Holiday fever

So, just woke up. At like 12 something. Good stuff.

Since the holiday period has started ive essentially been doing nothing but playing games - league of legends in particular with cross and leetfella.
my housemate yesterday got Red Dead Redemption though so ive had a chance to play that some, i actually bought it myself but ordered it back to my house in Essex, figured id get the full experience with the big HD tv and surround sound. The mexican standoff thing at the start of the team deathmatches should be in every game from now on, its amazing.

Stuff planned:
Today - Nothing
Tomorrow - Alton Towers
Friday - Epic cleanup of the house and then Pizza hut buffet
Saturday - Go home

Pub Golf

So we did a pub golf thing last night, which is basically 9 (watering) holes, You do one drink at each bar, a set drink, and have a par, and have to finish the drink in that many attempts.

uh.. i think the drinks were like...

- pint of guiness (skipped)
- Pint of lager/Cider (par 2 / Me 2)
- Shot of baileys [wuddufuk £3 hell no] (skipped)
- glass of wine (par 2 / Me 1)
- Strawpedo [bottle drink - smirnoff ice] (par 1 / me 1)
- Rhey and Nephews [which is a 65% shot, the strongest one they have] (par-1 / me-blackhole)
- Vodka redbull (par ? / me 1)
- Sex on the beach [cocktail] (par 1 / me 1)
- Pint of 'eliminator' [which is a bunch of crazy shit, i know it has lambrini in there and a bunch of shots]

After the 65% shot i was pretty fucking wasted.
Wasted enough to not know when to stop, and then downed the vodbull, sex on the beach and tried downing the eliminator.

Couldnt walk straight, couldnt see straight, couldnt SIT straight, couldnt talk intelligently

I actually feel kinda drunk now - the morning after. C'mon liver/kidneys, stop lettin the team down.

2010 Biology exams 'The Good the bad and the ugly'

So I still havent finished exams yet as of writing this, and i'll be sure to update it accordingly if something under one of these categories occurs, but for now...

The exams 'Good , bad and the ugly'!

The good:
Cell Signalling lecturer 'Davey' gave the most blatent hints as to what the essay questions in this years exam was going to be, everyone wrote down what he said during the lectures, everyone powerrevised for those questions, praying that they would actually be there. Exam time, and lo and behold- there they were, both of them, in the exact same wording he said 'might' be in the exam. I have never written so much for one essay question ever, i think i wrote about 4 pages (including a diagram) on phosphorylation in signalling pathways - which will hopefully give me a decent mark...

The Bad:
I think it was 'Enviromental Health Microbiology', one of the questions worth 3 marks were 'name the reservoirs for the following diseases' (In English - disease is commonly found in...... ) and then went on to list a bunch of diseases (tuberculosis, salmonella... etc) , I.... had no idea, didn't revise it, didnt even see it in the lecture notes. I wrote 'cows' for tuberculosis and moved on. I usually come back to check that i've written something for every answer after i finish doing the questions but I ended up using up all of the time in the exam writing on the essay questions.
After they announced to stop writing, i noticed I had essentially left the front 2 pages of the answer booklet empty. I peeked up to see where the invigilators were, and without skipping a beat went down the list of 6 diseases and wrote 'birds' 'birds' 'birds' 'birds' (cows) 'birds'. Closed the booklet, handed it in. Why birds? I have no idea. Will i get any marks? well... one of them has to be birds surely.

The Ugly:
The first exam we had, the essay question came up (we get a choice of 2), one of them... I didnt really know in much depth at all - "discuss repeating regions" or something. The other one I sort of knew, but the question threw me off.... "Discuss phase variation, relate it to one pathogen"
Now... I had revised phase variation in a fair bit of detail, thinking it might come up, its basically when the organism is able to flip around abit of its DNA, letting it make a different protein (letting it do different shit [variation between phases] ), the example we had studied it in was 'Salmonella' - I looked at the exam question again, I don't know this, i thought to myself.
"or well.. i know what phase variation is, but we didnt study any pathogens that use it, I only that it happens in Salmon"
..........
That was my genuine thought process.
Thats right, I did not answer the essay question I knew the answer to because I thought I had learnt about something which occurs in Salmon instead of Salmonella.
Fuck. Sake.

