psyche

GCSEs finished; they were good overall. I can only hope I did well. Seriously. I’m down to hope as a strategy. Down to hope. Also, there was a guitar concert and our illustrious teacher, Prof. Michael Lewin, entertained parents with a humorous side I can’t say I’ve seen before! It went quite well despite several unfortunate incidents (Faraz had a few mishaps with wrong music and such but still managed to improvise something to fill in for a page or so of Bach he’d misplaced without the audience realising).Awesome, you know?Pax

After repeated visits to Denmark Street, I think I’ve remembered that guitar is pretty awesome. In some shop there, I was surprised to see the same leaflet given out at school - marked with the SPS insignia - for a performance by UnoGuitarDuo in the Wathen Hall. They were really good. Awesome. Rock. I’m going to do a Guitar-X course over the summer holidays. Pax 

I saw Ocean’s Thirteen with Vivan today, having missed out on the prequels. I thought it was pretty good! Also funny.

Vivan’s drumming was good - Alex, he* and I will have to meet up and pwn.

Pax

*Thanks to Guy Emerson for correction

I recently saw some video for The Fray’s How To Save a Life - it wasn’t the same as the one I’d seen before. This one had a white backdrop and lots of people crying and words like “Fear” and “Surrender” coming up. This sort of epitomises how teenage angst has been updated. Any complaints just become ridiculous and contemptible. I don’t know why. At some point in the past you could think “Argh. I’ll just KILL MYSELF and then you’ll be sorry!” or start crying, or be broken and expect people to suddenly realise you’re hurt/they’re wrong. However, it’s not like that. Life is an enemy that does not give up or act like it should. You actually have to risk losing. I don’t like risking loss so I basically avoid most sports and academic competitions. Loss is humiliating and belittling but it’s also honest. For those of you who don’t lose, it’s much worse than you would believe. However, some people don’t respond badly. Some people use their last match to burn their own life down, but others, for whatever reason, correct or not, are reformed and become stronger - like bone or muscle, being driven to the edge and becoming more powerful.

This is no longer an option; it is necessity. Karma, God, faith, hope - all symptoms of some minor confusion over what life is: an enemy!

Maybe I’m just bitter. Well, I am bitter. However, I am motivated by something else.

Pax

They’re going fairly well so far (although English was long). I have Maths and Music today. Maths is fine and Music, well, erm. I’m just not gifted enough. However, Dominic Yeo reassured me by telling me that “last year everyone did really badly in the mocks”, so fine. Hopefully I won’t be alone in my failure this time! Anyway, yeah.

My computer is still dead. I haven’t really done anything with it. All my data (apart from Home Folder which is backed up, and an OLD revision of my HD - from pre-Yellow Dog times) hangs in the balance as my hard drive creaks and squeals but for some reason, I’m not worried. Perhaps I just don’t understand that this several-thousand-dollar piece of equipment has been ruined! Oh well. Anyway, it was raining and cloudy when I got up. I love that kind of weather! It smells clean. I enjoy failure. Well, not enjoy. You know what I mean. It’s like an old friend.

Pax

UPDATE: Maths was fine (about one and a half hours of free time in that exam, wahey!) and Music was a bitch. Maybe it’s because I’m shit at music. Ho ho! Anyway, yeah. From what I heard from Elliot and Guy Emerson (!), Systems and Control was also completely retarded. Just Biology, History and Physics Challenge to get through now! As aforementioned, I had a chat with Dominic Yeo in tutors this morning (I wasn’t required to turn up because of exams, but I did) and he helpfully told me to approach the Physics Challenge logically and on the basis of the equations we already know; sounds good!

To be honest, my brain is off. I’ve been, well, not sleeping for a while now. At first I thought that it had few ill effects; I was tired but hardly out of action and fared well indeed - and still am doing so, apparently. However, there are a number of internal changes. Things I want to do appear to be drifting away and things are slipping and sliding into awkward positions and I wish I could get a handle on all this stuff but I just can’t. Maybe at Durston I was smart, but now I’m not. I possess neither knowledge nor understanding. I am a shadow - a shadow - of who or what I used to be. Whether what I used to be is idealised in my brain, I don’t know. I suspect it is, a little.

