By the time you folks are reading this, I should have left Vancouver! I’m writing this email before I leave so… rare Twice-Weekly Daily Nightly Buzz not written in the thirty minutes before publication.

I’m ripping off Sam Low for this one and reviewing my courses!

Review of my third year term two courses

I only did four courses this term which… I dunno I feel bad about for some reason which is kind of silly. Number of courses taken is a morally neutral metric. I’ve just done five courses basically every other winter term at UBC. But the Fall 2024 term was — not to put too fine a point on it — Rough™ for me, so we decided to chill out a bit this term. Now that I’m through, I feel like I could have been fine with courses, but it’s deeply unclear if that is actually true. And this term has been a massive mental health and general morale W (genuinely thanks to a lot of folks subscribed to this newsletter), so there’s no cause for complaints from me!

ENGL 330 — The Structure of Modern English: Sounds and Words. I really enjoyed this course. If for no reason other than finally having a reason to learn some International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Y’all won’t be surprised to find out that I went to a little bit of speech therapy as a child and even now, I still really struggle with making sure I’m using the right vowels. But having symbols to differentiate between /i/, /ɪ/, /ε/, and /ǝ/ — for instance — has genuinely been incredibly helpful for me.

BUT ANYWAYS. The course itself. I really liked how it was focused on learning the concepts more than just memorizing a whole bunch of stuff. All of our assessments were entirely open book + open resource (with exception of generative AI models which. You know. Incredibly based). And for our minor quiz assessments we got two attempts on them! I also found the small, graded-for-completion assignments really helpful to cement my understanding of everything we were learning.

ENGL 331 — The Structure of Modern English: Sentences and Their Uses. You know, you’d never guess it from my general vibe and personality, but I think grammar is pretty cool. When I graduated high school, I was gifted a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style which I spent the summer reading through front to back. I get very excited when I find a 31 page style guide — even if I don’t know why we think Alex Trebek is a whore. That being said, ENGL 331 was an online course… with a 3 hour zoom lecture. Let’s just say that even though I’m not officially diagnosed with anything beginning with an A, it was impossible for me to pay attention the whole time. I was able to learn basically everything I needed to from the textbook/reviewing the slides. Drawing little sentence trees and applying transformations to them was really fun :D. The assessments were all unproctored, online, and closed book. Which as a goody two-shoes is like… really? I know everyone else is searching their PDFs during this. But alas.

CPSC 310 — Introduction to Software Engineering. Multiple people warned me going into 310 that it was going to be brutal. That the project was nearly impossible and that I should expect to spend near the entire term in tears. Though I spent much of the term in tears, that is fully unrelated to 310. I thought the project was actually really chill. I got a random partner and we worked really well together. We’d meet after each part of the project was released and go… that’s it???? We can do that! I’m not a real one like Sam Low, so I hadn’t made a bunch of completed projects before 310, but 310 made me feel confident enough in my skills to realize that doing so could be actually easy and literally fun.

I’ll also say: the lectures were a bit rough for this course. The lecturer for my section seemed so incredibly nice, but the lecture did start at 8 am. Which… yikes. And though our section had like 150-200 people enrolled in it, less than a dozen ever showed up to lecture. Feels bad. Also, the assessments in this course were dumb. Seventy per cent of my grade shouldn’t be true false questions. I genuinely had no idea how I did walking out of every quiz — walking out of any of them, I didn’t know whether I got a 40 or a 100 even though I felt I understood the material. When the project takes up so much time, I think it should be worth more than 25 per cent. That’s just me.

CPSC 320 — Intermediate Algorithm Design and Analysis. I haven’t decided how I feel about this one yet. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it. This course basically comes down to becoming familiar with different problem categories then developing/proving algorithms for those/similar problems. I really enjoyed the whole dynamic programming unit. That was really fun. It’s kinda like Trust the Natural Recursion 201. It takes a moment to figure out, but once it clicks into place… just so good. Also lots of proofs in this course which I found fine for the most part even though I wouldn’t say I’m the best at writing proofs.

Like ENGL 330, this course had multiple assignments throughout the term, but unlike 330, this course’s assignments were longer, more difficult, and not graded for completion. I will admit I made things a little more difficult for myself by just going at the assignments without a partner. But I think even though the assignments were more difficult and time consuming, it really helped me get the material. I had to understand every part of every question: I couldn’t just punt it over to my group mate if I was struggling. (This is typically how I go about most group-optional comp sci things. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’ll learn more if I make myself do all of it).

