[Darkness' Scrapbook] I will find a better name for this

[Darkness]

Okay, scrapbook, here I go. I think I'm going to make this my random thread to throw things at. Chances are it won't end up being actually readable - it's somewhere in my plans over there, but my plans tend to get derailed.

So before you get to reading it, the warning(s)! This thing I'm writing for myself. Sometimes my wording will be weird, sometimes I'll say things nobody agrees with, and I'm sure at some point I'll stop making sense altogether.

With that out of the way, I guess I should give some information about myself. In no particular order:

I'm a male in my early twenties.
I'm not a native English speaker.
I'm better at writing in English than my native language.
I'm doing two majors, and I deeply regret it.
I should be studying right now, and I'm not. This has been a constant throughout my life.
I am bad at people. I'm better at machines.
I don't consider myself a writer. I do enjoy writing and I love RPing, don't get me wrong, but it's just not a word I'd use to describe myself.
I am, however, a gamer. I play everything, from breeding unicorns to competitive PVP games.
I've been a D&D DM for the last four years. In this time I never played a PC myself.
Ain't no rest for the wicked, so I'm really prone to waking up at absurd hours in the night.
I hate those times when I can read the forum but not post on it.

More to come later. This place is a WIP, probably will be for a while because I'm still trying to figure out how templates work. Also I just discovered I have no idea how to make those circle thingies people use for items on a list. The button up there lies, it doesn't make them, and that makes me sad.

Anyways. Later.

[Darkness]

Funny how this goes. I've been swamped with work lately, clearing the stuff that's been piling up while I recovered the "normal life" pace and health stopped being the most pressing issue.

In two days' time I have this huge dreadful exam. I will put forward that I'm absolutely terrified about it because I'm going into it with a rather large handicap (having had no classes whatsoever on the subject), maybe that helps understand my reaction.

If I didn't have time yesterday to write anything, I definitely don't now. As of this moment I am writing this with a beautiful book called "Fundamentals of Electromagnetism" on my lap, open by the page I should be studying. Which, as you can imagine, I am not studying.

Earlier today I wrote a post. Now I'm doing this, and I've already got ideas for things that I normally wouldn't play but that sound like the most fun ever right now. I get the feeling there's a part of me that wants really, really bad to hide under a rock and wait for the exam to pass.

So I guess this is more me writing to get steam off than to actually do something. Maybe I can guilt-trip myself, it works wonderfully when other people do it.

Anyhow, I'm ranting with little purpose and less coherence. Later.

[Phoenix]

I just went through this myself. I have been studying for an exam I took today since Friday and last night all I wanted to do was post and write and read and watch tv and sit in the shower or do anything that didn't have to do with what was stressing me out. Though I have to be honest, I never read so much or so quickly as when I'm stressed about something or faced with a deadline. Procrastination does wonders for productivity, however ironic that is. You're not alone because as I was reading this I was nodding my head along, completely agreeing. I think what you should do is take it one step at a time. Give yourself easy goals that aren't as frightening. Step one: Read the chapter(s). Step two: Go back and re-read them, taking notes on the more difficult things or the things you know you'll need to remember later. I could come up with more steps but I think you get where I am going Also, if you give yourself breaks I find it easier to focus for longer periods of time. If I start studying at noon and know I will stop to eat or whatever at 3, it's much easier to spend those hours studying and not get distracted.

[Darkness]

So as just about anyone who might want to read this would know by now, I had to take a not-so-short break from Mizahar (and a lot of other things) due to life being extremely unreasonable.

Usually, that's a problem for me. It's a problem because I tend to see things as being way bigger than they really are. My (fortunately unrealistic) expectations were that some people would not want to RP with me after that kind of precedent, and I honestly wouldn't have blamed them, so I decided I'd ask the people I owed posts to if they wanted to continue the thread or just close it. I'm pretty sure that by the time I asked the last one I didn't sound as involved as with the first one, so maybe that wasn't the brightest thing to do in retrospect.

In any case, when the replies arrived, I was very surprised, and very pleasantly so. Each and every one of the people I asked made no big deal of my absence, and told me to continue posting.

So I'm making this post now, to say thank you to all of you for being awesome. It really made my day.

Anyhow. I'm getting soppy, and I can't let that happen. Later.

Edit: Oh, and thanks for your advice, Phoenix. I have another exam relatively soon (tomorrow - this scrapbook is probably cursed with awful post timings), and I'm using it right now. My friends are not exactly helping me keep the rest-work schedule, but it's definitely better than the rest-procrastinate one that I had before.

[Darkness]

Delays, delays everywhere! I'm taking a bit longer to reply than I'd like right now, as some of you might've noticed.

The reason for this is that one of my teachers has decided to make me do a customizable code for communications (I could go full techni-derp here, but what's the point), in the programming language that least fits it as far as I know. So my language only understands numbers, and I have to work with full sentences, for instance - this makes for an extremely amusing experience, as you can imagine.

I've spent the last week basically fighting with my computer, trying to convince it that I know what I'm doing and my code makes sense. Today, at 3:30 AM, I finally managed to do so. Tomorrow (or later today), I hand it in. And tomorrow afternoon (or even later today) I'm going to get writing.