Team Work

No idea if this is a controvercy or not, but I am going to rant nevertheless.

You are a student. A fairly good student, although there are always people who do better than you for some reason. You are in a class with lots of people you've never met before and/or get randomly assigned a group, with whom you have to devise a paper, 20 or 30 pages in length.
Am I the only person who thinks that this is a complete waste of time and entirely futile and that the work would much, much better have been done by one person alone? I am always, always worse off when I work with a group, never better. I never gain anything from what other people contribute, except, maybe, for a little time. But this is deceiving, as I usually spend more time in total with group work than doing the same amount of work alone. So... where is the benefit? It cannot be that they are actually trying to teach us co-operation through this, seeing as most of the time the members of a group are so different that individual parts of the work need to be distributed among them. Also, one cannot go and actually write a paper in joint effort. It is just not possible.

Argh!

Therefore, I think that group work at universities is entirely useless and should be terminated from the face of the earth.
Ook. I spoke. (To mix Terry Pratchett and Karl May.)

Musical

To be honest, I think we have a musical thread somewhere, but I was too lazy to look for it to tell you all that I bought the piano sheet music for Wicked now (IMG:style_emoticons/default/bananadance.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/bananadance.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/bananadance.gif) and am insanely happy practising these insanely difficult pieces. For piano - barely sight-readable. But I am learning.

Sooo... back to Musicals as such. Got any favourites? Is there anyone but me who has a bunch of insane sisters and cousins around them who keep wanting to play and sing the sings from various musicals over and over again? (piano and voice mostly, no karaoke, sadly (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_mrgreen.gif) )

Living - how do you manage?

I'm curious how people perceive the world around them. This is a bit of a random post, I admit, but I was wondering if people other than me sometimes look at the world before them and feel it is strangely twisted and surreal somehow. Like a badly written story or like a very real dream. Not real at all, and far too short.

Being 24 1/2 years of age, my perception of life is changing constantly at the moment. It is just... all so strange. I find no better words for it. Within my family, my grandmother is nearing 90 years and I know, logically, that she is probably going to die within the next ten or twelve years. That alone, is absolutely surreal to me. Unimaginable, even, because she is still perfectly healthy and just the same as ever. She is one of the last of her generation (within my family) and her children (my father and his siblings) are now growing old. Some of them (the 60+ ones) look and act already like my great aunts and uncles used to when they were still alive and I was a lot younger. And because they died now, this reminds me horribly of the fact that the next generation is going to die as well and the next, and the next.
This sounds absolutely stupid, but I really feel I would like to talk to some of you guys about this topic, particularly because some of you've already passed the next stage - the next ten or twenty years so to speak. What I'm interested in is: does it change? The perception, I mean. My perception was so much different when I was 12, 15, 18... does it keep changing?

I know, of course, that there isn't something like "an answer" to all the insecurity and the big "why are we here" question. Not really. But... how do you cope? How do you live day after day knowing that you are going to die at some point and knowing that your friends and family are going to die - so many of them before you will?

Magical Creatures

A few more random DH bits to think about, hoping that I haven't overlooked this somewhere in any of the other threads.

I was just re-reading the final battle scene and was wondering what it was that made the centaurs change their mind of not meddling in human affairs. Did I miss anything? I also cannot think of a solution ever given to the giant problem. Them being banished to the mountains and all. The third question, and perhaps the most pressing one concerns House-Elves. I seem to remember JK saying that their "situation was improved" through Hermione's efforts in the field, but I'd really like to have known what it was that made them think they had to serve witches and wizards all their lives without an option of getting paid and all. How come Dobby was the only one to see reason? It couldn't have been because he was treated particularly badly because I'd say Kreacher was hardly better off and he didn't stop being a servant to the last (what with Harry planning to ask him for a sandwich before going to bed after the battle).

Deathly Hallow the Fanfic

Got you in here, did I? All those people with a desire to rage at me for calling Deathly Hallows "fanfic-y" as a means of putting it down and who have "just about had enough" of people comparing JK to the numerous stories out there that were created in her name with her characters, her own invented places...

But that's not, in fact, what I was going to do. I really only wanted to know if anyone apart from me and Moth did, in fact, notice a change in JK's writing style, regardless whether you or I or anyone consider it good or bad. Whether any of you think (and this is about hearing your personal theories concerning content and style of the book) that JK was, in fact, influenced by what she read about her own story after all. Because she has read fanfiction, she says, and of course she reads published stuff as well all the time.

My theory is thus:
- JK was influenced by whichever fanfiction she read during the writing of OotP, HBP, and DH in terms of pairings. She said, I think, that she read somewhere Lupin and Tonks would have "multicoloured puppies" and... I can't remember if she said that this directly lead to her pairing them up, but it might have been a factor. Ginny/Harry, I feel, could just as well have come up without outside influence. Another thing she might have thought "readers would like to see" was the wedding between Bill and Fleur. The way every detail was described there felt a lot like it was serving rabid teenage fans to their needs rather than serving the story.

- JK was influenced by fanfiction and possibly pieces of published literary fiction written in fanfic style (for a lack of a literary term for this) in terms of how she wrote certain scenes. I observed (or think I did) a sudden increase in descriptions of people's clothes. No other book before DH has as many detailed descriptions of dresses and hair and whatnot, with the possible exception of the Yule Ball scene in GoF. Strangely, this caught my attention not only during scenes in which this might have been vaguely appropriate (like the wedding) but also increasingly during scenes of tension, such as towards the end when she suddenly mentions how Snape was not, in fact, wearing his nightshirt, but his usual cloak. Now, in that particular scene the description doesn't take too much of the page, but it felt like overall there were a lot more bits like this thrown in, some of them longer than they would have had to be.

Thoughts?