So recently I've tried squeezing in some anime between my work sessions. I haven't watched much for quite a long time. In fact I haven't watched anything seasonal for a while. Which I suppose is okay, because not many good shows have come out this year (and no, I'm not into Type-Moon). So I don't feel I've missed out on much. On the topic of Type-Moon, let's talk about Canaan.

I finished watching Canaan a few days ago. It was an okay show. Canaan is just really, really average, and after having watched it I realized how much P. A. Works had improved as a studio during the past several years. For me, Canaan resembles a less well-executed, less exciting version of Black Lagoon. Most of the action scenes were pretty hilarious (Canaan is just that good at dodging bullets), and only a show like Jormungand is arguably worse when it comes to animating unrealistic gunfights, even by anime standards. The show was literally a trainwreck. The story is okay, but I felt that the pacing is a bit too slow and for someone with a short attention-span like me, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged. 

Well, there are pluses, I suppose. For one, I like the character designs. Canaan looks pretty sexy. She's a cold-blooded killer but she also has that tiny dose of humanity which makes her a bit more likeable. Every other character, however, are completely 2-dimensional, which is to be expected since Canaan is largely a story-driven show (except that the story isn't very good). Secondly, Canaan also did an unexpectedly good job portraying Shanghai. I've been to Shanghai a few times and let me tell you, the run-down districts look almost identical to how Canaan portrayed it. The interiors of the trains and taxis looks very much like their real-life counterparts. So I applaud their attention to detail.

An actual Chinese market looks almost exactly like this. Minus the tits.

Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (or Danna ga Nani for short, although to be serious I have no idea what its abbreviation is) is one of the more interesting shows I've watched in a while. Well, it's not really a show because it, for the most part, doesn't have a continuous storyline. Every episode is like a comedy sketch that lasts a few minutes long. It's about the life of a good-for-nothing otaku husband with an office-lady wife, and the stuff that happens in their daily lives. The husband doesn't like to work so he stays home all day, while the wife is in a dead-end office job and gets drunk on a regular basis. What's surprising, I guess, is that they somehow made a comedy out of this.

Shows that talk about otaku typically fall into two categories. You have the Lucky Star/Oreimo category that makes comedy out of it (and is typically filled with references to the culture itself) or you have shows that looks at its 'dark side' via satire (NHK and Genshiken instantly comes to mind). Danna ga Nani starts out sort of between the two categories. After a few episodes, however, the tone changes, and it turns into more of a sketch about what you'd actually expect in the daily lives of a young couple. It's mundane, it's somewhat repetitive, and it can be pretty cute at times.

I suppose that if otaku do get married, they'd most likely stop thinking about their waifu and worry about raising kids very, very quickly. The last anime I watched that was solely about post-marriage life is Otono Joshi no Anime Time, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Japan really needs make more shows like these. Which is unfortunate, because the minds of the anime fanbase, by and large, are stuck in high school. Not many people will enjoy an anime about divorce when most fans are either single, or spend their Christmas taking a picture of their favourite anime girl looking at a cake in front of the monitor.

I've been revisiting some of the old shows I've watched. A few days before I watched an episode of Aria the Natural, and it touched my heartstrings in the same way it did three years ago. I'm also trying to finish off Tamako Market, but really, I don't think any KyoAni shows post-Nichijou is worth watching. The only show I'm watching that I found interesting is Gunslinger Girl. I'm only three episodes in and I already think it might be one of the best shows I'm ever going to watch. Somehow they managed to combine little girls with blood and gore and ended up with something that's actually tasteful, unlike Elfen Lied (which honestly was terrible). It also has an amazing soundtrack. I can't wait to watch all of it when I have time.

It seems that 2015 has quietly arrived while I'm typing this up. So yea, happy New Years everyone.

So I've been pretty tired lately. Tried playing games, but video games just tires me out nowadays. Every time I play I either feel stressed or nauseous, and I don't really know why. Maybe it's a sort of mild motion sickness, I think. That feeling goes away when I start working, though. It feels nice to work, to read, and to do all that stuff. Anything but video games...

Been working on a new project. It's not really a book, I guess. It's just an exercise where I get to try out new techniques and improve my Photoshop skills. However a lot of the elements were borrowed from some of the artbooks I own. The images below are just drafts of the real thing, so there's definitely a lot to improve on.

