Bilbo takes it up the arse from Judicial Champions.

Cool, just had my first person finding the blog on Google.

Whoever it was was looking for "WFRP Online", and found one of the posts I put in about Hogshead getting bought out, ages ago.

Fuck, the reformist Serbian prime minister's just been shot dead by a sniper using 'high calibre' ammunition, i.e. probably a proper sniper rifle, i.e. a proper marksman.

Just a few weeks ago, someone tried to crash his car by cutting him up with a lorry, but screwed up. That's a trick the Serbian secret police used to use in the bad old days, and was used in a failed attempt against the Opposition leader during Milosevic's presidency.

The world's busy looking the other way at the moment - people really aren't paying attention to the Balkans any more. Could get nasty.

North Korea's been taking advantage of the situation already, with its threats of war and so on, and Ethiopia's been moving troops up to Somalia's borders over the past few days (I wouldn't put it past them to start a war of conquest - they did the same to Eritrea a while back, before the international community got involved).

This could be the start of a take-back of power, perhaps, by Milosevic's old guard. There's still enough of them around (some of them working within the government) to be a threat, and Milosevic does still have public support.

Heh heh.

[Embarassed shuffling of feet.]

Right, I did lose a file, but not a particularly important one.

There were two files: 'Analysis 1 of 4 - 13th Legion - Tyranids to Typhon' and 'Text 1 of 4 - 13th Legion - Tyranids to Typhon'.

Last night, there was an error when saving 'Analysis...', but it rescued it as a file with a silly numeric name. So, I had to manually save it as 'Analysis 1 of 4...da-di-dah-di-dah'. I must have accidentally clicked on 'Text 1 of 4..'.

Ergo, 'Analysis...' went bye bye in the failure, but was recovered. The recovered file was then saved over the 'Text...' file, by mistake.

Fortunately, 'Text...' exists as a hard copy, which I just need to retype so that I have an electronic version. A piece of piss.


Now I can finally go to bed. I might shoot some Nazis just to help me relax for a few minutes though.

No, no fucking virus.

SO WHERE DID THE FUCKING THING GO?!?!?!?!

Well that's my tomorrow planned out. Start again.

But where did the fucking thing go???

I haven't deleted any files from the dissertation directory, so I can't have accidentally got the wrong one.

I didn't cut and paste it anywhere.

I haven't renamed it.

I've searched on my hard drive for files with 'analysis' in the title - I only found the shortcut from the Documents menu.

On the offchance it was eaten by a virus, I'm running a full check now.

I've got to eat something.

I don't know what happened.

One minute it was there, the next... gone.

I'm talking about my dissertation.

It should have been in that folder, waiting for me to come back and work on it.

I copied the whole directory across onto my network drive this morning, so that I had a backup copy.

Maybe I should have checked it was all there in the first place.

Neither the backup directory or the original directory had the main text of the dissertation in them.

My dissertation has leapt back to 0 words, and I wanted to get about 4-5000 done by the end of tomorrow.

I'm fucked.

I feel sicker than I ever have done before.

I'm going to email Mick, get something to eat (a plate full of chicken nuggets should fill me) and then just go to bed. Maybe I'll play something gratuitiously violent beforehand, depending on how frantic I feel. I've got my handwritten notes on printouts of the texts I'm analysing, but there's still a hell of a lot that hasn't been written down, and needs to get from brain to screen all over again.

Well, Lorna's emailed me back. She's feeling a little bit more upbeat and says she might actually go along and see LUSU tomorrow.

That's good. Crisis averted, at least as far as me being able to write my dissertation goes.

New crisis though: I'm out of Coke.

I need caffeine if I'm going to work this late. What do I have? What do I have?

...

Hot chocolate, and I've lots of milk that's just past its best before date. I see hot chocolate with marshmallows in, coming up!

Ah, fuck!!!

I can't stop thinking about Lorna's crisis, and I'm meant to be working on my dissertation!

Theatre Group AGM tonight. There was an antagonistic moment where the president had to be forced to allow the membership to vote on a proposal that he didn't agree with (the proposal wasn't passed anyway), and it did go on for three and a half hours, but that wasn't the worst bit.

Worst bit of the night:
Lorna stood for election as Publicity Officer. She was up against Davey T, one of the current exec, and all-round popular guy. She put in a hell of a good showing, Lorna probably was the better candidate, and apparently the vote was close, but Theatre Group's as cliquey as hell. She lost, in other words.

She was really upset and walked off into the darkness. She'd already asked me to give her some space if she did that, so I let her go.

