Apathy Sketchpad

The game I own with probably more bugs than any other is, depending on your definition of the word ‘bugs’, either Counter Strike, or Worms World Party. The first features fun bugs like “the bots throw themselves off cliffs preferably to killing you” and “the console randomly vanishes”, while the latter features more heavily armed bugs with amusing names. It was also widely criticised for being altogether too similar to the previous game, but when Worms Blast was released it was criticised for being “just not Worms”, basically for being too different. I mention this because I personally have no problem with Worms Blast, and therefore don’t want to see it take another popularity hit for no reason. To this end, I intend to stress the following point: Worms Blast is a computer game, whereas the killer virus is called the MSBlast worm.

Or, more accurately, it isn’t. Technically, any geek could tell you that a worm is not the same as a virus is not the same as a trojan. A virus is “just not worms” either; it is in fact a small program that is good at going unnoticed and copying itself programmed by a pasty-skinned male with no social life when he clearly ought to have been either drunk, asleep, or both. A trojan lives inside another program and offers a way in to your computer, and was named after a famous horse. (This is where we derive the phrase “beware of geeks bearing GIFs”.) A worm is… well… it’s something else entirely, and that’s the point. But whatever it is, it appears to have infected the entire university, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been able to update the site recently. A larger problem, one may suspect, is that very soon the next semester starts, and at three on a Wednesday, for example, the Viglen cluster is booked out for a module called Introduction to Computational Physics. Fortunately, if the ISS department haven’t by that time managed to get rid of this worm there should be only the most minimal disruption to that module, since the module doesn’t actually exist. It has a reference code, three hours a week timetabled, and a course team of two, but will not have any students for at least another year.

Planning ahead, of course, I am all in favour of — I hope to try it myself some day — but I can’t help thinking that booking out rooms four hours at a time for a module with no students at all is at best redundant and at worst insane. If only it came as some kind of a suprise. Unfortunately, however, this is somewhat par for the course (if you’ll excuse the pun). In a few weeks I hope to start a module called Laser Physics And Photonics, but I don’t know if I will be allowed to since I haven’t done all of the pre-requisite modules. I expect this will be overlooked, though, on the grounds that the offending pre-requisite module doesn’t actually exist either. We are also offered two modules which are felt to have too much overlap with other modules and consequently if we wish to take one of them, we cannot have studied an overlapping module. By now only the most naïve readers can actually expect either of the overlapping modules to exist, but allow me to clarify just for those people: They don’t, Annie. Meanwhile Adam is trying, quite reasonably, to use the phone network to produce a loud enough ringing noise somewhere in the Physics department that they might pick up their phone and talk to him in order to make the ringing stop. This is in the vain hope that they might tell him when the electronics exam is before said exam takes place (which may of course be in the past).