TAing CPSC210. My beloved. I love TAing 210. I just think it is such a fun course. For those of you who don’t know, CPSC 210 has student complete a personal project (following some broadly applicable rubric items). And for many people coming through, this is the first project they’ve done! I really enjoy meeting with students every week and seeing their projects come together. It’s incredibly fun and rewarding.

Plus I have a bit of an ego thing and it makes me very happy to have gay little comp sci students come up to me and be like “you’re so cool and not intimidating and make me actually feel excited to learn and do you have office hours?”

Other News

GO VOTE NERDS

I’m sure I don’t have to say this given the demographics and origin of this newsletter. But you know. Make sure you vote in the Canadian federal election.

ALSO VERY IMPORTANT. I wasn’t given a sticker for voting in the Canadian federal election, so if someone could pick me up a sticker tomorrow, I will love you forever (not as much as I love The Ubyssey, but still a lot). I need it for my computer’s I Voted sticker collection.

Also Texas people I think municipal elections are happening this week? So maybe you should go vote in those. I’m going to vote for the major and 3 council seats in my town tomorrow. (The mayor is uncontested, so it’s a big vote. Just like the AMS for real).

I did kinda mid art but im happy

I only started putting some amount of effort into learning to draw a couple months ago. It’s been really fun to do something that I suck at! But like… I was able to do recognizable doodles — even if their poses are incredibly static and the proportions are scuffed as fuck — which was basically my goal with practicing drawing more. So that’s super exciting.

Plus I did each of these in like 1–2 minutes, so I could probably do these better if I put time into them.

My Boyfriend’s Partner Doesn’t Read These

They told me they haven’t read any of the Twice-Weekly Daily Nightly Buzz since the campaign season ended. And the only reason they read the last issue was because I mentioned my boyfriend in the subject :(.

This is so mean :(

AMS Council Happened

I am very easy to convince. A true sheep. All it takes is a half dozen people telling me I should do something fun and not masochistic with my life to make me skip council to see a very fun improv (ish?) show.

But! Not being in the Michael Kingsmill Forum shall not stop my incredible joke posting that people definitely enjoy. Here are most of the posts I made last night:

(dare I say, unhinged behaviour to reschedule AMS Council TO YOUR BIRTHDAY 🚩🚩🚩)

Has Anyone Gotten Campaign Reimbursements Yet?

I simply haven’t heard anything since submitting my reimbursement form. I sent another email to elections two weeks ago just asking for an update and I’ve been ghosted :((((((. This is so sad. Minus $400 angle.

From the Web

• Sifting the Rubble After Rebel News Worked the Election Debate (The Tyee). Truly, the more I learn about Rebel News at the federal election debate

• D&D’s Missing Monster (LegalKimchi on YouTube). D&D’s most recent revision controversially removed stat blocks for a number of humanoid species (people mostly complained about removing orcs). LegalKimchi talks about what (and more importantly who) we consider monsters. LegalKimchi is really good y’all.

• “can i offer you a nice egg in this trying time” by Iori Kusano (It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton). A story about longing for a world that no longer is. A life you briefly lived and will never be able to live again.

• Not really a web, but I also started reading Hi Honey, I’m Homo! on the plane. It’s a history of the portrayal of queerness in American television and its influence on American culture. I’m only halfway through but I’m having a great time.

From the Archive

Truly, I just scroll a random amount on the Ubyssey archives and pick a random issue. And I guess the ones today are boycott issues! From what I can tell, there was a three day boycott to try to get the province to provide more funding to UBC, which is pretty snazzy. We do have a history of doing that type of thing here at UBC.

I think next time I’ll come back and look at some of the coverage after the boycott and see what came of it.

That’s All!

I think exam season should be over by now? So congrats to everyone who has graduated! Very exciting times. And congrats to everyone else who made it through another year at school, but a smaller congrats. No congrats to people who have already graduated. Unfortunately I ran out of all the congrats I have :(. I’m gonna need to go to the congrats store to pick some more up before next time.

Also I just saw that the EIC email unsubscribed. Aisha doesn’t want two of my emails that’s so sad :(. Sam Low gets my emails three times!

Let’s hope I don’t mess up doing timezones with the publication of this. Until Wednesday at 10:03 pm, buzz on, my busy bees!

Sorry babe, the Ubyssey-paper handcuffs say on since 2025