So as you can see, nothing too special. I really wanted to do effects that are a bit more complicated, but composition and colour are probably more important than making them look flashy. As I've said before, looking at the work of professionals really makes me want to get better. I think what made my work process a lot harder than expected, is just how much it takes to tear down what obviously looks terrible and remake things from scratch. That, and the lack of ideas. At the beginning it was hard to think of what to actually put into the project. Maybe I'm just not that much of a LL fan.

2015 will be here soon. Honestly, I'm pretty scared. I'm scared that I'll be one year older soon and that I won't amount to anything, that I would waste my days idle. The feeling of working, and working, and finally working yourself to exhaustion is the best feeling I've ever experienced. If there's really a New Year's Resolution I'd want to follow, it'd be that I can work myself to exhaustion everyday. Work is the only thing that brings me satisfaction nowadays.

I also realized I uploaded two of the pictures as transparent PNGs. I'm so retarded. Also, tomorrow morning I'm most probably going into Auckland city. Oh how much I look forward to going outside...

Whelp, here it is! Merry Christmas everyone. The files are pretty huge, actually. It'd take forever to upload it here. Here are the thumbnails for the album.

And...here's the link! Enjoy. Off to playing Shogun 2.

Woah...I'm so tired...

I've been trying to learn Photoshop lately. To be precise, since yesterday. It was a really, really challenging task, to say the least, especially considering that I'm the kind of guy who's never used anything outside of Word and MSPaint. The reason why I'm trying to learn Photoshop is because I want to make a few projects and make myself slightly more employable since everyone's asking for 'advanced computer skills' nowadays. Okay, scratch the last part. I just feel like making some cool stuff, you know? And things turned out okay, I suppose.

Back when I was in high school, I applied for both what I'm doing now, and Architecture school. Needless to say I spent a lot of time on drawing and designing and all that stuff. I'd work when I get back from school at 3.30pm and keep working till 1 in the morning, watch a few episodes of Toradora then go to bed. That was how devoted I was. Then for some reason, I decided to go with what I'm doing now instead. From organizing space to organizing people, it seems. Anyway, toying with Photoshop felt very nostalgic. The exhausting feeling I'm getting now reminds me of my high school days, when I'd just draw houses and floor plans nonstop. It's a good feeling.

So yea, as you can see, that's one of the first things I ever did in Photoshop. I couldn't even figure out the layers out, let alone knowing how to put down colours and all that jazz. Why can't it just be like MSPaint, you know? So it was kind of an achievement (as silly it was) to have made my first reaction image. Wow, I am so cool. Please respond.

For Christmas this year, I wanted to make a friend of mine something special. I promised him to send him a Christmas card. As you can see, it's almost the 24th of December here in New Zealand, and I haven't sent out anything. I'm so incredibly lazy, it's hopeless. But I decided I was going to make him something a bit more special, without paying a cent of postage. I made him an artbook.

Well of course, I won't show you the whole thing. It's not Christmas yet, you know (or, uh, Kurisu-masu, if you catch my drift?! Ha!). But yea, that's what I did for the past two days or so. The fanbook is a total of 18 pages. Unfortunately I absolutely suck drawing anything anime related, so I didn't draw any of the pictures. It's kind of hard to do it on Kurisu. My friend really likes Kurisu and probably knows her really well. I think my unfamiliarity with her character probably has something to do with the fact that I haven't actually read or watched Steins; Gate. So I had to rely on a lot of second-hand information. Sorry!

Making this project was a pretty confusing process. Imagine a guy walking into a workshop. He doesn't know how to use any of the tools, he doesn't know what he's making, and he's not really that smart. And he has two days to make something. That's me using Photoshop in a nutshell. I had make up designs on the spot then Google the technique of making it happen. Then I would get distracted by a picture of Ruka for 5 minutes before going back to work. Then I would accidentally delete something and then Ctrl-save then have to make everything again. All of this, while listening to K-pop at full-volume for several hours straight. Tracking down the artist names to give them credit took a lot of time and patience. It was very tedious and reminded me of putting citations on my research papers.

I actually seriously considered printing it out in hardcover just for myself. Then I realized that it's just 18 pages and it wouldn't make a very good coffee table book, which I guess is the sort of aesthetic I'm aiming for. Honestly, after flipping through the finished product, I'm not very satisfied at all. Here I see a lettering that should've been corrected. There I see that the spacing is too big or I applied a bit too much Gaussian filter. I have a few artbooks at home and when I compare them with what I've done, I think there's still so much room for improvement. It's like a huge mountain in front of you to see the work of pros and to compare it with your own. It makes for good motivation, you know! Photoshop is really amazing. There's only one thing limiting you, and that's your idea. And the thing about this sort of creative design is that most people don't have good ideas.

