u/millers_left_shoe

(disgusting shower wall in 3rd pic)

I have wavy/frizzy and very thin hair, it’s always been this thin, almost like baby hair. Ever since I was 18ish I have been losing a LOT of hair with every wash (I’m 23 now) and I’m worried my hair might be starting to thin. The first photo was in march, the second photo is now, the third is how much hair I just lost washing my hair lol.

Used to use Head and Shoulders shampoo and my last hairdresser said to switch to clear shampoo for wavy/curly hair so I’ve mostly been using BaliCurls since then.

I wash my hair every 2-3 days (it gets semi-greasy on the 3rd and very greasy on the 4th day), just wet, shampoo, rinse, no other products. I carefully dry my hair with a towel (microfibre, not terry cloth) and then let it air dry.

Should I be concerned? Is there anything I can do to help my hair? I’m scared of going bald by 26. Do you think it might be worth trying topical minoxidil? My mum had a spell of quite bad alopecia when she was pregnant with me at age 40 and she’s successfully been using Regaine ever since, so maybe it’s genetic (except I’ve never been pregnant).

Edit to add I had my blood levels checked recently and there was nothing concerning, low iron or anything.

Hiya, I’m back - the unprepared panicky testee from a few days ago :) soooo this went much better than I had ever hoped, but PLEASE don’t do what I did and go in with only a few days’ preparation, because it was a terrible idea and I could have saved myself so much fear and worry just being more prepared.

I thought I would make a post anyway with everything I remember from the exam, in case someone googling past exam questions comes across this or in case anyone has any questions.

Listening:

Part 1 was a phone call between a festival volunteer and the organiser. You had to fill in missing words from the conversation into paraphrased sentences, fairly simple words like “pass”, “bus”, “hat”, the most complicated might’ve been “emergency contact”. There was another exercise in this part but I don’t remember, sorry.

Part 2 was about an Australian island resort (okay the location wasn’t officially mentioned but the speaker had a noticeable Aussie accent). They described their selection of guided tours, especially a quad tour, around the island and you had to answer a few single choice questions about them. Then there was the typical floor plan question, where they describe were certain locations are and you have to match them to letters on a floor plan. I felt they were speaking very quickly for this part and had trouble following along on the floor plan, but that might just be bad spacial thinking (stuff like “the second left” when you don’t immediately know what direction you’d be coming from)

Part 3 was a convo between an economics student and their professor about supermarket strategies. A few more sentences where you had to fill in missing words, but more complicated this time, and then matching certain advantages (from a list) to certain supermarkets based on their conversation. There was some oddly specific vocabulary here, eg “rapid turnover” vs “fast distribution” of products but it was mostly guessable from context if you understood the rest of their conversation.

Reading:

I don’t remember the exact types of exercises we had to do, but I remember thinking the texts we got to read were very interesting. Part 1 was about Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, with portions about its archaeological discovery and portions about its ancient history, who might’ve lived in it etc.

Part 2 was an article about a circus arts degree programme at a kiwi university, you had to match paraphrased quotes to the people who said them and also decide in which paragraph a particular topic came up.

Part 3 was Steven Mithen’s take on his book The Language Puzzle about the origin of language; we had to do the classic true/false/not given type of thing as well as single choice. I felt it was a bit of an unfair advantage here to know a bit about the basics of linguistics and/or the general stance of Darwin and of Rousseau as they both came up a lot.

Overall, the highlight function helped me A LOT. I highlighted the most important words in every sentence and it made it way easier and faster to go back to a specific spot when answering questions.

Writing:

Oh god I don’t even know. I accidentally wrote wayyyyy too much for both parts (300 for part 1, 600 for part 2) and have no idea if I was penalised for that or if I just left out bits of info they were expecting. Expected like 6.0 here so I’m very relieved.

Part 1 was a table of Aussie people’s % annual spending listed by type of expense, 1986 vs 2009. I wrote one paragraph paraphrasing the question (what the table shows), one paragraph on general trends (no numbers), one paragraph on stats that had changed significantly and one paragraph on stats that had stayed the same.

Part 2 was about agreeing vs disagreeing with a statement: “Museums used to be places where you could learn knowledge about culture and history, but now this knowledge is freely accessible on the Internet. Therefore, there is no longer any use for museums” or something like that. I wrote an intro (question paraphrase and current real world context + my opinion), one paragraph on how the internet might replace the museum, one paragraph on aspects it could never replace, outro with a quick summary of all points and my opinion stated more clearly.

