The Bum Blog

22.05.2026

My exams began on the 14th of the month, and so far they've gone alright. I did hit a bad exam on the 19th, but it shouldn't count to my overall grade, so it didn't hit me too bad. I felt quite tired today, after dealing with three days of exams in a row, so I only did 3 relatively light papers. I'll try to sleep relatively early tonight and be less miserable tomorrow. I have over a week until my next exam, so I ought to make the most of my time.

Hopefully I'll be more productive and consistent over the next week, things aren't going so badly after all I feel better. I should probably update my website once or twice over the next couple weeks, although my writing is definitely on the back burner now. I'll have plenty of time to write when I don't have exams.

13.05.2026

There's nothing much to do today. My first exam is tomorrow, but I've just about finished with preparations. I'm going to sit a paper at 13:00, to prepare for the real thing, because I usually work in the morning.

It's raining quite heavily outside, and I thought I'd take a picture and turn it into a page background, but I don't want to accidentally dox myself.

Well I sat the paper, and I finished with 70 minutes to spare. I might do the 2026 Brampton Manor Academy (Not my sixth form!) mock papers tomorrow, but all that's set in stone is that I'll take a shower and a long walk in preparation for the exam.

Exam season is going to be fun again, and like with GCSEs, I've already got the worst of the stress done with. Then it was the Spanish speaking exam, but this time it was the interview all the way back in December. Waiting for my first interview gave me the cortisol spike of the century!

11.05.2026

I noticed other peoples' websites have very basic update sections. They may have made multiple changes, but all they put is "take a look! :3". Maybe I'm autistic, but I appreciate a good old-fashioned bullet point list.

In yet another report of, "in other news", I have beaten 'Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma'! I haven't started dating anyone yet, although I have made significant progress on the bonding quests up to those commitments. I believe the post-game content requires marriage to unlock, so I'll have to settle for someone. I hope I can marry multiple characters, because getting with some of the gods would be fun. I'll pick a new game up soon, or finish a couple I'm near the end of.

08.05.2026

I fear I lost the day to the local elections, but that's okay, because elections I'm actually interested in like these only happen once or twice a year. That said, I was able to publish the reviews update to my website, so I'm certainly better off for experiencing the day.

I don't even care much about politics anymore, but I still get autistic over percentage swings, and maps, particularly those with more than four colours! We're seeing a lot more of those these days :)

07.05.2026

I've effectively finished school, finally, as I'm now on study leave until the end of exams. Exams begin in 7 days, but I only have to sit 15 papers this time, just over half of what I had to deal with in year 11. Technically, going off last year's grade boundaries, the minimum number of exams I have to sit to get into my insurance university is only 7, and it's 8 for my firm. At my [firm / insurance], this would require getting an [A / A*] on Mathematics by doing [2 / 3] of the 3 papers, getting at least [82% / 95%] overall. I would get an A* on Further Mathematics by scoring at least 99% on Core Pure and Major Statistics, skipping three of my papers. Finally, I would sit both Computer Science papers to get my final grade, while skipping all of Physics. Then take both STEP papers if going for my firm choice.

Of course, I'm not going to skip any papers in reality, but the thought of being able to skip papers and still be fine puts me at ease. If I decide the simplex method (hardest non-mechanics further maths topic) is scary in the morning of my exam on it, I can go back to sleep peacefully.

I've been playing Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, and writing a bit. I think of the gods in Azuma, I'd be most like some combination of Kanata and Kurama. I anticipate that over the exam period, I'll actually post more to my website than I have over the past month, because I've just about finished STEP preparation.

Good luck to others who have exams soon...

26.04.2026

Exam season is usually one of my favourite times of the year. Of course, exams are fun, and they're a great opportunity to "IQmog" others, but more importantly, they leave open a wide window for playing games and doing anything other than work. Since there's no expectation to learn new content, you can technically get by without doing any work at all, if you trust your unconscious self to remember what you've been learning over the prior couple years. This year, due to STEP, it's not so trivial, but I'm enough of a masochist to find STEP "fun", so it's not such a terrible thing anyway.

I just got back into playing Geometry Dash, because I have some real life friends I don't want having harder demons beaten than me. I spent the weekend beating Nine Circles, Future Funk, and Jawbreaker, my first three real hard demons. I think I beat the levels pretty quickly, all things considered, except for Nine Circles, which I had been grinding on and off for a couple years, but was only able to finish over the course of an hour or two on Saturday. Future Funk was the longest and hardest of the three, and I'd require a full essay to evaluate which is the harder level between Nine Circles and Jawbreaker.