Well, that's about all the things I've been doing recently. I guess I'll put the imgur album link to the full version of the book when it's Christmas Day. I think looks okay, but yea. If only I could draw. If I'm doing another fanbook for my next project, it's probably going to be really cutesy. I want to experiment with a really elaborate, over-the-top style (this one is pretty simple in terms of design). So expect a lot of cute girls and flowers and candies the next time I post something Photoshop related.

Also, this song is amazing.

So as we all know, GvG came out a few days ago. I wasn't actually too keen on the new expansion when some of its cards were first revealed, because some of them seemed a bit too random for my liking. Overall, however, GvG is a very good set. People have already started making new mech decks, although I haven't seen any murloc shamans just yet. Besides Unstable Portal, the RNG around most of the other cards is the sort of RNG that spices up the game, but are largely controllable. For example, Handlock players have already figured out that Recombobulator is basically a 2 mana 3/2 Ancestral Healing for Mountain Giants. Unstable Portal is the only RNG card that, I think, is really unbalanced. At its worst, it replaces itself with a 1-drop, and there is a pretty decent chance that the random legendary you pull will win you the game outright. The problem is that all minion-based Mage decks will have to run this card because it's just that good, even though what makes it good is pure RNG.

The changes to Soulfire, Flare and Auctioneer are okay. The Auctioneer nerf is completely on point because of the new spare parts. But putting Flare at 2 mana is not a good nerf. Flare is only overpowered in the Hunter versus Freeze Mage matchup. Tempo Mage is not particularly reliant on secrets (and they also have Counterspell), Pallys never run Secrets and Hunter vs Hunter is more about board control than anything else. I've had my Freezing + Snake Trap blown up by a Flare and still win because my Undertaker got out of control. In my view, Flare should stay at 1 mana, but not draw any cards if it destroys a Secret. Flare has pretty much become unplayable in Hunter, much like Starving Buzzard. And making cards totally redundant is not a good thing - cards like Buzzard and Flare should stay as 'niche' cards, instead of being unplayable.

The 1 mana change on Soulfire might seem small, but it's going to affect Warlock deck building a lot. I think it's more of a Zoo nerf than a Handlock nerf because Zoo needs Soulfire more than the Handlock. Darkbomb has become an excellent replacement for Soulfire in Handlock, which I think is a pretty bad card (in my opinion) in Zoo because of its cost. Clearly, some changes will have to be made, and as a keen Zoo player I've decided to update my list for the new meta. I haven't laddered too much with this deck, so things will change a lot in the near future.

The GvG cards include 2x Clockwork Gnome, 1 Annoy-o-Tron, and 1 Enhance-o-Mechano. What's perhaps most surprising is the complete absence of Soulfire and Dark Iron Dwarf. Let's start with Soulfire.

Soulfire serves two purposes in Zoo. It provides extra reach when you are going for lethal, and it gives you valuable tempo in the early game. In the Zoo mirror, for example, Soulfire is almost always a must keep in the mulligan because you can coin out your 1 drops then Soulfire their 1 drop for free. Part of what makes the 'old' Zoo so powerful is that it plays exactly to your mana curve, while having constant access to 4 damage whenever you need it. 1 mana is very costly for Zoo in the early game. 1 Soulfire is justifiable to provide extra reach, but I don't like 2.

Now, the mechs. Clockwork Gnome has largely replaced Leper Gnome in Zoo lists because it provides actual value while buffing your Undertaker. The spare parts it generates are almost always useful, and at worst they provide discard fodder for Doomguard. Enhance-o-Mechano is an one-off that, I think, will replace Dark Iron Dwarf in Zoo lists. Its Battlecry is pretty insane. The buffs it gives to your small minions gives them a lot of value. Yes, sometimes you do get Divine Shield on your Nerubian Egg, but you also might get Windfury on your Doomguard. It's definitely a win-more card, and in general fits well into the Zoo game plan.

Annoy-o-Tron is purely a tech choice. It serves the same function as Voidwalker, and it's amazing with Abusive Sergeant. The problem is that its stats are very mediocre otherwise, and is a very weak drop on an empty board. It's the sort of card you'd play when you are already ahead, and you want to protect your Flame Imps from getting traded. So I think a 1-off is just right.

