havent seen one, central bit spins, arms move up and down and the individual cars spin round the arms). I can only assume because it was at a small fair that the guy running the thing just couldnt give a fuck, whacked it up to full speed and then went out for a cigarette, it went ridiculously fast and felt like it was like that for 5 minutes or so, Nausea set in, my arms now ache from gripping so hard, there was ZERO saliva in my mouth (dry as a bone). When we came off im pretty sure a girl in one of the other cars had passed out, she wasnt moving at all.

Later on in the night we decided to play pass-out, where we all got very very drunk. During and after pictures ahead. You can see what the board actually looks like here (rules are pretty self explanatory just by looking at the board)

Ugh. im pretty sure someone was taking tons of pictures on a digicam too :< They’re bound to look terrible when they’re inevitably uploaded to facebook

Also, some more pictures of my wardrobe mirrors

I’d like to say its all coming together but…. ehh.. idk.
6 days til my first exam, 3 weeks until the end of exams. Ive gone through all the material once at least, but havent really gone into practice papers or anything, will be doing that over the next few days i suppose.

Then i get to enjoy the summer~ And by that i mean find full time work because i need some fuckin scrilla. fawk mah loife.

Times will be in military because it saves me time formatting it

0700 – alarm

0800 – alarm

0900 – alarm – wake up , brush teeth, check ‘dailies’ (daily webcomics, FB, Twitter, gaming blogs eg. siliconera etc)

0930 – Start revision

1100 – Probably bored by now, take a break and play a game for a bit (maybe split second or mario galaxy 2)

1130 – revision

1300 – Get lunch , eat it whilst watching Anime (fairy tail, durarara, working!!, K-on!!) or Modern Family

1325 – Attempt revision, get sidetracked by websites every 5-10 minutes , wonder downstairs every hour to see whats happening

1800 – Get hungry, cook dinner , eat it whilst watching Anime or modern family

1830 – Attempt revision, get sidetracked lots because of sheer boredom

2200 – Possibly some sort of house activity, or maybe i’ll still be revising

2300 – Depending on how much work ive done, Gaming or TV time!

0100 – Sleep

Repeat cycle every day until 25th Jun (and its been going like this for a good few weeks too)

Not much to report about my personal life, however yesterday morning I went to answer the door (expecting a fan which i ordered from amazon) to find 2 female police officers wanting to speak to 2 of my housemates. They had gone out to clubs last night and usually get pretty drunk so naturally i assumed they robbed a shop or vandalized something or god knows what, went to get luke- and was surprised to see that he looked like he had just gone 5 minutes in a cage with kimbo slice and brock lesnar , bloodied and bruised and all that. Turns out they got assaulted buy a group of 3 on the walk home from the club and chased through backroads and all sorts of shit. The world is a fucking disgusting place sometimes, dont know what the fuck is wrong with people :/ At any rate though, they’re safe and alive which is what matters most i suppose. Its kind of been an eye opener that this shit isnt just stuff you hear on the news or through rumours, it actually happens to unlucky people. Guess its time to start working out a little just in case.

On a lighter note, we also had a BBQ for Ian’s 20th birthday yesterday, so there was lots of food and banter, eventually though the party settled down and they started watching family gay in the lounge, which i figured would be a good time to get the fuck out of there and do some revision / watch modern family.

Started watching modern family after simultaneous tweets from leetfella and cross saying how good it was, so figured i should give it a try. Turns out it is indeed a good show, a comedy sitcom but not a comedy which is too in your face (like friends or big bang theory with canned laughter) , they kind of point you in the right direction and let your own weird sense of humour do the rest. I put it on the harddrive in the lounge and recommended it to my housemates, they’ve watched some but i think only 1 or 2 (of 4) appreciated the well thought out humour. (i guess they do enjoy family guy so good TV is probably wasted on them)

The other day Ian got a card game delivered in the mail, its called ‘Munchkin’ and is a very VERY light take on Dungeons and dragons sorta thing, with an emphasis more on dicking each other over than… idk, whatever you do in DnD. The jist of it is you pick up a dungeon card – which represents you opening a door in a dungeon, there may be a monster or an item, if the monsters level is lower than your attack power (level+gear) then you kill it and gain a level – and take any treasure it was guarding. The aim of the game is to get to level 10 first. Cards which arent monsters consist of classes, races, equipable gear, 1 time buffs , or what are essentially ‘dick-on-people’ cards – which are like ‘+10 to monster strength’ and you can use it whilst other people are fighting a monster, meaning they have to either find a way to beat it, run, or die and lose their gear/cards.
Its a really fun game, and hilarious when people are unable to kill +10buffed ‘Lvl 1 Potted plants’ , on the other hand its always a frantic struggle to super-buff a monster that someone who is level 9 is fighting (as if they kill it, they win). We played for like 3 hours on the first night we got it and it was awesome fun.