My advice would be to stop blocking people going to university and you might not be met with anger. Protests and demonstrations are fine in my mind, but pickets stopping people doing what they do, is a different matter.

the other gates, which you were attempting to picket as well?

what was the picket in aid of anyway?

Ahhh UCAS forms...the biggest pain in the arse known to man. Where have you applied for mate?

Lol. What ones are you regretting? And why?

Lancaster, doubt ill get in there. Id love to go Stirling though, especially for media-related courses!

i wouldn't worry about it, back when i was going through UCAS i applied to
Durham
York
Lancaster
Newcastle
Manchester

only got offers from Manchester, Newcastle and Lancaster, you should always put in one or two unreasnoble ones, just in case mate, as you never know!

The situation is a lot deeper than that. In the 60s-70s-80s we had militar dictatorship here in Brazil. During that, the police could do whatever the hell they wanted on campus. Lots of abuses, like searching a person just because he/she is black, male cops searching girls, homossexuals arrested for public indecency just because they were hugging, etc.
Then the students organized protests, specially on the University of São Paulo. The movement started there, moved out to the cities and the government fell.
I don't know if you know anything about Brazilian Dictatorship, but it was REALLY violent against protesters. Anything that happened, could be 10 people sitting somwhere to protest against something, they'd send the cops to repress everything. People were murdered, tortured and disappeared during that time, due to police actions.
At that time, a law was created, the AI-5, that represses any sort of manifestation with force. That law still exists, but after the system fell, police inside campus was made illegal. Seriously, it's in our constitution.
What we see now is something a bit similar. Police exageration, doing the same things they did back on those times, in order of the rector, someone who supported the dictatorship back then. Smoking pot is illegal, but the way the handled the situation showed that they have no skill to deal with it. Cops usually just tell the stoners to fuck off and throws away the joint, no biggie.
While we have like 13 assaults in campus every month, we have hundreds on the neighborhood around. What we don't want is the police force watching our every move. While the government sent 400 well-armed cops from ROTA (sorta like the SWAT in the USA), helicopters, everything, the entire city of São Paulo was getting robbed, raped and murdered on much more places.
About the manifestation here, it lacked organization. We were going to shut all gates, because 300 people said they'd be there and only 80 showed up. Then we saw that it failed mostly for that, some personal political discussion between two of them made it pretty much die.

EDIT: And for the record, the cops never did any good on USP. Where that student was murdered and on other dangerous places, the students rarely see a police vehicle.

Edited by user 11 November 2011 03:11:15(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

sounds nice :)

do you start with all the stats etc you built up at the end of the last one or is it a fresh start all over again?

Okay, so last night I went out drinking with folks from work, except when I say drinking, I was not drinking, they were. So it was kind of weird for me.

A couple of my drunk friends started fighting which was horrible, and then where it went from there was completely outside my wheelhouse, going to this other bar, being in a cramped space with a mixture of people I know and don't know, including a girl that I like, and the whole thing was really weird. For me, this kind of thing is not my natural environment, I was like a fish out of water.

I ended up walking this drunk friend through the south-side of Glasgow to make sure he got home okay. He's a great guy, but I think he over did it, and it all got kind of emotional. Eventually I bundled him into a taxi though.

I think it's fair to say at this point excessive drinking is probably not for me, but at least I was in the company of good people.

On the other hand, I'm getting glasses today, so that should be interesting.