#also we’re doing our first science exam and the people doing double are going to be insufferable

[ineffablehunter]

When I tell you tomorrow is going to be the best day of my life (!)

[redhoodieone]

I’ve Got You

A/N: This is a special one shot to a good friend on here @thatartkid101! I hope you love this, and I hope everything works out. You’re beautiful, strong, and don’t let anyone put you down! You’re amazing! 

Warnings: Language 

Words were never important to me before. I’ve never really given them much thought, but I suppose it’s because we speak every day in our lives. Whether we speak loudly, softly, to ourselves, or just reading and thinking. Words are often used a lot, which could make the words lose or overuse their meanings.

Such as “I love you” or “I’m sorry.”

I can’t even remember the last time I meant any of those words. It almost becomes a common habit; just saying it because you know it’s right, not because you actually mean it.

Which could explain why people around me always double check with what I say.

I guess I’ve never sound so confident and sure when I speak.

Bruce had invited me along with him, the Batboys, and Alfred out to dinner at one of his restaurants in Gotham. I, of course, accepted even though I always feel weird and uncomfortable going out with them since they’re practically handsome and popular celebrities, while I’m just an average girl.

I met the Batfamily one horrifying night about two years ago. I was nineteen years old and going through an awful time with my high school boyfriend, Rob. I was with Rob throughout high school, and after we graduated, we kept dating while I was attending G.C.U as he worked with his father and uncles at his father’s auto garage.

Our relationship had been good up until a point where Rob wanted me to quit school and become a “stay-at-home-wife-and-mother”. I sometimes wondered if Rob was jealous of the fact that I had a separate life during the daytime, while the two of us only have the evenings and nights. I even came out of my shell (I’ve been told I’ve been a hermit crab for most of my life), and even made new friends; particularly Tim Drake.

We had some of the same classes, except for math and science classes because Tim’s practically a genius. So, the only classes we shared were English, history, and even computer classes. In a way, Tim became my friend after tutoring me for tests while I became a friendly face when he needed someone to joke and talk to during study hours.

Our friendship blossomed within the seven months we met. I even met his father, Bruce Wayne, his trustworthy, sassy butler Alfred Pennyworth, and his brothers Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Damian Wayne. While all of them welcomed me into their home and accepted me as a friend of Tim’s, I realized I was suddenly struck by lightning to one of his brothers.

Jason Todd.

Jason fucking Todd.

I didn’t know what initially drew me to him; like a moth to a flame. Jason is obviously handsome, but what most people didn’t know was just how sensitive, insecure, funny, and caring he truly is. Jason has made it perfectly clear on more than one occasion that he loves his family no matter what (even if they piss him off…and I’ve seen that firsthand), he takes crimefighting more seriously now, and he’s matured a lot since fixing his relationship with Bruce.

It’s like Jason had changed for the better, even if I didn’t know him back then.

But of course, Dick insists Jason is still the same in some ways.

Like how Jason is still a tall, muscular teddy bear at heart (his hugs prove it, since I’ve been lucky enough to receive fifteen within three months), how he laughs and snorts when something is very funny, and especially when he flirts with women he adores.

Ah…the flirting.

I knew I had a boyfriend. I was faithful, and I’ve never done anything wrong to give anyone a reason to not trust me.

But Jason flirting with me on a few occasions just showed how much I was attracted to him. The warm, teddy bear hugs, the innocent cuddling on the couch during movie nights, and how he would look deep into my eyes whenever we had serious or light conversations deep into the early mornings.

And the one night we could have kissed.

Jason had offered and drove me back to my apartment late one night. I had a test the next morning, and I was too tired to drive home since Tim had tutored me for our final exam in English. Jason had been a gentleman and walked me to my door, too. The second I unlocked the front door; I turned to face him and thank him for the drive home.

And then our faces inched closer and closer until I could feel his hot breath above me. Jason had smelled like Old Spice deodorant, and a cologne I couldn’t identify. His breath smelled like the whiskey shot he downed with Tim and I when we finished studying. His ocean blue eyes were hypnotizing, and were so full of lust, warmth, and care.

I found myself leaning in more. Our lips were very close, and my heart was pounding in my chest, as if I could die from a heart attack right then and there. My hands had a mind of their own, and I soon found myself gripping his brown leather jacket and pulled him towards me; until I woke up from the lust and magnetic force shield, I was currently trapped in.

The moment I pulled away and let him go, Jason appeared hurt and confused. But he knew why it couldn’t have happened, even if we both wanted it.

Because I tried hard to stay faithful, even if my heart and body were telling me otherwise.

And of course, I had stayed faithful.

Rob didn’t.

Catching Rob in bed with a female receptionist at his dad’s garage was beyond hatred and betrayal. It was evil; pure, ugly, and sickening evil.

I clearly told Rob we were done; broken up and just finished forever. I tried very hard to stay strong, and I left his apartment with hope that I could just leave and cry privately. But that’s too easy, isn’t it?

Rob eventually caught up with me when I managed to walk a good mile away. He was yelling at me and shoving me against the wall and accused me of cheating on him first: with Tim Drake. I tried to explain to him we were just good friends, and that I didn’t cheat on him. I wanted to tell him I wanted to, but it didn’t seem like a good idea. But Rob’s anger was far from over, and he was now shouting in my face and threatened to ruin me for any new guys that would come around me.

Rob’s threat didn’t fall on deaf ears.

Red Hood landed down beside us. Twirling his gun around his fingers, he approached us and looked more intimidating than anything I’ve ever seen before.

“Wow…you’re a real douchebag,” Red Hood said, his voice is full of rage and violence. After the gun stops spinning in his fingers, he holds it up to Rob’s head. “And here I thought I was…but hey, I guess maybe I’ve grown up and learned yelling and threatening pretty ladies is just a fucking asshole thing to do.”

Rob twisted his face around to face Red Hood. He’s clearly pissed off at Red Hood for interrupting our fight.

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, okay Dildo Head?! This bitch is my problem, and I’m not leaving until I teach her some manners!” Rob snaps harshly.

“It’s one thing to call my helmet a “dildo head”, but when you disrespect women…now that’s crossing the fucking line, you dipshit!”

Red Hood beat the shit out of Rob, but that didn’t mean Rob went down easily without a fight. While Red Hood had the strength, stamina, and moves, Rob did manage to knock Red Hood’s helmet off.

And it happened to be the one-time Red Hood forgot to wear his domino mask.

Jason Todd.

Rob was thankfully knocked out and didn’t see Jason’s face, but I did. After Jason got up and fixed himself up, he knew his secret was out.

And then I eventually learned all their secret identities. I even became a part of their social and private lifestyles…including sometimes Batfamily meetings and helping with cases or whatever they needed.

But after all of that, I’m in a better place to where I don’t mind getting back into the “dating game”, but the fear of being rejected and cheated on still plagues me from time to time. It also didn’t help that the media and paparazzi insisted I was dating Tim and Jason on different occasions. The rumors were worse. I was considered a “family whore” and that I was trying to sleep with Bruce, Dick, Jason, and Tim.

Luckily not Damian or Alfred. But Alfred’s too precious for me, anyways.

Bruce, Dick, and Tim never paid much attention to the rumors or paparazzi. While they understood how I felt, they dismissed and corrected the rumors as much as they could. But Jason appeared not to care about the rumors, either. In fact, he loved putting on a show as much as he could.

Jason would hold my hand from leaving the limo and entering the building. He then would hold my waist and walk me back to the limo and made sure to wink and wave at the cameras. Jason had even taken it too far once when he kissed me.

A quick peck on the lips. But it’s still a kiss!  

We never spoke about it or brought it up again. I wonder if Jason even remembers the kiss.

Once we arrive at Bruce’s restaurant, he leads us from the limo and into the restaurant. He smiles and is polite to everyone and expects us to do the same, in which we all do. Dick, Tim, Damian, and Alfred follow Bruce while Jason and I lag behind, because Jason wanted to hold my hand and bring me closer to his body so the cameras can get good shots of us. While I think we’re in the clear from paparazzi and reporters’ questions, one man decided to ask me a personal question.

“Y/N! Is it true you were in a gangbang after high school?!”

I immediately freeze up. It’s like the air was knocked out of me. Every muscle, breath, and cell inside me stopped working.

Jason had stopped alongside me as well. His hand remained on my lower back, while I moved to the man who asked me that question.

“What did you just say?” I repeat, not even aware I’m sounding like I’m losing my mind.

“You didn’t know? Your picture was leaked online. It’s everywhere, babe!” the man declares.

The man then gives me his cell phone. The second my eyes land on the picture, I tense up. There am I, passed out drunk from a party that Rob was throwing after high school. I’m passed out on a bed, wearing short shorts and a pink bikini top. Rob’s friends, Chris, Jake, and Vince are around me, clearly intoxicated like me. Touching me, kissing me, and passing me back and forth between them.

The picture was taken by Rob’s ex-girlfriend Lily, who clearly and obviously wanted Rob back. The picture nearly destroyed our relationship. My parents were even disappointed in me, and scolded me for being so reckless and drunk, but they eventually forgave me. I even told Rob I was drunk, and that his friends were the ones who were taking advantage of me when I was passed out.

Rob didn’t believe it at first, but then we never spoke of the picture again.

But now it looks like Rob wants to ruin any future relationships for me. This picture is the end of me.

The man takes back his cell phone and laughs at me. “At least you learned that pictures never die or disappear from the web, Y/N. Once you fuck up, you’ll be reminded that you fucked up for the rest of your life. Now, can I get a quote?” he asks seriously.

“Fuck you!” I snap.

“Nah, I’m not into gangbangs like you. Maybe you can ask Bruce Wayne and his sons to join you? My God, would you really do that? You must really be a slut!”

Jason steps in front of me and glares down at the shorter man. “Back. The. Fuck. Off.” Jason threatens angrily.

“Damn…you work fast, Y/N? So, what’s next: are you going to fuck the Luthor or Queen family next?!”

I rip my arm from Jason’s grasp, and I run away from the crowd and restaurant. I had to stop after a block to remove my heels, and then I was back to running away.

No matter how far I run. No matter how hard I try to hide my tears. I was broken.

I finally stop running once I realize I made it all the way to the pier. I remember the pier from when Dick showed me where he almost killed his parents’ killer. Walking slowly and barefoot, I make it to the rail where I take a seat and allow my legs to dangle above the water. My arms are holding the rails above me, and for just a second, I wish I could disappear.

If I fall into the dark water, I would be gone quickly, and no one would ever know.

It’ll be as if this pain never happened. It’ll be as if I never caused trouble.

“You’re not going to jump in.”

Jason?

I whip my head around and see Jason approaching me. His black tie is undone, and he removes his jacket. He sits beside me, and carefully places his jacket over my bare shoulders. Jason exhales, and allows his legs to dangle beside mine.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier if I did? I already ruined your family’s reputation. I even ruined my family’s as well,” I remark.

“Reputation? Doll, in case you haven’t noticed, reputations are meant to be ruined,” Jason says, as he chuckles lightly. He glances at me, but I still refuse to look him in the eyes. “Bruce and Alfred are already doing damage control to the media. Since your shitty ex-boyfriend leaked that picture, Timbo and Dick are making sure it’s taken down online and we’re going to sue his ass until he’s poor and dead.”

“What?” I barely whisper and turn to look at him.

“You’re a part of our family whether you like it or not, Y/N. We protect each other, and that means we’re going to protect you, too. And trust me, Bruce and Alfred are very good at clearing up the rumors and paparazzi bullshit. Alfred even said he’s going to talk to your parents, so you have absolutely nothing to worry about, sweetheart. And as for Tim and Dick, your picture will never surface online again.”

I lean my forehead on the rail. “What about Damian?” I ask quietly.

“He’s doing me a favor, but that’s not important right now! I want you to know I believe you, Y/N. You are not what Rob says you are. You’re not a whore. That picture was taken without your consent and those fuckers had no right to do those fucked up, disgusting acts to you while you were drunk. And as for your fucking ex-boyfriend, he’s fucking asshole who should have believed you and beat the shit out of those other fuckers,” Jason growls under his breath, and runs a hand through his dark hair. “If I knew you back then…and knew what happened…I would have killed all of them, sweetheart. I would have shoot off those fuckers’ balls, and then I would have jammed my gun down your boyfriend’s throat, and then up his ass until he pukes up bullets.”

I slowly turn to face Jason, and I soon realize he never took his eyes off me the entire time he’s been talking. “W-why are you saying all of this, Jay?” I whisper.

“Because you deserve to know the truth, and you deserve better. Fuck doll…you’re the strongest babe I know. Y/N, you literally don’t hesitate to speak your mind, you don’t take shit from any of us, and if I remember correctly…you once kicked my ass during that time Dick and I fought over a mission gone wrong. Remember? You took me down with just one punch and kick to the knee?”

“How can I forget? I felt bad right after, and we ended up eating a carton of chocolate ice cream while watching stupid movies on Netflix,” I say softly. “All night long.”

“The best night of my life,” Jason replies, and grins before he scoots over next to me. “This…what happened tonight isn’t going to destroy you, Y/N. Do you want to know what I see happening?”

I force myself to choke back on my tears. “What?” I barely ask.

“You’re going to hug me, and I’m going to tell you you’re stronger than this. You’re going to flip off the fucking paparazzi with me, and we’re going to show them we’re two badasses, who are not going to let the media tell us bullshit, when we know we’re better than all of them. And then, I’m going to take you out to dinner, and then I’m going to spend the entire night convincing you, that you are perfect and how much you mean to me,” Jason says seriously. “Because doll…I’ve got you.”

“Then what?” I ask, wiping a tear from my cheek with a small smile.

“Then I’m going to tell you I love you, and that I want you to give me a chance. I want one chance to show you how fucking crazy I am for you, and that I’m so in love with you that just being near you isn’t enough. I can’t be a friend anymore Y/N, especially when all I want is to kiss you, hold you, and protect you until the day I die. But most importantly, you’re going to tell me that you love me, and want to be with me as well. And after we kiss and seal our love, you’re going to tell me you’re so strong, that no matter what the media, public, and Rob says: you are going to overcome all of this, and you’re never, ever going to let anyone put you down, when you are clearly above and better than all of us.”

Before I can say anything, Jason leans in and kisses me. Our lips together send fireworks throughout my entire body, and I feel as if I’ve fallen into hot lava. I feel my body on fire, and Jason clearly does too, when he reaches to hold my face, as the other holds my waist tightly. As we explore each other’s mouths and bodies (over the clothes), we hear someone honking their vehicle. Jason and I pull away from each other, and then we see it’s the Batmobile.

Jason helps us to our feet, as we check out the Batmobile. The window rolls down and we see Nightwing in the driver’s seat, along with Red Robin beside him. Robin is in the back and shakes his head at us.

“Don’t you know how to answer your cell phone, Todd?” Robin scoffs.

“We were busy at the moment…” Jason says, and leads us to the Batmobile. “Did you do what I asked, Demon Spawn?”

“Affirmative,” Robin says.

“B wants us to drop Y/N back at the manor while we finish what we started,” Nightwing says, with a smile for me.

Jason motions Red Robin to climb into the backseat with Robin. Once the passenger side is clear, he climbs in and pulls me onto his lap as Nightwing revs up the Batmobile. We speed away from the pier, as Nightwing drives us back to the manor.

“Finish what?” I ask curiously.

“Just a…little mission…” Jason answers sheepishly.

“Don’t worry about a thing, Y/N,” Red Robin insists.

“Indeed, you will never go through this again,” Robin speaks up.

“B says not to kill him, so we have to be careful with what we do,” Nightwing clarifies, as I stare at the brothers in confusion.

“What are you guys going to do? Are you…going to kill Rob, and his friends?” I ask.

Nightwing grins at me, as Red Robin and Robin flash their innocent smiles. Jason bursts into a fit of laughter and kisses my cheek. With both strong arms wrapped around me, he leans his face towards mine.

“Oh, we’re not going to kill him or his friends, sweetheart. We’re just going to break their bones!”

[starlit-scifi]

Chapter 1

Next

It’s dangerous, you think.

Not just the whole being on a starship far away from your home planet on the edge of possible interstellar war thing. Not just the huge pile of homework hanging over your head. No, the real dangerous part in all this is that you don’t know how you feel about her, besides this weird tight feeling in your chest when she passes by.

So very, very dangerous.

Her name is Lorina Estevna. Born in a tiny colony on a desolate planet, somehow good enough for the military program here, taking her first required cross-program collaborative class this term, somehow and oh so unluckily paired with you for the rest of your years on this ship.

She has a reputation for being a no-nonsense hard worker, as tough on her underclassmen as she is on herself. Her grades and her PT scores reflect that: she’s at the top, or nearly there, in nearly every respect among your year-mates. But she also has an arguably bigger reputation for breaking hearts: you know she’s been with a lot of your year-mates, and then some. You know it never lasts long; she’s quick to move on for reasons that rumors can only guess at. But you've also heard that it’s never because her partner isn't satisfied, and you can only wonder…

You shake your head to banish the thought, and walk faster to catch up to her.

“Hi!”

