Metal Gear Solid 4: Gameplay

I was reading about this on Kotaku but the video wasn’t working so I looked them up on YouTube for myself. Obviously, sickness ensued…

Geekdom

So today’s little trip down south was a fruitful one and my feet are effectively sore-ish from all the meandering. Anyway, one of the stops for our party of three lightly seasoned with a hint of otaku was the Silver Snail. This, of course, is a comic book store, but so much more! It’s located near Queen Street and St. Peter Street (southeast corner, if I’m not mistaken) and it’s full of all the things a nerd could ever ask for. There are busts (as in the “shoulders and up” statues, not fun-bags) of anime, movie, and comic book characters, modeling kits (Gundam, Evangelion Neon Genesis, and even a giant submarine), comic books of course, figurines, pre-built models for display, toys, etc… They even had a Samurai Champloo Zippo that I would totally buy if I had the money. Needless to say, the place left some of us in a mutliple geekgasmic state.
We saw a lot of stuff downtown and you can find the photographic evidence at my flickr. I’ve been using flickr for the last couple months and I’m quite fond of its convenience and clean look and feel. I especially like the nifty description and image name editing that are quick and simple (i.e. doing these things on other service providers such as Mediamax is a real chore). For image hosting (like the image you see at the start of this post) I use Imageshack. Queenie told me to use it and I finally got around to it (I never bothered to try it out for no reason before… FTW).
Anyway, flickr and Imageshack honourable mentions aside, destinations of today’s trip all over downtown include the three floors of the Eaton’s Center (the Coast Mountain Sports there had three floors worth of Nalgenes but sadly, not a single one that was pleasing to my eye), up and down Queen Street, Burrito Boyz, the Silver Snail, all down what I think was Neville Street, a closed Bay-Bloor Radio, and Ginger for dinner (a little Vietnamese restaurant beside a strip club). After dinner, we just started strolling along Yonge and walked off all the food we had (burrito was decently sized but dinner wasn’t super heavy). All in all, a fun day.
I don’t know why but I felt very anxious at times (mostly the quieter times on the subway) and it’s a stirring feeling. Fun though. It was funny when I received a 2007 calendar full of, what I think was, Hugo Boss or Calvin Klein (or something to that effect) male models as a gag gift. I didn’t bother taking a picture but I was genuinely relieved when Queenie busted a Shrinky Dink “bones fish” out of her purse. This one was to replace the one I’d made myself (and snapped accidentally months ago) and serve as the actual gift (or bonus… to the very homosecular calendar). Very sweet.

God’s Jackpot

I don’t mean to associate God with gambling or anything but today’s date is exactly all made up of sevens — 07.07.07 — and I think it’s also strangely fitting to have my 490th post on such a day (490 = 7 x 70 of course). Seeing as how seven is supposedly God’s number, I figured today would be a holy jackpot of sorts… I don’t really have anything specific I want to talk about so I suppose I’ll write about my comings and goings of late.
As mentioned before, I decided to write about one Clive Staples Lewis for a pretty big paper. To date, I’ve read all of “The Magician’s Nephew” and approximately thirty-four pages of “The Pilgrim’s Regress” which is a bit of strange book to say the least. It’s not a novel or narrative per se. It is sort of like an allegorical story but on crack where everything is very obviously representative of something else, and dabbling heavily in Christian and Biblical themes. It’s a slower read than “The Magician’s Nephew” — the likes of which I thoroughly enjoyed, mind you.
After reading just the first book of “The Chronicles of Narnia” series, I’ve grown quite fond of Lewis’ writing style and quirky humour. I’m beginning to understand why he’s so admired by so many people. It has something to do, I think, with his almost childlike demeanor in viewing, constructing, and describing his ideas.
Anyway, this coming week is looking packed with LoaH and Summer Retreat practices and I’m quite looking forward to them. IMO the best part about serving in a musical capacity is the practice and fellowship time I get to have with my peers/teammates. I mean, playing and actually leading is exhilarating too, but I don’t really take more joy in that part than one should (since it’s leading and not soaking that I’m supposed to be doing). LoaH songs are sounding pretty good for the most part after our intense practice the other day — Eric (vocals and guitar), Stephen (drums), Adwin (electric guitar), and I (bass) practiced without Melissa Kwan (second vocals) this Thursday morning for three hours. Retreat worship is also looking pretty good so far, but that is to be expected with the competent leadership of mainly Katherine and Gabriel. I think playing my bass in these kinds of settings is pretty much the best part of my summers nowadays. With no job (part-time or otherwise) in sight, I’m going to make playing my summer (pre)occupation for this year pretty much.
My aunt and uncle (Monique and Jock respectively) are over from the states with their young son, Philip. Before you go “Haha, sucker!” because of the addition of an extra young’un (my sister + Philip = 2 little and potentially annoying kids) in my vicinity, I want to sneer at you because with Philip here, my sister is officially sleeping over for the duration of their trip. And with them (my aunt, uncle, and cousin) staying with my grandparents, I am virtually un-childbearing. This means I can do all the things I couldn’t do at home (with my sister around) before, like leave my stuff out without fear of annihilation and play with my more dangerous toys (like my totally hot Zippo and… I don’t have any other violent toys actually). Of course, this liberation comes at the price of having my aunt and uncle randomly coming over to borrow my wireless Internets… That leads to me thinking “GTFO my Internets before I telegib you.” but saying “Hi, welcome! Feel free to use it as you please.”

