When no-one’s looking or it doesn’t count…
Heyyyyy! 😀
It feels as if I should introduce myself all over again! Yes, I’m back! And yes, I promised to return with cartoons and I do have cartoons! So, let’s start with that first, shall we?
I had meant to post a philosophical and slightly witty (to me, at least) cartoon about the rat race, but then I got the idea for this one while playing on Pottermore. I don’t think this applies only to Pottermore, that’s why I expanded it to something that I hope is funny.
*ahem*
You all know that feeling: being able to do something when you don’t get marks for it, or when you don’t have an audience, but failing miserably when either of these situations don’t apply. You can flip a pancake perfectly, until the kids are watching you. You can win a race when it is only friendlies, but never in a competition. You can drive, until you need to take your license test. And that is where today’s thoughts led…
I was playing wizard’s duel on Pottermore. Now, you probably don’t know it, but I suck at that. I just can’t seem to get the accuracy levels that you need to beat anyone else and earn house points, but I was playing it anyway, trying to help my house out a little (goodness knows we need it 😛 ).
Now I feel a fool… The only time I managed to get really great accuracy, I don’t even get any points for it. This would probably be the time for some choice profanity. 😉
The worst part is that it is the same in real life…
I am perfectly well aware that I will never feature on a list of “good drivers”. However, necessity forces me to drive and I try my best not to endanger any lives while doing so. Recently, after not driving for about three weeks, I took to the streets again. Predictably, disaster struck.
I managed to stall the car just when the light turned green (it’s a stick shift). I don’t even know what I did – my foot must have jerked or slipped off the clutch or something. The most important thing is that the engine died a quick and easy death. Oh, did I mention that this happened during the lunch-hour rush? On the busiest thoroughfare that I use on a regular basis? There was about a million cars behind me, all of them impatient, and of course I couldn’t get the engine started again, from pure embarrassment and nerves.
Why can’t this ever happen in a quiet street with no-one else in sight? Why can’t I try to manoeuvre into a hard parking spot without an audience? Why, oh why, did I have to get stuck in the mud in the university parking lot that one day while about eleventy-one people were watching me? The worst bit about that was probably doing the nonchalant walk away from my car after I finally managed to get out and into a proper parking spot. Yes, I think that was also worse than stalling the engine in the street. At least there no-one can see your face afterwards. 😛
Please tell me that I’m not the only one with a tendency to have driving mishaps at the moment when there is the biggest audience possible? Please?
Okay, change of topic! It feels good to be back! I am still deciding whether I want to stick to my old posting schedule of every Friday/occasionally Saturday or if I want to make it Monday or some other random day. Or perhaps ditch the 7-day posting schedule completely…? I might do that and just go with it, though it might not be so good for me. The regime kept me on my toes and prevented procrastination. Anyway, I’ll see in the next week or two.
Speaking of posting schedules…
I really enjoyed writing the book challenge posts! I really hope you enjoyed it too. I tried to be as honest and straightforward as possible in them, even when the post was hard to write. For example, Day 16 – Luna Lovegood was extremely hard for me to write, but I had to try. It is always hard for me to write about how I was bullied and how dark I felt my life was back then – I just get emotional and that is not a good state for writing. It just makes me think that the old wounds are not so much healed as I thought they were.
Anyway, because I enjoyed it so much, I would like to add some book review/opinion posts to my schedule as monthly or bi-monthly feature. This would be in addition to the cartoons and writing, of course. After all, you cannot be a creative writer if you do not read a lot. So, do y’all think?
Let me know what you think!
Right, then I’ll be off!
Well, I’m back. (And on Pottermore).
My titles just keep getting weirder and weirder. I seem to like putting punctuation in them lately. Also, I’m going through another “quoting Lord of the Rings“-phase.
Anyway… hello! How is everyone? I’m (mostly) back from my exam-imposed exile. I wrote three papers last week. Three! I only have three modules! And the exam period is three weeks long, but what happens?
^^ Pinterest supplies me with wonderful things like this, to help me rant my way through three papers. Now I only have one paper left, two weeks later than the others. I usually hate my exam timetable, but this time it is worse than usual.
Well, that is all over and I survived. And now… on to what happens now.
Once these exams are finally over, I’m going to go away on a little holiday. A bit of road trip and a visit to family. I will be taking mobile internet with me, but I don’t think I’d be able to blog. So, I got an idea! I decided to queue up a lot of posts. (Not a very original idea, I admit.) But what would I write about?
