Stupid Blog

Nostalgia. I see that word being thrown around often. Frutiger Aero, Dream-core, liminal spaces. All memories caught up in a net like fish to be fed to the starving. I can remember things, I'm nostalgic. Nostalgic is all I am now, but I got the worst kind of nostalgia, because I can't remember any of it.

It snuck up on me this afternoon, a feeling I couldn't push away, the sudden feeling of escape. Parties I'm not invited to in my own home. The smell of sparkling rose engraved into me before I even knew the words for it. Brick walls, aluminium metals, rickety old houses. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fight Club, DVDs.

But it was fun, I was given a macbook&mdashprobably my Dads&mdashjust so they could give me something to do. We used to scroll through YouTube, and you showed me Crazy Frog and Gummi Bear music videos. I can't think of them without you. One of the ads was of the movie Annabelle, and I had nightmares for years.

Maybe it's still April back then and the moon has still not adjusted, and it's 6:00pm and it's still light outside but dark enough for us to keep our lamps on. Maybe I still remember that bulky TV in your shed and the fireplace you had to check on. Maybe we're still in that pizza restaurant and we're crawling alongside my baby sister, or we're sitting still and politely, and I'm still staring at that painting of Baby Cupid and wondering what it meant.

Maybe we're in your living room sitting across from one another and nothing bad has happened, and we're both studying on the stupid things we find interesting. Maybe I'm still walking with you to school, maybe I packed us lunch and maybe there is a light above both of our heads that says how we were feeling.

But all lights go out, and it's 5pm on an April night, and I might watch Fight Club or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I might have pizza for dinner, orI might put wood in the fireplace. Or I could write about all the people I knew before it's too dark to see anything.

I'm about over a quater way through my double-degree and I'm here to share some avice when it comes to studying, at least advice in the computer science field.

First, and probably most obvious, is to take notes. I use Obsidian to take all my notes, but I reccommend starting with paper and branching out into different things to see what works for you. I started out with paper, then wrote everything on a google doc, then went back down to Obsidian.

The best way to start taking notes is to develop a shorthand, which will come as a sort of second language with use over time. Here's an example of mine.

It's also a good idea to index your notes so you can reference them when taking other notes. You can do this really easily in Obsidian by using links, but if you're writing on paper you could number your pages and write in a page reference number.

Secondly, create a timetable. Once you create your timetable, write everything in it. I mean everything. I have the times I aim to sleep in there, as well as when I have to go to work and when I have to catch my bus.

I like to use a mix of Google Calander and a weekly dotted journal for writing down meeting times and special events. It's really important to have times and things written down, not just so you know what you are doing in the future, but also so you can look back on them later on.

I guess as another thing that's useful is to write have a daily memo journal/book to log funny comments or important things. But I might do another blogpost about journalling later.

Lastly, get to know who you're studying with. Try to get to know your tutors, lecturers, and classmates. I found that it really helped being social with my classmates and tutors, as asking for help came a lot easier.

Hope you found some of that advice useful. I'd like to talk more about how I study and what I do that helps. Until next time, bye-bye!

I'm gonna burn a CD today, watch this space. I've done this before quite a few times, but since I got some new CDs at the op shop, I figured I might as well compile some of my favourite tracks and a few other of my other favourites into a CD together. I also thought it might be something fun to 'blog' about.

I like to start by ripping the CDs I've already got and downloading their .flac files onto my computer. I'm ripping these three that I found at the op shop (for $2 each). I wrote about one of them (Diana Ah Dain - I don't think I'm pregnant) in my music reviews (should be at the bottom since it's the first one I reviewed).

Of on a bit of a tangent but my PC didn't come with a disc drive (which normally they don't nowadays anyway) so I got an external disc drive as a Christmas present. The program I'm using to both rip and burn these CDs is called MusicBee. Look it up, it pretty much just a music player for your local music files. It's also very intuative and comes with different customisable styles.

After that I organise the tracks I want into a playlist. This playlist is kind of fun alt-rock songs I like, mainly centred around female vocals or male falsettos. Then once again, I'm gonna go back into MusicBee (I was already in there) and burn the playlist to my chosen blank CD.

Just for fun, I used Audacity to add a bonus track to the end of the last song. This plays at the end of the last song after a few minutes as a special treat. I chose 19-2000 (Soulchild Remix) by Gorillaz because it's such a fun and funky song and I thought it would be a good surprise bonus track.

Because of the file sizes and the limit of the CD (700mb, I had 745mb worth of songs), I had to get rid of a couple songs from the playlist (Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye and Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie). Once it's finished cooking let's take it out and git it a name.

Whew! Thanks for reading, that was a short one and I wrote most of this before actually doing it lmao. This is my first time actually trying to 'blog'. It's kind of a dying medium, imo. I mean, even on tumblr, things have just gone to short one or two sentence paragraph posts. Even with writing this, I felt like I was writing very short stuff. I'd encourage more people to do this, to make the internet and being online actually mean something, because I feel like at the moment it's just mindless entertaining content. People are getting lost.