Let the games begin!

My last exam went down not without a hitch yesterday. What can I say, Math is a beast. It wasn’t difficult for the most part, I just did not know the formula for one of the questions at all which meant I spent a lot of time recreating the formula from scratch. The rest of it was fun. Anyway, English was also pretty smooth but I’m sure Olsheski will find one or two spelling mistakes worth >25% of deduction.

I spent a good two or three (if you include the morning session both the exam) hours playing Tekken yesterday as a sort of preemptive strike on summer, getting the juices flowing early. Of course, I don’t plan on playing games all summer… Here’s my unofficial to-do list of summer 2007:

• start/do/finish insurance classes for driving
• learn to drive from an instructor
• work on my extended essay
• read up on C. S. Lewis’ life (biographies)
• read works by C. S. Lewis (novels, apologetics, etc…)
• get in contact with an English professor at Tyndale who will be speaking about exactly what I’m writing about (sweet!)
• go downtown to Burrito Boyz with some friends from school for a feeding frenzy
• get a lot of practicing done for retreat worship
• get a crackin’ on reading through Romans twenty times**
• watch each and every installment of Lucky Star to come out
• rest and relaxation
• finish off the third season of House and get caught up with Arrested Development
• make some more shirts
• (to be announced once I figure it out/think of it)

** I did 1 Peter until around… seventeen times before I chickened out.

Half-baked

If there’s one thing I like, it’s a good baked potato with chives, cheese, and sour cream. I had four exams to do and did two yesterday. By the time I finished the chemistry exam (after a 2 hour biology exam finished in 40 min flat) I had the makings of a headache. Tomorrow I’ve got to write an English exam. There are two possible outcomes, one of which I doubt will ever be the case:

1. I write an exam, a stellar commentary on a sight piece, and Ms. Olsheski has a brief revelation and realizes all the potential or even just validity of what I’ll say in my analysis and she’ll give me a great mark of 85% and up.
2. I write the commentary and Ms. Olsheski, upon reading what I have to say, will be reminded of all the times she’s circled and underlined random words and phrases (much Ms. Quejada) and continue with her fiendish ways of being petty, stubborn, and tunnel-visioned, landing me a mark no greater than 75%.

As for any marks landing between 75% and 85%, I’m willing bet that she won’t even consider it. If she’s in on of those “Oh I love this but I don’t know what it is” moods, then I suspect success, otherwise, she’ll pick my commentary out of the entire two classes’ worth and dump on it. I’m actually not too worried since it is grade 11 (read: not IB) English and she is a stubborn toad. Usprech went “WTF?!” at my first term English mark (as did I) and I expect to do so again at my final. Does this count as fatalism or just expecting the worst?

