˙uɐɔ I ʍouʞ I ¿sıɥʇ op I uɐƆ

Well look who's got a break to type some stuff so that people who vaguely care can read about it.

Me.

I've had a lot of things happen to me since February, and problematically my short memory span means that I'll forget to mention half of them here and perhaps do so at a later date - with a significant amount of the remaining memories being forgotten to time itself.

Firstly and foremostly, I completed my Honours Project, entitled 'An Investigation into the Effectiveness of Co-Designed Teaching Games versus Traditional Learning Games' (or something like that, I've not had to write out the full title a lot) - visited the local primary school used them as guinea pigs, plagiarised their ideas and made a game which they enjoyed despite the shoddy production values and the fact that it was just one big evil experiment. My research actually delivered a result contrary to the research of just about everyone else researching the same subject so I either did something wrong or did something VERY right. To be fair, I've never actually seen research in the exact same scope and field as to what I did so technically I could have just done something scientific - but I am a self-deprecating person so I'm going to assume I fluked it.

I panicked quite a lot around the time to submission since I still had a lot of work to do in the week leading up to hand-in, plus two additional presentations to prepare for: a presentation of the software, and a traditional conference-style poster presentation.

If you are interested, the software presentation went so much better than expected that I nearly cried coming out of it, it was on the same day as my only exam of the semester and I was incredibly nervous since it was to be presented to both my sometimes-critical project supervisor, and the 'hard-ass' project coordinator for the year. They were surprisingly amazed that I'd managed to make anything half-way competent since technically speaking there were very few programming-related classes on the course, the fact that I had chosen a Develop-and-Test project over an Experimental project was an even bigger surprise since there were programmers who had specifically avoided this type of project because it required coding.

The poster presentation was a much more awkward event. The presentation was only in front of two active listeners, someone from the department and someone from outwith the department. Ironically the person from in-department was also one of the lecturers I was quite pally with and had referenced within the text of the project. He knew the material well and questioned in a quite a harsh way, as you do. Arse.

Consequently when I graduate, I will no longer be Mr. Aerif.

I will be Mr. Aerif BSc (Hons) 1st Class.

Which is pretty damn wonderful. To translate that into American (or rather Latin) would probably be Summa Cum Laude. Obviously I'm quite pleased, and apparently this is an academic first for the university, the course has been available for nearly 10 years and this is the first time someone has achieved this type of Honours. In addition to this I'm also supposed to be receiving additional marks of merit from the University that technically I can't talk about until I'm awarded them.

Oh and Richard Lemarchand (lead game designer of the Uncharted series, and great inspiration to me) will be at the graduation ceremony to receive an Honorary Doctorate. He's also giving a lecture the day before, which I'm attending.

I hold a conditional offer to a Masters course which will feature zero tuition fees, and have technically met the condition. So I may also be doing a Masters next year.

Studying pays off kids. Well, so far.