Went back to Nanyang Primary today, only to find that everyone else left, including the teachers (the school provided for them some lunch thingy). So there wasn't much point in going there. D:

 

After that, the 8 of us went to watch Secret. It was rather good, focusing on the themes of distances between the two main characters, with subtle hintings about the plot throughout. The ending is also quite ambiguous, and leaves it to the viewer's own interpretation. Suspension of disbelief is needed though.

 

So yeah, Jay Chou can write stuff like this. (b^^)b Oh, and this post's title is a spoiler.

Today is the second day in which people suddenly turn into pyromaniacs and contribute to smog and haze. It makes me sneeze more.

 

Anyways, some specific issue has been bugging me for a while. It's not the pyromania.

 

 

Firstly, a search for the definition of "humanities" turns up this:

"the branch of learning that includes the arts, classics, philosophy and history etc., but not the sciences" (Wiktionary)

 

What I get in "humanities" classes is certainly not dealing with any of those. Unless you count essay writing under, uh, "classics".

 

Now, the reason why I chose History as an elective is so I could learn more about Communist Russia. But the education system works in marvellous ways. Instead of focusing on the facts and dates, they force us to learn how to write in a specific way so that we can score high marks and move on with the rest of our monotonous lives. The actual facts? "Read up on it yourself, we have no time to cover that - I have to teach you people how to write essays for tests."

 

"Oh, and remember that reading up is essential for content knowledge so that you can write better essays."

 

Note that the teacher didn't actually say that, it's mainly my own impression. Nevertheless, actual impartation of knowledge is now second fiddle to writing impractical essays just for school tests. Hey, whatever happened to, you know, history?

 

At my World History class in oosa, almost every class was like this:
"Alright kids, shut up and watch this video I'm going to show you."

 

Note that the teacher actually said that. (And I still think he's awesome.) It's mainly documentaries about the topic, but we all know that motion and color fascinates people and grabs their attention. Oh, and hey, it's relevant to History too. Also note that we almost never touched essay questions during tests.

 

It's almost the same for "IH Core", just replace the fascade of learning about Communist Russia with the fascade of learning about the governmental structure and stuff. Yes, there may be going through of policies in class, but when it comes to tests, it's essays again. It doesn't matter if your mastery of the concept is there, if you can't write it in a way that they'll accept it, you can celebrate if your marks reaches two digits.

 

"Okay, I'm going to give you this stack of readings for you to read up on your own, because we have to go over the 'Level of Response Marking Scheme' again. Some people seem to be unfamiliar with this."

 

Could someone point out to me the relevance of writing essays according to specific rubrics or comparing between sources to the real world? Maybe I just couldn't perceive its importance. Or maybe I just wrote this because I am sore about getting subpar grades for my recent essay just because I didn't heed the great guidence of those little printed lines on that teacher's rubric. For the n-th time.

 

*Now anticipating people with l33thax essay writing skills laughing at me and saying stuff like "don't blame others for your own n00bness", then I'll go "hey they may be right!", try again and return disappointed, then making a post similar to this one.*

 

On a side note, you may get an amusing output when you run "Raffles Institution" through Babelfish, Chinese-Simplified. Whatever comes out from that however is not of my opinion though.

6 days left to the Summer Comiket, where people release good stuff to the world lucky people who could attend.

 

Inclusive of those good stuff is the trial version for Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. Previous screenshots and Youtube vids show a huge change in game system compared to Tasofro's previous Touhou fighter work. I was kinda disappointed that they changed the spellcard system (I still think it should be a last resort instead of just a super), but then this screenshot came out just today.

 

 

They included some cool weather system apparently. (All is forgiven! ^^;) They also seem to have redrawn the cut-ins, so people could  stop whining about how they reuse IaMP images.

 

6 days seems so near yet so far?

Someone should do a video like this:

 

Record with a camcorder yourself using Vista on a comp. (Read: not your comp.) Open the browser, and search Youtube with "vista sucks". Browse through the videos and say that those people are stupid and that Vista is actually quite stable.

 

Then you attempt to prove it and begin doing random stuff on Vista such as running videos using third party progs like VLC (causing security warning thingies), and RAM-heavy games. Minimize those windows while still running, open up more windows, open Task Manager, comment on how the CPU usage percentage isn't a lot, etc.

 

Then all those running progs and processes somehow overloads and bluescreens the comp. Utter something impolite and end the recording. Encode the video on not Vista and put it on Youtube. ????, then profit.

 

EDIT: Just after posting this my Messenger crashes. いんぼうですね？