Blueprint

…was the name of this year’s edition of the Vic Park yearbook. It was a long year of hard work and to be frank, I’m not sure it payed off. Before I go headlong into a rant about all the things wrong with it, I want to at least give congratulations to Amreet in particular since his sports section was nuts (in the good way). I also want to mention that the cover is pretty neat looking and some other pages (few and far apart) are pretty nice too. Now, let’s get into the heart of things: why does this yearbook suck?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way: not everyone on the committee/team was cut out for the job in the first place. When working on pages that are going to go into a yearbook, graphics and a good sense of design is very very necessary. I’m going to come right out and say that nearly everyone on the yearbook committee this year, honestly, had little to no experience working with Photoshop/digital image manipulation software. This isn’t coming from having to field questions about how to do things (which I did) or from having them admit the fact (which no one did), but from just looking at the kind work put out by some of the members.
Designing a page around the theme of “blue prints” is a little more than tacking on a graph-paper background and throwing text on top (well, at least not for every single page). I did that once, but the idea of the page was to keep things clean and simple (the page was titled “Basic Principles” and it was the principals’ page). This also happened to be the page I had to rush because the head editor “forgot” n times over the course of 6 months (while being reminded by me quite often) to get the photos and write ups I needed, not to mention losing the write ups once after finally getting them.
Lesson #1: Only take people onto the yearbook committee who actually have Photoshop experience. The reason those people (mostly Indian girls, not that that has anything to do with anything) even got on the committee was because they all happened to be Sheliza’s friends. Therefore, the blame falls mostly/completely on Sheliza for this one.
Next we’ve got the fact that many simple things went completely catastrophically wrong for no good reason apart from negligence on the part of people doing administrative work. The way we do things is as follows: first, pages are mocked up and then created as semi-roughs which are sent for “proofing” to the plant which sends us back what the page would look like in the book so that we can make corrections and send back the good copy with changes and extra info (such as spot colour hue and positioning). For one thing, I had pages with spot colouring that I didn’t even want to be coloured (thus effectively wasting the colouring we payed for) since it’d look better without it.
Whoever was on admin decided for me that these pages would receive spot colour treatment anyway. To make matters worse, the tones of blue chosen for my pages were completely off. For example, let’s take an example of graph-paper blue vs. a dark but not quite navy blue. Those two are both blues but the latter makes black text placed on top completely illegible and reading painful to do. To make things even worse, the positioning/shape of the colour (which is printed separate of the first B&W printing) was totally off/not quite enough, leaving blank white bits all over the place. Ugly.
Another thing that admin screwed up on was the submitting of corrected pages. After getting the proofs back, we make corrections and then send the plant finalized versions. I remember correcting and resubmitting a candids page (basically a page with loads of photos) to be resent to the plant. Well thanks to the awesome admin people we’ve got (who are still remaining nameless until I finish ranting about this) the plant never got the updated/fixed page because of, well, nothing. I’m guessing the person doing the collection and distribution of corrections just… never got around to it and sent out “corrected pages” (the same pages we got back with all the mistakes) without actually repackaging the final pages. Way to stay on task.
Lesson #2: Make sure your administration staff/person is reliable and knows what they are doing. I do believe this year’s admin person was mainly… oh that’s right, Sheliza again, the head editor. Thanks for screwing with my pages Shez, you’re the best.
One thing that was told to me and everyone else on the team by both Ms. Leung (the staff supervisor) and Sheliza our head editor was to make sure not to put loads of photos of ourselves in our own sections since that is generally frowned upon. I actually got told off for putting three photos from the yearbook camp/retreat of not only myself but other members too on my candids page (which had at LEAST 100+ small thumbnail sized photos). Then lo and behold, we find about a zillion pictures of certain people on yearbook in the final section of the book (which is devoted to messages from the yearbook executives). That wouldn’t be a problem since those pages ARE to recognize the committee members, but when 99% of the photos include either only the head editor (who is responsible for the section) or photos of the head editor and her friends, then we’ve got a huge problem. Can you spell hypocrite?
The messages themselves were all written up and handed in, but some people were given much more page space than others for no reason. Sheliza had tons, but she’s the head editor so she’s supposed to have lots of stuff to say. Mona, on the other hand, was just another editor but also had an ass-load of space to write up, whereas other people–who, in my opinion, did much more work–had to settle with very little. Simply astonishing.
I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with hypocrisy (since we are all tempted into doing it from time to time) if the rest of the messages from the committee were at least typed up properly. Scanning through the messages written, I found a few people’s messages (including mine) were completely screwed up. This screwage includes double typing some sentences as if the copy+paste went completely berserk or something, irregular text formatting (e.g. making some letters within a word black instead of white when failing to highlight the entire paragraph for formatting), and even cutting messages short, in mid-sentence! It’s almost as if… hm… the pages were done in the final minutes before the due date. Great work ethic, whoever was responsible.
Lesson #3: What can I say? Teams can only work as well as the heads. And when leaders are petty, sloppy, incompetent slackers who play favourites, well, you can guess at the kind of final product you’d get from it all. This year’s head editor was… Surprise! Sheliza! Let’s have a round of applause!
So all in all, I’m pretty angry about how this yearbook turned out (especially at how some of my pages look). The spot colouring was off completely–in my defense, I mentioned not having it on those pages because they’d look better than way but Sheliza ended up doing it anyway because “we paid for it” and what kind of reasoning is that by the way? The corrections I made weren’t even submitted. My message at the end of the book was one of the ones that were completely raped, hands down on the ground. This whole year’s worth of working under Sheliza has been by and large a huge hassle. At this point I’m pretty much miles past the line of diplomacy and I’m just bashing her but really, find one argument I’ve made that wasn’t valid. I’m sure I haven’t nailed everything in this one post but I doubt we need anymore to work with. This rant is ending here and I hope I never have to do this kind of thing again.
Final Lesson: Get rid of Sheliza. Really, just, do it. Get her gone. That is all.