On Saturday, I also got back into playing Persona 4. I got the first "bad ending" in (real life) December, and stopped playing for a few months because the gameplay loop got a bit stale after 60 hours. I don't think there's much left in the "normal route" of the game, so I should beat it fairly soon. I'm not sure if I'll try to max out everyones' social links and go for the "true ending" after beating the game normally, but if I do, it'll probably be quite a long time after this first playthrough.

23.04.2026

I swear I made at some point since the last one, but it must've been deleted after I forgot to publish it.

In this 12-day period, I had my worst day of the year thus far, although it wasn't so bad. I spent some time thinking about what I want to achieve and become in the next few months and years, and I wrote a private text working through some of my private problems.

I'm feeling better now, but I don't seem to be as productive or energetic as I was a few weeks ago. Of course, that doesn't really matter, since all of my vital work is more or less done. I finally got my last university decision, and was able to submit my final choices. Except for a few exams, nothing I do between now and October really matters, but I'd like to continue learning and making things during the long holiday.

Today might be a school day, but we're so close to exams now that attendance is optional ;)

I'm disappointingly pleased about writing an article today.

11.04.2026

I've started coding on C++ over the past couple days. Surprisingly, I actually quite like it. A friend of mine is a devout supporter of the language and I sort of had an inferiority complex, being a Python user... Anyway, I solved my first Leetcode hard problem (Largest Rectangle in Histogram) today! It took me almost two hours, but now I can say I'm an expert in "monotonic stacks".

I went on to compete in my first Leetcode contest, the biweekly one. I solved 3 of the problems rather quickly, but was then stumped by the fourth problem, causing me to give up after 45 minutes. I'm sure there was some trick to cut down on the memory or time complexity (I had a "Memory Limit Exceeded" error") which I didn't know.

I'm almost at the end of Pokemon: Let's go Pikachu! now, only having the "elite four" to deal with. I found the last two gym leaders trivial, but I like their characters, so it's okay.

After being on screens for 11 hours, I took a brief look out of the window, and saw a lovely view of the trees. They're starting to grow leaves, and they're thriving in the late afternoon sunshine. Strangely, I can feel both as if I'm lesser than them and greater than them, simultaneously, but it's difficult to imagine myself at one with them, or nature as a whole. I suppose that's what happens when you stay inside 95% of the time!

07.04.2026

Today was basically a rest day from serious work, although I did finish my "article" on the book, 'Letters to a Young Mathematician'. I dealt with essential busywork tasks, like retrieving my final termly travel pass, and filling in forms for university. I don't know why Cambridge asks for so much. All the other universities I have offers from are satisfied with whatever UCAS tells them, and since Cambridge asks for your student finance letter, it feels like they expect you to firm them. Of course, 99% of people will firm them but it still comes off as a little presumptuous and narcissistic. Whatever, I'm just complaining about having to do paperwork.

I went on to research more on future careers, and realised I really really really don't want to go into investment banking, for I would rather not work 90 hours per week. The typical 60 hour workweeks you find in tech, quant, and even some other finance jobs seems much more reasonable. If I want to avoid investment banking, I'm best off locking in for STEP, so I'll make sure to do a full paper tomorrow.

Last night, I finished watching the original 70 episode run of 'Cardcaptor Sakura'. I might write about the anime in detail at some point, but there's a lot to get through. I still have to watch the second movie, the OVA, and the Clear Card arc. I'll just say that the last episode made me cry for the first time in at least six months, which surprised me, as I didn't get invested into that part of the plot until quite far on. The few episodes prior to the final one were also excellent.

I've been playing 'Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!', over the last few days. I've owned the game either since 2018 or 2019, but I never really got started with it. I've never made much progress on any pokémon game, but this one is apparently related to the first generation of games so it seemed like a good place to start. I have four of the gym badges and I'm liking the game so far, although I don't have many complex thoughts to give on it.

03.04.2026

I posted this late, apologies.

I have an interesting idea for a 24 hour challenge. It's the "No Numbers" challenge, where you have to live through an entire day without seeing a single number. The restriction eliminates basically all digital devices (there's clocks on everything these days) and you probably couldn't even read a book (page numbers). If they weren't eliminated otherwise, you probably wouldn't be able to watch videos, listen to audios, or play games either. Saddest of all, nearly all of maths would be prohibited.

