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I started University in September of 2014. I was in the faculty of sciences and was undeclared because I knew I was not smart enough to get a high paying job doing research. Thankfully whether I was declared or undeclared it didn’t matter. First year sciences is the same for everyone.
This was how I studied for the first 2 years of uni.
Most people find libraries to be a good place to study, however I do urge you to try unconventional places. For example inside a car or laundromats. The place that is chosen does not have to be aesthetically pleasing as long it works to keep you comfortable and focused. You might be pleasantly surprised where you find you concentrate the best.
The place I am most comfortable studying is in the living room while my family was watching TV. I got yelled at all the time to study elsewhere, but it was the living room that I found the most comfortable and where I concentrated the best.
Most people know how to set deadlines or so they think. It’s important to know when everything is due and keep that in mind at all times to have a certain level of baseline tension (If that makes any sense). Most people don’t like to get stressed on a daily base, but it’s better to have a low level of daily stress than a high level of stress for a few days.
I am a very anxious person, so once I know something is due I will do/start it that day even if the due date is 2 months away. I understand that this was very extreme and requires a lot of discipline, but this will prevent or lower the chances of part 3 from happening.
It’s normal to be overwhelmed by all the deadlines that are coming up, the bad grades, the uncertainty and everything that comes with being a student. It’s okay to be stressed to the point to having a breakdown, as long as you can recover.
How I prepared for the impending feeling of doom was to have a good cry session. Set a time limit and only breakdown during specific circumstances. This is a good way to release all the negative emotions that has built up.
I’m not a naturally smart person, so there is no such thing as “studying smart.” I got through the first 2 years of undergrad by studying hard. This requires a lot of work and sacrifices. It’s not fun nor is it pretty.
Being a full time student requires dedication, motivation and perseverance. Studying and getting good grades is one aspect of getting an education, however it is not the main. It’s important to study hard for the end goal of how you want your life to go.
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”
- Sir Winston Churchill
“all retail employees should get to kill one customer per holiday season” text post based on statistical error. jin guangyao, who works customer service in fantasy ancient china and discreetly kills 18,000 people per year, is an outlier and should not have been counted
[image is a 2-panel comic. an anonymous person angrily demands of a smiling jin guangyao, “this is outrageous! i demand to speak to your sect leader!” jin guangyao, still smiling dangerously, replies, “i am the sect leader.”]
The Book of Names lists each person murdered at Auschwitz
Since there's been a lot of fandom history on my dash tonight, I want to tell you about something I've referenced before, and which always gets funny notes in my inbox whenever I do:
The day fandom collectively lost its shit after logging into Delicious and finding it was like, a horrible mix between MySpace and Reddit.
Like AO3, it's a story of fandom using a space that wasn't intended for fandom, and then being utterly destroyed when that space decided to adopt hostile policies.
Delicious was a social bookmarking site, which was basically a way for users to save content from around the web. This was during a time when browsers were notoriously awful, and saving bookmarks locally was guaranteed to end in you losing everything because Firefox updated and did something weird, or Internet Explorer just randomly shat the bed and reinstalled itself when you weren't looking. And it was superior to browser bookmarks, because it had tags and organisational structures that were set by each, individual user.
And it happened to be perfect for fandom, because at the time we were primarily using LiveJournal, another site that didn't want us, and was actively trying to push us out. Delicious was used in two primary ways:
Readers of fic would use it to save the ones they liked, often using their account to curate reclists.
Community owners would use it to organise posts to the community.
Free LJ accounts only allowed so many tags, and even paid accounts often didn't have enough for large communities. Roleplay was huge on LJ, and users would often want tags for all their characters so they could find old threads. Some megafandoms with huge ensemble casts would very quickly run out of tags on their communities, especially if they tagged for content creators, tropes, kinks, etc. With Delicious' tag system, it was a perfect site for both of these purposes.
And then one day, without warning, we all logged in to do our thing, and it was a completely different site. Tale as old as time, Yahoo! bought it, decided it wasn't profitable enough, and decided to rebuild it from the ground up without any warning. They got rid of the tag system entirely, and I don't think anyone ever truly figured out how the new site was meant to be used.
But fandom was utterly and truly in a mass panic, because this backbone of how so many things were run just evaporated. Ever wonder why AO3 has the tag system it does? It was built by the same people who used Delicious. Before AO3, fandom had collectively decided that the information AO3 displays on fic headers was what should always be displayed. People would have to build their own headers, but they always included the same general gist of fandom, characters, pairing, rating, word count, warnings, kinks, and summary. You could browse a stranger's Delicious account, and would have a reasonable certainty of seeing these same, or very similar prefixes in their tag system.
So. Fandom is panicking. Entire communities are un-searchable, reclists are broken, people have lost years of bookmarked fic, and we were all scrambling to find something that worked like Delicious, or build something like it, but it had happened so abruptly that there wans't time to really coordinate.
Then, from the shadows came Maciej Cegłowski, aka Pinboard Guy. (Not to be confused with Pinterest.) Pinboard Guy had heard that Delicious had shat the bed, because fandom wasn't the only group that used the site, and weren't the only people who lost their bookmarks, but we were certainly being very loud and obnoxious about it. Pinboard Guy reached out to fandom on the whole, with a glorious gift. He had his own Delicious clone, that he built from the ground up and maintained for better privacy and security, and he sold accounts. At the time, it was around a $5 one-time fee, with a structure that increased the fee by a fractional amount for each new account. Basically, as server load increased, so did server costs, and this is how he managed to keep up with that.
