Righto, yay exams are over. I've had a lot of fun learning this sem. It was such a good sem (:

Lately I've been super into the art of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac


The picture's from Dulac's illustration of The Real Princess (a.k.a. the Princess and the Pea) and it's so gorgeous, the attention to detail. I mean look at the tapestry in the background! And the colours of the bed hangings. Seriously, it's just so beautiful hahaha.

Anyway, I've been introduced to a lot more fairy tales through their illustrations. Like Maid Maleen and Iron John. I really liked Iron John. It's like an epic movie with too many things going on and too many plot holes. I didn't like the King's daughter in it though. At first I got really irritated that she kept pulling his cap off to see his golden hair, like she not shy one leh. But I realised that her familiarity with him must have come from somewhere, especially at the part where he asked for her hand in marriage. But anyway, I think it shows a lot of potential for someone to write a romance based on it hahaha.

So I've been harping on about how great my darwin mod was, and I'm really really really sad its over. I learnt so much! It's amazing the sheer amount of knowledge the module covered, and I'm really glad to have learnt so much.

I challenged myself this sem with modules I wasn't too sure I'd enjoy: 2 seminars, 2 science mods, and one in between mod. Lit was okay, but I learnt quite a bit on Little India too. I was really apprehensive about the whole idea of a seminar and talking and all that, but taking those 2 mods helped me realise that there wasn't anything really to worry about. I now know the history of Little India like how it was constructed as a tourist space from Serangoon Road. I can tell you the history of Abdul Gafoor Mosque on Dunlop street and show you what old European town once was. I learnt so much about the history of Singapore from the Little India mod.

My physics mod was so utterly disappointing. I'm going to fail it, I feel it, and I'm just praying I'll be able to S/U it, but in the meantime I guess I'm glad to have taken it because I can now hold a pseudo-intellectual conversation about the Big Bang and relativity and quantum physics etc etc. Stupid bosons. But its an incredible thing to realise how all of creation is made up of things smaller than atoms with tiny electric charges that nevertheless balance out each other and this balancing out effect makes things solid and not collapse...

And I loved syntax so much. I found learning such an accumulative process. What I learnt every week built upon the last and it was a very nice experience. Our brains are so clever! That's what I learnt from syntax haha how we have so many filters to English and language that we intuitively know what can be considered grammatical and what cannot. I like how they stripped language down to its core as just words with arbitrary meanings. It's not how we use words in real life, but its a really good theory for how our brains process language. (:

And I've gushed so much about darwin to everybody else that I'm kinda sick of my gushing, but I loved it so much. It helped me realise what an unlikely species us homo sapiens are! The infinitesimal odds it took for bacteria to evolve into something capable of complex thought and speech, and our cumbersome circulatory systems...it just blows my mind every time i think about how long we took to evolve, and how unlikely our very existences are. How special we are! I guess it has helped me a lot when it comes down to my faith, in matters both big and small. I appreciate my existence a lot more, and it was really great to read how the people so long ago (16th century) realised that the bible was not to be taken literally at least in the book of Genesis, unlike nowadays. Like Christianity has such an intellectual tradition, I get really upset by fundamentalist Christians because it seems like they dumb down all the centuries of thought or give it up just because they don't understand or try to understand. It seems like fear controls the whole world.


Anyway, its been a really great sem (: made some new friends, did a lot of learning etc etc. But I'm really glad its the hols now *yay*