“Hello.” It would have sounded like a question mark belonged there if she was a less confident person. Her pale brows make the shape that she has trained so painstakingly out of her voice.

“I was thinking,” you say, struggling to keep up with her pace in the crowded hallway, “Maybe we could meet after—”

Those brows snap together. “Can’t, busy.”

You laugh, a little shocked by her bluntness. “I didn’t even say a time or date,” you point out. She comes to a halt and turns to face you, icy grey eyes regarding you coldly.

“If it’s any time this week, my schedule is packed from waking to sleeping, and then some.”

“Oh. Well—”

“Sorry, I have no time and do not reciprocate your feelings. Have a nice day.” Mechanical, precise, and engineered to drop your heart to your stomach, which it does. She turns neatly and strides away as you’re left reeling from the impact. But then you realize exactly what she said, and run back to her.

“I really, really think you misunderstood my intentions,” you say hurriedly, and there’s more than a little annoyance in her expression now. You try your best to smile. “I’m your partner? I was assigned to you? For Colab?”

Those eyes light up and oh your heart is pounding

“Ah! Sorry. I didn't mean to make such a bad first impression. That ball that’s coming up? It seems like every suppie in our year is trying to get me to go with them. We really should discuss Colab though. Are you okay if we sort things out right now? This is pretty much the only time I’m free today.” You nod quickly and she gestures towards the empty bench you’re standing by. You sit as gracefully as you can, and she settles down neatly beside you and activates her airscreen. “So, you are...” Her grey eyes cut through the electric glow, and you’re captivated for a moment before you realize what she’s asking.

“Aurora Delenz. Third year, of course; Biological Archiving and Interplanetary Relations.”

Cue eyebrow. “Those are two very different subjects.”

“I’ve got it under control,” you lie. “It’s really interesting!” That second part isn’t a lie, but most nights it really, really doesn't make up for the first part.

She smiles a smile that lets you know she sees right through you, and gets it. “I bet,” she says. “Lorina Estevna, third year, Computer Science… not quite so impressive, I know.”

“It’s… I know a couple Comp people, they’re nice…” She shrugs good-humoredly, and you feel an intense urge to be anywhere else but there. The best place to hide is behind your airscreen, of course, if you could get the stupid thing to turn on. Finally it flickers to life, and you cast the screen so it hovers next to hers. “Um. So. Do you have time in your awfully busy schedule for, say, working on that classwork together?”

Just like that she’s all business again. “That’s meant to be part of my schedule, yes. Give me your info and we’ll work it out.”

You nod and quickly tap out your airscreen keycode, and raise your hand. She presses her palm to yours and in a moment you hear the ding of your information request going through. You both scroll through your schedules. She’s so organized, and you have pretty much nothing but your classes and a few office hours in your schedule.

“The… seventh hour on the twelfth?” It’s the first blank slot she has, and you don't have anything planned… not that you ever plan for anything.

“That's fine with me,” she says, and sticks a box in the appropriate slot. You watch intently as her fingers tap out your surname, and her lips move, mouthing something silently.

“Do you. Um. Need anything else?”

She fiddles around with her screen for a moment, flicks away an event with a girl you’re pretty sure was, at one point, her girlfriend.

“I think I have everything, thanks. I’ll get in touch with you if anything comes up.”

“Okay. Do you, uh, need my—”

“You shared your school screenname, yes. By the way, your lower school one is still listed. You should probably get rid of that.”

You frown and check; she's right. You quickly delete the info and look up at her. She’s watching you intently, stony grey eyes and thin pale lips.

“Well,” she says after a few seconds, “If that's all?”

“Yes! Yes, it is. Um, thank you, Ms. E—”

“Just call me Lori,” she says quickly. “After all, we’re going to end up seeing a lot of each other.” She looks at her airscreen again, making a few more adjustments. “It’s going to be a long year,” she mutters.

“But hopefully a good one,” you add hesitantly. She looks at you, and for a long, long second you’re not sure what she thinks at all. But then she smiles, briefly.

“I hope so. I have to go, see you later.”

“See you…” you say, trailing off. She’s already gone.

---

After the excitement of the first week’s new classes and old friends, your third year begins to grind on just like any other. You sit beside Lori in Colab now, which is a relief because you could tell from the first lecture that the instructor’s lecturing style would be completely incompatible with you. You take notes as much as you can, and make sure to nudge her awake every once in a while—it won’t do to have two sets of incomprehensible notes.

Your workload is heavy, but that’s only to be expected. The fact that you chose this burden for yourself doesn't make you feel any better about it. Still, you know you’re capable. It’s just a pain in the butt.

After your daily meditation on exactly how much of a pain in the butt it is, you gather the energy to face the day. You drag yourself out of bed to take a shower. Your thick, curly hair was your mother’s pride when you were little, but now it’s a bit of a burden, and slicked back and put up in a bun it doesn't even matter how pretty your curls are.

You get dressed quickly. You’ve never not had a uniform, from when your parents dragged you away from your online lessons at ten years old all the way through secondary school. Now, though, it’s a real uniform, with rules that matter more than what color cardigan you wear. It’s still not as strict for suppies as it is on the mil side, and you’re grateful, because yours is some sort of “traditional throwback” and the collar never lies right and the skirt fits everyone oddly (And skirts as part of a uniform? In this era? Really?). You try to tug it into place anyway, with moderate success.

Moderate success is all I’m gonna get, you think, double checking yourself in the mirror.

You unplug your airscreen from your big projector, pop the headpiece over your hair, and put the control bracelets on. The computer itself goes into your bag, along with your stylus pen and the collection of data chips that has all your books and notes on it. Some of your classmates laugh at your insistence at having hard copies of things, but when the network gets bogged down during exam weeks, you suddenly find yourself making new friends.

You check the time once more. You’re okay, since really it takes less than ten minutes to get anywhere on the ship, but you still don't want to cut it too close.

As you step out of the elevator from the suppie dorms, you join the crowd of your fellow students. Whether heading to classes or just returning, going to the library, grabbing an early lunch, or simply going to relax and stargaze a bit, everyone’s paths cross in one big central space. When you go through the center, you’re basically bound to run into several people you know on your way to anything, which would happen anyway considering that there's only about a thousand of you. It was overwhelming as a first-year, and to be honest it’s a bit overwhelming even now, but you’ve learned to handle it. Mostly.

You follow the flow of people heading towards the classroom zone, pausing to wave at or have a short chat with several acquaintances on the way. Your second-year roommate, a lab partner, someone from that composition class you had to take… it’s always a whirlwind of half-familiar faces.

And one face, one that’s growing more familiar with each passing day.

Lori waves at you through the crowd, and you wave back. You make your way over to her.

“Morning!”

“Morning. How are you?”

“I'm okay. You?”

She shrugs. “Fine. Tired. Not looking forward to the quiz.”

Your heart nearly stops. “Was that today?”

“Day after tomorrow,” she says, clearly amused by your reaction. You sigh in relief as she continues. “I’ve been trying to get ahead on studying, and it’s not looking great.”

“Yeah. This class is… yeah.”

“Very much so,” she says with a sideways smile. “If you’d like to meet up and study tonight, I should have some free time.”

You nod quickly. Honestly you hadn’t even thought about studying yet. She pulls up the study room reservation page while you both settle into your seats.

“You’re okay with a small room?” She says in a low voice as the instructor walks up to start the lecture.

“Um, sure.” You know which rooms she’s talking about: they really are meant for one person, but Unity was built with a smaller population in mind, so it’ll have to do.

Even if you’re sitting elbow to elbow all night long.

You fidget with your stylus pen as the lecture begins, and definitely zone out for the first few minutes until Lori nudges you and points at something in her notes. You mouth “I don't know” and she shrugs and turns her attention back to whatever’s going on.

Focus. You can't fail this class.

Mostly because you’d lose a year, but also because Lori might be left without a partner, in which case she would also lose a year, and possibly her best shot at a decent career.

You steal a glance at her. She’s taking notes diligently, her pale lips shaped in concentration as her fingers work at the virtual keyboard. Whatever her reputation, however blunt she seems or how busy she is, she’s your partner from now on. You both have a responsibility to work with each other, and to help each other succeed.

She deserves the best I can give, you decide.

She catches your eye; you give her a tiny smile and she returns it for a moment before looking back at her notes.

And in that moment, warmth blooms in your chest and you decide that you do know how you feel about having her as a partner:

Happy.

Next

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Their Hero Academia: Chapter 13

Raw and unedited (especially until I get Chapters 14-16 written to upload along with it), but I finished the 1st draft tonight and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Especially with switching to some new protagonists. Chapters 0-12 can be found here:

Their Hero Academia – Chapter 13: Takuma Sero Makes a Show of It

If there was one thing Takuma Sero liked about living in the dorms, it was the sense of privacy. Sure, there were fifteen other people living in the dorms, three others on his floor, but compared to his home, that was nothing.  Between his parents, his three younger brothers, and baby sister, there was always somebody trying to butt into whatever he was doing.  At least on his floor, all he had was his best bro Kenta Sato. Daisuke Shoji simply kept his head down and Takiyo Aoyama had made it clear early on he had no interest in “whatever nonsense you two are getting up to.”

As if trying to become the next internet sensations was nonsense.

Which reminded him… he really ought to check their hit counter.  With Kirishima-Bakugo out of the cafeteria yesterday, he’d actually been free to host a new round of “Will Sato Eat It?” without fear of being exploded or having her tear his arms off.  He was actually pretty certain she wouldn’t do the last part.  Their parents had been friends for decades and he was on reasonably good terms with her most of the time.  But yesterday had been pretty impressive as far as the game went. Kenta had eaten a soup bowl, a baseball, a rock, and a tire that someone had somehow managed to get into the cafeteria.

Kenta’s dad had broken it up after that, with a threat to report their antics to Aizawa if they kept doing it.  And Kenta had gotten a talking to from his dad later on about irresponsible Quirk use and making a spectacle of himself.   At least the elder Sato had learned the futility of trying to rat them out to Takuma’s parents.  His mom was one of the most Instagram-famous Pro-Heroes in the business.  She actively encouraged his aspirations.  His dad was just vaguely puzzled by the whole thing and just let his mom take the lead.

Checking the video upload, he found that the hit counter was already in the thousands.  Wisely, he opted not to look at the comments.   It was like his mom always said, “Never read the comments.”   Sure, you got a validation high from some of it, but there were way too many trolls and mudslingers to make it worth it.

Takuma broke into a grin. “Yeah, we’re gonna be famous. Just you see.  Heroes and entertainment sensations.”

He checked the time and found he still had nearly an hour before class.  Plenty of time to finish getting ready.  There was also the matter of homework he hadn’t quite completed, but he could probably copy the answers from somebody, at least enough to squeak by. Math was going to be the death of him. He understood numbers well enough, but once you started getting letters involved with numbers, his brain just refused to track any of it.  It had nearly sunk his entrance exam score, but he’d managed to just barely pass that. A good practical exam score had done wonders for making up the difference.

Twenty minutes later, he was out of his room and ready to go.  He did not have the world’s most developed fashion sense (much to the regret of Kimiko Ojiro, his other best friend, who had declared him “the worst gay best friend ever”), but he had an entertainer’s sense for showmanship in his appearance.  He spotted Kenta coming out of his room and gave him a double finger guns.

“Sixty-five hundred hits in less than twenty-four hours, my man!”

“All right!” Kenta said, giving him a fist bump.  “That’s twice as many as the last video!”   He let out a burp and clutched his stomach.

“You okay, man?” Takuma asked.

Kenta shook his head and burped again.  “Heartburn and indigestion.  Dad says just because I can get anything doesn’t mean I should.”  He grinned, thick lips pulling back to reveal his perfectly white teeth.  “But I say it’s a small price to pay for being famous.”

“More famous in your case,” Takuma told him.  Kenta was already a good bit famous from all the times he appeared in pictures and his stories on his father’s “Food and Family” blog. According to his mom, it was crazy popular with single moms.

Kenta waved it off. “That’s really Dad’s thing.  This is ours!”

Takuma was about to begin discussions of the plans for their next video when he was distracted by the sight of Daisuke Shoji walking back to his rooms, clearly having come from the showers.  The six-armed boy was only wearing a towel wrapped around his waist, his silver hair still damp, and a small about of moisture still visible on the muscles of his arms and abs.  He nodded politely to Takuma and Kenta on his way back to his room.  Takuma kept watching until Shoji’s door closed.

His trace was broken by Kenta giving him a small shove.  “You okay there, bud?  Kind of went away for a little while?”

He sighed.  “Why are the hot ones always straight?”

Kenta gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.  “Hey, there’s lots of other guys at U.A.  You’ll find somebody.  Or you could always try online dating?”

Takuma made a face. “I’m not that desperate.”

Anything further was interrupted by his and Kenta’s phones buzzing.  Both checked and he saw they had identical texts from the school’s emergency alert system.

Homeroom has been cancelled.  All first-year students should report to the Gran Torino Memorial Auditorium at 0800.

Kenta gave him a curious look.

“Don’t look at me, man,” he said quickly.  “I haven’t broken any rules that would cause a grade level assembly.”

“This school year,” Kenta said.  “I still can’t believe the time you…”

“Don’t remind me.  I’m still barely out of being grounded for that.”

“I think that was the first time I ever actually saw your parents punish you.”

“Oh, would you look at the time, we should really be getting to the Auditorium!”

***

“Any idea what this is about, Takuma?” Kimiko asked. He assumed she was looking at him, but honestly, even after having known her all his life, it was hard to tell.

He shook his head. “Beats the heck out of me.”

All around, the other seats in the Auditorium were filling up with the first year students.  There were the three Heroics classes, three General Ed classes, three Support classes, and three Business and Management classes.   Sixteen students each in the Heroics, twenty in each of the others, for one hundred eight students total left the auditorium about half full.  

Down on the stage, he could see the majority of the teaching staff.  There were the three Heroics Homeroom teachers, Aizawa, Super Ball, and Battle Fist.  There was Power Loader, the aging director of the Support courses.  Word around campus was that he was considering retirement after experiencing the Iida Twins.  And there was FireFox, their math teacher; Hawkeye, their English teacher; Figure Sk8, the dark-haired daughter of the Twins and Izumi’s uncle and aunt, who taught their Science classes; Palette, the paint-themed Art History teacher; and Hopper, Tokoyami’s uncle and their Literature teacher.  There Hound Dog, the school counselor, Vice-Principal Midnight, and even Kenta’s dad.   He also spotted Doctor Izumi sitting with her husband, Kota, the Rescue Hero and Rescue Instructor called Water Spout (or, at his mom embarrassingly always referred to him, “the first man to see me naked”) There was also All Might, and several teachers he didn’t know, who he presumed taught some of the classes taken by the other courses.  Whatever this was about, they were taking it very seriously.

And slowly approaching the podium, leaning heavily on his cane, was Principal Nezu.  Takuma wasn’t sure if he was a rat or a bear or possibly some kind of creature from Australia (or was it Austria?  Whichever one had the kangaroos.  Those were real, right?), but he understood that the old animal was crazy smart.  He’d guided U.A. through some of its roughest years and managed to still come out on top.

“I am sorry to interrupt your usual class schedule,” Nezu began.  “I know your studies are of great importance to you all.  But after the events of the last few days, both here at our school and elsewhere, we have been made aware of events which you all deserve to know.  The Center for Quirk Research is expected to make a statement later this morning, but we thought it might be best if comes from us.”

He took in a breath and continued.  “The CQR has discovered, working in conjunction with several Pro-Heroes, the existence of a virus which causes the victim to lose control of their Quirk.  It appears the Quirk is… man made.”

Any side conversations that had been going on were immediately silenced.

Nezu went on.  “After an as yet unknown incubation period, it causes a power-flare up during which time the user’s Quirk will activate out of their control.  This lack of control appears to last an indefinite amount of time, but appears to be a onetime flare up.  Unfortunately, even as the number of cases are growing, information is scarce.  There appear to be no obvious early symptoms and we are unsure how the virus is being transmitted. At this time, it appears that only Emitter and Transformation type Quirks are effected.”

A ripple went through the crowd as the full impact of the Principal’s statement took effect. Anything that could do that is dangerous indeed.  From the time they were young, they’d always been taught about the importance of controlling their Quirks.  And now something could just take that away…

“That’s…   that’s not good,” Takuma said.  Absently, he rubbed the patches on his right hand where his Acid Tape came from.  His Quirk was technically a Mutation type, since he had slightly different physical structures to allow for it.  But his mom was an Emitter type, so were many of his friends.  So were a lot of people out there in the world.  And there were lots of people out there with really powerful Quirks.   What if somebody like Ground Zero or Deku caught this thing?

“We’re… we’re okay,” he heard Kimiko say.  “Not… not like I can get more invisible.”

“Hey,” Kenta said, “it’s gonna be okay.  People’re smart.  They’ll get this figured out.”  Kenta’s dad was an Emitter type too, he recalled, even if Kenta’s own Quirk was a very minor Mutant type.