He also understood that by its nature, fandom is very social, where his site was very asocial.
So he asked, what does fandom need? And someone opened up a Gdoc, and a lot of people put together a very well-written and organised (and enormous) list of ways in which fandom used social bookmarking. How we needed prefixes, and bundles, and a way to discover other accounts, along with detailled explanations of why. A lot of work was put into this, which was basically a fandom manifesto explaining to an outsider everything he would need to know to rebuild Delicious. For a lot of us, we didn't expect anything, but just being humoured was validating.
And then this man implemented these features for us. When you go into your account, you can tick a box that says you're part of fandom, and it will open up an entirely separate part of the site, that he built, just for us. He didn't have to do this. But he did it anyway. He's changed the pricing model since then, and it's now a yearly fee instead of one-time, because Pinboard is still run by Pinboard Guy, and no one else. No ads, no sponsors. Just Maciej Cegłowski and his ancient-ass code that still looks like the internet did in 2009.
And then, a few years down the line, like the fucking baller he is, Cegłowski bought Delicious and shut it down. Just killed it dead.
Not a lot of people within use Pinboard anymore, because AO3 also serves the first reason people used it: bookmarking fic. Allowing for external bookmarks meant that the reclist people didn't need to rely on a service that might not always be friendly to us. And then, well. LiveJournal kicked fandom out through a series of hostile policy changes, and Dreamwidth failed to take off, so we no longer really needed that community archive aspect.
But 2009 was a rough year for fandom, because it was the year fandom pretty much everything changed. While we gained a huge, centralised archive that wasn't the Pit of Voles that FFN is, we lost that centralisation when fandom fled LiveJournal for this fucking hellsite. Some of us vainly tried to make Dreamwidth happen, and clung to it in the desperate hope that Tumblr would fail and people would miss journals and communities, but it never happened.
And I'm telling you. When this Post+ thing finally drives fandom off this site, I'm gonna be torn between sitting back and laughing because it's the same shit all over again, and collapsing into utter despair because I am too goddamn old to learn how to use another site that isn't built for the way fandom likes to shove square pegs into round holes to make sites suit our needs.
OG Shen Qingqiu waking up and remembering his torture at the hands of Luo Binghe. Yue Qingyuan is above him, all concerned because he’s been running a fever for days now. The thing is about remembering the torment he went through, is that he remembers that Yue Qingyuan died.
He remembers that demon bringing the remains of Yue Qingyuan to him. Even under all of that torture, Shen Jiu had never once broken. Not until he learned that Yue Qingyuan was dead. Gone. Because of him. “A-Jiu?” The words are softly uttered and then he suddenly has a lap full of Shen Jiu in his lap.
He’s trembling, Yue Qingyuan realizes, still with shock for a moment before he wraps his arms around him. He doesn’t know what to think, nor why he’s awoken, only to show such an intense reaction. Yue Qingyuan has never seen him so shaken before.
He’s about to speak, but today is a day for yet another shock. “Qi-ge.” Those words that he never thought to hear again are uttered, and he goes still in his shock. Something had happened to so thoroughly shake Shen Jiu that he’d uttered those words that brought a bittersweet pain to his chest.
Shen Jiu needs a bath, to be properly taken care of, but Yue Qingyuan pays that no mind for now. “I’m here. Xiao Jiu, I’m here.” Come what may, he won’t leave him like this. No matter what. He won’t abandon his Xiao jiu ever again.
(And if his robes are stained with tears in the aftermath, Yue Qingyuan doesn’t dare to speak of it once Shen Jiu has composed himself. Yet the image of Xiao Jiu crying will forever be ingrained in his mind. Ah, he thinks through the pain, This is what breaking feels like.)
After reading a whole lot of danmeis by several different authors, I find the difference mindsets on morality by three of the most popular ones sort of funny :
MXTX: actions have consequences and when ppl have power those consequences might be terrible even if the intentions are good. Still staying true in one’s heart is important. Also, fuck mob mentality, social media and peer pressure, and celeb internet culture. Anonymous masses are vultures and they can both be terrible on their own or easily manipulated and weaponized. (this last part is really the metaphoric message of the novels, not a reference to any lead actor’s scandals…which makes the whole irl thing even more ironic…and yes I know I’m using it wrong but if Alanis Morisette can, so can I).
Meatbun: Okay, the protagonist is scum. Not just regular scum. Psychotic Genocidal Totalitarian scum (also very into BDSM). Do you think he’s bad in the first chapters? Oh he gets worse. Do you feel like stabbing him yet? Good! Only he is the biggest victim of them all and he is now horrified with his actions and bc actions matter regardless of personal excuses, he’s gonna suffer with that knowledge forever. Suffer along as the lead pines, despairs and crawls on his path of redemption and neither you nor the characters will ever truly emotionally recover. Conclusion: If you honestly repent then there is a chance at redemption no matter the crime (how very catholic).
Priest: Be Gay, Do Crimes, Have Fun Storming the Castle!, Murder Parties for all! No need to feel bad, or sorry. Just find a kindred ruthless bf, stir shit up and then retire together into a little cottage somewhere. The world is chaos, do what yo gotta do to survive, don’t sweat it. The ends justify the means. Morality is optional, a strong sense of patriotism is advised (“ For the Greater Good/ The greater good”), being utterly devoted to your loved one is mandatory tho!