A Tory Government

If you'd like a bit of trivia that I'm likely to bring up time and time again, it's that the constituency I live in and the surrounding ones (mostly ones heading North into Kent) are the most comfortable Tory seats in the country. I hate the Conservatives. I'm a middle class white British citizen living in Sussex with siblings in private schools, and I hate the Conservatives. With fear of parroting every journalist in the world at the moment, I've always felt that the Conservatives only have interests with making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Of course, being neither, it would be safe to assume that I would remain unaffected by either of these polar ends. Sadly not.

One of the great joys of teenage life is the GCSE/A level/Early Uni years time. This is mostly what this fortnight's post is about. I had to take my Physics GCSE exam a few hours ago, and the exam barrage will get worse next year. I don't really care about taking all these exams. They're what, 50/60% of my exam? The rest is taken with coursework ('cept for my BTEC, which is of course all coursework).

But it sounds like this is going to not happen as much. Mike Gove (Gotta love that man*) is planning to change both the GCSE and A level courses. For those not in the know, he wants to lesson the pressure of coursework and rely more on the end-of-year exams. He also wants to rely more on the end of two-years for A levels, meaning fewer or even no more AS Levels. Finally, he wants to abolish the seperate exam boards and have one per subject.

What he wants is harder exams that "really challenge bright pupils" or something to that effect. This is twinned with the removal of many practical subjects, known by their BTEC Level 1/2/3 tag. A small problem with that is, walk into an average secondary school and you have pupils who are disruptive. They often aren't the "bright pupils" that Gove wants to "really challenge". Often they can't sit still through a one hour lesson, let alone a three hour exam. These are the pupils that the practical subjects were made for. If they do manage to sit through their GCSE's, they're probably going to be D's or lower. Chances are they'll wind up jobless and be a strain on the benefit system. At least with the practical subjects they can prove they have skills in something like plumbing and get work. Yes, they're not about to be accepted into Oxford with these qualifications, but it's better than nothing.

However, as a "bright pupil" (I've had my time on a Gifted + Talented register before now), I'm not mad about the removal of practical subjects. I'm angrier about the possible demise of AS levels. When I go to my sixth form, I want to take a French AS. I'm not great at French, but I want more than a GCSE in it. So many people choose to do this, in fact, that my intended sixth form rarely run the full French A level. The AS is a great way to just get a little extra in the way of languages while not over-stretching yourself. My life is roughly planned around this AS level. I wouldn't be surprised if this format copied itself around the country. The Government are forever complaining about the lack of take-up of languages by students. Are they seriously so stupid as to not realise that the loss of AS levels could mean the demise of good French, German and Spanish speakers among Brits?

Alas, when I finally calm myself down about my future, the Tories find another way to fuck it up again. Way to go, Mike. Way to go, Dave.
And Nick, don't think the £9k limit has been forgotten about.

*that was sarcasm, by the way.

Fanfiction

Recently, I started playing Final Fantasy (FF XIII, if you must know). And this morning, I was debating painting a scene from it. Fanart in it's purest form. I always paint things I like.

I also debated writing some fanfiction of it. People who know me well know I'm not a fanfiction kind of person. I wrote one or two pieces a couple of years ago, and I read a piece or so when specifically asked to. So I think the desire to write fanfiction surprised me.

It's funny how these kind of things pan out. Until about eighteen months ago, I wasn't aware any browser but Internet Explorer existed (still use IE), while many other people stopped using IE the second they were able to. While some write nothing but fanfiction and that's all they've done for ages, I just can't write it at times. Like, I sit down and I'm just embarrased to write.

Fanfiction is something I've only recently heard of, so I probably just need more footing in it. Yet it seems to be gaining more ground, but I don't know whether that's always been the case. By "more ground" I mean the Fifty Shades series being a Twilight fanfiction, and major similarities (bordering on plagarism, I'd say) between Carrier of the Mark (Leigh Farron) and Twilight.

I asked, is fanfiction going to become popular enough for it to be published in the mainstream? I already know of a Panic! At the Disco fanfiction (The Heart Rate of a Mouse) that's over 300,000 words, I think as far as twice that length. You can actually buy copies of it off the internet. Of course, it's self-published. But if you think through fandoms, if you belong to one, there's always "that fanfic". Sometimes it's just a one-shot, or it's very short, and others it's as long as THRoaM. How many of them could be available to get online in time?

Fanfiction is the way into writing for some writers. All I'm thinking is, it could be a way into reading for some readers.

And as for that fanart, I decided with a scene from Palumpolum.

8 - 12 Age Range

This was going to be another angry week. But then I had ice cream and I started hallucinating about unicorns or something so I'm going to talk about my History GCSE.