Nezu continued, “We are able to run tests for the virus and will be doing screening following this assembly.  However, as there are no tell-tale symptoms prior to manifestation, we urge you to talk to your teachers or Doctor Izumi should you have any concerns.  We will be doing everything we can to protect you, which includes providing you as with much of your usual structure as possible. Classes, including Heroics courses, will continue as normal.  Rest assured, everyone is doing everything they can to get to the bottom of this. But at this point, cases are isolated and sporadic.  We advise caution, but there is no need to panic.”

Takuma made it a point to never take life seriously.  But for once, that didn’t seem like such a good idea.

***

“You heard what the Principal said,” Aizawa said, after they had returned to the classroom.  “The moment you feel anything out of the ordinary or even suspect that something might be wrong, I expect you to tell me or another teacher.  Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mister Aizawa,” the class said, nearly as one.

“Good,” Aizawa said. “Now, we are going to proceed as normally as possible.  Which means we have a little bit of business to settle.  Choose a class representative.  I don’t care how.”   He zipped himself into his sleeping bag and disappeared behind his desk.

“Well,” Midoriya said, “I think we should probably vote on it?”

“I vote Toshi!” Shota Shinso cried out.

“Toshi,” Asuka Tokoyami agreed.

“I’ve got to go with Midoriya too,” Isamu Haimawari said.

“Toshi has my vote as well,” Izumi Todoroki added.

“Guys… Shouldn’t this be a secret ballot?” Midoriya asked quickly.

“Too late now,” Takuma said. “Besides, I think we all know you’re gonna win it.”

As much as he loved the spotlight, he loathed responsibility.  Better Midoriya than him any day.  Besides, it would take away from his own pursuits.  And Midoriya really was good at taking charge and helping people who needed it.  Guy wanted to help the whole world, even more than the average Hero-in-Training.

“Personally, I think moi would be best,” Takiyo Aoyama said.

“Oh, give it up, Frenchie,” Mika Mineta told him.  “Midoriya’s definitely the best shot at this.”

“I fear I must agree with the rest,” Akaya Koda told Aoyama.  She really seemed to be one of the few people who could stand the arrogant blond for more than a few minutes.  She must have had the patience of a saint.

“Going with Midoriya here too,” Kenta said.

“Yep, me too,” Chihiro Kaminari added.  “And Tokoyami for vice-rep while we’re at it.”

“I like those ideas!” Kimiko said.  “Both of them!”

“Makes sense to me,” Shoji said.

“This is highly against protocol,” Tensei Iida said.  “But I cannot argue with the consensus either.”

“My younger brother is correct,” Sora Iida said.  “I agree with the conclusions drawn.”

“You really must stop using that qualifier!  I am only younger by three minutes!”

“It is scientifically accurate!  Do you dispute this?”

“It is needlessly semantic, and yet I cannot argue with the precision!”

“If I agree, will it shut them up?” Katsumi Kirishima-Bakugo asked.

Motion was carried. Midoriya and Tokoyami were their class reps.

Takuma belatedly realized that probably gave them some kind of power of his and Kenta’s antics, but that was their problem, not his.  Besides, it was worth it to see Aoyama pout.

***

“Hua-whah!” Even though Takuma had practiced swinging from building to building by using his Acid Tape many times with his dad, doing it always made him feel like his stomach was going to flop out of his mouth.  It didn’t help that his Quirk was more complicated than his dad’s.   The elder Sero only had to think about shooting out his Tape until it hit something.  Takuma’s Acid Tape meant that he had to be continually concentrating both on dispensing more tape and on maintaining the properties.  Since he could make it anything from slick to sticky to acidic, that meant he had to do a lot more concentrating.  And doing that while ten stories up made it all the more problematic.

Even if it was supposed to be a simple Heroics exercise in cityscape navigation.  All they had to do was make it from one end of the faux-cityscape as quickly as they could.  For quite a few, like Kimiko, Kenta, or Koda, there wasn’t much more they could do than run as fast as they could.  Others were doing a much more impressive job.  Midoriya was bouncing with leaps that were easily carrying him, the Iida Twins were blasting through the air, and Haimawari was zipping through the streets. And somehow, Kirishima-Bakugo had gotten herself up on the rooftops and was parkouring herself through the course.

Takuma let himself go flying through the air for a moment, before shooting out another strand of Acid Tape.  It stuck to the fire escape and as he began to swing, he could feel something go wrong. With a sickening sound of tearing metal, the piece of the fire escape he had snagged with his tape snapped and broke, sending him falling!

He shot out another strand of Acid Tape, trying to save himself, but instead of snagging a lower portion of the fire escape, it melted right through it.  He’d made it too acidic!  He was gonna die!  He was never gonna reach a million followers!  Involuntarily, he felt his eyes close.

And just as suddenly, powerful arms caught him and he was rising.  So he was dead then, and the angels were carrying him away.  Good-bye world, he only regretted that he not let more of you gaze upon his awesomeness…

“Are you all right, Sero?” a voice asked.  “I was afraid I would not be able to match your falling speed without causing you injury, but I believe I was able to calculate something close enough…”

An angel who apparently sounded just like Tensei Iida.  He chanced opening his eyes and the first thing he saw was himself, reflected in the chest plate of Iida’s costume.  Looking up, he saw a silver helmet.  Definitely Iida.  Which meant he wasn’t dead?  He was alive! He could still get that million followers!

“Sero?” Iida repeated. “Are you all right?”  He slowly started reducing power in his jets, letting them drift downward.

Oh, right.  He needed to answer his rescuing angel’s questions. “Oh, ah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, finding himself stumbling over his words.  “You really saved my ass, there, Iida.  Thanks.”

“Of course,” Iida said. “As your friend and classmate, not to mention as an aspiring Hero, it is my duty.”

“Well, right now, you’re my hero, Iida.”

Inwardly, he groaned. Was he really saying something that stupid?   Apparently, he was.  At least Kimiko and Kenta weren’t there to hear it.  They’d never let him hear the end of it.

***

The Iida Twins could be found in the Common Room, pouring over blueprints.  Usually, the Twins spent whatever free time they had in the Support Workshop, but according to Sora, Power Loader had kicked them out under out under threat of unspecified punishment, all because they had “accidentally used too much power and caused a few small explosions and fires.”  So the two had returned to the dorms instead to work on what they could.

Takuma, Kenta, and Kimiko peered from around the corner at them.

“This is a really dumb idea,” Takuma said.  “And I know all about dumb ideas.”

“If you were doing this for me,” Kenta said, “you’d be making your “good idea” face.  The one that always means it’s something that’s going to get us in trouble.”

“Besides,” Kimiko said, “this is for romance!  We’ve got to! You’re cute, he’s hot, you’re pink, he’s got pink hair, I’m gonna call you Pinky-Squared!”

“We don’t even know if he likes guys!  He could be into girls!  Or machines! I’m gonna make a fool of myself!”

Kimiko slapped him upside the head.  “That’s loser talk!”

“You want us to film it?” Kenta asked.  “You’re good in front of a camera.”

Takuma went a paler shade of pink.  “…No. Definitely not.  I do not need this preserved for posterity if it all goes south.”

“Look, this is the most romantic thing to happen since school started,” Kimiko told him.  “So you are not chickening out now!  Kenta and I are going to get Sora out of the room and you are going to ask Tensei out! Do you understand!?”

How someone whose face he couldn’t see could have such an intense glare, he didn’t know, but her tone suggested that there was no arguing with her.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s do this!”

***

I can’t do this!

With Sora out of the room (he was so stressed he literally could not remember what excuse Kenta and Kimiko had used to get her out of there and he had seen it literally seconds ago), Takuma was free to make his move.  His smooth move.  His ever so smooth move.  He was the king of smooth.

He was not smooth.

As casually as he could, he approached the table where Tensei was still working.  “Oh, ah, hey, Iida,” he said.   “Ah, thanks again for saving me like that.  Pretty sure I was on my way to being a pile of pink goo.”

“The fall was not nearly enough to reduce you to goo,” Iida said, looking up from his blueprints.  “But it would have been very messy all the same. I am happy I was able to prevent that.”

He rubbed the back of his head.  “Yeah, well, either way, I appreciate it.”   He frowned, trying to think of how best to proceed.  “So, uh, what are you working on?”

A very crazed (and very attractive) grin spread its way across Tensei’s face.  “Modifications to Sora’s and my Hero costumes.  After training yesterday, we came up with several potential ideas to improve performance and work with our Quirks, such as a more adjustable wing system and potential storage for emergency supplies of apple and grape juice.”

“And that exploded?”

“Oh, no,” Iida said.  “That was the idea for a capture-weapon to add as an additional support item.  We may have made the propulsion element a little too strong.  Power Loader apparently believed that we would benefit from some time away.  But I do not see how we can improve our designs to their fullest without practical, hands on work.  And we cannot do that if we are banned from the workshop for a week.”

“That sucks, man,” Takuma agreed.  It’d be like someone telling him he couldn’t upload stuff to the ‘net.  A guy had to have a passion, after all.  “But, ah, I guess that means you’re gonna have some free time?”

Iida frowned.  “Unfortunately, yes.  There is only so much we can do without the space to put theory into practice.”

Okay, it was now or never.   He could be brave!  He had this!

…He didn’t have this!

He had this!

He didn’t have this!

He had this!

“So, um…,” he said, “if you’re gonna have the free time…  maybe you’dlikespendingsomeofitwithmesomewhere?”

Iida blinked.  “I… don’t think I caught that, Sero.”

He took a deep breath. “I was thinking, if you were gonna have free time anyway… maybe you’d want to spend some of it with me? Somewhere?  Like a date?”

Iida’s eyes widened in surprise and for once, it looked like he was at a loss for words.  “I… I would like that very much, Sero.”

He had this!

[rossessjano]

A Hell Hole

Me, again space!

As you all know, I am currently an official Thomasian drop-out for certain reasons (more about it on my next post). For the few months of being free from academics, certain realizations cross my so clouded mind and made me wonder more about myself and the world. It even includes the experiences which I feel like affected me and perhaps some of the many reasons why I left college. In this entry, I enumerated four of the things I learned in this hell hole.

1.       College will put your dispositions into test. It might help you grow or help you find yourself but never ever lose the person that you are.

Before I enter college, I was certain of myself- who I am, my values, my stand, and what I want to be. I was so driven and passionate to learn.  I was so eager to serve and stand with the #ParaSaBayan maxim (which I’m glad that all my blockmates firmly stand with as well). Back when I was in SHS, I was not only busy with school works but also in building who I am. I built myself completely in such a way that I thought I would never break or give in with what I stand for, be it in social, political, spiritual or ethical (studies) facet. But then again, the world doesn’t only revolve with one person. Each person has their own world with their own ways to survive. Everyday would be a test, whether to adapt those ways and swallow your pride or stick with your own with a bare chance to last. There were a lot of times that I was so tempted to break my own rules and I’m not proud to admit that I did. Building those values and dispositions was not easy that’s why breaking them is a big of a deal for me. Those values and dispositions made me who I am as a person. It defines what I am and breaking them makes me doubt myself. I was thinking that maybe “pride lang yan” and you have to accept the fact that you cannot survive this alone and by thinking so high of yourself, but no. Suddenly, everything that was sure became uncertain. I was slowly choking the person that I’ve become. I hated the decisions I’ve made and overthink everything before I close my eyes at night.

 This is not me.

I thought.

This is far from who I am. The brave, clever, driven, strong and independent girl I always have been.

 But few months of thinking made me realize that although I know, that we’re still learning, growing and still on the process of finding who we are and our place in this world, we should never ever lose ourselves on the process of building ourselves. I know I’ve been writing about this for few years now, but is still and I think forever will be relevant. Never lose the person inside you. Let it shout to remind you who you really are. You can learn. You can grow without letting the world swallow you alive. Do not ever let the system of the society break the person that you are because when the time comes that everything seems to be falling apart and unfortunately, you’re family and friends are away from you, at least you have yourself—your complete and unbreakable-self.

2.       You can learn whatever you want on your own terms.

I am studious. I love to learn. I love the smell of the paper, the colors of the highlighters on my readings, the new findings, and the challenge of figuring something I can’t understand. I’m that student with many questions but keeps it to herself and does her own research. Before college, I already have my own study habits. I decided few years ago that I need to study everyday even if there is no exam coming. Maybe that’s the thing when you know you’re not smart enough—you know you have to triple the effort of studying and researching on your own. Slowly, those efforts became habits and later on, I realized I love what I’m doing. During my first semester in college, I did the same routine, not to mention that I doubled my usual effort because “it’s college”. My class is at 1 pm but I was already in school by 8 or 9 am, trying to learn and make myself productive inside the library everyday.

Days passed and I’m slowly losing the eagerness to learn inside the class. There are different factors of course and pressure was a big part of it. I know I want to learn but I don’t want the feeling of having no option but to compress everything in your mind. I want to feel that I want to not that I need to. I was beginning to think that I’m wasting my time inside the classroom, trying to listen and comprehend everything that the professor was saying when in honestly, I learn more with my own terms. It felt like I was just paying for a piece of paper that proves that I at least finished a degree. It didn’t feel like the same learning I used to know. The fascination wasn’t there anymore, replaced by mantras that I have to read this and that, I have to learn this and that.  

I know people might say that I’m weak, because “that’s college and everyone has undergone that way”. Maybe, I’m part of the small population of the youth who learns differently.

 So I’m planning to study on my own. I will create my own plan and schedule of the things I want to learn. Hopefully, I could make this work while still working as manager. This way, everything would be and feel so honest and genuine. I don’t have to eat pressure every morning and feel like a time bomb that’s gonna explode any time of the day. It would feel more free and true because I want to, not I need to.

 3.       There is a bigger world than school.

When I say I can learn on my own terms, I’m not just referring to the academe but also to different facets and ways of learning. It didn’t just feel like wasting my time because I found my own ways of gaining knowledge, but I also feel like wasting my days inside a room when there’s a bigger world outside that waits for you. I know it’s fallacious—you cannot just go freely to the world with nothing, it’s too much of a risk yet it’s a risk I’m willing to take. For me, the world is so big, for people to follow the same path, to be at one place, and to have a copied story from others. I want to invest on experiences, too, not just with theories. Especially that I was a Political Science major, my love for the society will always follow me wherever and whatever I’m doing. I will always want to feel the pain of the people and uplift them in any possible way I can. I want to volunteer to help out others and to make money for my family. With being in school, I can’t do all these. I can’t even join organizations because I can’t balance my studies (with a maintaining grade) with other priorities. Now that I left school, I feel like I have all the time to do all these while still finding myself. With all the time I gave myself, I feel like I can do anything. I never thought that time for yourself could be this empowering.

  4.       It’s okay to have a different timeline.

As I would be choosing a different route than the cliché college-career-love life-married life track, I guess my timeline would be a little different from others. I’m not expecting that everyone would understand, that people might judge me for it but here’s my cover. I’m not totally going to be an out of school person all my life. I still would want to achieve a degree but in a different time. Maybe when the time comes that I feel like I need to. Perhaps, 5 or 6 years from now. I want to find myself first (while doing volunteering) and help my Mom with everything. I want to make myself unbreakable so that when I enter college, I’m stronger.

When I told some of my friends about these decisions, they told me I’m so brave, not knowing the courage I took to accept that having a different timeline is okay. People were already judging me for going out of school, and now this? It took me few depressive months to accept that I was a different person and that I cannot do what others are doing. It was so hard to acknowledge that I can’t stand with #ParaSaBayan anymore. I took all the courage to face the mirror and say that I have my own story to tell and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the same with others.

[inkofamethyst]

May 14, 2022

PERSONA 5 MUSIC????? ??  GOOD STUFF.

If I had a dime for every time I got into media through its soundtrack, I’d be a rich woman.

A summary of how finals are going, updated as they continue:

Took the in-person part of genetics and that sucked.  Seems like I could get a 73% 62% (the prof uses +/- but only for ~1% of the grade cutoffs (and there’s the possibility that the exam could be curved but the averages have been reasonable so I don’t see that happening)) on it and still have just the barest of an A in the class though which... idk I’ll be cutting it close (got full marks on the online portion ayyyyy).  I was way less prepared than I thought I’d be :/  Unfortunately, that’s the easiest one I’ve got.  Here’s hoping for partial credit.  I would really rather just get an A in this class thx. [edit, 3 days after: 86% ON ITTTT WE GOT OUR FIRST (actually second bc english but still) CONFIRMED A LETS GOOOOOO]

160 pages of notes for biochem.  Last semester was half of that.  Tbh while I’m preparing for A- in pretty much all of my classes, the only one that’s worrying me gravely in biochem.  I was in a high-stress state for ~24 hours, and the morning of I was a wreck.  I certainly didn’t study nearly enough, but I feel like I might’ve gotten at least a 40%.  Not the greatest at all, but at this point I’m just relieved that it’s over.  And that I’ll (probably) never have to take another chemistry class ever again.  [edit: 70% on the exam so my grade didn’t change lol, curved to a B overall!]

