Victory Yoghurt

The dissertation. It’s done. It’s in. For better or for worse, it is over.

So how was it?

Well now, that’s a very broad question. Firstly, I should address what my dissertation even was. I’m a Creative Writing student, so my dissertation was essentially to take everything that I’d learned and write an 8,000 word piece of fiction to hand in, alongside a 2,000 word critical commentary. At the beginning of the course, this sounded very appetizing. “We can write whatever we want!” I probably exclaimed. “Piece of cake!”

And unless I was talking about a cake made out of obsidian, then I was wrong.Whilst the prospect of writing 8,000 fictional words may sound promising when you have dozens of half-baked ideas swirling around your head, the time of actually choosing what story to write for your magnum opus becomes a little trickier. Suddenly all of those ideas are awful or previously used, and you’re left stranded in the dark with nothing but a vague “Write a good story!” to go off of.

I ended up writing a thriller piece named Rerouted, which I shan’t discuss too much here. Let’s just say that the narrative was experimental and focused on perspective, which is a key interest of mine. As a story in itself, I think it turned out alright. I’d happily return to it and tweak it a bit and include it in a collection of short stories someday. But a magnum opus it was not. In my opinion, it failed to delve as deeply into the fascinating possibility of perspective as it could, and the entire time I was writing the thing I had doubts about the actual message that the narrative would deliver by the end. It was not the intended conglomeration of writing skills and abilities I’d picked up over the previous semesters. It is merely, at best, a decent story with an interesting narrative perspective.

The critical commentary was worse though. For those of you who don’t know, a critical commentary is a creative writer’s chance to write academically about their own work, to prove that it reflects what they’ve learned in the module and that their fictional imaginings have merit as coursework by showing how it’s been influenced by the works they’ve studied. Of course, with the dissertation there were no set texts, merely a vague pointing towards the potential topics from previous modules. With this in mind, I focused on a text we’d studied last semester which had inspired my narrative style, and essentially tunnel-visioned it. By the end of my critical commentary I’d put almost no critical theory into the thing and had left little room in my argument for it, and by this point the deadline was fast approaching.

As a famous, lovable yellow bear once said, “Oh bother.”

So all of this has led to me frantically polishing and re-writing sections of my critical commentary, before handing in what will inevitably fall short of the grade I’ll desperately need if I’m to achieve a 2:1 in my university course overall. This did, you might imagine, leave me in a bit of an emotional slump, until I made a totally lighthearted Facebook post essentially daring anyone to be disappointed in me and was instead met with widespread support. Not only that, but we were gifted with frozen yoghurt upon handing in our dissertations. Frozen yoghurt! Who can stay upset when your university gives you frozen yoghurt? I might be dwelling a little too long on the frozen yoghurt. Let’s move on.

So why bother to make a public blog post to tell everyone about my marvelous underachievement? Well, personally, I believe that an honest assessment of one’s shortcomings is a healthy way to deal with such shortcomings. But if you want complete honesty, well, this dissertation has been practically my life for the past few weeks and so I have essentially nothing else to write about. In fact, I have more deadlines coming up! So that’s fine. I’d better run and start making with the fiction.

I wonder if they’ll have more frozen yoghurt on results day.

Actually, I’d better not think about results day.

Erm… Woopsie Daisies!

Hello there! Apologies if you came here looking for a blog post yesterday. For an idea on how steeped in university work I am right now, I went to write a blog post yesterday about how I couldn’t afford the brainpower to write a blog post, realised it was 9am, decided to leave it until later when people would be awake and then plain forgot amidst everything else.

I’m unsure as to whether I’ll have a blog post for you next week, as I have more deadlines then.

Sorry for the hiatus!

Lying by Omittance

So to catch you up with British politics if you’re not already aware, our Prime Minister David Cameron is currently under scrutiny for evading tax. One reason why this is a big deal is because if he is indeed dodging tax, he’ll be a hypocrite and a liar, and his promises will now more than ever be revealed as false and the legitimacy of his attitude towards many issues called in to question. Nobody wants a liar for a leader. (And I certainly didn’t vote for him!)

Now, as one can quite imagine, this has riled up public dissatisfaction with our great leader, and there was therefore a rather large protest in front of Downing Street last week, calling for David Cameron’s resignation (or, as some of the more ambitious folk went for, a full on public revolution). #ResignCameron started trending on social media websites sometime before, and continued for some time after, and the crowd that came together in front of Downing Street was rather sizable… sizable enough to make it onto a supposedly unbiased, public-serving news program such as the BBC News, for instance.

It did not.

On BBC News and many of the papers the next day, there was not a single mention of the protest which had gathered outside Downing Street in an attempt to change the leadership of the country – as is our right as a democracy. Calls for a snap election were silenced through the BBC and other news outlets’ deafening ignorance to these events, muting megaphones and bleaching placards blank. 2,000 – 5,000 people were estimated to have gathered, a figure which is apparently not newsworthy.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the BBC may have gotten away with this. However, due to the rise in social media and camera-phones being readily available, demonstrations such as the protest for Cameron’s resignation no longer rely on the medium of television to be shared, and can instead find its home on social media. What perplexes me is that there is still some journalism which hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that by failing to report such things, public outcry will later follow, painting their own news stations and papers in grim light and reinforcing the idea that the public is controlled through a silent censorship of what makes it into the news which they digest, and take for fact. If journalists do not report on such events, then the people will, and the people are all the more likely to bias things, leave facts out and tarnish the reputation of news resources.

But then, news resources often tarnish themselves. Whilst doing some research for this blog post, I used The Independent’s article as a resource to find out how many people were estimated to have gathered in protest on Saturday. For further frames of reference, I turned to other news sites, and only then discovered through The Mirror’s article that what I had previously understood to be a peaceful protest had apparently descended into violence. I’m no fool; I know that each paper has an ulterior motive, and whilst one will focus on the ignored activism, the other will focus on alleged barbarism.

I’ve said it before on this blog, and I’ll say it again. No matter what ‘wing’ you swing for, if you skew the facts with your bias, you are misrepresenting true events. Journalism should, in my opinion, be an objective tool which is used to present unbiased facts to the public, who can then make their own informed opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. You may argue that it is impossible not to use a certain level of bias, and perhaps that’s true… but for The Independent to completely omit the fact that some level of violence took place within the protest is almost akin to a lie.

(Quick addition: I do not endorse any particular newspaper in this blog post.)

And let’s not forget where this blog post all started – with BBC News completely omitting the notion of any public unrest taking place on Saturday. The only reason I can think of for them to do this would be so as not to encourage more people to go and join the protest whilst it was still underway, lest it become an unwieldy mob. But it’s been days since this event took place, and there’s still no word from the BBC about it. It’s frighteningly reminiscent of the history lessons in which I learned about how censorship was enforced in societies of old, as a tool to keep the lower class in check.

Democracy is, in theory, supposed to be a solution to give the people a say in the way their lives are allowed to be lived. But as long as we are being manipulated by news resources with an ulterior motive, we cannot look through the manipulation of our government, cannot make an informed decision on the next, and therefore cannot prosper as a society.

A Totally Legitimate Post

Here is today’s pog post:

What’s that? I must have misheard? Well, drat. All I had lined up for this week was an excellent analysis on pogs, but unfortunately that clearly isn’t going to suffice. Well, I wouldn’t want to subject you all to some half-baked last minute piece of second-rate rubbish, so let’s all agree to meet here again next week!