Speaking:

Fairly straightforward, I think the examiner seemed nice and encouraging although I spoke to a few other candidates after who said they found him intimidating haha. He grinned sometimes, ever so slightly, when I said something he seemed to have an opinion on or mentioned a book he knew.

Here’s some of the questions I remember:

“What do you do for work, or are you a student? What do you like about what you are studying? Are there parts that were difficult at first? Does anyone help you?”

“Do people in your country sometimes give each other flowers? Why? Do you know anyone who likes flowers? Are there flowers near your home? Do you often take photos of flowers?”

“What is the kitchen appliance you use most often? What for?”

(Cue card) “Talk about a time when you saw a child behaving badly in public. Where was this? What was the child doing? How did other people react? How did it make you feel?” (I completely blanked and couldn’t think of a single instance of a child misbehaving. Eventually just made up a story about a boy bathing in a public water feature and splashing people because it’s the first example of “bad behaviour” I could think of. He didn’t ask any follow up questions or call me out on it.)

“Did you sometimes behave badly as a child? Do you think parents and the culture they grow up in change the behaviour of a child? What do you think matters more, peers or parents? Do you think it works to lead by example?”

“Is it hard to know what is right or wrong? Would you agree that people only ever change when it benefits them? Do you agree with the idea that everyone has a good side and a bad side? Do people with bad morals sometimes succeed in life?”

Preparation:

I know I said I only prepped for a few days, BAD DECISION, and this is mostly true. I worked through a few online practise tests and focused mostly on writing. I also sent ChatGPT a few sample responses I had written, for both part 1 and part 2, and he consistently rated me around 7-7.5 for missing info. It helped me a lot to have a solid plan in advance as far as paragraph structure goes.

HOWEVER there are a few parts of my general lifestyle that came in quite handy and probably helped me more than the 4 measly days of prep:

I’m an avid reader (not absolutely wild but like 35 books a year), and imo just getting used to reading a lot helps not just with reading comprehension but also vocabulary and spelling. Absolutely read more books if you’re concerned about reading or speaking/writing (vocab). If reading in English doesn’t come naturally to you, choose books you already know the plot of, eg classics or ones you’ve already read in your native language.

During covid I fell into a terrible rut of watching unhealthy amounts of British daytime television (at least anything I could find on YouTube). I binged all the crappy reality shows like airline uk, can’t pay we’ll take it away, homes under the hammer, escape to the country, snog/marry/avoid… truly it was not the pinnacle of television but I actually think this helped me a lot when it comes to listening and speaking, as you get used to a lot of different accents and to idiomatic expressions you might not otherwise be familiar with.

Anyway sorry for the long post, let me know if you have any questions :)

And thank you SO much for all the support I got over the last few days, both in this sub and over on r/EnglishLearning. You’re the best and I couldn’t have done it without you.

I see now what they mean by fundamental vs inessential (taking fundamental to mean “invaluable”, “important”) but surely fundamental and complex (or even involved) can act as antonyms, too?

Eg he’s only just learnt the fundamentals of thermodynamics so I wouldn’t trust him with any complex/involved equations. vs this is quite fundamental stuff so I think he should be able to manage just fine.

Ok not sure if the pictures get the point across but I’m looking for something that reads like The Silver Book, or you know, like Giovanni’s Room, like Bonjour Tristesse, like Homo Faber or Death in Venice or like Alan Hollinghurst’s books. Literary fiction with vivid European settings and messy and toxic relationships and self-discovery and drama and whatever… but with any sort of lesbian subculture / lesbian protagonists / sapphic relationships, whatever. It’s alright if it’s subtextual.

There are so many queer classics and contemporary queer fiction being sold at my local bookstore and part of me loves it, the other part is a bit miffed it’s all about men.

It doesn’t strictly have to be literary fiction, I’ll take anything at this point, but good/interesting prose is important to me, and I’d love a setting that feels sort of like the pictures. Think orange trees (or apple trees if less southern), art galleries, pleasure boats, warm evening wind as the moon kisses the sea, awful posh people sipping overpriced martinis, self-proclaimed starving artists sipping cheap watery coffee. More focus on character and atmosphere than plot.

Before anyone recommends The Safekeep and/or any Sarah Waters, I’ve already read those :( (ok not all Sarah Waters but she’s on my radar)

Hi, I’m knitting the Zora sweater by Isabel Kraemer and I blocked it on the needles towards the beginning because I realised I hadn’t blocked my swatch and wanted to make sure my gauge checks out (it does). The problem is that now you can kind of see the tension change between what's already been blocked vs what I’ve knit since.