Gave myself ~6 hours 4 hours (the plan was 6 but I got out of bed late) to study for physics and make a “formula sheet” which was basically a double-sided sheet of condensed notes tbh but we were allowed to take it with us soooo (kinda similar to how I’d spend the day of orgo 2 exams making a guide because I hated studying for orgo 2 (except this guide was only a page and I was writing formulas and notes in like size 4 font to fit it all in bc the prof was like “bc you get a note sheet we’re not providing anything for you”)) yeah, it was fine, but I did a quick lil grade calculation and I could probably get an A with a 50% so I ain’t all that pressed.  My physics prof used one of the exact same questions from our last exam so there’s that. [edit: 76% on the exam, A overall]

Three exams in three days is tough.  The only one I’m really worried about at this point is biochem.  I don’t even know what to expect except that it won’t be good :/  Like, a C overall typa not good.  B+ best case scenario, I think, but I’m preparing for the worst.

I don’t know if I’ve ever explicitly said this on here, and it doesn’t even have anything to do with what’s going on right now, but today I am thankful that I was placed in the humanities honors program despite practically begging to be placed in the science honors program.  Admissions people knew what they were doing.  And if I have mentioned it before, then that’s okay, because I can be thankful for things repeatedly.  I’m thankful for my parents and my sister all the time, and my friends, and the people who’ve helped me get to where I am.

Oh and also I’m thankful that all my exams are done lol, just an essay left, and it’s a pretty easy (but long) one tbh.  I’ll probably outline a little tomorrow then work on it Monday and Tuesday.

[edit: when Lou Rawls said he was suffering with the blues, I felt that]

[edit 2: Nina did not, in fact, outline on Sunday]

[newstfionline]

Young Nigerians choose to fight Boko Haram with books

By Ryan Lenora Brown, CS Monitor, June 19, 2018

MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA--In Gwoza, the gunmen arrived just after 10 a.m., skidding to a halt outside the school on motorcycles and surrounding the Nigerian students who huddled in small groups around the courtyard, frittering away the short break between their classes.

In Damasak, they came as a teacher was placing an exam paper facedown on the table in front of one of her students. This time, everyone in the classroom heard an explosion first, cracking over their heads like a clap of thunder. First one, then another, and another again.

In Bama, it was still too early for school when Boko Haram appeared. It happened before dawn, as the morning call to prayer was just beginning to blast out from mosque speakers around the city. The shooting woke up the rest of the town like a staccato alarm clock.

In the school courtyard in Gwoza, Lydia began to run, tripping over the bodies of her classmates as she fled. In the classroom in Damasak, Aisha ran, too. And in Bama, Fatima’s mother dragged her out of bed and whispered urgently, go. Don’t take anything. Just go.

Today, northeastern Nigeria is a place of suddenly interrupted lives. Since the Islamist movement Boko Haram began its violent insurgency here a decade ago, nearly 3 million people have been uprooted from their homes and scattered across Nigeria and its neighbors. Among them have been about a million children like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, for whom the sudden displacement has often meant an equally abrupt end to their education.

For Boko Haram--whose name is often translated as “Western education is forbidden”--that fact is no accident. Their campaign for a fundamentalist Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria has deliberately and brutally taken aim at the region’s schools. Since 2009, the group has murdered some 2,300 teachers and destroyed more than 1,400 schools, according to figures from UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency. Kidnapping children from schools, meanwhile, has become one of the central ways the group has earned its international notoriety.

But as Boko Haram’s war against education here grinds into its 10th year, a quiet counterinsurgency is also building strength. It’s a fight with unlikely front lines--like the battered open-air classrooms inside camps for displaced people across this region, where teachers lead geography lessons in open defiance of the group’s flat earth ideology. Or in the dormitories of girls’ boarding schools, jammed with chattering teenagers in pink hijabs, reading romance novels and braiding each other’s hair as though they have never heard of girls kidnapped in Chibok or Dapchi.

And leading this particular fight are young Nigerians like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, who have seen Boko Haram’s terror firsthand, and who, when it comes to their education, have chosen to fight back.

“Going to school is our way of battling against Boko Haram,” says Aisha, tucking a stray strand of hair into her bright pink hijab. After being out of school for three years while in a refugee camp in Niger, the 19-year-old, whose last name has been withheld for her safety, is now less than a year away from graduating from a boarding school in the city of Maiduguri.

“They don’t like education; they don’t want it,” she says. “So just by doing this, we are all fighting them.”

The tenacity of that fight among northern Nigerians has startled many experts. For decades, after all, northern Nigeria has sat stubbornly at the bottom of nearly every national ranking of educational achievement. Fewer than half of young adult women here know how to read, and only 46 percent of children are enrolled in school at all, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

“This is one of the most disadvantaged places in the country when it comes to education,” says Babagana Goni Ali, secretary of the Education in Emergencies Working Group at the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board. Historically, he says, many parents here haven’t seen the point of sending their kids to school. Life, after all, often seemed to be on a single track. You grew up. You got married. You started farming. There weren’t really other choices, and certainly none that required you to be able to read a novel in English.

And Boko Haram soon gave many families another excuse. In a YouTube video released in July 2013, the group’s commander, Abubakar Shekau, said, “We are going to burn down the schools if they are not Islamic religious schools for Allah.”

Over the next few years, the group torched schools across the region. The militants often specifically targeted teachers of subjects such as science and geography, which flouted the group’s fundamentalist Quranic interpretation of the world. Sometimes these raids doubled as forced recruitment drives, with the group snatching up young boys to become soldiers and young girls to become “wives” to their commanders.

At first, it seemed to be working. In 2016, the Nigerian government announced that the number of children who weren’t going to school had shot up 50 percent since the start of the crisis. Teachers stayed home, too, fearing targeted attacks.

But as the group retreated from many of the major urban areas in Borno in recent years, Mr. Ali began to notice something. It seemed Boko Haram’s tactics were beginning to backfire.

“There’s suddenly a huge issue of congestion in our schools that wasn’t there before,” he says. “It’s the blessing behind this tragedy. You find suddenly so many more people are interested in getting an education.”

Indeed, although there aren’t yet statistics to show how much the situation has changed, many here say Boko Haram’s insurgency has done something that decades of low educational achievement failed to do. It has lit a fire under people.

“Lack of education is the disease that caused [Boko Haram] in the first place,” says Fanne Abdullahi, a mother of five who lives in a wind-swept camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Maiduguri. She never had the money to attend school herself as a child, she says, and anyway, her parents didn’t approve of a girl learning how to read. So when she grew up and had children of her own, sending them to school wasn’t much of a priority either.

But after Boko Haram attacked her village, killed her husband, and sent the family fleeing in 2015, she began to rethink that. When her family moved into the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, someone told her that UNICEF was running free schools there, and she decided to sign up her three school-age children.

“Instead of them getting brainwashed by Boko Haram,” she says of her reasoning, “it’s better for them to get educated.”

Now, they join about 3,000 other kids each morning in a huddled collection of open-air learning spaces that serve as one of the camp’s two schools. Their “classrooms” are little more than a concrete platform with a grass roof sagging over them. Most once had walls as well, but nearly as soon as they are put up, school officials say, they’re stolen for firewood.

On a recent morning, as Mastapha Kaltumi taught math to a group of about 50 fidgety third-graders, wind whistled through his classroom, flapping hijabs and fluttering notebooks. Nearby, just beyond the school’s flimsy chain-link fence, children screamed and giggled as they chased each other in a game of tag. A little boy in a raggedy T-shirt walked by flying a kite he’d made out of a plastic bag.

It wasn’t perfect, Mr. Kaltumi thought. There were still too many kids in his class, and too many kids outside not getting to class at all. But it was something. It was a start.

“Many students here are coming to school for the first time in their lives,” he says. And he knew that for many of them--like himself--focusing on addition and long division was a way to get out of their own heads: to forget, briefly, the things they had seen.

From the government’s perspective, it also doesn’t hurt that northern Nigeria’s current crisis has brought a wave of international money and expertise into its schools.

“The government has always had an interest in educating kids here, of course, but the international assistance makes a big difference in what we’re able to do,” says Ali of the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board.

Last year, humanitarian organizations in the region received about $12 million for educational projects in the region. But at Yerwa, Fatima doesn’t know about any of that. She’s got her eye on one thing: finishing high school next year. After that, if she can somehow manage to scrape together the money, she hopes to go to college and train as a doctor. When she lived in a displaced persons camp, she saw firsthand what happens when there isn’t a good medical system.

“I saw people dying in hospitals and just being left there to die because they couldn’t pay,” she says. “When I’m a doctor I won’t do that. I will save your life, and then later, if it’s possible, you can help me.”

[ilyseok]

The Assistant

Fandom: GOT7 Pairings: Choi Youngjae x Reader Genres: Fluff, college AU Rating: PG Words: 3.3k

Summary: Are you going to the cute TA’s office hours because you’re failing zoology, or are you failing zoology because you’re too distracted from going to see the cute TA?

AO3 Link

A/N: Happy birthday, sunshine <3 I loved writing this - the iguana that my college kept in our department makes an appearance in the fic. As does the professor Y/N hates so much... lol I had a lot of fun reliving old college memories after this. This is my submission for CYJ fic fest 2017 :) Enjoy!

Photo cr. bona5010 - Please do not take without credit.

"All available graduate assistants: please report to the second floor immediately."

The intercom dinged as the department chair hung up the phone, ending his announcement. You turned to your friend, Sooyoung, with a smirk and quirked an eyebrow.

"Chubbs escaped again, eh?" she said. You folded over in laughter as seven different research and teaching assistants bolted out of their offices and laboratories, each one quickly making their way to the stairwell at the end of the hallway.

"I thought the zoology club was going to build a bigger cage for him," you said. "One with a working lock."

You fought the urge to sneak upstairs to watch the drama unfold as Chubbs the Iguana had escaped from his cage for the fourth time this week.

"You going to watch?" Sooyoung asked, knowing how much you loved to observe the chaos among the department staff as the nineteen-pound lizard marched through the hallway like he owned the place, new students ducking out of his way while the juniors and seniors watched intently.

"No, I've got to go to the third floor," you sulked.

"Office hours? Again?" she said.

You nodded and pointed your feet in the opposite direction to head toward the stairs. "I'll see you after theatre lecture, Sooyoung," you said as you walked away. Sooyoung nodded and waved, then turned around to take the opposite stairwell to spectate the show on the second floor.

The third floor of Spellman Hall is perhaps the most relaxing place to be, for a life science building. Some of the laboratory doors were open, and you could hear music resonating through the empty halls. You could distinguish the reggae above the rest as it echoed from the lab belonging to Dr. Jacques. You walked quickly, wanting to get away from any reminders of your nightmare of a professor.

At the opposite end of the hallway, you navigated around several twists and turns to make your way to the graduate assistant offices, and then stopped in front of the door labeled "Choi Youngjae."

"Y/N, are you sure you're going to your TA's office hours because you're failing zoology, or are you failing zoology because you keep going to your cute TA's office hours? Which is it? The chicken or the egg?" You remember Sooyoung badgering you one afternoon before class, to which you promptly replied with "the egg" because if there's one thing you've learned in that godforsaken zoology course, it's that the egg came before the chicken.

Softly, you rapped on the door underneath his nameplate.

"Come in!" he said. Without even seeing his face first, you knew he had that big ol' grin plastered on his face by the tone of his voice.

You pushed open the door and poked your head through. "Hey, it's me. Got a minute?" you asked, breathless from the mere sound his voice and his smile.

"Y/N! My favorite student," he laughed. "What's up?"

"I have some questions about our last exam," you said sheepishly. "I don't understand what I've done wrong."

You pulled out your exam - marked with a big fat "F" - and laid it on his desk to examine. He pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and read for several minutes, flipping through the pages and making notes on some sticky notes. Your eyes scanned the wooden bookshelf behind him as you anxiously waited, making a note of the many pictures of a small, white Maltese dog and the stacks of textbooks he'd collected over his years as both an undergraduate and graduate student.

When he finished, he rolled his office chair to the other side of the desk, next to you with his left arm touching yours. "This problem right here - this is where you went wrong," he said. "This is a nine-part question, so you need to have the first answer correct to figure out the rest." His breath smelled like freshly baked sugar cookies - intoxicatingly sweet and tempting to just lean over and-

Your fantasies were dreadfully interrupted when a picture of Dr. Jacques' face flashed through your mind, with his green and yellow John Deer hat and the permanent scowl embedded in his features. You could even hear his gruff voice as you distinctly remembered his words from the first day of class. "It's 'Jakes,' not 'Zhock,' if you'll kindly learn to pronounce my name right. I'm not a famous French explorer."

Youngjae peered closely into your petrified face and waved a hand in front of your eyes. "Y/N? Hello?"

"Right! Yes. Sorry," you said and perked up in your seat, relieved the war flashbacks had ended but also embarrassed that you likely appeared to be completely uninterested in his explanations.

He frowned and pushed his glasses back up again, then took a red pen to your exam. "It'll be easier for you to take the next exam if you can keep the order of your classification hierarchies straight."

"Yes, I've been having a lot of trouble remembering how that goes," you admitted.

He was silent as he wrote the letters K, P, C, O, F, G,  and S in a straight, vertical line on the side of the page. You watched him curiously out of the corner of your eyes as you took a sip out of the bottle of cola from your backpack as he filled in words next to each letter:

"King Phillip Cries Out For Great Sex"

The carbonation of the soft drink burned the back of your nasal passage as you choked and nearly sprayed soda through your nose. With great restraint, you were able to manage your coughing and took a few more sips to clear your throat. Thankfully, Youngjae was too busy writing the real meanings next to each word off to the side to notice.

"It's easier to remember the order when you use a mnemonic," he said, then finally looked up at you to make sure you understood. A smile instantly spread across his features, and he doubled over, clutching his stomach in a fit of laughter.

"Your face," he breathed between giggles, "it's so red."

You cursed your luck and desperately wished you wore an oversized sweatshirt to the office that day, to bury your nose into the soft fabric - anything to get the attention away from your face. "It's not my fault you give your students perverted mnemonics," you murmured.

He chuckled. "That is the one I use because most people seem to remember it the easiest," he said and leaned back in his chair. "Hey, at least there's no way you can forget that now, is there?"

A fair point.

"Yeah, thanks," you said with your chin tucked down and pulled your exam back from him. He rolled back to the other side of the desk as you shoved the packet of papers back in your bag and hauled the heavy pack over your shoulders. For a minute he clicked through the screen of his MacBook Pro, so you said your goodbyes and set out to get lunch before your last class, but by the time you rounded the corner, Youngjae called after you.

"Y/N!" He hurried out of his small office to catch up with you, a yellow flyer in hand.

“Yes?”

“The zoology club is planning a trip to the zoo for an end-of-the-semester celebration. We’re trying to get the university to pay for it as a school-funded activity, but we need at least one more person to justify asking for the reimbursement,” he said, holding out the flyer to you. “Would you like to go?”

Without skipping a beat or even a second thought, you enthusiastically nodded and took the sheet of paper from him. “Yes!”

He exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath, then rested his palms on his knees. “Thank goodness. They’ll be so happy to go,” he said. “Thanks, Y/N.”

“No, thank you,” you said. You checked your watch and panicked as you realized you were almost late for your next class. “Bye, Youngjae!” you scurried away, faintly waving to him.

He stared blankly at you as you ran away and managed to raise a hand to wave back weakly. “Bye!”

Lions, tigers, and bears - oh my.

The two youngest members of the zoology club led the group as you walked the length of the park as a group, occasionally stopping to take pictures of every exhibit and to upload videos of cute baby animals to Instagram. Yugyeom dragged Bambam by the wrist, then suddenly stopped when he noticed the giant vivarium in the center of the park. He pointed toward the lit sign that read “Monkey House,” and suddenly exclaimed, “We have to go!”

Poor Bambam had no warning before his friend broke into a run with his hand still tightly gripping his wrist, dragging him along for a brisk jog up the steep hill leading to the vivarium. Meanwhile, Jaebum, Mark, Jackson, and Jinyoung strolled along casually behind them. You laughed at the energetic kid and his enthusiasm, wishing that you could borrow some of that energy for yourself.

The hot sun bore down on you, making you regret your choice in long-sleeved shirts as you roasted like a chicken in the oven on Christmas day. Youngjae walked on beside you without saying much, but he seemed to be completely unaffected by the giant heat lamp in the sky.

This is what happens when the sun is outshined by star brighter than itself.

“Are you okay? You look like you could use a break,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

You didn’t want to complain before, but since he was offering, you admitted to it.

“Actually, I’m feeling kind of sick,” you said, rubbing your forehead. Youngjae pulled you to the side by your upper arm, and you stumbled, feeling an onset of nausea and the world spin around you. He sat you on a nearby bench in the shade and bent down to your eye level.

“Do you need some food? Anything to drink?” he frowned.

“Too warm,” you said, not sure if you were referring to the sun or his hand resting on yours.

“I’ll get you something to drink. Just wait here,” he said, jumping up from the ground and running off to the nearest vending machine. He returned a few moments later a can of lemonade and cracked it open.

“I’ve heard this brand was pretty good, so I thought you might like it,” he said, holding the can out to you. You welcomed the sour aftertaste of the drink and puckered your lips after the first sip.