Well, not specifically my History GCSE, but that topic shall come up. Right now, in fact. In the GCSE course my school runs (and so, I take) a topic about Medicine through Time. For the past year, I have had to suffer my mixed-ability class ("Miss, I know you've been teaching us this for the past six weeks, but can you repeat everything because I have the memory of a goldfish?" ¬_¬), as we learnt about Galen etc.

I have also started watching Horrible Histories, because at heart I am five years old. Recently, I've discovered as I plough through the series, it is pretty much teaching me my course. Yes, I am only scraping by in History because I watch a show for eight to twelve-year olds.

It's shown on the CBBC channel, which was roughly my life until I was about... eleven. I would spend hours watching The Story of Tracy Beaker, Young Dracula and Blue Peter, to the point where I was banned from watching TSoTB because "my attitude was suffering". Now, they show CBBC on BBC One until 5;15, but back when I was younger and had only four channels on my telly it wasn't, and I watched The Weakest Link instead.

What brought on my little trip into my past? Recently, in the paper, they announced the removal of various programmes from CBBC while it aired on the BBC One channel. This includes Blue Peter.

Not Blue Peter! The glorious show that most people under the age of fifty have spent a childhood watching Blue Peter. And I'm fairly sure that because it's on BBC One many adults still watch it too. By moving it solely to CBBC, the chance is it'll lose many of it's viewers. Why? I'm going to answer this in the form of something I once yelled at one of their continuity presenters.

"Why are you here, and not on the CBBC channel?!"
"BECAUSE I AM NOT BETWEEN THE RECOMMENDED EIGHT TO TWELVE AGE RANGE!"

Community

I was going to talk about something or other that came under the title "Advertising". However something happened recently that made me so bloody angry that I'm going to leave that for another time, and talk of this instead.

There are many things that annoy me about my town, the lack of rail links, lack of decent shops, lack of any form of life. I can't change these, and don't particularly care enough about my town to try. Despite this, I am on my school's council, so we can raise important issues for them to politely ignore.

Now, in one part of the school there is a gate and a path, next to a couple-of-tennis-courts size space of grass, which was next to two tennis courts. The majority of students who attend my school go through this side path (there are only three other ways into the school). This gate looks onto a main road, ten minutes one way and you're through the town centre, half an hour the other and you're at the train station. So you can imagine at school run time, with kids for my school and two close by, the road gets pretty busy. Past the area my school grounds cover and past the adjoining school, is a set of traffic lights. I use these traffic lights every day to get home.

In the morning, the road is blocked up with cars dropping children off to school. Yet this does not mean that the cars go slowly. Kids being kids, they'll happily run straight across the road without looking. I can't move for times I've seen near-misses and skids of cars as they struggle to brake. This happens to the ones who are too lazy to walk to the traffic lights and cross there. It's worse after school, when parents have queued up outside for half an hour or so (my step dad once needed to pick me up, he got there half an hour early and it was already full with waiting parents). The same children who go to run across the road in the morning do the same in the afternoon, only this time from behind parked cars. The braking and such gets much, much worse.

Bear with me, I'm getting to the point. So I went to a school council meeting yesterday, where we began discussing a new hydrotherapy pool that's been built on the grounds (my school grounds are actually two schools, one is for special needs children. As a result, we have strange doors in walls that lead to the second school. Think Coraline). This pool sits on this couple-of-tennis-courts size space of grass. In this conversation, the leader of this meeting admitted that this space was actually going to become a roundabout, so we didn't get the backlog of cars in the afternoon. What happened? The local residents, the people who live across the road, refused to allow it.

And now I'm at the point. Surely it would not be better to allow the roundabout and stop the traffic? Stop the children running out from between parked cars? Quite a few of the local residents would have bought their house knowing there was three school in a very close-knit block. They would have known things like this would prop up. Why would they be so selfish as to prevent the building of something that would help hundreds of people, every day, to the possible minor inconvenience of themselves? The same argument goes to the proposed creation of a zebra crossing just outside this gate.

I may not be an active member of community, but if I needed, I would take a small amount of time from my day to help the greater good. These people would only have to bear with -shock horror- a slightly different method of traffic for about an hour five days a week. They need to stop being so bloody selfish, grow up and help many schoolchildren get home slightly safer every day.

Save the Papers!

The other day, I went to read an article written by a journalist working for The Sunday Times on their website (I hadn't bought the paper as The Independent on Sunday is my Sunday paper of choice). I was slightly dismayed to discover that if I wanted to read any of their articles it would cost me between £1-£6 per week. But then, when I thought of it, the cost was justified. By going on the internet to read the news, I was adding to the slow but inevitable death of the newspaper.