I realise now I should probably have put it on some scrap yarn for blocking rather than physically leaving it on the needles. It seems like the stitches on the needles got pulled a bit, to the extent that from far away it sometimes kind of looks like a row of twisted stitches, but when you stretch it (last photo) you can see they’re not twisted.

Is this going to block out? How can I get the line to go away?

Edit: i should’ve said, the yarn I’m using is Solstice 4ply from West Yorkshire Spinners, which is 70% Falkland wool, 20% tencel, 10% cashmere goat (non superwash)

Aka, books that I can read while listening to my 60s/70s playlist haha

Hi, ich habe gerade eben diese Mail bekommen, allerdings an meine private Emailadresse, die nicht einmal meinen echten Namen verwendet und die ich meines Wissens auch nirgends an der Uni angegeben habe. Also, als Recipient in der Adressleiste stand nicht direkt meine Emailadresse, sondern nur der Verteiler vom Institut, aber sie ist in meinem privaten Gmail-Postfach angekommen, und bei meiner Unimail kam nix dergleichen an.

Erst dachte ich, vielleicht ist das ein Scam? Aber die Mail benutzt den Namen einer tatsächlichen Professorin, bei der ich auch tatsächlich vor drei Wochen eine Klausur geschrieben habe, und der Absender sowie die Unterschrift unten ist von der Instituts-Sekretärin, mit der ich kürzlich erst (von meiner Uni-Mail aus) geschrieben habe und bei der ich auch gestern erst im Büro war, um einen (unrelated) Vertrag zu unterschreiben.

Also habe ich unser Online-Notenportal gecheckt, und tatsächlich wurde da heute Vormittag unsere Note für besagte Klausur eingetragen.

Aber woher in aller Welt sollte die Sekretärin oder meine Professorin meine Privatmail haben? Und was für einen Grund gäbe es, an diese statt an meine Uni-Mail zu schreiben?

Kann es sein, dass irgendwas verwechselt wurde und die Mail gar nicht tatsächlich an mich gehen sollte sondern an andere Studierende? Es steht ja nirgends mein Name, und die Emailadresse läuft wie gesagt auch nicht über meinen Namen. Ich habe zwar anscheinend eine 1,0, kann mir aber nicht vorstellen, was an meinen Antworten so besonders sein sollte, dass es etwas zu besprechen gäbe? Also, das ist super lieb wenn es echt ist, aber fühlt sich etwas unverdient an. Oder heißt das, dass eventuell jemand denkt, wir hätten geschummelt? Traue mich nicht so ganz, mich zu freuen.

Eigentlich hatte ich in der Vorlesung sehr gute Erfahrungen mit der Dozentin, und ich hatte auch vor ein paar Wochen Mailkontakt (per Unimail) zu ihr, da ich hoffe, im kommenden Wintersemester bei ihr meine Bachelorarbeit schreiben zu können. Ich habe aber noch keine strukturierte Gliederung dafür und wollte deswegen eigentlich noch damit warten, ihr zu mailen wegen einer Sprechstunde, bis ich an der Front etwas vorbereiteter bin. Stecke momentan noch im Prüfungsstress in meinem anderen Fach.

Außerdem habe ich leider vom 20. August bis Anfang Oktober ein Praktikum im Ausland, könnte also sowieso nicht zu der vorgeschlagenen Sprechstunde kommen.

Was meint ihr? Sollte ich ihr oder der Sekretärin deswegen mailen? Hat vielleicht doch jemand meine Mails gehackt? Gibt es hier Grund zur Sorge? Hat irgendjemand eine Idee?

I was torn between posting this in r/classicalmusic vs here, sorry if that would’ve been the better option.

But I’ve recently stumbled across a few jazz tracks that use existing classical pieces; namely Brad Mehldau’s album After Bach, Hiromi’s version of the Pathetique and Eugen Cicero’s album Swinging Bach. Personally I’m in love, it’s not like I’ll stop listening to the originals or to other jazz, but for a change every now and then this feels like the best of both worlds and combined in such an interesting manner.

On one hand, I want more; on the other hand I can see how this might be controversial to some people. So I just wanted to ask what you folks think about this concept, and maybe about these particular examples? And do you have any suggestions of pieces/albums in the same vein for me to check out? Thanks! :)