Anyway, there was another composer’s concert last night and it was okay. Some people (like me) couldn’t play what they had to play and others (like me) had written crap pieces with no dynamics, titles or structure (lol) but whatever. The music department pulled it off admirably. I’ve just written some disgustocrap (= disgustingly crap) piece, or disgustopiece, for my third piece of GCSE coursework. It’s pretty bad, seriously.

Quotation of the day (Composer’s Concert)
Elliot: (has been doing technology, not music, for the past one and a half years) *is in Cyrus’s vicinity*
Cyrus: (with an air of mild surprise) …I didn’t know you did music.

Lol that’s actually great. I respect Cyrus for assuming that Elliot could have been doing music for almost two years without being noticed. I genuinely respect him for that.

Also I have some fencing Nationals thing over the weekend, which sounds ominous. I’m going to do very badly. Really I am. But that’s not to say I’ll try!*

Anyway, I was just thinking BLEH. I wish that I could be an outgoing and fun person with lots of friends who did things. The cruellest joke of all is that I misunderstood things right from the start. I thought people were good at some things but not others - alas, then, when confronted with people at this school who are good at everything they need to be good at, I wasn’t intimidated but I failed. Ho ho! Total failure; meh, who needs to do well in exams, have a girlfriend, be a calculator, know all the chords, always keep their eye on the ball, set an example, sleep frequently? Oh, bollocks - I do.

*I meant “That’s not to say I won’t try!”… hmm… sleep deprivation, typo or Freudian slip, a symptom of a deep-seated psychological trauma? Ho ho, I don’t know.

Pax

P.S. I hate achieved talent. I hate natural talent. I hate genetics. I hate attractiveness. I hate personality. I hate hatred. I hate war. I hate peace. I hate life - not in a “ho ho i r go slash mi writsts 4 fun an den u’ll b sori ho ho” way, but more of a “Being sentient is the ultimate torture!”. This disgustocrap. Life is an impurity! I am not a nihilist but I am hormonal, sleep-deprived and ugly and therefore I will say these things! Long live the world, resting on its side!

I’m looking forward to the officialisation of the XHTML 2.0 standard (yay for all elements being potential links - this is a major codebloat destroyer!) as well as actually having time to revamp Psyche and learn CSS properly as opposed to muddling through as I am now. Also, it’ll be nice to do computing as a subject. I must learn Python. I am confused.

Anyway, at the moment I have Yellow Dog running on the iBook - it had no important data on it so I had no problem smashing the hell out of (= partitioning) the disk and installed as normal. I soon discovered the joy of dependencies. My goodness. Such horror.

It’s occured to me that some people don’t enjoy being sad. I don’t enjoy it - it doesn’t make me joyful - that’d be rather paradoxical - but I’m sure the rain isn’t so bad.

The awesome Sibelius Technical Support team have cleared all the failed G7 registration and now it works properly. I’m upgrading to Kontakt edition as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Psyche 2.0 is being built slowly - not from scratch, but sort of like this: (the technique has a name) I look at each old page, assess the functionality, choose which functionality is unnecessary or more trouble than it’s worth, and code a new version with stuff I want to omit, well, omitted - without ever looking directly at the source code. So I’m basically saying “anything I can’t see isn’t going to be on my page”. Obviously for compliance I’ll add “alt” attributes and perhaps some JavaScript functions - if they’ll contribute to the efficiency or functionality of the site. No more gratuitous scripting - Elliot’s terrible computer reminded me that not everyone even has JS (or in his case, not everyone has a version of IE7 that’s not totally fucking screwed).

Expect Psyche Public Beta soon.

Pax

P.S. Making widgets is fun