Funny thing for me to talk about, don't you think? A teenager growing up in the age of the internet, practically born with a phone in one hand. Yet for a few years now, I've read the paper every night before going to sleep. At first The Sun, before moving on to The Independent, and now the i (since day two!). It's something I don't even register nowadays, just a force of habit, a daily occurrence, like eating breakfast or making tea as soon as I get home.

As the internet has become more widespread, and the idea of instant news has become more commonplace. Why buy a newspaper for £1 when you've read everything on Twitter? Why read all the news that's broken late night yesterday when you can read news that's broken five minutes ago? Newspapers are becoming worryingly redundant as more people turn to the internet.

So why do people still bother? A main problem with this internet is that with so many sources, it's hard to know who to trust. Who's reliable, who's biased, who's parroting rumours, etc. Reporting the facts has been done in so many ways it's dissolved into slush. We need newspapers (and their articles posted online) to give us quality reporting. Our lives would be dominated by pathetic gossip that's difficult to trust and impossible to regulate.

An industry like newspapers has been around for many, many years. Measures like paying to read stories on the internet are just a response to change, a method of keeping their heads above water. Annoying, yes. Necessary, yes.

Lego

Yesterday, my mum bought me some lego. No occasion, just some lego. Apparently, I can make it into three different shapes! Planes, boats, cars! A world of imagination, for under £4!

When I was younger, I won a competition. I had to build an object out of lego, so I built a spaceship. As a prize, I won "Clickits" (A whole week before they came out nationwide!), and a big tub of lego. Sadly, I don't have the tub anymore, but I do have memories of endless days of lego building.

Lego is great fun, at any age. It's one you can never resist playing, no matter who you are and who you're playing with. It's also bloody expensive, when you get the branded stuff. Lego Star Wars a key example (You can get anything in Star Wars brand these days). For a kit building the Millennium Falcon, they want over £100 for it! No thanks, I'd rather spend my money on books.

But no-one really cares whether or not it costs extortionate amounts, because when the plastic is torn off the packet, and the little pieces are strewn across the carpet, nothing really matters except the lego. All the pieces of an impossible puzzle, with a terrible instruction guide that you wouldn't understand even if you were paid.

At the end of the day, no-one cares about the lego. They don't care about the hours of fun that ensue. But they bloody well care about the pain that shoots through a bare foot in the middle of the night.

Laziness

A quick introduction before I start the main post. Yes, I forgot to post last week and I'm sorry. Two hours of French fits badly with having to write afterwards. Also, this post is a tad lazy as it's a speech I'm forced to write for English. The topic's Things I would put in Room 101. Enjoy, see you in a fortnight.

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"Above all, I wouldn't hesitate to put paranormal romance novels in Room 101. There are very few things I hate more.

Do I really care about some unconnected, 2D characters fall in love with a pale, muscle-y bloke who reinforces a bad image of masculinity? I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to wade through a pathetic slush pile to get to any kind of quality.

It's getting too popular for its own good. Some nearly-author sends off their paranormal romance manuscript and of course it's going to get published. An agent receives a half-legible story and they just know they'll be bathing in money by the end of the week.

Paranormal romance falls, sadly, under the umbrella of sci-fi/fantasy. I search for fantasy novels and young adult romance novels always come up. I see a book about the Devil. Brilliant! Always wanted to know to what Lucifer gets up to on a day-to-day basis. Yet no. It's a bleeding love story. I don't care about his love life, I care about his general evilness. He is Devil, after all.
One thing that gets me, though, is the readers of it. The fangirls, and I can assure you that 90% of them shall be female, are possibly the second most abhorrent type of fangirl. They shall squeal and scream, metaphorically, at every twist of the book. Boring, lifeless character A snogs boring, lifeless character B. Big deal!

It's not how they read, and subsequently share on the internet, the books. It's how they buy them. Fellow sf/f fans shall agree that being an sf/f fan is like being in Fight Club. You don't talk about it. The idea is you walk into the bookshop, hunched over and silent. You paw through a few books, although it's more likely you'll know what you're looking for, find one that looks nice and buy it, then go home. I find para-romance readers go to the section with an entourage of friends. They giggle loudly as they talk about dud pararomance book number eight and how it's just come out, smugly hinting to the world they've read the whole series. Congratulations, you can read!

Once they've finally bought it, after half an hour of talking about who has decided to play hard to get more or which character had his shirt off the most in the last book, their pompousness doesn't stop. They decide to continue to talk about every minor detail to all their friends as they walk out of the store. Who is going to sleep with who, how great it would be as a movie (tip: it wouldn't) and how many more books they can buy. Must I refer back to my Fight Club analogy? You can talk about the book in a highly detailed and legible review, and that's it. Discussing out of the house, and out of sci-fi conventions, is a major no-no.

So, as a message to every reader of Meyer, Clare and whoever else you care to name. Think about what you're about to read, think really hard. And then go read something better."