Everything else about the list is pretty standard, a tried-and-true Zoo list not too different from what everyone else plays. Some cards that might be considered for an updated Zoo list include Spider Tank (a solid 3 drop), Piloted Shredder (good 4 drop with Deathrattle effect), Jeeves (refills your hand, Zoo runs out steam surprisingly quickly), Anima Golem and Fel Reaver. The last two deserves special mention, because there are times when I play Zoo and I feel I have trouble closing the game out, especially when I don't topdeck into Doomguard. A 8/8 left unanswered will win the game very, very quickly, and its effect is hardly detrimental to Zoo because you will rarely feel bad over burning Flame Imps.

Honestly, I don't think the meta will change too much from what it was like before. People are still adjusting, after all. Despite getting Vol'jin and Shrinkmeister, I think Priest is sort of overrated post-GvG. Control Warrior and Handlock are still very good at what they do, while Hunter arguably benefited the least from the new GvG cards (the only legendary I got from 15 packs was the Hunter one, which I think is almost useless). Zoo is still okay, I suppose. What I'm really looking forward to are the new mech decks, especially midrange Mage decks that run Secrets, mechs and especially Snowchugger. They look pretty legit.

So a few days ago, I went drinking with a high school friend. I hadn't met him for quite a while, actually. In fact, the last time I went drinking with him was before Seattle, so I wanted to have a talk with him. It's funny because every time I go drinking with him (and just him, strangely enough), I get pretty emotional afterwards. I would throw a tantrum, get all nostalgic all of a sudden and in general say a bunch of things I usually wouldn't say. And then I'd forget about most of it. All I could remember from that night was that I goofed off for most of the night. We listened to that awful Anaconda song by Nicki Minaj with my high school friend, and discussed how she's poisoning music, etc. It was pretty stupid. Then on the way home, I thought about my time in America, and how idyllic my lifestyle was over there. It made me very nostalgic.

My days were very quiet when I was at Berkeley. A normal day would be split between lectures, gaming, a bit of socializing here and there, and food. I can still picture myself, even today, walking across that campus with a pair of sandals after a lecture, heading to the local Internet cafe to play some Dota (I must've spent like 500 dollars there in the space of 5 months...what a terrible waste). Then afterwards, when night settles, I'd head back to my apartment, remembering to pick up some takeaway (or a big slice of pizza), along the way. I'd work on my assignments, talking to my floor mates about how their day went, what interesting things happened on campus, and why the floor's toilet was blocked. Just things like that. And by 1 am, I'd be asleep, waiting for next day's lecture. At Berkeley, my days were quiet, but I had plenty of time to read and do what I want.

But at Berkeley, I didn't have any close friends. I was friendly with my floor mates, and I had a few acquaintances I talk to from time to time. But a lot of the time, I was alone, and that occasionally made me a bit homesick. I had a few online friends, though, and they made my time there just a bit more interesting, a bit less lonely. We would have conversations till early morning, even on that one night I was locked out of my own room and we streamed anime together to kill time. When I didn't go online for two days, I would see that my message box was filled with their words, asking how I was doing. And we talked just about everything and anything. They had a pretty big impact on me in those months away from home, actually. They helped me through some tough times, especially because of how my personality is, and that I don't talk about these things face to face, with anyone. Not even my parents. But when I listened in on their ridiculous Skype calls, I somehow felt a bit at ease. It was almost as if they were in front of me for the whole time.

About a week ago, I watched a really good movie, called Liberal Arts. The movie, in a lot of ways, resembles a little private fantasy of mine, that deep inside I've always had the impulse of studying at a small liberal arts college, reading literature, history and all that underneath a tree in the middle of autumn. Studying not for a degree, not for employment, not for the sake of anything except for the sake of learning new things, discovering new ways of experiencing life. To some extent, my life in Berkeley was exactly like that. I'd read a bunch of books unrelated to what I study, go to those antique local bookshops, and stroll the campus after an intense reading session. Everything felt like an extremely sweet, idyllic fantasy. Kind like alcohol, really. It leaves you intoxicated and when you wake up from that dream, you feel much worse than before.

I had been drinking for the past couple days. Two bottles per day, in fact, although in my defence the drinks were actually really, really nice, and if they hadn't been so expensive I definitely would've bought more. Every time I drink, I get into a minor stupor but fall way short of intoxication, so at times I'd just slump there and feel sentimental and nostalgic. I think I should stop this before it's too late. There's an old Chinese saying that goes: "Using wine to quench misery only invites more misery", and I feel that most of this misery is really just a product of my misdoings.