NOTE: I’ll post some photo evidence/examples after Mediamax gets back online from maintenance.

EDIT: Here are the pics of what I’ve been ranting on about.
The Good:

• Alexander’s Cover
• Amreet’s Sports Collage
• Amreet’s Sports Pages
• Mustafa’s Division Pages

The Bad:

• the numerous “ZOMG HAND IN SOMETHING!” Filler Pages
• the botched Yearbook Committee Messages

The Raped:

• Candids Page
• Grade Nine Day (1, 2)
• Principals’ Page

I think that about sums it up. I’ve only got one or two pages that I am proud of in the entire yearbook, and one of those is the World Events Spread (click here for my original digital render). I’m pretty sure the only reason that one turned out the way it was supposed to was because I didn’t leave any part of it to anyone else to take care of. Sorry, but that’s how I’m saying it.

Final Exam Season 2007

Next Monday will mark the beginning of exam week at VPCI and as I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve come down with something like an auto-immune problem. Nevertheless, here’s the run down:

• Monday – Exam Review Day = massive skippage
• Tuesday – Biology (2 h) at 9 am and Chemistry (1.5 h) at 1 pm
• Wednesday – No exam! Break day for sleep and some review I guess.
• Thursday – English (2 h) at 1 pm
• Friday – It’s the big one, Math (2 h) at 1 pm

So that’s what I’ve got lined up for the coming week. Tomorrow night I’ll be heading to Hosanna to have a night’s worth of guys’ sports without girls around (win win!). I’m actually quite glad we’re having a guys’ night since we never get to actually compete for real with girls around… (this opinion of mine is also why I could never play mixed for badminton).
We were reviewing old tests in Biology today and I was quite surprised to find my results weren’t half as bad as I’d thought (I’ve a terrible way of being relatively under-prepared for this class). Obviously, the marks weren’t amazing but really, I’d say I did quite well. I could’ve done better but sometimes I don’t really think it’s worth the extra effort.
While walking through Fairview Mall today with my good friend Shivon, I came up with a pretty neat idea. I’m not going to say what it is since I wouldn’t want to give away this kind of thing but I am pretty fortunate to have friends like Shivon (and Kishon, even though he’ll likely never read this) around to keep me company. I mean, they may not be the most tactful or comforting friends at times, but they sure are honest. Seeing as how I’ve shared maybe only 2 classes with Shivon in my entire high school career, I’m pretty surprised that he and I are good friends to this day (I tend to not keep friends with whom I don’t have things in common very well). I guess it’s all thanks to Frisbee and ranting about school stuff.
Speaking of Frisbee, I’ve joined the TUC and the Junior’s league in that club. Today was the second skills and training session of two but the first session I attended since I missed last week’s. League games start next week and we get our stuff (rulebook and more importantly, one of their 1337 standard size and weight Frisbees) next week too. Today’s scrimmage was pretty good and I think I played pretty well (not to mention the fact that my larynx burns when I breathe). See what I did there? I named the part that was on fire with Biology knowledge. These exams are going to be interesting. I just hope I get better sooner before later.