Battle of the immortals

Looks pretty intresting, might give it a go after im done with these exams - from the gameplay videos ive seen it looks better than some of the other shit ive played at least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNxM8qKP-Ew

http://boi.perfectworld.com/

Scott Pilgrim VS the world

This game looks pretty hot. Pixel art style Streets of rage / Castle crashers sort of deal.

And it has awesome music by Anamaguchi!



Also, Nintendo killed E3 so hard. Just thought id put this down on my blog so shits official

VVVVVV (V 6 times)

I seem to end up linking people to this game alot, the other blog post links to someone elses upload of the beta so I thought if im going to keep this habit up or recommending this game to people I may as well upload the full version.

http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/files/vvvvvv_install.exe

Also, if you find this upload distractionware, i'll take it down if you really want but im spreading word of your awesome game! Although as awesome as it is, charging £10.50 for a game which can be completed in a few hours seems a little steep dontcha think?

Gauntlet

just a blog post to let you know im still here.

Have had 5 exams out of 12 so far, with my 6th one tomorrow and then 3 more on saturday ~.~

Have to say, its not looking great so far, the exams I have had have all been really hard :<

1 - Molecular biology - Hard / Bad
2 - Cell Signalling - Hard short questions, Easy essay question which will hopefully help me pass
3 - Neurobiology - Horrible, didnt know the essay question at all which is worth half the marks. FML
4 - Clinical Microbiology - Nice short questions, meh essay question (wasnt that bad but I couldnt remember alot of the stuff :<)
5 - Enviromental health microbiology - Hard short questions, okay essay question

Tomorrow: Immunology - I can already tell its going to be hard and horrible, at best it'll be 'meh' but i already know I wont be walking out of it smiling, its probably my worst subject.

Eg. This is a simplified version of what we're supposed to know. a SIMPLIFIED one =(

Fucking unsavoury to the core.

And then it'll be the next 3, the next 2 days is pretty much the gauntlet from Gladiators except replace the gladiators with Cena, Kane, Undertaker and the Big Show. And its for the grand final, and if i lose then I lose £18,000... (and if i win i still lose £18,000 but i get a nice piece of paper at the end)

The Lull

Just a heads up, my exams are starting this week (or.. tomorow rather) so don't expect many blog updates for a fortnight.

Will still be updating via twitter or facebook though so feel free to follow me there

http://twitter.com/mengplex

[and i imagine everyone who would want to find me on facebook already has me added, but if not - its pretty easy to find me....]

Exam layout..
10th - 1 exam
14th - 2 exams
16th - 2 exams
18th - 1 exam
19th - 3 exams :<
23rd - 1 exam
25th - 2 exams

Upgrade

Upgraded to the latest wordpress (2.9.2 from 2.7.1) , let me know if anything is broken and stuff, I dont actually use my own site much other than publishing posts so.. yeah

edit: I broke everything. Goddamnit. Guess i'll wait for wordpress 3.0 to be released since its apparently in RC

First good day in a while

So yesterday was a good day, mainly because there wasn't a huge amount of revision done. In the morning we went to a summer fete, which had odds and ends to buy, nothing particuarly useful that we wanted though. We played the tombola (raffle thing) and our house won a bunch of crap:- set of glasses, fitness set, car worklight, china cups and probably more shit i cant remember.

We also found the game 'pass out' (RRP around £8-15) for 50p. Bargain!

later on in the day we decided to go to the local fair, where we went on the ol' dodgems a waltzer and... the monster beneath.