If I did the challenge, my strategy might be to spend as much of the day outside as possible. That said, the outside world is dangerous because you don't know where you'll find numbers. It'd be inevitable to see numbers if you're in an urban area, and even if you're in a rural area, because most doors have numbers on them! I'd have to spend a few hours in nature, possibly scaling a big hill. I would love to do this with a camera to take photos and videos, but the camera display would surely be filled with numbers... I *would* be allowed to write or draw on unmarked paper. Past that, it's difficult to think of any numberless creative pursuits. Even craftsman trades involve using numbers, unless you're making everything up as you go along.

The easiest approach would be to sleep and eat all day, or otherwise simply "do nothing", but this is boring, so in the spirit of the challenge, this strategy ought to be penalised. Of course, it would be up to the individual if they care about this rule, but employing this strategy would remove the potential value of these kinds of challenges, which is to find new things to do you wouldn't have thought of doing before.

01.04.2026

I'm really getting into writing here now. Although I didn't get to work on any interesting projects last year, nor start a website successfully, I'm thankful to the me of 2025 for doing enough work for me to be to carefree in the lead up to exams. I know some people who will be stressed, grinding exam papers for the next 80 days. They're not wrong to do that, but besides one exam, I'm no longer feeling the pressure. I took a holiday, to Bala, in the middle of my GCSEs, but not before I knew I was going to be okay. I'm not going anywhere physically different this year until summer, but I'm obviously not grinding exam papers all day.

Admittedly, that "one exam" is quite a nasty one. If I hadn't sorted everything else out until now, it would truly be over for me. I'm making good progress, and on one of the problems on the paper (STEP II 2018) I did this morning, I cut my time down from 4 hours to 19 minutes. To be fair on my old self, my last (successful) attempt was two years ago, and so it was quite a difficult problem for me at the time. It's lovely to measure the progress I've made in such a clear-cut way like that, even if I'm still struggling on some questions. I got a simple maximisation problem wrong today, about a gambling game. It's not looking good for my future career as a casino owner!

I'm going to spin this blog post into a proper, if short, article, because I'm getting into a rhythm here.

In other news, the visits counter for my website is approaching the calendar year. I'm not sure how accurate the counter is, but it's nice that some people are falling into my website, presumably reading one paragraph, and clicking off! I feel bad because at least half of those visits were from before I came back to the website in February, but soon enough most visits will have been post-February.

31.03.2026

I spent quite a lot of time today researching a wikipedia rabbit hole, doing actual work, and writing. My student finance got approved almost instantaneously, and fortunately, I've been given the maximum possible loan. Hooray for povvo privilege!

Big things are happening tomorrow!

30.03.2026

Now that exam result fears have been alleviated, I have a couple weeks of Easter holiday to play with. My workflow should consist of physics and language learning, among other learnings, as well as book reading and article writing. My top priority remains working through past STEP papers, but I've already done most of the papers from the last 25 years. I'm going to have to go back to papers I've already done and answer the questions I deemed to be too intimidating on my first attempt of the paper.

That said, I'm going to take some "off-days" from STEP so I can focus on writing more. Allocating just one or two hours a day to writing just isn't enough, because I'll probably "lose" that time, and sacrifice the writing instead of more pertinent work. Even if I do manage to sit down on Obsidian (yes), I'll only get on a roll after an hour or two anyway. If I wrote for just an hour a day, I'd have a lot of unfinished notes and articles!

In terms of other life news, I've started with student finance, but am still waiting for my fifth university choice to get back to me, meaning I'm unable to choose the universities I actually want to go to. I could just reject that fifth university myself, but I know that's what they want me to do.

I recently brought my monitor into my primary room, and I don't think I'll be able to go back to playing my Switch 2 in handheld mode, at least not while I'm at home. I want to find other devices to plug into the monitor, and I might start playing my old console games again.

I started my new island in the Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream demo, christening it as Little Saint James Island. The first resident was, I don't need to say it, and the second was myself. One thing I like about the game is that there's barely any filter, which has already led to some interesting conversations on the island. I'm not going to write about the island on this website very much because it's going to include lots of people I know in real life, and I don't want to dox anyone.

22.03.2026

I actually published an article and updated the website today!

I think my new "PLANNER" might be helping me to structure my day better, ensuring I get things done and do the things I really enjoy. For some reason, it's really difficult for me to get started writing or updating my website, even though when I do do it, I almost always have a good time. It's a similar story for doing past exam papers, which I know I'll be able to at least tolerate, even when it's a boring A-Level paper. I even face resistance when I try to play vidya or watch anime! It's like the only thing I can do "naturally" is eat food, which is of course great, but not the only wonder of the world!

To avoid burnout, I only did a couple STEP questions today, but one question I did had a really pretty graph I'd like to share with you. Spoilers for STEP III 2019 if you're into that.

