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I’ve been somewhat neglecting this venue of late. I can’t claim I haven’t had the time – I have – but recently my creative energies have been sapped somewhat by a relentless barrage of assignments and coursework for my maths degree, and for the last few months, I’ve barely been able to keep up with my writing duties on the comic. On Friday, though, I handed in the last piece of coursework for this year. Exams start in a couple of weeks, but the pressing feeling that I ought to be doing something else is, at last, in abeyance, and I can write again.

There are many, many drafts of things sitting in this blog’s slushpile: there’s a review of Skyrim which is mostly about plates; discussions of House, The West Wing and Community and all the other TV shows and films that I’ve watched, books I’ve read, games I’ve played, but as yet, I’ve been unable to write anything of length or substance about any of them. Which is why I’m instead going to talk about Ivor the Engine.

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So, according to the Graun, 682,514 students applied for university places this year. If we assume that most of them applied to multiple universities (which I think is a fair assumption, but let me know if I’m way off the mark), that makes 600,000X£21=£14,332,794 pounds going to UCAS, or thereabouts. This seems like an awful lot of money – though they do process a lot of applications, and I would imagine overheads are quite high since they’ve got to print pamphlets and (ahem) keep websites going…
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Dear Square Enix,

I arrived home this morning after a brief journey into town to find that Amazon had delivered my copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I was naturally pleased to get my new game, so I grabbed my laptop, popped in the disk, and it began to install. Register on Steam? Fair enough, I like Steam, and it’s good to know I’ll be able to download and play if I scratch the disc or something.

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Scott's ticket.

John Finnemore? If you listen to the credits of Radio 4 comedies, you’ll notice his name is a frequent occurance. Anyway, the other evening, I, along with NRB associates Scott and Luke, went to see the recording of some of his new sketch show for Radio 4. While it’s fairly easy to get to London from our general location, it’s still a bit of a hassle, what with having to get a train then a Tube then wander around until you find the darn place, which a bit of a dull slog, even to someone like me, who likes train travel*. Fortunately, our experience was unexpectedly enlivened by a bomb scare.

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New podcast – Feedburner is messing me around, so it isn’t on iTunes yet, but you can get it straight from the site. Go and listen. Subscribe and review us on iTunes!

A few things. I’ve been spending a little time over the last few days unfollowing people on Twitter and unfollowing feeds on Google Reader. Partly because I was following over a thousand people on Twitter and separating the good from the cruft was becoming increasingly problematic, so I cut it down to 551. I just read this thing which Merlin Mann wrote some time ago. I think I was subconsciously trying for something in this vein – trying to ingest only the best, rather than an absolute cavalcade of crud.
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Hello! I’ve had rather a long day, visiting the University of East Anglia in sunny Norwich. Very nice place, and I’ll hopefully be going there in September*. I’ve also been playing Dragon Age 2, which is excellent. I’ve been playing Origins for the last month or so, and the improvement in combat is VAST. The increased immediacy of the combat is such a welcome relief after the sluggish, shuffle-around-to-hit-anyone combat of Oranges. I prefer the Hawke character to the Oranges character, if only because he has a name characters can call him**, but also because his family and background affects you immediately and continuously, rather than in the origin story, wherever you visit that’s relevant and in the epilogue.
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Last Thursday, NRB associate and hecklr co-host Scott and I took the train up to London (I’m steadfastly refusing to refer to it by a stupid nickname) to watch Peacock and Gamble‘s Emergency Broadcast, which was very funny. At one point, they gave a man a fish. I hope that bit makes it into the podcast (which will apparently be edited down from the two hours of performance to just one). I’ve mentioned the podcast on here before once or twice , and if you don’t already, go and listen to it.
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I haven’t actually seen 300, by the way. This is just to signify that this is the 300th post on this blog. In all honesty, I’m not sure what to write here. I’ve been caught up with other things and I haven’t had time to think of something to write, so instead, I’ll introduce you to an idea for a new voting system that I had.

Just a brief preface to the abrupt change of pace. Around the time of the General Election, I was discussing the idea of electoral reform with my family over dinner. This was before it was apparent that the Lib Dems were going to a)not make any significant gains in terms of seats or b) trade in their principles for the tawdry promise of power from the evil evil Tories (with a few notable exceptions). At the end of the meal I excused myself, promising to come up with a better alternative system. This is that system.

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