(no subject)

So apparently I got four awards at that ceremony last night that I didn't go to, but finding that out wasn't the highlight of my day. A lot of people were perfectly happy to let me know what I'd won, though.

No, the highlight of my day was in second block, when a friend told me that my English teacher, who was the one to give me the highest departmental honour for English, gave me an absolutely amazing compliment at the ceremony. "I wasn't there, I don't know what she said," I told him. "What, nobody's told you yet?" he asked. "No, so tell me what she said!" I demanded.

A little background: we talk about the canon a lot, because it's the body of work that you're going to study in English class. We'd often joke about how this person or that person was going to end up in the canon, though we really were just joking - there aren't a lot of modern writers in the canon, because literary people are snobs and so it's really hard for modern writers to get their work recognised as something on par with writers like Shakespeare and Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck.

So I asked my friend to tell me what my English teacher said about me at the ceremony, and he told me, "She kind of blatantly said that she can see you in the canon, sometime in the future."

I almost cried when he said that. I am crying now, just thinking about it. That is an absolutely amazing compliment, and even just hearing it second-hand, it's still really profoundly moving to me. (I guess it helps that said friend then went on to say, "I almost cried for you, though I'm also really jealous" and another friend added, "I can't even see you any more. You're just kind of this glowing light, like an angel.")  I, personally, don't believe that my work is that good. But I can at least believe in the people who believe in me. I mean, they must be onto something, right? There probably is an amazing, canon-worthy writer in me somewhere, I just have to find her.

The students who got departmental medallions are supposed to wear them at graduation. I'm going to wear mine with pride.

(no subject)

I didn't want to mar that last post with Mass Effect, but the point stands that there is something that needs to be said about Mass Effect.

There's an assignment you can get in the Attican Beta cluster, UNC: Lost Module. The guy who wrote this assignment is an asshole on par with the guy who decided that the Mako maps needed all those mountains (which is a whole other complaint. I bet the conversation was something like, "So! This Mass Effect thing, I think it's about ready to ship." "No, wait, hold on. I don't think there are enough mountains in the Mako maps yet, let me add some more.").

So you go to the planet and you find the module. But wait, it's missing its data core! Well, the planet is home to these weird space monkeys. Clearly, one of them took the data core from the module! So then these four space monkey colonies show up on your map, and you have to go to each one. And search each monkey until you find the one with the data core.

Now, if you've already done this, or if you checked a guide or something, you'll know that it's the same monkey each time, and that that monkey is at the back of the mines, so you could just rock on over there and pick it up. But if you've done neither of those things, you'll go around to each monkey colony and search each and every goddamn monkey, because you don't know which one it is and the mines aren't even marked on your map! You don't even know they're there until you drive into them!

That, friends, is an example of a bad assignment. So don't ever do that.