"What is this ominous light that threatens to engulf us?!"

Yesss Reading Week, gotta take this chance to catch up on things because this is the only downtime I will have before March, when all hell breaks loose. This also marks the time when I'm finally done actual experimenting in my research lab, but now need to read up on tons of articles to prepare for my write-up.

I'm only casually following the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, mainly just to see the medal counts and for which events. Apparently, we have broken the "curse" of never winning a gold medal while we are hosting the Winter Olympics, so that is good news.

The exam schedule for April has been released, and interestingly all of my exams take place on Wednesdays. Of course, I'm not complaining; I would much rather have the exams spread out over a longer period of time than to be forced to write all the exams at the beginning to finish early. Cramming for several courses at the same time never works really well, even for things you have been reviewing throughout the semester, because you have to keep switching your focus between subjects.

Distemper

I guess I'll just throw in a post with some links to my user-created Sporcle quizzes. I've placed a badge linking to the site in the Links section. In short, Sporcle is a site with a bunch of fun trivia quizzes on many topics. Popular ones include:
Countries of the World
NFL Teams
The Simpsons Characters
Periodic Table
Commonest English Words

They enabled the creation of user-made quizzes sometime around September last year. It doesn't have the full capabilities as some published quizzes, but a lot of pretty impressive and creative quizzes have already been made thus far by various users. Ones that are popular enough or really novel may get published by Sporcle as an official quiz.

I am already rather humbled that any of my quizzes managed to garner some level of popularity, but I'm not sure if any of them will be published. The most well-accepted ones so far are:

Shape-Describing Words
How would you describe in a single word something shaped like a cross, or a star? This quiz might help... Definite plus if you know some Latin or Greek vocab, but there are a lot of words whose meanings can easily be inferred.

Look-Alikes: Hidden Objects [pic]
I took a picture from the book Look-Alikes by Joan Steiner (amazingly creative, I read it when I was younger and loved it) and asked you to identify all the everyday objects Steiner used to create the picture. She uses objects in a way such that they "look alike" to something else, such as using slices of bread to create a sidewalk or a lemon juicer to look like a spinning carnival ride, all rather convincingly.

Pokémon Trainer Classes (Gen I)
Pokémon Trainer Classes (Gen II)
Hopefully if you played Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow back in the day, or even the Gold/Silver/Crystal versions, this might give you a nice nostalgic blast. Can you remember all those annoying trainers from the game who stop you in your tracks, walk up to you to say something completely non-sequitur, and then challenge you to Pokémon battles?

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Here are also some of my other quizzes. There is a bias on Pokemon-based quizzes since those were mostly the ones I started making first before branching out to other topics. I do have some more pending release, like "Accidental Inventions/Discoveries" which I'll release soon...

Classical Mythology Lovers
Identify the lovers from famous classical mythology couples. For example, the woman whose face "launched a thousand ships"...?

Common Drug Delivery Forms
You'll find examples of all of these around the local pharmacy or hospital somewhere. What common methods exist to deliver medicine/drugs into the body?

Pocky & Pretz Flavors
If only I was able to try all of these flavours...Mmm Pocky.

Pokémon by Cry I
Pokémon by Cry II
This was an interesting idea to put together. Can you identify the Pokémon based on the sound they make in the game? Too bad it's not what they say in the anime, since that would make the quiz rather easy. ;)

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And now, all the really niche quizzes/rest of the many Pokémon quizzes.

Non-Evolving Pokémon
These Pokémon defy the laws of evolution. Then again, so do the ones that do evolve since individuals do not evolve. Oh well.

Pokémon Supporting Characters (Game)
No single quiz would be able to encompass all those supporting characters from the anime, so I compromised with supporting characters from the games.

Pokémon Without Footprints
Pokémon by Footprint
Ever wondered what it's like to be a Pokémon forensic podiatrist? ...Me neither. Yet these quizzes exist!

Foreign Pokémon Names
It seems English Charmanders say "Charmander!" while French Charmanders say "Salamèche!". Weird.

Digimon Partners (anime)
Strange that all the world-dominating digital supervillains always seem to show up at Japan first.

Word Disassociation Lyrics
This quiz is flouncy, panicky redundant.