21.03.2026

Right, sorry about that. I forgot I had mock exams for a week, and I kind of wanted to do okay in them. It's not over yet, but there aren't many papers left, so I'll get back to writing and doing other things apart from revising more.

I finished watching Takopi's Original Sin (as in the consoomer corner) and I played some Touhou Mystia's Izakaya, among other things. I haven't been very productive this past week, but I suppose that's what exams are for, excuses!

14.03.2026

This is an obligatory post to wish you a happy Pi Day!

To be truthful, I didn't get much done today, ironically particularly with respect to maths. I researched future career opportunities with my good friend Claude, and continued on a recent project of compiling a bank of tasks for me to fit into my routine every day until I get to university. Every evening, I try to make a schedule for my next day, but usually I can only stretch it to about noon, when I give up and go to sleep (the evening, not noon the next day!).

The purpose of this "bank" is to make the scheduling process easier, giving me a lot of good things to be getting on with without the need to think about it. I've separated tasks into various categories. The most obvious productivity category is university and career preparation, involving pre-reading for courses and doing puzzles, programming, book reading, and more to prepare for both university and my eventual career.

I also have sections on "PLAYAN, WATCHAN, LISTENAN, READAN", learning new things, writing (including this site) and going outside. It's not complete yet but it's pretty close.

In other news,I spiced up my desktop environment's icon panel today. It has a rainbow gradient, randomly coloured tray icons, times new roman font, and curves. I'm not showing it to you because I don't know how best to present an image with a 32:1 aspect ratio.

Lastly, I'll keep myself accountable to writing another article tomorrow, probably.

11.03.2026

I started the day off with an A-Level paper, followed by a STEP paper. [Repeat for 100 days]

In the afteroon, I went through my external hard drive and reorganised all of my files and folders, deleting anything which was redundant. I had most of my home folders from multiple installations, so it took a couple hours to work through it all. I actually had fun though.

After this process, it was time to install Fedora, having given up on Arch, which of course isn't a bad distro, rather it just wasn't my thing. My gaming performance wasn't great, which I'm sure was my fault, but I found no better solution than switching things up.

I installed Fedora swiftly and painlessly, but when I made it onto the installation, something was off. My pointer was very sluggish, so after logging into some accounts and doing the basic setup, I checked the settings, and discovered that the refresh rate was locked to 60Hz, and it felt more like 30Hz. It quickly became apparent that this was due to NVIDIA driver problems, so I followed an online guide to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, ditching the open-source ones. I had to reboot my laptop, but after that, it was smooth sailing. I transferred my files from my external hard drive just as I had planned

All this left me with little time to do much else, but it's quite alright, as today was an "investment", okay?

09.03.2026

I set up my "LinkedIn" today and took a looksie of profiles belonging to people from my old secondary school. I was shocked to find that my colleagues, once young, and full of joy, had all morphed into "aspiring" [fill in the blank]s. The worst offender was an "Aspiring Chartered Tax Adviser". I understand that I should expect nothing less from LinkedIn, and I'll be guilty of it too at some point. I'm sure everyone's still normal in real life, but the uncanniness of these profiles amused me. 17-19 year olds btw.

In other news, I had M&S ring doughnuts (4-pack, not expensive!) today, and one of them didn't have a hole! I'm astounded, flummoxed, perplexed, nonplussed.

08.03.2026

I'm acutely aware that there isn't long until my exams begin, just 67 days. The exam period should be a fun time, except for the STEP II and STEP III papers in 88 and 94 days respectively. Not long after, exams will end in 102 days. I will leave for university approximately 100 days over that, meaning I only have about 200 days to prepare.

Most university "preparations" will be made during the summer holidays, but it doesn't hurt to get a headstart, especially since I'll hopefully (pending middle east war) be occupied by a trip to Malaysia for about 25 days.

I don't have much of a plan yet, but the vague idea is there.

Over the summer, I'll probably have to learn to do various "life" things, particularly cooking. Counting up the loans and bursaries, I won't be too strapped for cash, but I won't be able to eat at restaurants or shop at Sainsbury's (with any frequency).

I'll need to "lock in" during the first couple weeks to get to know people, so I don't become a recluse for four years. I want to come up with a list of interesting or at least unusual questions to ask, to stimulate conversation. I'd ask for ideas, but there isn't anywhere to give them.

The main thing that makes it difficult to prepare is that I won't even know which university (and city) I'm going to until the 13th of August, leaving me with rather ltitle time to handle the specifics. I imagine I'll be inclined to lethargy between the end of exams and results day, so I need to develop a list of interesting activities and things to learn so I always have something to do.