NOTE: Click title for Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” covered by Kanye West. This one was brought to my attention, rather appropriately, by Shivon so yeah, have fun.

Life’s Edge

Is the tentative title for the culminating movie project of my group (tentatively named Pointy Hat Grp./Ltd./Wtf.). It’s a story that revolves around two brothers, one older and essentially the generic blessed and admired older sibling and the other one who is younger and conventionally jealous of the older brother’s success and good reputation.
One summer day, after some harmless sparring in the park (both brother conveniently happen to be martial artists, go figure), the older brother (played by Darren Guo, superstar in queue) suggests that they go for food together. The younger brother (Henry Leung, my doubles partner) brings them to a restaurant he heard about from a friend nearby.
Upon exiting the shady cafe, the two brothers happen upon two mobsters (played by my good friends Kishon M. and Jonathan L.)headed the opposite direction. Some short bursts of dialog follow ending in the older brother fending off the two mobsters and a third one in hiding (played by Alex K.) with a sledgehammer while the younger brother makes a run for it. He is soon gunned down just as the older brother is beaten unconscious.
From here, it only gets better, but you’ll have to wait until the final product is out (via Alex K.’s editing). To say the least, there’s a lot of revenge and sword busting-out-ing.
I received a (pardon my French) fucking cool gift today from a school friend as a way early birthday present. Amy happened to be at Anime North, an anime convention of epic proportions I’m told, and I had originally asked our friend, Queenie, to pick up something in my stead for ~$20. Neither found anything totally awesome on the first day (past Saturday) of AN. On Sunday, however, Amy had to make a judgment call. Either get for me a bookmark with Fuu (from “Samurai Champloo”) on it, a huge pin-up poster of Haruhi (from “the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”), or a mystery gift. The bookmark, she said, was too girly, even for my tastes. And she feared what I might do to the life-sized Haruhi poster, so she ended up buying a wooden sword for me because it was expected that I’d appreciate something so (pardon my French again) fucking cool. She was totally right.
Here are the pics (click for a larger view):

The sword has some pretty sweet detailing etched into it’s smooth black finish (it’s wooden, remember?). Click here for a video groping of it.

Note: If you’re wondering why, the sword came originally wrapped in gift wrap paper and then plastic cling wrap under to prevent scratching. I didn’t wrap it in a huge latex–nevermind.

French SL Papers 1 and 2

It’s been almost twelve hours since I finished my last IB exam paper for this year and I’m still pretty exuberant about it all.

Paper 1
Section A

• There were a whole slew of short readings. The first one was about Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Quebec and their various populations of francophones. The second had to do with some crackpot lady’s trip to the capital of Niger. The third one had to do with a woman who crossed the ocean in a single-person boat–how did she go to bathroom (not a perv-question btw)? And the last had to do with plastic bags and their effects on the appearance of the countryside, wildlife, and future waste management problems.
• There were also corresponding short answer type questions, including matching the correct endings to beginnings of sentences, matching the right synonym to vocab words taken from the text, and true/false + justification from the text type questions. Those were mostly easy and I’m sure I killed them all (with the exception of one tricky vocab word that I couldn’t place until after I handed the paper in). “There’s only one real answer and you can find it in there.”

Section B

• A short writing task of at least 100 words where one had to write an article or argumentative essay that would go into the school newspaper citing the problems associated with using plastic bags for many daily purposes (NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES IN CONSUMPTION!).
• I remembered reading over the format/structure (worth a third of the mark for writing assignments for IB) of “les discours” in particular (I just had a gut feeling it’d be handy) and so I was well versed in how to write in this style. You’re supposed to use exaggeration (OMG t3h b49s 4r3 4tt4ck1n9!), emotion (think of the dolphins and turtles!), and humour (plastic bags are like people with disgusting perfumes, they’re grossness lingers even after they’re gone) to prove/argue my points. So I did. I even came up with the title “L’attaque des sacs!” for my “discours” and I’m actually pretty proud of coming up with that on the spot (and in French, no less).
• I also used (and slightly abused) idiomatic expressions which score big style points with IB. I’m such a nerd.

Paper 2
For paper 2 we were to choose one task from the 4 (or so) given and carry it out writing at least 250 words and using the writing style appropriate to the task (eg: essay, official letter, informal letter, guide, report, journal entry, etc…). Obviously each type of writing has its own quirks, pros, and cons. I took on the first task.
Question 1
Write a page of your personal journal describing your decision to move in with three of your friends and the difficulties of living together.