He sat next to you on the bench and hunched over, folding his hands in his lap. "We can sit here as long as you like. Don't worry about the others - they can handle themselves."

You tipped your head back to chug more of the sweet drink, muttering a small "mhm" with a mouthful before you swallowed. "Is there anything you want to see today? You've been following around the other members until now."

He chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. "Actually, I've always wanted to visit the aquarium, but I've never had the chance," he said.

"Well, why don't we visit it today? I don't mind walking around a building with air conditioning," you said after finishing your drink and tossing the can in the recycling bin next to you. You stood and stretched your arms and legs. "Thanks for that, by the way."

A grin spread across his face, clearly excited to visit the aquarium. "No problem."

The cold rush of air at the entrance of the aquarium building was a welcome reprieve from the humidity of the late spring day. Aside from the white and gray paint on the walls, the entire building glowed with a faint blue tint from the light emanating from the tanks.

Youngjae wandered through the maze of hallways and dead ends with his hand on the small of your back, watching the moving marine life with fascination and wonder. His favorite displays were the brilliantly colored saltwater tanks with their colorful foliage and bright, exotic fish. Your personal favorite was the manatee tunnel. Aquamarine hues of light surrounded you as you walked through the tunnel surrounded by glass and water on all sides, and you watched intently, straining your neck to follow the movement of the majestic sea cows. A small calf swam up to the tunnel window, nudging the glass. You could faintly hear a squeak from the other side of the glass display.

You tapped Youngjae's shoulder and pointed to the calf. "Look, Youngjae!"

"Aww, hey little guy! Where's your mother?" he spoke sweetly to the marine mammal. Just then a larger cow swam up to the window and cried out to the baby. "Ah, there she is."

The tunnel ran the length of the entire south wing of the building, so by the time you arrived on the other side, you saw the setting sun through the small windows of the exit doors. "We should go," you said.

"Yeah," he said calmly, looking back at the tunnel and some of the displays you saw earlier. "Thanks for coming."

When you opened the doors again, you were struck by the warm air, making you remember how nice you'd had it inside the aquarium. You scanned the area in front of you from the top of the stairs before you started your descent, hoping to find some of the other members as the park would close soon. Before you knew it, they were calling out to you from afar.

"Y/N!" Yugyeom called out as he sprinted over to you. "We finally found you! Where did Youngjae go?" He rested his palms on his knees, panting when he finally caught up to you.

You hadn't realized he'd slipped away so quickly until Yugyeom pointed it out. You shrugged. "Not sure. He was just here a minute ago."

"Hopefully he comes back soon. JB is getting cranky, and he's still our driver," Bambam said, casually walking up behind the youngest member. "We need to go home."

Attention, Seoul Grand Park Zoo will be closing in 15 minutes. Please note locker rentals and the park gift shops will be closing at this time, a voice announced over the park intercom system.

You whined, disappointed that the shops were closing so soon as you wanted a souvenir for yourself. "That's a shame. I wanted to check out the gift shop," you said with a sigh. "There's always next time, I guess. Let's go find Youngjae."

"I'm right here," a familiar honeyed yet deep voice spoke from behind you. You jumped when a soft object poked and tickled your back, and you looked over your shoulder at Youngjae who held out a small stuffed otter in his outstretched hand.

You couldn't contain the squeal that escaped your lips. "Oh my god - it's so cute!"

"You said otters were your favorite, right?" he said. Your face flushed - you couldn't believe he remembered something so small that you had only off-handedly mentioned once in his office.

You nodded and hesitantly took the plushie from his hands. "Yes, thank you. You didn't have to-"

"I wanted to," he said, flashing the most charming smile your way. The two of you were caught up in your world until Jaebum, who'd snuck up behind the younger members, cleared his throat loudly.

"Let's get this show on the road, kids," he said.

Youngjae looked at you fondly and placed his hand on the middle of your back to usher you forward. "Ready?"

"Mhm."

--

The members of the zoology club crashed for the majority of the car ride back. Their content, sleeping faces brought warmth to your heart and made you giggle as both Yugyeom and Bambam leaned on each other as they slept, mouths hanging wide open. Yugyeom stirred and wiped a trail of drool from his face before going back to sleep, resting his head against the window this time. You envied them. As tired as you were, there was no way you could sleep when you sat in the back of the university van with your entire right side up against Youngjae’s left. The two of you talked in depth about the biology department, his assistantship, and your upcoming final exam in two weeks’ time.

“Sorry I can’t be of much help. Dr. Jacques won’t even tell me what he’s putting in the final,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning downward. “If it were up to me, I’d give you a good score, but I don’t have a say in the matter. I can only grade your lab reports.”

You groaned. “Thanks for trying anyway.”

He patted your thigh and placed his hand on your knee, making you painfully aware of the warmth of his hand. You wished you could see his face in the darkness.

“Soon it will all be over. I can’t wait, to be honest.”

“You must be pretty happy to get rid of us undergraduates, right?” you laughed nervously and gave him a tender smile.

“No, no, it’s not that,” he waved off. “As much as I am looking forward to my break, I enjoy the time I spend with my students.” The sincerity of his smile pierced your heart like a ray of sunshine peeking through a clearing in the trees on a bright, sunny day. You fought the urge to squeal over the brightness reflected in his smile.

“What is it, then?” you asked.

A small hiccup of surprise escaped your lips, and your heart fluttered when Youngjae leaned in and cupped your ear with his hand, his breath tickling your ear and the back of your neck. His next few words left you speechless but in a good way.

He pulled away and searched your face for a reaction - preferably a positive one, but he supposed no reaction could also be considered a positive response. When he realized your struggle to form a coherent response, he reached into the front pocket of his backpack and pulled out a party-size Snicker’s bar and a sharpie. After writing a quick note, he carefully and subtly tucked it into the palm of your hand.

Your moment was interrupted when the street lights leading up to your driveway blinded you, and Jaebum spoke up from the front of the van.

“Do you want me to drive you to your front door, Y/N?” he said.

“No, you can just drop me off here. You won’t be able to get through the gate without my key card,” you said and gathered up your purse and your souvenir otter from Youngjae. Jaebum pulled up as far as he could and put the car in park to let you out.

“Thanks for the day out,” you said.

Youngjae squeezed your shoulder. “See you in class, Y/N.” He waved, and you ducked your head down once more to wave back before slamming the car door shut. You hesitated for a moment, not wanting to leave the boys because that meant the day was over and you’d be alone again. Your hesitation disappeared when Jaebum finally drove away.

Absent-mindedly fiddling with the wrapper of the candy bar in your hand, you took a shortcut across the lawn and through the garden back to your building. Your stomach growled, and suddenly you were thankful for the candy. It had been several hours since you last ate, after all. Just as you were about to tear into the wrapper, you noticed the note on the underside of the flap and held it close to your face to make out the words in the dark.

Call me after finals week. (XXX)-XXX-XXXX - Youngjae :)

Never have you looked forward to finals week, until now.

Youngjae leaned over to cup your ear, and his warm breath tickled your neck. His lips accidentally brushed your ear, earning another muffled squeak from you, and you sensed the smirk on his face, even in the dark. Your heart raced in your chest as he spoke.

“It’s because I can’t date my students.”

[airoasis]

Learn Blockchain Programming (curriculum)

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/learn-blockchain-programming-curriculum/

Learn Blockchain Programming (curriculum)

Hello world it’s Suraj and who’s ready to learn some blockchain for me to be able to write the decentralized applications book two years ago I needed to study blockchain technology hard AF and fast AF and efficiently AF since I was simultaneously traveling through different parts of Asia so if I were to start learning blockchain from scratch today this is the two-month study plan I’d make for myself but I’m gonna open-source it for you wizards since I love you this is a two month curriculum dedicated to in order one week of cryptography two weeks of Bitcoin two weeks of aetherium one week of other crypto currencies and lastly two weeks of decentralized applications but before you do anything else remember to hit the subscribe button if you haven’t yet to stay updated on my content this channel is my life’s work as you learn this technology make sure to follow several blockchain authorities on Twitter to keep up with the pulse in this space and yes in Soviet Russia blockchain authorities follow you oh and for more things to remember before we get started with this curriculum first watch videos at 2x speed and eventually 3x speed as your brain learns to adapt to faster pacing take notes by hand as you watch for memory retention dedicate at least 2 hours every single day to uninterrupted learning and yes that includes weekends and find a study buddy in our slack channel or someone in real life it will help keep you motivated remember this is not a game the links for everything will be in the video description before you get into the weeds with crypto currencies you have to understand why the word crypto is used in cryptocurrency crypto short for cryptography is the art of securing information given some sensitive data it asks the question how do we prevent a third party a an adversary from reading that data most people don’t realize just how crucial cryptography is for Humanity pretty much any kind of money transfer authentication flow and mission-critical system relies very heavily on cryptographic techniques to help maintain secrecy and cryptography itself sits at the intersection of math computer science and even physics but luckily for us its prerequisites aren’t worthy of dedicating weeks of study to we can pick them up in a single well structured cryptography course after reading some reviews it seems that the intro to cryptography course on Coursera is the best option here to get started it’s a seven week course that we’re going to complete in a single week don’t do any of the graded projects until you finish all of the videos knock them out one by one at the end of this week do the final exam for week seven really put in an effort then double check your answers to learn from your mistakes now on to weeks two and three we’re gonna focus on the blockchain that started it all Bitcoin so normally I almost never recommend reading books to learn this kind of thing since videos are so efficient but sometimes there are exceptional books out there like the deep learning book and Where’s Waldo in this case I’m gonna recommend my friend Andreas Antonopoulos book mastering Bitcoin it’s open source and available to read on github Andreas does such a great job of breaking down all the moving parts of the Bitcoin protocol his technical writing skills are next-level there are 12 chapters in this book we’re gonna read two to three chapters every single day until we finish them all pacing ourselves included in the book are technical instructions for configuring and using the Bitcoin protocol go ahead and do those via your terminal if you get an error at some point try to fix it but if no luck don’t get too caught up on it for too long just move on after you’ve completed the book go ahead and the official Bitcoin white paper specifically an annotated version to make it easier to understand those concepts then download a Bitcoin wallet and buy some Bitcoin it can be a really small amount but it’s mostly just to feel like you’re a part of the network and experience the cryptocurrency world firsthand for the second week of Bitcoin learning take the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies course on Coursera when you’re done with that spend the rest of the week building a blockchain that uses the proof-of-work consensus algorithm from scratch in your favorite programming language of choice I’d recommend either Python or JavaScript there’s a great article that explains how to do this that I’ll add to in the links add as many features to it as you can to get some hands-on experience in blockchain technology now that you’ve got a handle on Bitcoin it’s time to go down the second rabbit hole theory on Bitcoin removed the need for an intermediary when sending someone money over the Internet recording all transactions on a public database the etherium developers realized that they could use the same underlying blockchain technology to remove the need for an intermediary for running code think of it like a world computer a decentralized virtual machine to build unsensible applications on top of there’s a free really short aetherium course on udemy that you should first check out to help you understand the etherium architecture then you should read the annotated aetherium white paper for a better understanding it’s much more complex than the Bitcoin one so really take the time to go through all the details it will help you as soon as you start building aetherium apps using the solidity programming language oh and speaking of solidity once you’ve finished the course you can learn solidity using this crypto zombies game where you learn how smart contracts work by building them and applying them to this game world is actually pretty fun lastly black geeks.com has a collection of really in-depth articles on aetherium that I’d recommend checking out just hit them up one by one once you search for the etherium keyword until you understand all the parts of the architecture so Bitcoin and aetherium are out of the way but what about the other billion crypto currencies out there with all of their unique features and ideas are they worthless Yes No some of these projects have synthesized some really great ideas so we should dedicate this week to learning about some of those best ideas I’ve got a great playlist that goes over the crypto currencies I find the most interesting right here on YouTube that you should definitely check out remember to go through the Associated code and helpful learning links in the video description for each of them to get a better understanding you can spread this bit out to an entire week there are rabbit holes you could go down for any of the crypto currencies I talked about from Minh arrows ring signatures to cardano’s settlement slayer let your curiosity guide you this week and for the last part of this curriculum you’re going to wrap it all up by learning about the longer-term vision for all of these technologies decentralized applications start off by reading my book on the topic you can find a free version if you google the name with the word free afterwards also if someone posts a link to the free version in the comments I’ll pin it so you can check it out that’ll take you a full week and a lot of the code is deprecated now because of all the dependencies being updated over time but the pseudo code the ideas and the theories remain for the very last week build a decentralized application yourself pick an idea ride sharing or social networking for example and use the fastest method to prototype approach to build something in a single week and that’s it I just launched my decentralized applications course at the school of AI but we currently got a full class so sign up there if you want to be notified when the next course opens up I hope you found these tips useful please subscribe for more programming videos and for now I’ve got to upgrade the web so thanks for watching

[knights-of-221b-privet-drive]

I was tagged some time ago by @photosynthesizingparkhyungsik and I found some time so here!

THE LAST …

1. drink: water

2. phone call: my mum

3. text message: the bus company to pay my entrance thing lol, and before that: my dad

4. song you listened to: Defying gravity from Wicked

5. time you cried: from sadness: when I heard my mum/ people from my mums side had tried to take me and my sisters from my dad; from happiness: when I got the results of my exam

 HAVE YOU EVER …

6. dated someone twice: no

7. been cheated on: no

8. kissed someone and regretted it: no

9. lost someone special: from dying only some family that I didn’t really know well, so it wasn’t really special, but I once had a really good friend and we kinda grew apart, so that counts I think

10. been depressed: no

11. gotten drunk and thrown up: no, I don’t really drink alcohol (only once in a while a regular mojito but not enough to even get intoxicated)

 LIST THREE FAVOURITE COLOURS (12, 13, 14):

Uuh, the pink of a sunset

The white-blue of winter

The yellow-green when the sun shines through a fresh leaf

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU …

15. made new friends: yes! I went to uni and made one friend and she introduced me to some other people and I think I can call them friends too, and some people of the group I had exercises and practica with are kinda cool too

16. fallen out of love: no

17. laughed until you cried: yeah haha, I laugh a lot, so that happens sometimes

18. found out someone was talking about you: No I don’t think so (at least not in a bad way)

19. met someone who changed you: I think people always influence you so yeah, but I don’t think I changed drastically because of someon

20. found out who your true friends are: goh a bit, though I kinda knew it already

21. kissed someone on your facebook list: no

 GENERAL STUFF

22. how many of your facebook tumblr friends do you know in real life: For Tumblr: If you count just anyone I’ve met in real life: about 7, if you mean ‘have seen more than one time’: 5 I think ; and from facebook I think I know like everyone because I don’t take requests from people I don’t recognise

23. do you have any pets: we have 2 chickens at my dad’s, and we kinda have a cat at my mum’s but we don’t see him a lot anymore :/ the cats in the neighbourhood kinda go everywhere haha

24. do you want to change your name: not really

25. what did you do for your last birthday: do the dishes lol, it was a concert and a eating thing for band, but I had a lot of fun!

26. what time did you wake up: around 10 actually! But it was kinda late yesterday/this morning cause I watched the first episode of star trek tng, but it was a double episode so yeah, sad

27. what were you doing at midnight last night: watching tng haha

28. name something you cannot wait for: going on Erasmus, going to space (though yeah, that’s a dream), earn money, move out

29. when was the last time you saw your mom: like 10 minutes ago when I went to eat rhubarb crumble she made!

30. what is one thing you wish you could change about your life: that my parents never divorced

31. what are you listening to right now: Wicked (the musical)

32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: I don’t think so actually, I could forget someone, but I can’t remember I did

33. something that is getting on your nerves: politics, tumblr’s ‘why isn’t anyone reblogging this’/ ‘Because this is a (insert minority) person no one will reblog this’ like shut up, and also hot weather

34. most visited website: Tumblr, Facebook, Toledo, Wikipedia and Netflix probably

35. elementary school: was catholic, I always had nice teachers, they always sought stuff to keep me busy if I was bored (I wasn’t a lot, but I got to do extra maths exercises etc, also a presentation about space eeey), it had a nice environment with lots of green and a pond where we had to run around during cross-country (?), competing with other schools. Also we had a department for children who had dyslexia/had trouble learning/… (but like for when they couldn’t keep up with other kids you know what I mean?). And also a high school for them, but wtf some of those kids were such assholes, I remember they often smoked, sometimes spit on us while we were on our playground,… I have feared them my whole time there lol. Don’t get me wrong, there were some nice people too, but yeah

36. high school: also catholic lol, it was in a awesome castle, also in a green environment ‘in the middle of nowhere’ (Belgium style :p ), but quite a good education imo, is kinda known as an elite school lol, we only had ‘high studies’: languages/maths/sciences (like not art/care/metal…) so everyone who couldn’t keep up had to go to another school which kinda created the ‘elite’ thing I think. Also because it was not really near a city you had a different kind of people etc

37. college: KU Leuven! (also catholic haha, and I’m not even religious lol) no but it’s a great uni, and indeed ranked as best uni in Belgium I think! And since I study bio-engineering (so science) we’re on Arenberg, and it’s also a rather green and relatively calm environment (it’s a bit outside the city)

38. hair color: brownish

39. long or short hair: short! (still weird to say lol)

40. do you have a crush on someone: on some fictional characters haha, currently especially Jim Kirk eeey

41. what do you like about yourself: my humour I guess, that I can make a bit of music, that I don’t give up too easily

42. piercings: no, I don’t like needles haha

43. blood type: O- I think (I’m sure of ‘O’ haha)

44. nickname: Kaatje, zus, Katie (mostly used by my parents)

45. relationship status: very single

46. zodiac sign: libra

47. pronouns: she/her

48. favorite tv show: Star Trek!

