On Saturday, a group of eight of us from Manchester FoE went to Go Ape, which appropriately involves swinging through trees on an assault course of varying degrees of difficulty. I really enjoyed it, and everyone else seemed to have a good time too, although we did get absolutely drenched towards the end when the heavens opened just as we were lining up for the last zip wire. Sam has lots of amusing photos and videos on her phone which will hopefully be uploaded at some point, including one of me swinging from a platform down onto a rope net with Holly singing the Spiderman TV series theme tune (you can see a video of someone else doing the same on YouTube, though I jumped rather than just dropping down in a boring fashion, and I actually managed to grab the net instead of flailing backwards). I also got asked if I had been before and/or was ‘in the Territorial Army or something’ – I’m not entirely sure what to think of that! 🙂
Dissertation
I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel—either that or it’s a train heading towards me, I won’t know which until I get the marks back. I only need to get 50% in order to pass both the dissertation and the MA overall, and because of the grossly unfair way in which the marking system works I can’t get anything better than a pass overall, even if I get a high mark on the dissertation. I’m a bit worried about whether I’ve hit a high enough level to pass though, I feel my dissertation is better than my essays, for which I got 66% apiece, but the topic—representation of ancient warfare in modern video games—isn’t as classically academic as my other pieces of work, although both my programme director and my supervisor said it was an acceptable subject to tackle. I think I’m mostly worried because everything depends on this, and I don’t think I’d be able to face a lot of people if I failed.
Whilst on the subject of academia, I still don’t know what is happening with my application to do a PhD in computer science. The department asked for some more paperwork from me a couple of weeks ago, which I gave them pretty much immediately, but I haven’t heard anything since. Apparently they still haven’t allocated funding for September yet, so anything could happen, and I probably won’t know one way or the other until the end of August.