• I wrote down on my scrap piece of paper all the things I could remember about each of the different styles needed in the tasks mentioned, and I just ended up knowing more (than nothing!) about journal entries than the rest of the formats. I also didn’t feel like writing another essay.
• So I started out by drafting my introduction on scrap (I had 1 hour and 30 minutes to write >250 words so I took my time), mentioning how much I regretted my decision to move in with the three friends.
• In my first body paragraph I talked about Joe. Joe is my imaginary friend from grade school and he’s a big social butterfly. He also likes to bring home strangers and leave them all over the place without warning, so I wrote about how nervous it made me to come home to a random “inconnu” in my room. Perhaps an agreeable stranger (there’s only one way to find out!), but a stranger nonetheless.
• Then I talked about Tina, the studious Chinese (implied, not directly mentioned) immigrant who is a complete slacker at home. I complained about how she did all her work from school but never bothered to clean stuff. Frustrating!
• Last was Gordo. With a name like that, you can’t be surprised that he’s the one who eats all the food. I whined about him eating the food I put in the “frigo” (I hope they like slang in journal entries). “DAMNIT GORDO!” I actually ended this paragraph off with the sentence “ZUT!” which, FYI, means “DAMN!” and not “F*CK!”
• In my conclusion I pined on and on about how I’ve got to be more understanding of people (not entirely untrue for my real life friends/acquaintances) and less impatient. I also mentioned, in a rather emo fashion, that no one would like to be my friend otherwise…

And that was my IB French SL exam! Done within a total of almost 4 hours (7:30 – ~11:30 am). I’m really glad I went to Shivon’s place yesterday to review. I also really don’t think I would’ve done as well if his father, during the ride they gave me back home, hadn’t challenged me by telling me to think of “someone with average intelligence” as my model to follow. He’s a wise guy. “Expect the unexpected. You never know what will happen the next day. No one knows who will die tomorrow.” And so I went home and frantically reviewed (but not too frantically) and rested up. Now I’m dead tired and totally satisfied with my performance in the past few days.

Note: You might be wondering why I chose to remember these details from my exams and write them up. It’s not because I think most people with find it interesting. It’s my way of being done with the anxiety of these exams for good and recording them for future reference/nostalgia. IB exams come once in a lifetime. Savour the nerdiness.

Economics SL Paper 2

Today I wrote the second (final!) paper of my Economics exam and I must say, I’m feeling pretty good about it. It’s easy to feel good about doing decent but not exceptional after writing a paper like yesterday’s. I answered 3 of the 5 possible questions (don’t worry, you’re supposed to do that) and I think I related all three to development economics in one way or another.
Before the exam I said to Shivon, “I’m heading straight for the market failure and development questions.”

• Question 2 dealt with malaria treatments serving as merit goods (market failure) and African governments encouraged to purchase large scale orders of the treatments (development).
• Question 4 had to do with less developed countries (LDC) selling sugar on international markets (international trade) and inability of LDC firms to compete with subsidized exporters from more developed countries (development).
• Question 5 discussed the effectiveness of the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for improving the standard of life and economic growth in LDCs (development).

So I kept my promise. Three times over. I actually didn’t expect that many development geared questions (since there are usually only one or two per year that relate to each section) but some overlap allowed me to have my way (fun!) with the question. As soon as Uganda was mentioned, I knew I could drag in development economics. It’s almost sick how I profited from their suffering… Well, not really.
After the exam we had some two-on-two action in the field with four of us guys (we played frisbee). Then Shivon and I headed for SUBWAY for some quick eats (I didn’t have any cash on me but Shivon spotted me with his debit card) before returning to school to meet up with Kishon who just finished writing his academic economics exam. Apparently, it was a joke.
With a French exam tomorrow (both papers with 30 minutes break in between) I decided to hit up Shivon’s house for some review. We basically spent 3 hours writing practice/previous exams. The ones from 2003 and before are insane. I averaged 80% or so on all of them but then again, they were, in Shivon’s words, “F*ckin’ hard.” So if I can score decently on those (and before bell curve too) then I shouldn’t do too poorly on tomorrow’s since they’ve gotten progressively easier over the years. Confidence will either save me or screw me now.