i used to have a tag called "finnish university cunts" for this reason

i just almost gave myself a heart attack when i opened a to-do list i'd started making on monday and discovered an electronic study-plan orientation at 8 am tomorrow written on it (in a building i have never been to before, unless you count the illegal bar in the basement belonging to the chemistry students' club on my freshman hazing night two years ago. actually, i think my bra may still be there; i've never been back).

this electronic study-plan thing, which is called "minplan", is a perfect example of the total non-functionality and pathetic fatheadedness (but in a slightly charming way) of the university i attend. i don't know if this is the inevitable result of having public higher education or not, but everything's both understaffed and disorganised and nobody really bothers to explain it to the students.

this electronic study plan system was supposed to be required starting last year for students graduating in compliance with the new all-europe bologna standards, but they haven't been enforcing that because a) the system wasn't working and b) they aren't organised enough to enforce anything. this is fortunate, because nobody who enrolled before 2005 was given any orientation or even really told what the hell this system is.

not having any clear idea how to use it or, indeed, what it's actually for, i'm slightly anxious to be oriented; who knows when they will actually start enforcing that supposed requirement? the manual they keep online is pretty comprehensible, except for the part where it tells you to log on with your school email-system name and password and that doesn't work. (fearing for my own sanity, i tried it in three browsers and logged out of and into my email account to make sure i wasn't going senile and using the wrong password. no - it really is their stupid website not working.) thus, planning to go to the orientation. online investigation revealed the orientation tomorrow is for the faculty of humanities; i missed my faculty's last wednesday, eek. fortunately there's another one conducted in english for international students on monday, and i plan to gatecrash it even though it means skipping the second half of the first meeting of "theory of science", a required class covering the same How To Write A Research Paper which i learned in 9th grade.

recipe: chocolate-chocolate chip cookies

i've made these a number of times in the past year and a half and i thought i'd posted the recipe, but maybe i haven't. (otoh i know i've posted the recipe for toll house chocolate chip cookies, which are my ideal baked goods, but they're not in my recipes tag, so i've obviously missed something.)

these cookies are something i eat when i'm craving chocolate. they're chewy and very sweet and very chocolatey, kind of fudgey. they're quite rich, so i can't eat too many of them at once; i haven't experimented, but i suspect that reducing the quantity of cocoa a bit - maybe even by as much as half (and the sugar a bit too) - would make them more palatable to the slightly-less-sweet-toothed consumer.

( chocolate chocolate chip cookies, us and metric measures )

all-fandoms required reading

i was having a discussion with kessie and another with wax_jism simultaneously, and i remembered this, which i thought was one of the best meta essays i've read this summer. i went back to hunt it down in the writer's journal, and discovered she didn't have it tagged, so i am going to save the link here for my own and others' reference:

stop knocking down phoebe, by liviapenn: You know what paragraph I'm kind of tired of? The "knocking down Phoebe" paragraph. IE, the totally unnecessary paragraph in the story where the POV character thinks about all the other characters that the author doesn't want to pair him with, and one by one lists all the reasons why they're completely unsuitable.

i really think what livia is saying can be extended past the knocking-down phoebe paragraph into all generalised instances of knocking down phoebe, whether as a potential romantic partner or in general: the only prejudices which should appear in your story are those of the narrator, and if your prejudices are coming out, you should take a step back and look at them carefully (if not cut them out entirely to be safe). very little is as unsightly as the bones of fandom meta poking through the top layer of fiction (that is, in a story which isn't deliberately tongue-in-cheek and meta-filled). as a reader, i'm working to suspend disbelief here and lose myself in your world, but as a writer, please do your part and don't go knocking any holes in the fourth wall.

kent lyrics

( mannen i den vita hatten 16 år senare )