So, it’s been an eventful month for me, to say the least, and I’ve been slacking off in my blogging promises (yet still meeting the once a month quota, hah!). I headed up to Sydney late last month for the Australian Romance Readers Convention, a week later I graduated once more with Honours, and the following Saturday I made my annual pilgrimage to Supanova Expo. I’ll be blogging about all those, and I still need to get round to my thoughts on My Princess (so abominably late, I am), but firstly – graduation!

In the lead-up towards graduation I was feeling pretty off about the whole ordeal; I mean, graduation doesn’t equate to getting a job or a good one at that; it just officially closes that chapter of tertiary study. And now I’m really in a limbo. So there certainly was a sense of finality this time, whereas last year I was joking alongside the other graduates, thinking “oh, I still have all the time in the world!” I’d been through the graduation drill before, yet this year I felt as flustered as ever. Perhaps when I finally get that PhD in the distant future, I will tick …

It was my worst and toughest academic year yet, but equally just as rewarding (well, at least, I try to remind myself of the rewards, 43 cushions later). It was the year Australia voted in* its first female Prime Minister. It was the year a Queenslander hacker brought too much attention to himself by leaking a heck of a lot of alarming cables. It was the year Bruce Wayne returned as the Batman, and DC Comics went nuts, or rather, Grant Morrison was permitted to go nuts.

All things considered, it was just another tumultuous year. So here’s a summary of what made 2010 for me.

You may have also noticed over the week that I’ve overhauled Evening Hour ‘s layout a lot. I’m slowly converting this blog into a review blog, since it’s all I seem to be doing anyway. It’s still under construction so there may be errors or blank spaces here and there. Watch this space!

* = “voted in” in the truest sense is questionable, as former PM Kevin Rudd was ousted by his own people, rather than the public, therefore we really had no choice…

So, it’s the end of June, and I’m halfway into my Honours project—SCARY THOUGHT. If you don’t know what my project is about, you might want to read this post though my objectives have altered slightly as time’s passed. Now is the perfect time to critically reflect on my progress throughout the first semester. We were given the opportunity to present our process and findings in a quasi-formal verbal and visual (poster) presentation on the 10th and 16th of June. (Well, actually, it made up 75% of our total grade, so it’s a bigger deal than I’m making it out to be.)

Luckily for me I was assigned to the latter date, so that gave me a while to collate my ideas together, following my marathon completion of my artist book for my elective unit. In a nutshell, I formulated a new question/thesis, emphasising the merits of ornament over modernism, excess over restraint, maximalism over minimalism. The difference being a lot of me mixed into the concoction. I turned to critical theory and other texts to validate my arguments, and I believe I was able to confidently and convincingly articulate my ideas on, and more importantly my passion for, this subject.

I’m …

Nearly gave up with finishing up this summary, but here I am! This was the last day of the forum, when the enthusiasm is still thriving but struggling to stay awake. Well, for me, it was. I still hadn’t recovered from the previous day’s madness. Who’d have thought sitting down in somewhat un-ergonomic chairs for hours on end would be so exhausting? We had free copies of Dumbo Feather, Pass it On on our seats; I had to make sure I picked a seat with a back issue that I didn’t already have (!).

Agnete Enga

Agnete is part of Smart Design. She established FemmeDen to “save good women from bad products”. It was interesting how she criticised the way products are biased towards the male target audience, when companies ought to place even greater precedence on women, who actually influence 80% of consumer products. She demonstrated the “differences” between the genders through a rather crude experiment—2 men and 2 women from the audience were asked to volunteer to come up stage, and both sexes had to hold hands. Once with the opposite sex, and once with the same sex. They were asked how they felt. I think the all-boy couple said …

Day 2 of agIdeas! A somewhat later start, but this gave Liz and I a chance to have “breakfast”, and what better way to wake up than with a large cup of Krispy Kreme’s caramel latte. HEAVEN!!

I’m pleased or not so pleased to say that no one particularly “bothered” me today; it was all generally pleasant… Though you’d think it’d be better to be roused into fury or fangirl delight. I did get Wayne Thompson’s signature on my sketchbook though; I may scan that in later, if anyone cares to have a laugh with me. :P Vincent said (somewhere along the line of) my being easily affected by fangirl tendencies. It’s called passion, and dedication, and yes, some healthy doses of obsession!

Also was able to collect our “free” agIdeas 20th anniversary book. I am so sad flicking through the 2007 speaker list. And I’m always sad about this because CHIP KIDD (The rockstar graphic designer who like, totes loves Batman, even more than me! How is this possible!) attended and I did not go to agIdeas that year. I was in first year; what did I know about design then? Zilch! This book is absolutely a brick, weighing more than …