Vivat Libertas

Distinguished readers, I have a confession to make: I write fanfiction. Now, I know what you might be thinking. If you're active within fanfiction communities, you might think "oh, cool". If you're not, you might think that I lack social skills, have poor hygiene and spend my time pairing up fictional characters with my impossibly perfect original characters. I'm not going to get into shipping wars, because I think they're the one of the nastiest parts of any fandom. Nor am I going to try to prove to everyone that I'm a normal person, because while I do hold to socially acceptable standards of hygiene and conversational ability, I've made my fair share of terrible, overpowered characters. I might write about how this isn't necessarily a bad thing at some point, but this is not the post for that. Rather, I want to talk about fluff - light, happy fanfiction with characters acting adorably together. I think that in some fandoms, fluff is overloo...

So, more rambling from me. I don't know why this is happening. A transformation has taken place in me - very slowly, to be sure, but it has taken place and it is terrifying . Yesterday I was volunteering at Z-arts in Hulme and spent a few hours being mobbed by tiny, adorable children who love robots. It was fun. I really enjoyed it. But it was...a bit weird, I guess? You see, I was a sciencey kid and my parents always used to take me to work on big arty or sciencey projects. Guess what I was doing? Yep, helping to run artsy, sciencey projects where we programmed a robot's light sensor and tested it out on patterns we drew ourselves. (I came up with the idea in 5 minutes after not being able to carry a mat bigger than I am and transport a trolley loaded with relatively pricey electrical goodies. It worked much better than expected.) It just feels a bit strange to me, because I still have very clear memories and feelings of being a child wondering at how awesome the univ...

I'm not very good at this reality business, me. When I was a little girl, I wanted to become a scientist. I used to daydream about being a proper grown-up student learning science. Then, of course, I grew up to be an angsty and annoying adolescent, but "being dead" and "science" were my two main goals. And then my brain decided to fuck out on me big time during my last two years of school, during which my grades plummeted, I actually had to work to do even moderately well compared to GCSEs, and I was rejected from my dream university. Yeah, sixth form sucked. Actually, I was rejected from four out of the five universities I applied to. Let me tell you, this does absolutely nothing for your confidence or self-esteem. I spent most of sixth form crying and feeling like a failure - clearly, I did not use my hard-won independence well at all. Only Manchester gave me an offer and it was 2 A*s and an A. Reader, I missed my offer. I worked so hard I fell ill for...

I should totally become a theoretical physicist. A cascade of things has happened at exactly the wrong time: my lab partner has been sick, I have a zillion deadlines, my copy of MATLAB doesn't work as revenge for me pirating it, scilab is being wholly uncooperative, and best of all, I don't understand second year lab! Truly, I am a genius! Anyway, I was happily sitting around playing with radioactive material (as you do) when the head of second year lab came up to us. We'd forgotten to arrange an interview, since they're not automatically assigned, and unless we did it today we'd be slapped with a huge penalty for lateness. You know, today. When I hadn't finished any of my analysis because I couldn't work scilab properly. Shit . My lab partner had to calm me down and help me do data analysis, since I was on the verge of an anxiety attack. Perfectly normal thing that happens on a Friday afternoon, you know. (And we still entered the errors wrong. F...