I starting searching for a topic or blog challenge that would last me a long time. Finally I settled on the 30 Day Book Challenge, which means I can talk a lot about books. I love talking about books, but most people don’t want to listen. They tend to walk away in confusion, but the blog can’t walk away on me, or try to remind me that the things I read are not real. (I hate it when people try to do that. I know it’s not real, but that’s not going to stop me talking about it as if it was real. 😛 ) Well, I suppose the readers could walk away in disgust. But you are not going to do that are you. *glare* 😛
I have nearly finished writing all the posts and then I will start queuing then up. Actually, I think that it will be more than 30 posts. Why? Well, if you ask me to talk about my favourite character, do you really expect me to talk about only one person? Some of the entries grew into small essays, so I split them up seeing that I did not want to actually cut them shorter. So then I will post them across several days, because no-one wants to read that much all at once.
I will start posting the entries further apart before I leave, so that there is still space for me to pop in with other posts, but once I leave, I will set them to post everyday. Won’t that be fun? The only time that this blog has ever been active with posts!
Now for the most important order of business… (to me, anyway 😉 )
Pottermore!
I’ve wanted to get into Pottermore ever since I heard about it. I signed up for beta, but I never got an email. Then, when it opened to the public in April… I was in the middle of working through my stack of assignments and I was so disappointed. I was seriously tempted to just create an account anyway. Once, I got as far as the log-in screen and I was filling in my details when my sensible side decided to close the browser window to avoid further temptation. So I waited… until really late on Sunday night, I think. Then I signed up. I went much too fast through the first few chapters because I wanted to get to Diagon Alley and the Sorting Hat so badly… A wand and a House… those were the main attractions of Pottermore to me. Especially the House. I always wanted to get Sorted when I read Harry Potter all those years ago. Even though it’s just an online quiz it still felt… more official to get Pottermore to tell you your place at Hogwarts, instead of you deciding for yourself.
So… first I did the wand quiz and got a wand:
I thought it was kind of cute how the quiz asked: “Are you short, average, or tall for your age?” Obviously I’m a bit old for any “for your age”, but I’m still short. 😛
And then… I got to go on to the Sorting Hat quiz. I knew what House I wanted to end up in, but I wasn’t at all sure if I would get it. I know many people complain about not getting what they wanted on Pottermore and how the quiz is rigged, so I was ridiculously nervous. When I started the questions though, I could not see how people think it is rigged, or that you can really cheat on it. Sometimes there are six options to choose from and sometimes only two. And it is hardly ever obvious where any of the questions lead to, so I don’t think you could lie and answer in such a way that you would be guaranteed to end up in your preference. I must say, some of them I could answer immediately and some of them left me stumped. 😉 There is no indication of how many questions are left (actually, I wondered if some people get more questions than others) and I was still happily beavering away, when a screen popped up.
And…
………
…
YES! 😀 Exactly what I’ve always wanted, ever since I was a tween! 😀
Even when I was a little kid and my mother read me Philosopher’s Stone as a bedtime story, I wished that I would be in Ravenclaw. My preference never changed, even though I haven’t read a Harry Potter-book in years. I went on a happiness-high for the rest of the night. And the next day. I’m still kind of excited right now. 🙂
If there is anyone here who is also on Pottermore and would like to add me as a friend, my username is:
An unexpected bonus if you add me is you’ll be able to see in what country I live. It has always been something that I am sensitive about revealing online, because you wouldn’t be-lieve the stupid comments people leave you if you are not from one of the “mainstream” countries like the USA, the UK or Canada. I want to be judged on who I am, not where I live. So I completely stopped revealing my location. However, on Pottermore you can’t hide it. 😉
Right, now I’ll stop gushing about how wonderful Pottermore is. But can I just say that I love exploring the entire site? Right, right…
And I apologise to anyone who is not a fan of Harry Potter and found that entire last piece incomprehensible. I’ll try to limit my talking about it! 😉
In other, non-related news (nothing in this entire blog post is related to anything else), here are the results of the poll I put in my last post. Thank you to everyone who voted! I was surprised to see the wide age range of people who have patience with my ramblings! So…
I think that is now everything! I’ll get round to starting the book challenge posts sometime soon!
Ravenclaw-ish love,
PS. On the 3rd of June I finally achieved a 500-day writing streak on 750words.com. Phew! That was a lot of hard work, but I’m still continuing on! 🙂
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