-

On second thought, that really wasn't a very good translation. The original Chinese saying goes:

借酒消愁愁更愁

Interpreted literally, it means "Borrowing wine to pour onto your anxiety makes anxiety worse". Okay, so that sounded a lot like Google Translate, but you get what I mean. 愁 is particularly hard to translate because it doesn't exactly mean misery, or anxiety, or depression. It's a mix between melancholy, sadness, worry, and anxiety, although anxiety probably comes closest to its main connotation. The word is actually made up of two other words, with 秋 on top and 心 at the bottom - the former means autumn, the latter means heart. So perhaps we can put it this way: 愁 is the emotion your heart experiences during autumn. So poetic!

Today, my Love Live merch arrived. It was a pretty good day! It took about three weeks for the package to arrive, which isn't that bad considering it's SAL unregistered. So yea, I guess I'll talk a bit about what I bought, and post a few photos.

First, the mini wall scroll. Despite what the photo looks like, the print quality is actually really good, and the colours are quite saturated (my room has bad lighting). It definitely looks much better than your average bootleg wall scroll, although at 1000 yen it's actually quite expensive for its prize. It's called a mini wall scroll for a reason, you know! But seriously, it's actually really really small. It's about the size and width of an average keyboard. So it might look much better if you hang up a whole row of them because it won't look good just by itself. Honestly, I wouldn't have bought this if CDJapan didn't tell me that any purchase beyond 5k yen gets me some bonus shopping points. Such is life.

All right, now let's get on to the important stuff: the two CDs. I bought two solo albums by Honoka Kousaka (or Emi Nitta, depending on which dimension you live in) from Love Live. The first is called ほんのり穂乃果色 , which I guess is best translated as 'The Color of Honoka' or something like that. CDJapan classifies it as a character song album, although in reality it's mostly solo versions of well-known songs by μ's. There are only three tracks that are original to this album: two character songs and a track called ～Date with 穂乃果～, where you listen to the voice of Honoka set to a gentle background BGM as she goes on a date with you, eat picnic with you, and says a bunch of sugois, ureshiis and desus so you can pretend you went out with your waifu.

So by this point, anyone can figure out that this album is designed specifically for the most devoted Honoka fans. Or to put it more bluntly: squeezing out the last drop of milk from the Honoka cash cow. The two character songs are quite bland, and putting a 'Honoka Mix' at the end of every Love Live song doesn't make them any 'better', since μ's honestly sounds much better as a group. Not to mention that Honoka, in my opinion, doesn't have the most exciting voice of the group. As a leader, she hits most of the midrange notes quite well, but her voice isn't exactly dynamic. My overall impression is that you have to be really, really, really into Honoka to like this album, because most of it is just recycled material with one girl singing.

The second album, titled 'orange cheers!' is basically the same as the previous. Except that this time, there are no original songs, since every track is just a Honoka version of the season 2 songs. As much as I like Honoka, I really think her voice fits much, much better in a group. 愛してるばんざーい! , for example, is Maki's signature song and only Maki can do it justice. Which is not to say that Honoka's version isn't good -- it just isn't very exciting. Even Kotori might do a better job of it, since her voice is very cutesy and stands very well just by itself. 

Like what I said previously, there's really no reason to buy those albums unless you absolutely love Honoka. Personally, I found Honoka's personality and enthusiasm far more attractive than her voice. Which I suppose is enough to justify those purchases, but I suppose that Honoka fans should really look to spend the money on something like a figure instead. If there are plans in the future to release more solo albums/character songs, they should really produce more original material instead of remixing the same old songs over and over. Then again, knowing how fanatic the Love Live fanbase is, I'm pretty sure the otaku in Japan will buy just about anything with LL stamped on it.

I probably going to order one more batch of stuff from Japan before Christmas rolls around. Probably a figure, but I'm not really sure since I'm not really interested in any particular merch at the moment. Let's see how things go.

So I received my finals results just a few days ago. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how things turned out, even though (like always) I could've done better. I had been pretty lazy this semester, aka my last semester in my 3-year Bachelor's programme. Maybe it's because I had instant access to my computer, while in America I had to walk 20 minutes to the nearest internet cafe for a game of Dota. I really don't know. But overall things had gone okay, I suppose. GPA-wise, I landed myself something like a 3.75 (by American standards) to round off my degree, which is slightly better than an A- average. Here in New Zealand, they hand out quite a few A+ grades (apparently that means 'exceptional work' or something) when in America the A+ is extremely rare. So my grades might actually be a bit inflated.