49. tattoos: no, like I said, needles…

50. righty or lefty: Righty

 FIRST …

51. surgery: last year I think, my wisdom teeth got removed

52. piercing: yeah never

53. best friend: the son of friends of my parents, we went alternately to eachother’s after school so we didn’t have to go to day care (?), and we became best friends (everyone thought we were siblings and later a couple haha, but then we grew apart during high school :/ now we only do small talk

54. sport: athletics

55. vacation: I think probably the Alps in France, we always went to the same place, and it was amazing (wow last year we went to the Provence, and we made a stop because my brothers couldn’t handle the long trip in one ride, and we went to a restaurant to eat, and my dad had invited the couple that exploited that chambre d’hôtes and I cried, it had been so long!)

56. pair of sneakers: Kickers I think haha

 right now …

57. eating: nothing

58. drinking: nothing, I’m about to drink some water

59. i’m about to: after this I’m gonna watch another episode of tng probably haha, and maybe playing a bit piano too

60. listening to: Wicked

61. waiting for: nothing really much actually, maybe graduation and moving out

62. do you want kids: no, probably not

63. do you want to get married: goh, idk, not for the sake of getting married, but maybe if it’s handy

64: what career do you want:  in general: where I go to work without having to complain everyday about how work sucks More detailed dream career: I’d like to do some research first, then, when candidacies for the esa astronaut class open I will apply, then go to space and do some research too, and then maybe teaching biology to high school

 WHICH IS BETTER …

65. hugs or kisses: as far as I know hugs, though with the right person I think kisses could be even better because it’s more intimate

66. lips or eyes: eyes

67. shorter or taller: rather taller, but doesn’t matter that much

68. older or younger: no opinion actually

70. nice arms or nice stomach: goh, maybe arms? idk

71. sensitive or loud: rather sensitive I think?

72. hook up or relationship: relationship

73. troublemaker or hesitant: hesitant

 HAVE YOU EVER …

74. kissed a stranger: no

75. drank hard liquor: is rhum hard liquor? But only in mojito lol, oh and once some sips of whiskey-cola I think

76. lost glasses/lenses: yeah, kinda, when we went swimming with school I had dry eyes after it and was constantly rubbing my eyes and they fell out (the lenses haha)

77. turned someone down: uhm, not for a relationship, I haven’t had someone for that haha, but I did turn some kids down for a dance when I was like 11

78. had sex on the first date: noo haha, you need to date first haha (but I don’t think I would have sex on my first date unless I know that person already good)

79. broken someone’s heart: maybe I think

80. had your heart broken: kinda

81. been arrested: haha, no

82. cried when someone died: yes

83. fallen for a friend: if I fall in love, I almost always fall for people I know pretty good, so yes, actually three times, but I always think about it a lot, and I think it’s mostly just a crush

 DO YOU BELIEVE IN …

84. yourself: actually most of the time yes, though of course I doubt myself often

85. miracles: goh, some things are just too coincidental you kow? But I don’t really believe in: ‘if I think about this or that, it will happen’

86. love at first sight: I think for love you need to know a person, you can’t fall in love with someone you don’t know imo

87. santa claus: Here in Belgium it’s just buying eachother presents, but yeah I did believe in Sinterklaas until I was 9 or so

88. kiss on the first date: yes, especially if you’ve known eachother before that, but I think if the date’s long enough you can get to know a person well enough

89. angels: not in the religious sense

OTHER …

90. current best friends name: Sarah!

91. eye color: blueish grey

92. favorite movie: probably pride and prejudice (2005) I think?

I tag @fvfvxcvxcv, @thefirebreathingbitchqueen, @channybatch, @mats-bloody-hat, of course only if you want to!

[boredomoverloadmy]

College (in a nutshell)

So I’m officially done with college *insert party streamers emoji*. Actually I’ve been out for some time now but I have yet to get off my lazy arse to do anything genuinely productive (other than trying to master a few piano pieces with little progress). Mum put me in charge of most of the domestic work at home and chauffeuring the kid here and there and the groceries and all that jazz. I would go back to that part-time teaching gig but I reckoned I’d only be around for awhile and mum agreed to give me some allowance (mostly for the groceries though). But that’s beside the point of this post now isn’t it?

So now I’m going to talk about my college experience. Nothing special really and I don’t think I’ll be able to go into detail about it so if you have any questions feel free to ask. I have an ask section up there *points to the top of tumblog* and I (finally) turned my tumblr notifications on so I may be able to answer a.s.a.p this time.

I started my foundation studies June last year (2016) at Kolej MARA Kulim, Kedah affectionately known as KMKu under the Pre-U USM program. Basically its just like any other foundation like if you’d go to Universiti Malaya’s or UNIMAS foundation. But the difference for my program was that I had a sponsor (MARA) who would be supporting my degree studies later on, given that I reached the minimum requirements. Subsequently, those in my program were more or less “tagged” as to which field of study they would be pursuing post-foundation. I and 36 other people who were my classmates in college were tagged to do Medicine in USM-KLE in India later this year (2017). I’m not going to go into detail as to what USM-KLE is because I’m saving that for another post.

I’ve actually had a lot of people ask me why I didn’t choose to return to the UK. I have my reasons, mostly because I decided to pursue Medicine in the way that I wanted to. I’m the kind of person who chooses caution and strategy above everything else, so taking IB or A-levels to me was out of the question from the very get-go. Again, I’m saving the story behind that for another post.

Going off to literally the other side of Malaysia was both exciting and scary for me. When I was in secondary school it never really occurred to me that I’d be leaving Kuching because at the time my mindset was “ace SPM get good grades other stuff comes later”. So when the day finally came, I had no idea what to do with myself. My teachers would give you the illusion that I had it all figured out, just as I had the illusion that all my other seniors had it all figured out. The truth is, you never really do have it figured out. No matter how shiny your high school reputation looks, in the end we’re all just winging it one way or the other. But that’s okay. That’s life. Just go where the wind takes you and you’ll arrive to the place you’re meant to be eventually.

There was another person from Sarawak going to the exact same college for the exact same course. Her name is Martina and she was introduced to me by my old primary schoolmate over WhatsApp. She’s not from Kuching but we both decided that it would be better to be in contact with someone from the same state for travelling arrangements. We left from different airports though, I took a direct flight from Kuching to Penang while she had to transit via KLIA from Sibu. On some occasions we’d wait for each other at Penang airport to catch a taxi to Kolej, which was in Kedah (it was easier to go there via Penang rather than Alor Setar because it was closer).

Registration day for me was chaotic. It wasn’t because of the management though, I’d say that our seniors, Oddytix did a good job handling that and orientation. It was because I was missing some documents and I FREAKED (not an exaggeration). The fact that the only way to go home to re-do things was by flight did not help either. Before I left I double triple checked my documents so when I made such a big blunder by not printing out some of the required documents I felt so incompetent and I didn’t want to trouble my parents more because not causing trouble for my parents was why I accepted the offer in the first place. But in the end I guess it just added fuel to the fire. Throughout the first semester I found myself drowning more in the paperwork for the offer than the actual studying; constantly having to check in with my parents and the post office about my corrected documents. Note to self : when I decide to set up a scholarship someday brief the scholars as to how it’s done to save everyone’s time and energy.

My batch (which would be named Erovra) consisted of about 100+ students which was a few people more than the Transformers (my high school batchmates). We were divided into 3 classes, USM A, B, and C (see the use of the Oxford comma there? I just learned that haha). My class was USM C which consisted of 36 other people bound for India, a few people more than in 5 Delta (my graduating high school class). Each class was further divided into four tutorials, e.g. C1, C2, C3, and C4. My tutorial was C1 which had 11 people, 4 boys and 7 girls (Alya joined a bit later) including myself. Regrettably my tutorial was late to come together unlike other tutorials which bonded quite closely in the first semester. Towards the end of foundation I realised the reason why other tutorials called us C paling pelik and believe me it is a fact I will not deny (especially Lah I had no idea you were like that tbh hahahaha). 

Generally speaking, the first impression I got from my classmates was that God had copy-pasted 30+ versions of Stephen Goh Kok Yew, except some were female and none were Chinese or aspiring body-builders (inside joke. Transformers 1115 will understand). They were so studious that if Ben were to enroll in this program Ben would have been shocked and disgusted; shogusted (but deep down inside Ben is super rajin too don’t deny it). But I guess that’s how things are going to be from now on. After all, you wouldn’t want your future doctor to be a lazy bum now would you?

Before I forget, in this college there are several programs doing foundation studies (UniKL, MKPM or the regular matriculation, UMK and USM) and each program is referred to as a “unit”.  For accommodation the girls in my unit stayed at the Fatimah Az-Zahra block or FAZ. Each room had a minimum of 4 occupants. One of my roommates, Awin, was my classmate while the other two, Nida and Bella, were from USM A. Everything in basic in kolej was provided despite the fact that it still felt like we were in boarding school. For me, it was a level above what I’m used to, mainly because it had a laundromat and washing machine. I washed my all my clothes by hand in boarding school, even during my senior years and even when my hands started to have the skin peeling and flaking off because my skin doesn’t take too well with detergent. That was mainly because the one and only washing machine in my block would already be used and most often it was the juniors who used it but I was too lazy to play the seniority card. I don’t do that shit even if you’re what people would say “kurang ajar” with me. Berkat and kifarah are my magic words. But in kolej thankfully I didn’t have to worry about that which is a huge improvement, as opposed to what other people would say (people who’s schools can afford a lot of washing machines I suppose). Plus, food was provided albeit being the standard asrama food. My friends under other scholarships complained that most of their money went to buying food which was expensive in their area, so even though I found out I couldn’t stomach ikan keli (new discovery) for the most part I took what I got.

Studying and exams felt way different for me. Perhaps it was because I was surrounded by people who came from different kinds of schools. I felt a bit out of place honestly. My strong points were always reading and humanities subjects (Sejarah, Language, that sort) but now I had to put more emphasis on pure sciences. I constantly fell behind in Maths especially (no surprise there frankly) but I sought help from Muja and Zatil mostly which lead to small but consistent improvements. The lecturers were also really nice and helpful and we could approach them whenever. However I felt that my downfalls were caused by time, not that I didn’t have enough but maybe because I had too much free time (you can gasp now). For 2 years I had become accustomed to starting class at as early as 6.30 a.m. and finishing at 6.00 p.m. only to continue after Maghrib until 11.00 p.m. that having gaps in between felt strange and I felt I could have managed my time a lot better than I did (*highlights this point as a reminder for degree studies*). 

Two major components of my program to India (other than the exams) were the interview and IELTS. The interview was as straightforward as a medical school interview could get. IELTS was the rumoured killer. IELTS is basically some big shot English exam in which you have to score a certain “band” to be allowed to study or work overseas. Our requirement was 6.5/9.0 overall minimum. Now if you knew me personally you’d say “Faqihah mesti band 9 punya” which is close but not really. I scored an 8.5/9.0, which actually serves me right because out of the 30 hours access to the IELTS online learning module I used a total of 0.00 hours and the night before IELTS I was watching Moana with Bella. I kid you not and yes you can slap me later. My main downfall was the writing component. I wrote under 250 words for the second essay which was unusual for me and could have resulted in getting a 5 , I got a 7.5 for the writing component which was okay and my reading, speaking and listening components helped quite a lot. During the writing test I was very much distracted by the terrible kindergarten pencil and the crazy old guy who was making a fuss before the writing test. But as I’ve said again again this year, “as long as I pass what is required its more than enough”. 

I’m not going to lie. There were some moments where I doubted myself; whether I had what it takes to do medicine. I think each of us felt that way somewhere along the line, just no one dared to say it out loud or else there’d be people being condescending and saying “eh kata nak sangat jadi doktor kan”. But again, the truth is no one ever really has anything figured out. There were many times I thought to throw in the towel and go home. That would have been easier. But I realised the cliche of it all, that if it was easy everyone would do it. And that is the naked truth. You think you’re in control of things but it actually isn’t you. It’s Allah’s doing. Every. Step. Of. The. Way. You’re only expected to do your best with the challenges at hand. You don’t need any other reason to do it, only that Allah showed you that this is the way; and then you start walking. Crawl, if you must. As long as you follow it. 

I know that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there will be many more moments like these to come, but I’m writing this down so that when those moments come I’ll know where to look for the courage to keep going. And I hope after reading this, you will too.

[newshour]

Coral bleaching is killing reefs. Is the answer a great migration?

BY NSIKAN AKPAN AND MATT EHRICHS

HAMILTON, BERMUDA — “So, the sub is going to tip forward, that’s normal. Then it’s going to roll on its back, just tip back a little bit, that’s also normal. Here we go!”

That’s my co-pilot Kelvin Magee. The two of us are barefoot inside the Nomad, a two-person submersible. The captain shouts orders as the crew work cranes and levers.

Divers paddle nearby, ready to guide our path or rescue us. Everyone is tense because the water is choppy. One wrong wave could toss the 7,000-pound Nomad into the ship’s stern. Magee, a member of the Nekton mission, flips a switch, and our four-hour journey to the seafloor begins.

Then the ocean swallows us. The submersible drops 110 feet in four minutes, as the sunlight fades. Rather than feel suffocated by claustrophobia, the opposite happens. The dwindling sunrays reveal a welcoming expanse, full of tranquility.

As we descend, my mind drifts to the corals below and their collective fate around the world. Many creatures will lose against global warming, but coral reefs are exceptionally vulnerable.

The Nekton Mission is an alliance of 30 organizations conducting the longest seafloor survey in history. Think of it as a physical exam for the ocean. Future groups will be able to use the mission’s baseline findings to chart how oceans will respond to human-made threats like global warming. The project is sponsored by XL Catlin, a global insurance company from Ireland that has sponsored similar environmental surveys since 2009. None of the work is proprietary, and the data are open access so other researchers can use them.

Nekton scientists will coast through the Gully Marine Protected Area, a large underwater canyon near Nova Scotia, and will explore the swirling gyre of the Sargasso Sea.

Alex Rogers, Oxford conservation biologist and Nekton chief scientist

It is day 16 of the mission, and Alex Rogers, Nekton’s chief scientist and an Oxford conservation biologist, is diving in a twin submersible called Nemo. The plan is to plunge 850 feet at Tiger, a site off southeast Bermuda.

“This place is called Tiger because of tiger sharks, so who knows, you might even see one of the ocean’s spectacular predators while you’re down there,” Rogers had said earlier that morning at a prep meeting aboard the Baseline Explorer, a 150-foot research vessel. Shipping containers littered the deck. Some contained diving supplies for the volunteers from Project Baseline, a global citizen science initiative of 10,000 underwater explorers. Other containers housed fully equipped labs.

ScienceScope joined Nekton on this voyage to answer an important question: More than a third of the planet’s reefs are threatened by climate change, but can they adapt?

The Great Barrier Reef raised this question early last year. The entire reef didn’t die despite what you may have read in a viral fake report in Outside Magazine. Yet in 2016, a 435-mile portion of the northernmost section of the Great Barrier Reef suffered bleaching — the largest event on record — and 67 percent of the coral in that area died. Bleaching events covered the central and southern reef in 1998 and 2002, meaning the majority of Great Barrier Reef’s 134,000 square miles has suffered massive bleaching in the last 20 years. If total death were to strike Great Barrier Reef — the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem — Australia’s economy would lose $5.7 billion.

“People don’t realize the thing we’re trying to keep alive is the size of Italy,” Brett Lewis, a marine researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, told me via phone. Lewis studies the mechanics of coral bleaching — how it happens step by step.

Bleaching doesn’t always kill coral. It’s a survival tactic employed by zooxanthellate corals — species that sap nutrients from algae embedded in their polyps. When algae face sustained warming or other stress, their photosynthesis breaks down, and hazardous substances known as “reactive oxygen species” emerge like toxic waste.

The coral respond by expelling the algae — and it can be violent! When Lewis and colleagues exposed Heliofungia actiniformis, a mushroom coral, to extended periods of heat in a lab tank, the critters responded by expanding and contracting like balloons during the algae eviction.

“Imagine you or I just sitting there, and all of a sudden our tissue inflates to 340 percent of our current size,” Lewis said. “This expansion is very new. This is the first time that it’s been documented in coral bleaching.”

Heliofungia actiniformis coral exposed to thermal stress

However, it won’t be the last. Coral can recuperate from bleaching, once temperatures drop and algae populations recover. (The coral in Lewis’ experiment recovered and are alive today).

