Question

I should really revise, or talk about yesterday's exam or something (which was okay, ish) but I'm feeling much too lazy to actually do anything. Instead, just a question. Has anyone ever bought something second-hand off amazon.co.uk? Is it simple to do? And if you buy more than one item off the same seller, do you have to pay postage&packing more than once?

Oddments

This entry is going to feature everything I want to talk about at the moment, regardless of relevance to a)the rest of the entry or b)anything else at all. Just so we've got that clear before I go on.

time_and_chips is the most irritating community ever posted in. Ever. Gah. But taraljc is writing me fic, which is never a bad thing. Yay.

In other news, the exam I had yesterday morning was Talk In Life And Literature. It's module five, and I think it went fine. I was being insomniac and sleepy when I went into the hall, and I was more than a little worried I'd sit there and not write anything, but I managed. The two Othello passages were easy to put into context, and I wrote about six sides on Shakespeare's subversion of spoken convention before my hand quite dropped off. The other question was much harder - the unseen texts were a doctor/patient transcript and an extract from Middlemarch - as it always is, and I went to some effort trying to pick out conveyed attitudes and values. But I wrote something, and finished in time.

The afternoon's exam was General Studies. I didn't even know which module it was (good thing I took my calculator, in retrospect), and on the science essay question I wrote two sides before I just... stopped. Forty-five minutes of sleeping on my desk later, I handed it in. I have failed it without a shadow of a doubt. Oh, well, as they say; it's not like it's important.

The next exams I have are on Tuesday - Biology module five (Ecology and the Environment, or that stuff we did while wading through manure in Rhyd-y-creuau), and English synoptic. I have my pre-release for that. If anyone else has the same pre-release (it's A2 English Language and Literature spec B), please do comment. We can have a mini-study group before Tuesday. I'm terribly sad but I like this paper, as it's challenging without being difficult and also the only past paper I have ever got full marks for.

Let's see, what else? I've been tagged for two memes:

dynamitebebe wanted to know five songs I'm listening to at the moment, so here we go:

Coldplay - Speed of Sound (it's lovely, and has a gorgeously psychedelic video)

Indigo Girls - Language and the Kiss (I initially didn't like it, but it's really grown on me for some reason)

John Barrowman & Kevin Kline - Night And Day (because)

Counting Crows - Anna Begins (it reminds me of Hannah and it's a lovely song anyway)

Placebo - Protege-Moi (the end of it gives me chills)

And someone else wanted to know five things I do to relax, which I will write about when I'm feeling more... well, relaxed. In the meantime, daegaer is propagating a meme where you talk about what fic you like, regardless of what everyone else says you should like. Which seems to be a meme worthy of propagation.

I like fic about complex relationships. Most of the time this means I like slash, because a het pairing explored by the canon loses its complexity very quickly, or at least its unexplored complexity. I am shamelessly in love with characters with issues (witness my six-year crush on Remus Lupin), and I like relationships with issues. Which is why I insist on inflicting Remus/Hermione on the general population, and also why I'm so impatient with the shippers trivialising Doctor/Rose. A brief digression - I like Doctor/Rose. I like that our beloved, war-damaged Time Lord is joyfully showing Rose the universe for the first time, and I like the way it's played, with the hand-holding, the assumptions made by the other characters, the lovely, indefinable sweetness of it all.

But to forget the context of the (probable) longest-running sci-fi show in history, the universe, the characters, the plots, all in favour of sappy, saccharine badfic - urgh. Spare me.

And I also like that the Doctor, who lost his world, takes Rose to see the demise of her world; he nearly lost her at the end of WW3, but shamelessly manipulated her to get her to come with him; he messed with Mickey, threw out Adam and was instantly jealous of Jack. He might love Rose, but he's so emotionally fucked-up he'll probably damage her until she's as far gone as he is. Why don't we get fic that deals with that, mmm?

And after that, it's amazing that I like gen too, but I do. Actually, I only wrote gen for my first couple of years in fandom. Not very good gen, but gen all the same.

Sigh. Bedtime. A whole new day of study leave tomorrow, whoo-yay.