There are times when I ask myself why I care so much about my GPA. Why I labour so much over something that's only worth 5 percent, when I would turn up to a lecture even if it meant losing out on going to a concert, etc. To an extent, the GPA is just like an arbitrary number, like your salary, or your MMR. Those numbers are important to an extent (a C gets you a degree, 60,000 gets you a comfortable life, 4K MMR puts you in the top 1%, and so forth), but after a while, it becomes a matter of chasing after those numbers for the sake of it. I just want to do as well as I can in my work, just to see how far I can go, in the same way some people just want to earn as much as possible. My dad once told me that earning money is addictive. If you earned a six-digit sum in one year, you are not going to stop on the next. I think the same kind of applies to GPA as well.

Well, things didn't go quite as planned, but at least I could breathe a sigh of relief. I was very stressed before and during the busy exams/essay deadline season, and I was very very afraid of doing badly. More specifically, it was about an economics paper I took. I took this paper because I did pretty well in a political economy course and I wanted to see what economics 'really' looked like. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Since most of the work I did were in the areas of political science/sociology, the way economics presented its methodology and explanation for social behaviour was completely different to what I'd been exposed to in my education so far. And so I struggled quite a bit early in the semester. I always joked that the only thing I learnt was that I could now draw a supply curve and remember that it actually slopes up, not down.

Still, I don't regret it at all. I think that part of the challenge of being a student is learning to look at things from radically different perspectives. Every discipline, when faced with a common problem, produces its own explanations. So in international relations, for example, we might look for theories such as institutionalism in order to explain why nation-states behave in certain ways, why China treats Senkaku Island so seriously even though it lacks strategic value, etc. A sociologist might look towards class and identity to explain why xenophobia is such a prevalent issue in China-Japan relations. And an economist might pull out game theory to explain security dilemmas in East Asia. The last one is particularly interesting because I think game theory has a lot of explanatory value. It has a lot of utility in analysing decision-making and why people do things, without resorting every time to history ("X happened because previous events in history culminated in X'). 

The real problem that makes students like me reluctant to look at those varying approaches, is that different disciplines in the university tend to ignore each other. So the sociology student doesn't really think about how economics might explain their course material even better, while economics student might treats sociology as all gibberish (meanwhile, the computer science guy treats them as  idiots who wasted three years on an useless piece of paper). When I was in America, I asked one of my instructors about how important my major is to my future development. He said that you should never let what you learn in university dictate how you think. You just need to be really smart. I think he's really quite right. If there's one thing I really learnt at university, it's that you should just read and learn whatever is necessary to explain what is at hand.

___

A professor from my one of my courses sent me an e-mail the other day. It turns out she actually remembered me from our office hours earlier in the semester, when I told her that I had plans for finishing off my Bachelor's degree with Honours. Basically, she wanted me to keep studying because apparently I'm such a good student and etcetera and that the additional degree will make my qualifications look a bit more competitive on the job market. An additional year at university sounds okay, I suppose, but what I really want is to start working, even if it means starting off with an average entry-level job and working from the ground up. Anyway, it seems I'll be staying at the university for one more year, and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write for my dissertation. A lot of big organizations like to see writing samples, so to write my dissertation on where I most likely would work sounds like a pretty good idea.

Well, I guess the paper I wrote for her class was pretty good. I'm actually very proud of it, because it was a conscious attempt to make my language as precise and technical as possible (to make the 'science' in 'social science' pop out, so to speak), and for once things actually went as planned. I wrote my paper on comparative environmental policies between China and New Zealand, and ask whether a participatory democratic system lends to more effective governance over the environment. Writing the paper was a very challenging experience. It's always hard to settle on the right variables to test out your hypothesis in a social science paper, because you have to balance generalization with explanatory power. It is always important to simplify and exaggerate, making sure that you quantify the most important variables that shapes the phenomena you are trying to explain, be precise about your definitions, and not to mix up 'believe', 'prove' and 'argue'.

What I've realized is that precision and clarity is the most important thing when it comes to writing any paper, and to keep an argument as streamlined and clear as possible is necessary in keeping a social science paper respectable (and living up to the 'science' in its name). On this topic: something I've thought about for quite a while is whether social sciences, given enough time, will explain social phenomena in the same way as the natural sciences explain the natural world. Or whether the two are so fundamentally different that it would be a mistake for social science to see itself as a purely empirical endeavour. I had been thinking about this when I was writing my research paper, and wondering why all the source material I studied used prose nearly identical to that of a scientific report. And I don't have an answer, just yet, although fortunately I don't have a deadline to figure out an answer for that problem.