But elevated sea temperatures caused by global warming mean algae and coral may have less time to recover between bleaching events. That’s why coral died in droves when El Nino hit the northern Great Barrier Reef in early 2016.

Take a closer look, and a pattern emerges. The worst carnage tends to involve coral in shallow water, which is a trend seen across the globe. So far, one-fifth of the world’s shallow water reefs have perished, according to a report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. Rogers and others predict mass bleaching events, once decadal events, will happen once or twice a year for most shallow water coral by 2050.

A dire prediction, unless of course, the coral pick up and leave.

When temps go high, can coral go low?

As Nemo and Nomad plunged deeper into the Atlantic, the blue deepened as seawater more readily absorbed the reds, oranges and yellows in the sunlight. Picture the shades between dead of night and predawn, and you’ll know the color.

We had ventured into the mesophotic zone — a colder, more thermally stable region that might serve as a refuge for corals affected by bleaching.

Located 131 to more than 500 feet underwater, this twilight zone escapes the warming waters and other anthropogenic threats like waste runoff, which tend to pool near the sea surface. Most mesophotic coral reefs are left over from 18,000 years ago on continental slopes, when sea level was 400 feet lower than today. Unlike surface corals, mesophotic species are a mixture of those dependent on algae and corals that feed on other sea creatures.

Scientists record coral captured by divers in the Tiger region of Bermuda

All corals start as little larvae that get swept around by currents, before attaching in a single spot. So, scientists like Rogers are investigating reef connectivity — the extent to which shallow water reef species exist in the mesophotic zone too. Mesophotic reefs could function as migration stations for shallow water coral and fish during times of crisis, which is known as the deep water refugia hypothesis.

Magee flicked on Nomad’s lights, revealing a garden of corals spread across Bermuda’s sharply sloped seabed. We saw oodles of butterfly fish and pink roughtongue bass swimming through twisted wire corals, gorgonian sea fans and hydrocorals — a type of irregular sea fan. Neon green moray eels stuck their necks from the seabed. Oh look! A slipper lobster!

The submersibles are equipped with filming equipment, so the researchers can document the biodiversity. Each has a low-power laser that serves as an underwater ruler. By pulsing into the seafloor, the laser judges physical perspective so the team can measure the sizes of fish and corals.

A five-foot-long dog shark whipped from behind a natural bridge, and then darted away. His departure raised a question: How does this survey grasp the habitat’s full diversity when so many creatures skitter off?

The answer is environmental DNA. Rogers explained the concept, via radio, as Nemo cruised next to us at an 850-foot depth.

“The idea is when there are animals and other organisms present in the environment, they release cells,” Rogers said. Skin cells, scales and poop gets left behind, with DNA packed inside. Imagine if you put your hand in a big glass of water, and a few cells fall off your hand. Scientists can take that water and sequence it. A set of long plastic bottles hang off the Nomad’s bow for this purpose.

Later, the biosurvey data will be amassed and shared among Nekton’s research team. Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley, a reef ecologist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, collaborates on the project. While Rogers and I coasted along the seafloor, Goodbody-Gringley and a team of Project Baseline divers conducted similar surveys closer to the surface.

“Alex formerly worked in deep corals and has moved up to mesophotic, whereas I started in shallows and have moved down to mesophotic,” Goodbody-Gringley said. “So in a sense, we’re converging.”

The divers double-hosed tanks look like a Jacques Cousteau invention, but the equipment is actually a state-of-the-art rebreather system that recycles the air that they exhale. It permits extra long dives, which are helped by fan-powered scooters.

Divers aboard the Baseline Explorer.

“If we were to do only the 300-foot transects and come straight up, we would have to decompress for about three hours,” Todd Kincaid, Project Baseline director, said later on the ship’s deck. But with the scooter, the divers can travel at 1.5 miles per hour and follow the gentle slope of the sea floor, as they collect observations at a 300-, 200-, 100- and 50-feet-depth. The process take close to three hours, so they can decompress while they work.

Together, the environmental DNA sequencing and visual surveys offer a broad picture of Bermuda’s biodiversity and the connectivity between shallow and mesophotic habitats.

Return to reality

So, that’s it? Mesophotic corals to the rescue! Not so fast.

“We still don’t really know where all of these reefs are, what lives there, and how these communities function,” said Daniel Holstein, a coral reef ecologist at Duke Marine Lab who is unaffiliated with Nekton.

Holstein supports the so-called “deep reef refugia” hypothesis. His research has found deeper corals produce more eggs per polyp relative to shallow-water coral.

Yet in some areas, deep and shallow corals aren’t connected by ocean currents, so larvae migration might be naturally impossible. Researchers are thinking about rearing certain types of coral in a lab and the reintroducing them into mesophotic zones. But first they need to know where species can already survive. Yet it’s clear some shallow water species — elegant, lanky elkhorns — can’t make the migration, Holstein said. They rely too heavily on algae and sunlight.

Such is the case in the Caribbean, said University of the Virgin Islands coral reef ecologist Tyler Smith. A 2005 bleaching event and disease have imperiled the diversity of surface-hugging corals. Elkhorn and staghorn corals have declined precipitously, Smith said.

His team reported last year that mesophotic reefs near the Virgin Islands are also susceptible to bleaching. Due to the shape of the seabed, ocean currents can force warm surface water downward, putting mesophotic corals at risk during heat waves. The observation suggests that the deep reef refugia hypothesis may only apply on a location by location basis. Prior observations in the eastern Pacific near Panama found mesophotic fire corals had repopulated shallow regions after multiple El Nino events devastated populations. Fire corals near Panama, for instance, were wiped out for 2,500 years at one point and then returned.

Smith feels the hypothesis needs an edit. It isn’t that cold and deep versus warm and shallow dictate coral survival. It’s the change relative to the regular temperature.

“What you really need to have are environments that stay consistently cool relative to their average conditions,” Smith said. So if coral have already adapted to repeated temperature fluctuations in a particular area, then those reefs may persist through future climate change. Hence why Goodbody-Gringley, Rogers, Nekton and leagues of ecologists are scurrying around the globe in an attempt to identify which coral ecosystems are most vulnerable.

As Nemo and Nomad depart the seafloor, the coral forests fade into the background, but the scientists’ concerns remain. The submersibles race our air bubbles to the surface. I bid farewell to the sea cucumbers and slipper lobsters. Our sub’s dome breaches. Reality returns.

[biofunmy]

Playa del Rey, Los Angeles: Civic Pride Soars in This Tiny Beach Community

John and Sue Campbell loved their home in Bel Air, with its privacy, swimming pool and sweeping views. But in December 2017, as the Skirball Fire raced through Bel Air and the slopes of the Sepulveda Pass, scorching hundreds of acres and sending residents fleeing, their quiet cul-de-sac with only one way in and out began to feel dangerous.

Then came 2018, and with it the Woolsey Fire, which ripped through the canyons of Los Angeles and broke records for destruction in California. Mr. Campbell, 66, and Ms. Campbell, 62, decided they’d had enough.

“The fires just kept raging,” said Mr. Campbell, who grew up in Britain and is the founder of Palawan Productions, a music production company. “The helicopters would fly so close that we could make out the face of the pilot. We would wake up and our entire place would be covered in soot. It was very frightening.”

They sold their three-bedroom, three-bath home for just over $2 million and headed to Marina del Rey, where they keep a boat docked, living in a temporary apartment at the Marina Bay Club while they searched for a new home. They knew little about Playa del Rey, the tiny, funky beach community wedged between Marina del Rey, El Segundo and Los Angeles International Airport. But much like the new home they eventually moved into, the neighborhood, they realized, was well worth a second look.

In April they paid $1.5 million there for a new home with three bedrooms, 27-foot ceilings and windows offering sweeping views of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve and its egrets and blue herons.

“This is a friendly, tight-knit community where shops and the beach are all within walking distance,” said Mr. Campbell. “In our old home we would sit on our porch and look at the view and think it was wonderful, but we wouldn’t get up and do anything.”

The Ballona Wetlands also lured Wesley Bullock and Jhoanna Pugrad to Playa del Rey.

Mr. Bullock, 34, and Ms. Pugrad, 29, were renting in Marina del Rey when they began their house hunt. They only discovered Playa del Rey because of their regular bike rides down the seven-mile Ballona Creek Bike Path, which separates the two neighborhoods.

“All of Los Angeles’s beach communities are so congested and they’re surrounded by tourists,” said Ms. Pugrad, an accounting manager for Snap Inc., the company that developed Snapchat. “Playa del Rey has a huge beach that felt untouched. It shot to the top of our list.”

The couple landed in a 1,300-square-foot townhouse with two bedrooms, two baths and a bonus room, with access to a gym, pool and tennis courts. Their double-pane windows block out the noise from LAX, and on the weekends, they say, they love staying local.

“My job can be stressful,” said Mr. Bullock, a contracts manager for a number of tech companies. “Living in the neighborhood, I’ve noticed a difference in terms of staying grounded.”

Mr. Bullock and Ms. Pugrad have been dating for seven years. Both are well acquainted with the adjacent community of Playa Vista, where planned live-work-play communities and campuses for Google, Verizon and YouTube have sprouted up in two decades of frenzied development. Playa del Rey, Mr. Bullock said, is the antithesis of all that.

“The reasons we moved to Playa del Rey are the same reasons we would never want to move into a tech-impacted community like Playa Vista,” he said. “We share the same admiration for Playa del Rey as the people who have lived here for many years. We definitely don’t want to change it.”

Prince O’Whales, a quintessential Southern California dive bar, is a favorite among locals in Playa del Rey.Credit…Adam Amengual for The New York Times

What You’ll Find

In August 2018, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to block the construction of the Legado 138 project, a mixed-use complex comprising 72 apartment units and 7,500 square feet of commercial space along Culver Boulevard. It was a huge win for local advocates, who had spent months campaigning against the proposal, arguing it would trigger a development rush and imperil the culture of Playa del Rey.

“When you look at Playa del Rey, you know you are not in Marina del Rey, Venice or Manhattan Beach,” the advocates wrote in a change.org petition that collected 4,390 signatures. “Playa del Rey is the last true small beach community left in Los Angeles.”

The language of that petition, entitled “Tell Legado to Fit In or Go Home,” offers a glimpse of the fierce sense of protectiveness many longtime residents feel over the community. There is no Starbucks in Playa del Rey, no upscale chain restaurants and no high-rise buildings.

Buildings, in fact, are capped at 37 feet or three stories, which gives the area the feel of a small village — albeit one with dive bars and a constant low roar from airplanes taking off and landing at LAX.

Around Culver Boulevard, a handful of new businesses, including Playa Provisions (from “Top Chef” winner Brooke Williamson) and the wine bar Bacari PDR share real estate with old standbys like the bar Prince O’Whales and the hamburger joint The Shack.

8324 DELGANY AVENUE | A four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house, built in 1929 on 0.16 acres, listed at $2.75 million. 855-789-0891Credit…Adam Amengual for The New York Times

What You’ll Pay

Despite residents’ efforts to fight gentrification, Playa del Rey isn’t immune to the tech boom in its backyard. But while prices have been creeping upward, the median home price in the community is still much lower than in nearby beach towns like Venice and Santa Monica.

In 2017, there were 276 single-family homes and condos on the market in Playa del Rey, at a median sales price of $697,500, according to Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. In 2018, there were 239 homes on the market, at a median sales price of $762,000. In 2019, there were 227 homes on the market, at a median sales price of $777,000.

Renters should expect to pay about $2,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment and $4,000 to $5,000 for a three-bedroom.

330 REES STREET | A three-bedroom, two-bath house, built in 1953 on 0.12 acres, listed at $1.599 million. 424-280-7400Credit…Adam Amengual for The New York Times

The Vibe

“Everybody is so intertwined here,” said Tom Corte, 70, a realtor with ERA Real Estate who has lived in the area since 1953. “There’s a sense of identity.”

Mara Epstein-Saidiner, 68, says that sense of belonging became so important to her and her husband, Grant Saidiner, 65, that when a family health crisis and bankruptcy forced them to sell their three-bedroom home two years ago, she insisted on staying in Playa.

“I said no matter what happens, we’re staying in the neighborhood,” said Ms. Epstein-Saidiner, who grew up in New York City and is the director of sales and marketing for Zalo USA, which makes high-end adult products.

8340 MANITOBA STREET, NO. 2 | A one-bedroom, one-bath condo, built in 1969, listed at $525,000. 310-766-1863Credit…Adam Amengual for The New York Times

The couple bought their home in 1999 for $340,000. They sold it for just over $1 million, and now rent a townhouse nearby with a rooftop garden.

Over the decades, Ms. Epstein-Saidiner became involved in Playa del Rey’s protests against development, which have run the gamut from protecting the wetlands and beach dunes to fending off large-scale developers. “They don’t like change here, they don’t want a Starbucks in our little town, and they’ll prevent things like that,” she said. “It’s a little time capsule of a place and it’s a very close-knit community.”

The Schools

Students in Playa del Rey are served by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Nearby elementary schools include Paseo Del Rey Elementary School (a science magnet school), Loyola Village Elementary (a fine and performing-arts magnet school) and Playa Vista Elementary.

During the 2018-19 school year, 44 percent of third-graders at Paseo Del Rey, 53 percent of third-graders at Loyola, and 81 percent of third-graders at Playa Vista met benchmarks for English language arts on the California Smarter Balanced Assessment test, compared with 43 percent districtwide and 49 percent across California.

During the same year, 23 percent of third-graders at Paseo Del Rey, 55 percent of third-graders at Loyola, and 81 percent of third-graders at Playa Vista met benchmarks in math, compared with 44 percent across the district and 50 percent across California. (According to the California Department of Education, students with scores at or above benchmark levels on these tests are ready for higher-level coursework.)

Most high schoolers attend Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, where during the 2017-18 school year, 60 percent of students taking the SAT exam met benchmarks for English, compared to 56 percent districtwide and 71 percent statewide; 24 percent met benchmarks for math, compared with 31 percent districtwide and 51 percent statewide. (For the SATS, the College Board defines students as “college ready”when their test scores meet a benchmark of 480 in English and 530 in math.)

The Commute

The eight-minute drive from Playa del Rey to Playa Vista can take up to 20 minutes in traffic. Downtown Los Angeles is about 30 minutes away, and the drive to LAX is about 10 minutes.

The History

In the 1870s, developers attempted to dredge the Santa Monica Harbor in what is now Playa del Rey. Its first land development, built in 1921, was called Palisades del Rey; the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille was among its homeowners. After decades of building, the city of Los Angeles seized many of the homes in the city’s southern portion to make way for an expansion of LAX.

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.

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What You Can Expect from EdSurge in 2019

EdSurge is redefining its mission.

Eight years ago, we started EdSurge to bridge the emerging communities of edtech developers and users. Using digital technology to deliver curriculum, support professional development and myriad other uses seemed novel; educators who tried them were pioneers.

Now technology has become intertwined with education in countless ways: Few schools lack a student information system and many administrators are becoming savvier about data protection and digital privacy. Teachers routinely share homework and resources electronically and turn to applications that give them a peek at how their students are navigating new concepts rather than waiting for an end-of-semester exam. And at our Fusion conference in October, we were thrilled to hear one education leader after another describe how their communities were changing their practices or rethinking how they wanted to teach because technology had opened up doors.

Even better: Educators, parents and increasingly students around the globe are engaged in rich and complex conversations about what kind of learning environments they want to create or experience. Technologies—from digital curriculum to the latest ideas in artificial intelligence—have given us all a broader collection of tools to support learning, whether that happens in formal settings or any other part of our lives.

So beginning in 2019, the EdSurge team is devoting ourselves to the next leg of the journey, to writing, researching and connecting leaders in education, technology and the communities that support them around the future of learning.

By focusing on the future of learning, we hope to underscore that we all are making choices around how we learn. We’re choosing how we learn and teach; how we build relationships between teachers, mentors, peers and students; when and where we learn; how we support learning throughout our entire lives and countless other issues.

As we chart these paths, choosing the tools—and the technologies—that support us is critical. That means EdSurge will dive even deeper into new technologies and their implications. We’ll chronicle how educators and learners are rethinking practices. And as the old saying goes, with power comes great responsibility. So we will ask tough questions of educators and technologists as we explore the direct and indirect consequences of changing technologies. And we’ll look for stories across the age spectrum—from early childhood education to adult learners.

I’m also pleased to share that we have some great allies to help us. In the fourth quarter of this year, we closed a $2.5 million fundraise. Along with many of our current investors, we received support from Golden Angels, and investors Deborah Quazzo and Jason Palmer. Central to the deal are two new partners for EdSurge, both based in China: JMD.edu, a news, events and research group very much like a cousin to EdSurge, and the Chinese education company TAL Education Group. The founder and CEO of JMD, Sha Mei, will also join the EdSurge board.

Our news stories carry an editor’s note if the story mentions any person or organization that is a direct investor in EdSurge; we believe that kind of disclosure is important. Furthermore, all our investors also signed a statement acknowledging that neither they nor any group affiliated with them will receive special attention from EdSurge.