Later, in the Any Other Business section of the meeting, Chris Parkinson (techie and part-time luvvie) proposed that Theatre Group set up a non-exec position of webmaster, since Davey T's only just started learning HTML, and Lorna's far better than he is in about six different programming languages.

Me and Kimball (sp.?) found her after the meeting to give her back her rucksack and jumper, that she left at the AGM. When we mentioned Chris's proposal, she said Theatre Group could go fuck themselves and announced she was dropping out of uni.

The main reason she was staying on next year was so that she could do techie stuff with Theatre Group, in particular the Publicity job.

Now, combined with the fact that her department's screwing her over bad style (see below for my interpretation of events), she doesn't see any reason to stay on until the end of her course, let alone next year.

Dammit, one of my closest friends, someone I care more about than anyone else at uni, and she ends up dropping out of her degree three months before it ends.


Why her department's screing her over:
Lorna handed in some work (from her end of year report) to her supervisor, for him to mark. Usually, he gets work back to students the day after, but it's now been over a week. The final deadline's this Friday. She talked to her tutor, he wasn't interested. She went to the head of department, he wasn't interested. She went to the course secretary, who booked her an appointment with... get this, the Student Councilling Service?!?!

Knowing what they'd say, she kept the appointment and yes, they said it: 'Nothing to do with us. Talk to your department, or maybe LUSU.'

Lorna doesn't see how LUSU can help, since the deadline's rushing closer, and neither did I at the time.

I've just sent her an email advising her to go to the Ed & Welfare Officer anyway. With the Union on her side, she could either persuade the department to cut her some slack, or put in an official complaint about her treatment.

They can't push back the deadline for her, but they could always get the markers to cut her some slack. Dammit, she deserves it.

And the second banner's gone, even before I posted the last message.

Why has Blogger suddenly decided to put two banners at the top of the screen, instead of just the one?

It's pushing the background and the blog entries down by the height of the second banner, but leaving the title, menu text and the counter where they were supposed to be, hence the chewed up and regurgitated dog's dinner that you are probably seeing before you.

It did this earlier but before I could be bothered to edit the HTML coding, the second banner vanished and everything went back to normal. I'll leave it like this til tomorrow and see if it repairs itself.


I'm currently squeezing out the dissertation like a fibreless diet - very slowly, with lots of pain and it's taking all night. Done nearly 1000 words tonight (actually, around 800, if you subtract the words I've deleted). I want to get the whole thing to a reasonable standard to show Mick, my supervisor, by Wednesday at the latest. I need to get some kind of feedback from him before the start of the holiday, otherwise I'm screwed. I'm not going to get all 10,000 words of the first draft sorted, but I figured if I do the first and last analysis, then add in a rough conclusion, I can show Mick that I'm at least doing something, and he can give me hints on where I'm going wrong.

I found out this week that I need a 2:1 in all four of this year's modules if I'm going to get a 2:1 at the end of the year:

Creative Writing: Probably a 2:1 - I've not done much this year, but what I have done has been good.

LING 201 Dissertation: Either a 2:1 or a 2:2 - it's basically stylistic analysis, which I'm good at, but I've been out of practice since the second year, and I'm pretty fed up with the whole thing, so that could drag my overall grade for the module down.

LING 204 [Not sure of the course title]: I got a 1st in my last essay, but I doubt I could carry that through to the next essay, which is due in less than a fortnight (hence why I want to get the rough version of this dissertation out of the way NOW). Of course, there's also an exam for this module, which is normally where I bugger up completely.

LING 206 [Something about language in society]: I messed up my last essay for this, which is a shame because I like the social side of linguistics. I've also missed too many lectures (9am, the only thing I have on Wednesday - can you blame me?). I need a damn good essay mark this term (due after the holidays, thank god!), plus a good exam mark if I'm going to get a 2:1.

I think, overall, I'm going to end up with a 2:2 (but that's not going to stop me trying). I may still be able to blag my way onto the Creative Writing MA by dint of a damn good portfolio (some of the best responses I've ever had from the Writers Guild and my Creative Writing group when I showed the pieces to them), and by putting in the 'tiebreaker' box that I founded the Writers Guild and served as president for two years, moving to vice-president next year, plus that I impressed Hogshead with my proposal for 'Nuln: At The Crossroads'.

Apparently, the department are planning to set up two post-grad groups next year, rather than the usual one, separating the full-time students from the part-timers, so the part-timers are more able to bond as one workshop group over two years, rather than half of the current single group leaving at the end of the first year to be replaced by another group of fresh post-grad virgins.