holiday plans

[particularities]

my first term of university is over!!! my finals ended last week (they went terribly the two grades i've received so far dropped from an A+/A- to final B grades. please don't talk me) and now i have a month of holiday before my next term starts. and i feel like putting my thoughts out here wrt holiday & other plans bc i think it makes me feel more. accountable to what i hope to do! so that's what i'll do.
i have a few categories, i suppose: (1) fun – media i want to consume, plans i need to make; (2) preparation – things i need to learn to prepare for next term's classes; & (3) projects – side projects i want to create for my own fun.

 

FUN

 

MEDIA

• james mcavoy's filmography: okay i'm not gonna watch... quite all of his movies, because i like to think i am sane, but i'm going to try watching more of his movies. maybe up to 10 of them? (i've watched 6 – 3 of them are x-men movies; i have dark phoenix left of the x-men prequel movies, which is. yeah. – and i'm halfway through another. so i'm pretty close to that goal of 10 already.) i think he's a fantastic actor and also like... very handsome honestly... and his movies have yet to disappoint me so far so i'm gonna keep going on this accidental binge i started last week.
• daniel craig's bond run: no time to die was the first movie i watched once finals ended, because i'd been wanting to see it for literal months, and it was honestly just... so good!!! i barely remember anything of the previous bond movies, so i decided i want to finish the other four again and maybe complete a full rewatch of his run, ending with no time to die again; hopefully no time to die will still be showing in theatres by the time i'm able to scrounge up some free time for a 3 hour movie again. i'm done with casino royale, so i have 3 left to come full circle.
• 18 more books: because i am only 12/30 books into my goodreads reading challenge for the year... honestly i've read millions of words of fic this year but since they aren't counted on goodreads. 18 more books it will be. i'm probably going to read comics because (1) they're a lot faster & easier to read, and (2) for a self-professed marvel comic fan, i haven't caught up with comics in an embarrassingly long time. i already have 8 volumes borrowed from the library, waiting for me to read them, so here's hoping i get around to actually reading them.

PLANS (?)

• oh my god this entire section poofed out of existence after i'd already written it... three extremely long bullet points... i'm gonna be super brief this time bc i can't be arsed to write all the details out again. fuck you dreamwidth.
• movies with T: my standing date for mcu movies! watched eternals with her last week (a month late because we both had finals, #Fuck you school) (also that was the worst movie i've seen in my entire Fucking life.) and i'll be watching spider-man: no way home with her sometime soon as well.
• movies with J: i asked sooo many people before i found a friend both willing and able to watch the lord of the rings movies with me! i've been wanting to watch them for a while because they're iconic (though i don't know anything about the series). he's one of those friends who i don't text a lot but we always hang out every few months without fail and i'm very excited to see him again!
• okay i have more plans but im lazy so this is all i'm gonna type

PREP

a far shorter list of things so i didn't bother putting this under a details section... i have two (out of five) modules that are actually for my degree next term, and the rest are core modules about like. writing and stuff. ugh. (sorry to be a stereotypical stem major who hates humanities classes or whatever but i hate that i have to take a class about WRITING EMAILS... we were examined on writing emails when we graduated primary school. i have taken my Goddamn A Levels. ENOUGH!!!)

anyway i'm going to try learning php, sql, http, and javascript to prepare for those two modules! probably not too in-depth yet. but these will also come in handy for my personal projects as well (since i plan on creating websites sometime soon), so... we'll have to wait and see see how much effort i'll put into these. i also need to improve my html & css; obviously not going to try memorising documentation, but i need to get faster at coding these things. and just look at this damn post! i got too lazy to create new code so i copied code from my last post for this division! in conclusion i need to be less lazy too.