Now im no stranger to extreme rides, a few of you may recall my myspace blog when i went to Florida in 2007 where I rode some of the most intense rollercoasters in the world (looking at you shiekra in busch gardens). Why in the fuck then, did i feel like i was going to die whilst riding on that spinny spin spin thing above (in case you havent seen one, central bit spins, arms move up and down and the individual cars spin round the arms). I can only assume because it was at a small fair that the guy running the thing just couldnt give a fuck, whacked it up to full speed and then went out for a cigarette, it went ridiculously fast and felt like it was like that for 5 minutes or so, Nausea set in, my arms now ache from gripping so hard, there was ZERO saliva in my mouth (dry as a bone). When we came off im pretty sure a girl in one of the other cars had passed out, she wasnt moving at all.

Later on in the night we decided to play pass-out, where we all got very very drunk. During and after pictures ahead. You can see what the board actually looks like here (rules are pretty self explanatory just by looking at the board)





Ugh. im pretty sure someone was taking tons of pictures on a digicam too :< They're bound to look terrible when they're inevitably uploaded to facebook

./facepalm

Some people seriously blow my mind.

Can you imagine him describing a house he bought?
"2 bedrooms, small TV but it could be an 80" flatscreen, oh and ive got a hoover but it could be a fully articulating five function robot that can read my mind and has feelings. floorboards."

An absolute fucking monster.

Mind = Blown

Also, some more pictures of my wardrobe mirrors





I'd like to say its all coming together but.... ehh.. idk.
6 days til my first exam, 3 weeks until the end of exams. Ive gone through all the material once at least, but havent really gone into practice papers or anything, will be doing that over the next few days i suppose.

Then i get to enjoy the summer~ And by that i mean find full time work because i need some fuckin scrilla. fawk mah loife.

'Dark Savior' tribute

This is a tribute to one of the best games ive ever played, a long forgotten game which I feel like only I have played.



Dark savior was a roleplaying game for the saturn, an isometric 3d game with a crazy story with plot twists, memorable characters and a distinct soundtrack - pretty much the opposite of most games made today. It mixed 3d mario platforming with zelda style dungeon puzzles and scripted fights which turned the game into a 1v1 fighting game - complete with ultra attacks and a capture system which would let you use that character later in the game.

The game also had some 'Lost' style parallel universes going on, basically when you start the game you have to run through the first area, and the outcomes of which will decide how the rest of the story will play out - but these are MAJOR changes to the plot and dungeon layouts, not minor things.
Basically, a monster escapes from its holding cage on the ship you're on and attacks the captain, depending on how long you take to get there - the captain may have died and monster escaped, you may catch the monster there and then, maybe the monster kills you (and the story then-on is fighting your way through hell), maybe a combination of the above.
This basically leads to 4 seperate storylines, each playing out differently and is great fun to see what has changed, enemies in certain parallells turn into allies and vice versa.
Ive no idea how long i spent on this game as a kid, but i completed all the 5 parallells and they were all great.

Unfortunately, im fairly sure this game would be ridiculously hard to find on the internet - or in shops. But if you can find it and have some free time, give it a go.

v Not the most exciting trailer in the world, and doesnt actually give a feel for the game at all other than showing off the 'amazing' 3d graphics of its time, but there arent many gameplay videos online that dont give away major plot points.

I

^Pretty damn amazing, not sure what instrument that is but 2 pedals AND 2 keyboards? (AND A DRAGON SUIT?!)
v Second video is actually even more impressive IMO (kirby)



Can find really weird and awesome stuff on nicovideo, the japanese are mad dedicated when it comes to song covers (or pre-teen dancing girls)

Japan plans to build robot moon base by 2020

Japan plans to build a moon base with robots.

This is pretty awesome, although I cant really imagine robots being that capable by 2020, Last i checked they were still pretty useless - certainly not competent enough to build a house out of lego, nevermind a moon base. Who knows though, if they success we may all be able to migrate to a city on the moon by 2050 or so (oh man, i'll be 61. mad depressing)