Advice on friends

I don't feel that advice giving is a strong point of mine but I'll do my best.

Tips on meeting/befriending fun and interesting people outside of school?

I'm not a particularly social person and I find making friends a daunting task but somehow I manage it. My advice would be to look on your pants and see if there are any nerdfighter gatherings happening in your area. This how I meet some good friends of mine, it's particularly good if there isn't a really a well established community, that way everyone is kind of in the same boat. If there isn't any gatherings coming up, make one!

Try going places with friends and get them to invite mutual friends that you don't know. You might have some common interests.

Rachel's question about defriending her friend.

I didn't what to put as the question for this so that is why I have that.

I have lost a lot of friends over the years, lossing contact or being ditched for the "cooler kids" or a simple fall out leading to silence for over a year, so I feel I have some expertise in this field. I'm going from what you've said, I would say if you no longer speak and just drifted apart there's no need to delete her from your sites, but if you've had arguments, disagree over things and seeing her posts make you annoyed then delete.

You shouldn't worry about how she will react, that's not your problem any more because you are not friends. If she's upset over it, that's her problem not yours. Keep the people you care about and who care about you, no one else should matter.

I know I've not really wrote much about it and sure it will help but my feelings about friendship are pretty black and white.

Agony Aunt-ing

I'm going to try to give answers to two of these questions. I didn't really have good answers to many of the others, and these two sort of go together a bit, so hopefully there's something here that might be helpful.


How do you stop procrastinating?


I really only have one piece of advice for this one, and it will only help if you have the same type of procrastination problem as I do, but this is actually the only thing I've found that really works for me. Sometimes I procrastinate by reading or watching TV or deciding that I desperately need to reorganize my closet, but most of the time my problem is the internet. I use site-blocking software to prevent me from accessing the sites that I waste the most time on. The program I use is a piece of free software called Cold Turkey. It's Windows-only, but I know there are similar programs out there for Mac. You just type in the sites you want to block, and set how long you want them to stay blocked. Once you hit go, you can't get on those sites until the time is up. I find that the benefits from this are two-fold: obviously, it prevents me from actually wasting time on those sites, but knowing that I can't get on them also shuts off that nagging voice that says things like "I wonder if anyone's tweeted anything interesting" or "I wonder if any of my subscriptions have uploaded new videos," so that I can focus better on whatever I'm actually supposed to be doing.

Do you have any tips for good studying habits?


Create a designated study area. Do all of your studying there, and when you're doing things other than studying, go somewhere else. This helps make sure that you stay focused while you're studying.

Where applicable, review past tests/exams/assignments to identify your problem areas so that you know where you need to focus the most attention.

Condense your class notes into study notes. Only go through your full set of notes once, in order to create a shortened version of the absolute most important points. After that, read through the shorter notes as many times as you can. Try to use the important points to remind you of the smaller details, and only refer back to your longer notes if you need to refresh your memory on something. For one thing, going through 15 pages instead of 50 feels like a lot less work, and you can cover the same amount of material more times. Plus, if you can teach yourself to remember things in those sorts of chunks, you only need to memorize the bigger things to bring the details to mind, rather than trying to memorize every little thing in your notes separately. If you're super-keen and have enough time, try to make condensed notes as you go along, once you've finished a topic, rather than waiting until you have something to study for, because it will save time later and make studying seem less daunting so that it's easier to get started. It also lets you make sure you understand a topic while it's still fresh in your mind, and help get your brain into that connection-making mindset.

Take breaks every few hours. If you study too much at once your brain will just get tired and start jumbling things up. Try to use your breaks to do something that will help refresh you, like going for a walk, having a snack, or taking a nap. This will help you hit the ground running when you do start studying again, and it will also feel more like a break if you get up and move around and change gears completely, rather than just sitting down and logging into Facebook.

I sort of feel like I just regurgitated one of those 'study tips' emails that my university sends out every exam period, but these really are all things that I actually do, and they have helped.

Time for some (un?)qualified advice

Hi!

I'm going to answer Rachel's cosplay question since that will take up the majority of this post and it's the one I can most adequately answer.

“What's the process for making a cosplay outfit? I've always really wanted to try, but it feels so overwhelming.”
It's really just figuring out how to begin in my opinion.

Step 1 Who or what do you want to cosplay?
Make sure to have a couple of options available to yourself. Are you planning a monster? Average television character? Superhero?

Step 2 The purpose of your cosplay.
Is it for a specific event? If so, what are your time constraints? Also take into consideration how accurate you want your cosplay to be also your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to sewing, sculpting etc. Of course this is not really important if you can persuade a friend or family member to do all the difficult tasks for you.

Step 3. Process of Elimination.
Knowing your time limit, skills and accuracy to the character goal eliminate the cosplays that you absolutely know you cannot produce in your allotted time. For example, there’s no way I can make a Silence cosplay in time for Anime Boston in April, so that’s off my list. Way too complicated.


This also reminds me to tell you that you also need to know the materials you will need for your cosplay, animated characters are a little more difficult but then again they allow you some room to choose a material you’re comfortable with. And it’s more than likely that someone has already done the cosplay and has posted about how they made it online, you can find specific tips quite easily when you’re at a loss.

If you know your cosplay requires a specific material and it’s too expensive for you at the time, it might be a cosplay to work on over a longer period of time and not on a time constraint. The materials for my Weeping Angel cosplay amounted to over $200 with the foam, cloth, paints, wig and stockings.

Step 4 Get Started.
Once you’ve selected your cosplay and made a list of the necessary materials you can begin to get started. You might need some sewing patterns to plan it out, which are no problem to find online, you might need to modify or pay for them, but they are definitely worth it. Also, never underestimate the values of cardboard, pvc, scrap wood, and other various items you can find in an arts and crafts store, you don't need to break out the fiberglass. And as I said before, you have the internet, people have more than likely posted specifically about the character you're working on or cosplays similar.

That’s how I go through my cosplays, I always check for what I’m able to do with the time I’m given, when I start really early I can do more complicated and difficult cosplays because I have more time to learn and practice new skills. I have to save up for materials and plan how I’m going to make my cosplay. Working a little bit every day or week, spreading out the workload, makes the process a lot less overwhelming and a lot easier.

I hope this helps you at least organize your steps and planning. If not I can get more specific.

2. That was awful long so I don't think I'll be writing much more. Can't wait to see the rest of this week's posts. Bye!