PROJECTS

my favourite part of this post... and the primary thing i wanted to talk about! during my term, i thought of a lot of fun things i wanted to do but didn't have time to explore just yet. so this is just. stuff i am super excited about doing!!! i hope to complete my short-term projects/goals before next term, and the long-term projects... hopefully before my final year of university. because they are really quite ambitious. i also have a little misc section because i'm taking a course that i have no choice but to complete, which isn't really... relevant to either type of goal but could be useful for my career idk.

MISC

• machine learning course: i'm taking a course that serves as an introduction to machine learning, and we're going to learn how to construct machine learning models and recommender systems. i have literally zero experience with this and i'm not sure if this is the path i want to take for my career, but this seemed like a great (governmentally-subsidised) way to get a grasp of the concepts so. here i am! there's also a group project, which is vexing because group projects are the bane of my existence, but... whatever. hopefully i get assigned a decent group!
• also this entire course takes place over 3 weeks so i am truly being crash coursed. i'm 3/8 lessons in rn and it's really quite intense but. hopefully i make it out Happy Healthy and Alive

SHORT-TERM

• learn content scraping: i've been really interested in learning how this works since i found out that this covid case database was created with the use of content scraping! i've started learning how to do it and it seems pretty cool. but more importantly i have a few fun little side projects i want to complete using this method, such as:
  • generating statistics of olympic medals won by countries, split into medal type & sport... i know there are already datasets out there that cover these breakdowns, but i want to generate my own!
  • and this one i am far more excited about because. it's just fun. i want to create charts showing... the popularity of fics in the fandom/particular pairings on ao3 over time... plotted against the release dates of instalments in a series. i'm just very curious about how the release of new instalments affects content creation! maybe i'll even break it down by tag if i can figure out how? but yes!!! i'm very excited for these.
  • i can also use other technologies i've learned to do this, i think: i've been learning several ways to visualise data using python libraries like matplotlib/plotly/pandas. and i'm excited to put that knowledge to use!!!
• and i'm unsure exactly what technologies i'll need to be able to do this, but i also want to find a way to sort my spotify library by genre. i think this will be a lot more complicated than just accessing wikipedia or ao3 like i'd need to do for the two goals above, since i think spotify library data requires you to log in to access it & all, but... we'll see!! i hope i can find a way to do this.
• oh and also i want to code a personal website for myself to serve as a portfolio!!! after i achieve all of these short-term goals of course... and learn the programming languages in the prep section as well... so i have something to show for myself, lest i create an empty portfolio.

LONG-TERM

• i need to stress how extremely long-term this project is because it's really ambitious and i'm not insane enough to thing i could create this anytime soon considering my skill level and limited knowledge of programming languages. that said. i want to create a site that's like... goodreads but better? letterboxd, but for books? i want to create a way to track reviews of books, basically, because i'm extremely unsatisfied with all the current available options. (sorry, storygraph! and anyway this is more of a personal desire to create something tailored to my preferences so the existence of alternatives is kinda irrelevant to me anyway. i literally do not care about how fresh this is for the market it is just... a passion project, i guess.)
• currently, my plan is to create a mockup of what the website and/or mobile app would look like by the end of my first year in university. creating mockups is a pretty useful skill to have even outside of this project, as well, if i want to participate in hackathons, so my first step would be learning how to make wireframes & mockups.
• i think i'll be able to reach out to some professors for help sometime soon as well, since one of my modules next semester is about web application development. hopefully by this point, i'll have my mockup ready to show them, so i can reach out to them for advice on what my next steps should be. and that's about as far as i've planned this so far!

ok well that's about it! i am just using dw as my personal diary at this point... a public sort of diary... what can i say i think it's fun. unfortunately i'm lagging a bit at catching up with my inbox (sorry to my lovely mutuals whose comments/convos i have left hanging) but i will get to it soon!!! :} if anyone has read this far. thank u so much. also if u have any things u hate about goodreads/like about other cataloguing websites/any random things u hate about web design plz let me know in the comments as well i'm all ears and would love to engage in a bit of Criticising Things Online heehee. goodbye!!!