The USS Quad Damage

I'm setting a pretty high benchmark for myself. Hugearse blogs every three days, and now you're probably expecting things to be multilingual. It's tough I tells ya. I've been sick the past couple of days. Exam time is a funny thing (at least in this country it is). It's about the same time that everyone gets sick. Also the same time that my parents give me work to do. The rest of the year I'll walk past my parents suggestively, like a "if you tell me to do work, I'll do it!" kind of walk, and they don't say a thing. Lock (proverbially) myself in my room and study, and my dad'll walk in and say "hey, you don't go to uni tomorrow, do you?"... Then I'll have a whole bunch of stuff to do.

I think parents in general have no idea what it means to study. If one of them sees me watching anime or playing a game for 20 minutes, they'll ask me to start doing a whole bunch of work. They don't quite grasp the idea that I'm trying to shove 14 weeks worth of material in my head in a week, and it needs a rest now and then. It's like going into labour, but for your head, and the baby's going in! It's OK if it's a 10 minute job or whatever (It's how long I was gonna play the game for anyway), but if it takes an hour, it makes things worse.

I had a wierd dream that in 2nd session, all my classes were on friday, and I had the rest of the week free.

I also have my first exam today. I'm effectively just wasting time until I get there. I don't have to leave for about 20 minutes. Too long to sit around, too short to actually study. This exam isn't exactly hard, though it is one of those rote-learning exams. A lot of people really like those exams, because they memorise stuff and regurgitate it out on the paper. I really hate those exams, because I can't memorise stuff, and everyone else can, so I do really badly compared to everyone else, and everyone else still knows less about the subject than me. It pisses me off that you can be smart at a subject and still get a shit mark in the exam. I love prac exams. Memorisey people hate em. I think they demonstrate your knowledge in the subject, and I always do well in them (I almost always get 100%). The absolute best thing about prac exams, though, is that memorisey people will almost always get near 0, because they don't actually know anything. This means that not only do I come out with the best mark, I also come out with a mark significantly better than everyone else.

I'm not up myself. I don't actually care about exams and exam marks, as long as I pass. You've just got to look at my academic record for that. But it totally pisses me off when people look at the marks and are all disappointed that I got a lower mark than this loser who doesn't actually know anything about the subject.

Correction... this winner who doesn't actually know anything about the subject.

I'm the loser. I'm a loser. That's what I am. I actually wear that as a sign of dignity. That I play the game because I like the game. Winning isn't actually all that hard. You can bend the rules, you can cheat a little, you can exploit the (usually completely irrelevant) rule to maximise your chances of winning, but I think that's besides the point. I think you've gotta play the game. Don't set your quake to run at 180 fps or whatever because a rounding error helps you jump farther. Don't memorise stuff to do well. Understand the material, learn to play the game better, because believe it or not, anyone can win.

Actually, it's really a fault in the game. I shouldn't blame people who win in a game that's flawed. I really should be blaming the lecturer. The guy who distributes the mark, the guy who sets the test, because he knows that more people will pass through the memorisey way, because most people don't deserve to pass. If less people pass, then he looks worse as a teacher, and there's probably repercussions, especially if the metric for measuring the success of teachers is by the number of people that pass. It's a game within a game. A winner favouring winners, because it's the only way to win.

You filthy winners... and meta-winners...