We also doubled-down on building EdSurge’s reputation as a trusted education media brand. We are deeply honored to share that Raju Narisetti, who now heads the Knight-Bagehot Journalism Fellowship program at the Columbia School of Journalism, is also joining our board. Raju has an extensive background in building respected media organizations, including his time at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, his days as a founder of India’s Mint publication and as CEO of Gizmodo Media Group.

Our recent reader survey gave us a fresh look into the topics and the questions that concern you the most. (Thank you for weighing in!) Based on that, we’re planning to focus our writing, research and events around a number of big themes relevant in the US and elsewhere, particularly in China. These will include:

Developments in teaching and learning, from the science of learning development to personalized learning and whole-child education;

Trends in technology that supports learning, including emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence along with privacy and data issues;

Leadership issues in education from broad topics such as managing people to pragmatic issues such as salary gaps;

The business of education technology, including issues relevant to institutions (such as procurement) and those central to companies, such as business models and financing;

The future of work from an education perspective, namely what we aim to do to prepare our students (and ourselves) for the world ahead.

We hope you’ll join us both online and at many of the events that we’re planning: We’re excited to share that we’ll host our Immersion workshop for entrepreneurs just ahead of the ASU + GSV Summit in April. We’re ramping up more podcasts and webinars, an exciting fresh Fusion conference, deep research reports and our jobs board.

Even as technology has been woven into the learning we do across all ages, all of us—including learners, educators and technologists—are becoming more sophisticated about what tools we use to help us learn. We’ve seen technology unlock great opportunities—introducing us to people and places and concepts we never dreamed possible. At the same time, it can also become a cauldron for anger and abuse, making it too easy to wedge ourselves into insular and barren corners.

The best way we know to navigate through the excitement and the complexity of what lies ahead is to keep the conversation going. So consider this your open invitation to reach out to us: Send us a note, come by one of our events (either live or online)—but do share with us your hopes and concerns, what you like and, yes, what you don’t.

Thank you for taking this journey with us. We’re all learning, every step of the way.

What You Can Expect from EdSurge in 2019 published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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5 Rules (and One Secret Weapon) for Acing Multiple Choice Tests

When it comes to taking multiple choice tests, there’s this common piece of advice that often gets thrown around. “When in doubt, always choose C.” Right? Or maybe for you it was B ’cause this advice comes from everywhere. Maybe you heard it from your dad or your teacher or you read it on the internet. I’m pretty sure that I heard it from some kid in my eighth grade history class named Jimmy, but as Abraham Lincoln once didn’t say, “Always independently verify advice given to you “by eighth graders named Jimmy.” Truer words have never not been said.

So today we are gonna go over some more well-founded and useful advice that you can use to make sure you ace that next multiple choice test you got coming up in the future. And I’ve got five main strategies to go through as well as one secret weapon of sorts, so let’s just get started. First off, when those test papers flutter down to your desk, don’t just start immediately going through the questions one by one in a linear fashion.

Instead, take a few minutes to go through and skim the test and just get a general overview of the questions. Now, as you’re doing this, you can answer any of the questions that stand out as really, really easy or that you’re really, really confident in, but another thing you’re doing by doing this whole little skim once over the test before you actually start in earnest is you’re priming your brain for some of the questions and details that are on the test as a whole. And this can be really, really useful for a couple of different reasons. One, you’re priming your brain to start thinking about some of the harder questions and we’re gonna get to that in a minute, but number two, sometimes multiple choice tests will have questions that hold details and hints or sometimes outright full answers to other questions on the test.

For example, say you’re taking a history test one day and you come across a question like this. Which American president’s death caused Napoleon to order 10 days of mourning in France? Now, as you’re going over the answers, you can eliminate one of them right off the bat, but the other ones, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, you don’t know which of the three is the correct answer. So maybe you skip it, you go on into the test and then later, you come across a question like, true or false. Even though Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were bitter political rivals during the heyday of their careers, they eventually regained their friendship and kept it until both of their deaths in 1826. Now that question just established that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died in 1826 and say that you knew from some other source that Napoleon himself had died in 1821. If you knew that, then that question answers the previous question because both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are not possible answers, therefore, it’s Washington. These kind of details and questions aren’t always gonna crop up in your tests, and in any case, you probably shouldn’t waste a whole ton of your test time digging around for ’em because, you know, preparation is a much better strategy.

You should hopefully come into the test prepared to answer most the questions in the first place, but it can be helpful in certain occasions, so just prime your brain with a little bit of a preliminary pass before you start in earnest. The second technique on my list is what Barbara Oakley’s book A Mind for Numbers calls the Hard Start, Jump to Easy technique. And this is a technique where, basically, you jump into a difficult problem and you spend a couple of minutes thinking really deeply about it, but if you can’t get the answer to that problem, you move on. Now this is something you’re teachers have probably told you in the past, just to save time on your tests, but there’s another benefit that they might not have told you about.

If you spend some time thinking about a hard problem, you’re engaging your brain’s focus mode. And I know this focus and diffused dichotomy is something I talk about a lot in these videos, but it’s really, really important. So while you’re using focus mode, you are concentrating on the problem and you’re using your conscious resources to try to solve it. But once you jump into a different problem, your subconscious resources, the more distributed parts of your brain, work on that difficult problem in the background. And then when you go back to the problem a little bit later, you probably have a better chance of answering it.

Oh, and my apologies to Dr. Oakley, but we have got to get a better name than Hard Start, Jump to Easy technique. So I’m gonna go ahead and recoin it the Tiny the Tiger technique ’cause it’s like that one boss battle in Crash Warped where you spend some time fighting the boss and then you switch over to avoid these tigers and go back and forth from there. Tip number three is to make sure that you read each question on your exam twice. Doing this is really, really important because multiple choice questions can be tricky and because they have a limited number of answers and those answers are just written out for you, it can be really tempting to simply skim over the question very quickly and then go to the answer that looks most familiar. But professors can be pretty sneaky when they’re writing these kinds of questions, so you need to watch out for a few things that can trip you up. For example, some of the questions on your exams might ask you which of the following is not X, Y or Z.

And it can be really easy to fail to see that word, not, if you’re going through really fast and just skimming the questions. Other questions might actually have more than one correct answer and your job there will be to find the answer that is most correct. And of course, in that vein, there are also all sorts of questions that have all of the above or none of the above as potential answers and I am not too proud to admit that in several classes during my college career, I took tests very quickly and failed to see these types of answers on a few questions, which I, of course, got wrong. Tip number four is a tactic that I found personally useful all throughout high school and college and it’s to double check your answers as you get to the end of each page of your test instead of just waiting to do it all at the end.

And the reason this is so useful is that once you get to the end of a page on your test, you probably only have five or 10 questions to go over and because you have so few, you’re probably not gonna rush or get intimidated by the number of questions you have to check and that’s gonna decrease the likelihood that you’ll skip over a dumb mistake or something that just should glaringly stick out and that’s gonna increase your scores. Now this is not a replacement for giving your test a good once-over once you’ve finished it. And I definitely think you should be budgeting time at the outset of the test to do that, but by adding this technique into your test-taking arsenal, you can increase your scores even more. Alright, let’s move on to tip number five here. So if you come across a question that you just can’t get the answer to, or maybe you feel like the answer’s on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t quite get it, try to envision yourself in the room in which you learned that piece of information.

Maybe it was your classroom, maybe it was your normal study spot, but either way, science has shown that if you can envision the area where you learned something, it activates something called context-dependent memory. Basically, humans are more able to remember things when they’re in the context or location in which they learned them, but research done in 1984 showed that if people simply envisioned the place in which they learned something, they can sort of, channel some of that ability even though they’re not physically in that room.

Now, if even that doesn’t work, or maybe you’ve run across a question where you just absolutely have no clue what the answer is, you’ve never seen it before or you just can’t eliminate any of the choices whatsoever, well, it’s time to break out that secret weapon. So, remember our friend Jimmy who gave us that old advice, you know, “When in doubt, pick C?” Well, yeah, Jimmy was wrong, but that’s okay, because instead of following some dumb rule or just randomly guessing, you can actually use statistics to exploit the way in which human beings typically write multiple choice tests.

And that’s because, as the author William Poundstone points out in his book Rock Breaks Scissors, humans are pretty bad at creating actual random distributions of answers. During his research, Poundstone collected over a hundred multiple choice tests from all sorts of different sources. Schools, colleges, drivers exams, online quizzes, you name it, he got it. And that totaled over 2,400 questions. And what he learned from doing statistical analysis on all those questions was pretty surprising. First off, he did discover biases for individual letter answers, but those biases changed based on how many answers were available on the question. For three answer questions, you know, A, B, C, there was no bias. And for four answer questions, the bias turned out to be B, not C, though it was a very statistically small advantage. 28% versus the expected 25%. And then, when we go over to five answer questions, you know, A through E, it was actually E that was the most common answer and C was the least commonly right answer. Those findings are just the type of the iceberg though, and personally, I find them far less interesting than all the other things he discovered.

Including the fact that with true/false questions, there’s a definite bias toward true answers being correct. In his research, 56% of the time, true was the correct answer and only 44% of the time was false the correct answer. Even more interesting and potentially useful to you is the fact that a question has a higher than average likelihood of not having the same answer as the question that came before it.

So if you have one question on a test where you knew the answer was C, you’re definitely sure of that, and then you move on to the next question and you’re stuck, or maybe you’ve narrowed it down to C or D, then it’s likely that D is the answer, not C. And perhaps most astoundingly, for questions that had either an all of the above or none of the above answer present, that answer was correct 52% of the time, which means that if you’re stuck on a question and you can’t narrow it down, that answer’s your best bet. Now even though I had fun calling these findings a “secret weapon” of sorts, I really want to emphasize that you should only use them when you’re completely at a loss and you have to take a shot in the dark.

You should use every other technique in the book to narrow things down, to give yourself some space, to use that Tiny the Tiger technique because, at the end of the day, all you’re doing is exploiting the way that people write tests. You’re not actually learning anything and you’re not actually using your mental faculties to work with the actual information and content of the exam. Anyway, beyond all the tips in this video, the most important aspect to your success on any multiple choice test or any kind of test at all is preparation. And if you want to learn how to prepare for your tests more effectively, I actually just put together a resource on my website called The Ultimate Guide to Acing your Final Exams. And it collects everything that I’ve ever made related to exams, so if you haven’t seen all those videos or you’re looking for a specific tip, you might wanna check it out and you can find it on the card on the screen right now or in the description down below.

Beyond that, if you enjoyed this video, you can give it a like to support this channel, it’s much appreciated, and if you have additional tips on acing your multiple choice tests that I didn’t talk about right here, I would love to hear from you down in the comments below. If you wanna subscribe to this channel and get new videos on being a more effective student every single week, click right there and you can also click right there if you want to get a free copy of my book on earning better grades. Now the recommended video this week is actually something related to this because it’s about a technique called confidence tracking that can help you even further increase your scores on multiple choice tests, so check it out.

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Various method to calm your mind



It’s no secret that our emotional state can affect our learning abilities, and although a bit of anxiety about an exam or upcoming assignment is normal, when that stress builds up too much, it can hinder our ability to take in, process, and store new information. Unfortunately, anxiety is on the rise among students, and according to one study, the number of students declaring a mental health problem has doubled in the last five years. But how and why do stress and anxiety impair our ability to learn?

Research shows that when we’re under stress, the brain simply stops forming new connections. This is because stress and anxiety activate the body’s fight-or-flight response and bring on physiological and psychological changes that enhance our ability to react to danger. For instance, our adrenaline levels will rise, our heart rate and breathing may speed up, blood is diverted to the limbs, and our body temperature may increase.

If this happens while we’re trying to study, however, the brain essentially blocks access to higher processing, which makes it difficult if not impossible to retain new information.

So if you frequently find yourself dealing with stress and anxiety that’s interfering with your studying, here are a few tried and proven tips for managing your learning anxiety.

1. Identify the source of your anxiety

If you’ve been feeling unusually anxious about your learning, it’s important to identify the underlying cause so you can tackle the problem head-on. If you’re unable to identify the source of your anxiety, start keeping a daily journal where you write down the events of the day along with your thoughts and feelings about them. This can help you identify unhealthy patterns and avoid specific things that trigger your anxiety, whether it’s a lack of sleep, unrealistic expectations, or even too much caffeine.

2. Try mindfulness training

Mindfulness is all about being aware of and paying attention to our thoughts and emotions, and research shows that mindfulness training can reduce anxiety and depression. One study from researchers at the University of Cambridge found that mindfulness training can be particularly useful in supporting students who are at risk of developing mental health problems and helping them develop preventative coping strategies.

So what did this mindfulness training entail?

For the study, students were offered eight face-to-face group-based sessions and were also encouraged to practice 15-25 minutes of mindfulness meditation at home, in addition to mindfulness practices like mindful eating and mindful walking. Students who received mindfulness training had lower distress scores after the course and during exam term. In fact, distress scores for the mindfulness group during exam time fell below baseline levels even during exam time, whereas students who had received standard support became increasingly stressed as the year progressed.

3. Seek support

Research shows that getting adequate social support is one of the best ways to cope with major life stresses, and people with good social support networks live longer and are healthier than those with few close relationships.

With this in mind, if a specific class or subject is causing you anxiety, don’t be afraid to approach your teachers, counsellors, or fellow students to ask for extra support. If you’re studying abroad or in another city, it’s also a good idea to allocate time to socialising and building networks in your new location, in addition to keeping in touch with your loved ones back home.

4. Prioritise your physical health

Our mind and body are closely connected, so if you’ve been feeling overly anxious, simply making an effort to eat the right foods, exercise regularly, and get plenty of sleep can already make a big difference to your state of mind.

Regular physical activity has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, and resistance workouts such as weightlifting are linked to reduced anxiety.

Research also shows that certain dietary considerations can relieve anxiety. Complex carbohydrates such as legumes, whole wheat bread, or pasta and starchy vegetables, for example, are metabolised more slowly, which can reduce feelings of anxiety caused by dips in your blood sugar level.

5. Plan and organise

Another way to manage feelings of anxiety that are related to your learning is to get properly organised by breaking coursework into smaller chunks and setting personal goals and deadlines.

Oftentimes, our feelings of anxiety are caused by a feeling of powerlessness, so getting properly organised will help you to regain a sense of control and feel calmer about what needs to be done. If you need some help, check out these tips for scheduling your study time.

6. Distance yourself

Researchers have identified a new strategy to tackle stress and anxiety known as “self-distancing.” It involves talking to ourselves in the third person, which can help us distance ourselves from stressful situations and gain some outside perspective.

Previous research from Michigan State University also shows that talking to yourself in the third person during stressful times can help you control your emotions without any additional mental effort. So instead of asking “Why am I feeling anxious?” you can simply replace the first person pronoun and ask “Why is John feeling anxious?” It’s a subtle change, but one that can make a big difference in how we perceive our situation and emotions.

7. Emphasise positive self-talk

Since we all engage in self-talk whether we realise it or not, one thing that can have a powerful impact our state of mind is focusing on our inner monologue and becoming more aware of how we’re talking to ourselves.

Research shows that while destructive self-talk can cause us to question ourselves, positive self-talk can actually boost our productivity. So when something goes wrong, don’t let your first reaction be to chide yourself with thoughts like “How could you be so stupid?” Instead, try to focus on more positive or constructive thoughts like “I’m glad I tried, even if it didn’t go exactly as planned.”

8. Focus on your breathing

Breathing isn’t something we normally pay much attention to, but when we’re stressed or anxious, we can actually forget to breathe properly and hold in our breath for too long or breathe too quickly, which can cause us to tense up even more and increases our anxious feelings.

So whenever you feel yourself getting tense or anxious, focus on breathing in slowly for five counts, and then breathing out for five counts. By the time you’ve done this simple breathing exercise a few times, you’ll already be noticeably calmer and more composed.

9. Procrastinate productively

Most students are no strangers to procrastination, and according to one survey, between 80 and 95 percent of students procrastinate. But while it’s true that procrastination can be a student’s worst enemy, some experts believe that it’s possible to use this tendency to put things off for good.

In his book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy points out that there are two types of procrastination: active and passive. Passive procrastination is a decidedly negative thing because it prevents you from getting things done. Active procrastination, on the other hand, can be a positive thing, because it involves delaying one task while you work on another important task instead.

So if you’re feeling anxious about tackling a particular learning task, you can temporarily put it off and still remain productive by crossing other important tasks off your to-do list. Not sure how to make it work for you? Check out this article for tips on how to procrastinate more productively.

10. Schedule your downtime

Sometimes when our stress and anxiety builds up too much, what we really need is some downtime to recharge our batteries and relax. So if you’ve been feeling unusually tense whenever it’s time to study, you might need to start scheduling some downtime the same way you would any of the other important responsibilities in your life.

Even if you feel you can’t afford to take a whole day off, make a point of scheduling at least an hour each day where you can turn off your phone, put away your laptop, and do something that totally relaxes you, whether it’s taking a nap, listening to music, or going for a nature walk.

Have you ever struggled with stress or anxiety that made it difficult to focus on your learning? If so, what strategies did you use to relax and get refocused?