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Welcome along to my latest life updates post. As usual, it will be divided into sections about my placement, my blogging and any other news I want to share with you. Hope you enjoy! Placement Year So, three weeks in and I’m beginning to really settle in to my placement year. My routines are beginning to fall into place, despite the fact that I still find getting up in the morning a struggle! After three weeks, I’m now starting to feel part of the team. Working in a friendly environment has really helped me to engage fully with my work and allowed me to develop all of the skills I want to over the course of this three months, which is fantastic. In time, I am hoping that I will be able to gain further new skills which will benefit me in the future, as I have already got so much out of this experience. At this stage, I would say that although at times it can be stressful, I love the sense of accomplishment and general satisfaction I am getting out of this placement experience. ...

This post will contain spoilers so if you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read any further until you have done so. First of all, can we talk about how amazing Maisie Williams was? I admit that I have never seen Game of Thrones but have heard such great reviews about her as an actress. I was really looking forward to seeing her in Doctor Who and I’m so glad she didn’t disappoint. I love the multiple dimensions of her character Ashildr, who had hints of vulnerability whilst also channelling enough of a strong character to challenge the false Odin to war. She also presents a helpful, kind character, but there were occasions when we saw her evil side coming out. All praise has to go to Maisie Williams as an actress, because it is not an easy thing for any actor to play a multi-faceted character, but to do it so well at 18 is simply unbelievable!  At the end of this episode, we revisited what appears to be the story arc of series 9; the hybrid. A few weeks back, I asked the ...

Welcome to this week’s life updates. As is now the usual, they are going to be divided into three categories; placement year, blogging and other. Hope you enjoy! Placement Year Week 2 This week, I got the chance to develop my telephone skills, something which I’ve been needing to work on for some time now. I was absolutely dreading having to face it, and it duly started terribly. After leaving a horrendous voicemail early on, I was embarrassed to carry on and felt incredibly out of my depth. Through support from colleagues however, I did eventually get there and began to make phone calls, some of which were voicemail, some of which were answered by some truly lovely people. After making around fifteen calls on day one and beginning to get better at it, I went into day two knowing that I’d already made progress and that I wanted to keep this up for as long as possible. I didn’t expect to make over thirty calls that day, which is honestly more than I’ve ever made in m...

WARNING! I know I say it every week, but I still feel the need to warn you that if you haven’t seen the episode yet, please do so before reading on because of the spoilers contained in this review. Once again, there are quite a few talking points from this episode that I want to explore. First of all, I just want to say that I correctly predicted that it was the Doctor in the coffin and that he would somehow use this to get back to Clara and the base. As it turns out, the Doctor did not die and become a ghost, he just created a hologram of his ghost to pass on a message to Clara and the others on the base, whilst being inside the suspended animation chamber found on the ship. This has become such a typical aspect of the show, not just in Moffat’s time but also Davies used to do it before him (such as at the end of series 4 with the regeneration which wasn’t a regeneration but actually now it turns out was a regeneration) so in many ways this made this episode fit in with so mu...

Just a quick note before we begin to say that from now on, these life update posts are going to be split up into three sections. The first of these is going to be about my university placement year and is intended to be a record of my feelings and thoughts across this amazing experience that I have now (finally!) started. I hope that this will also be useful to other university students who are considering or about to embark on a placement year so do let me know if this helps at all. The second section will be my updates on the digital side of my life. It will include updates on blogging, social media and information about any logo or branding changes surrounding this site. There may not be much in this part every week, but I will try to put something in it as regularly as I can. The third and final part of these life update posts will be called “Other”. Here I will be talking about anything else in my life that I want to share with you guys that doesn’t count as part of m...

WARNING! This post, as ever, contains spoilers about the latest episode so if you haven’t yet had the chance to watch it, don’t read on until you have seen it. This week, there are a few talking points from the episode that I want to explore. Firstly, I feel as though it would be impossible to discuss this episode without mentioning one word – ghosts. This feels like quite an interesting change for Doctor Who as it doesn’t really emphasise the concept of aliens and space as much as we are used to seeing. It changes and challenges the conventional idea of what the show is about and in a sense diverts the main theme from alien to human. Although we are used to seeing humanoid creatures in the show, the ghosts are a more powerful human manifestation than some of what we have seen before. This increase in the human side of the monster does however follow a pattern which is traditional throughout the show’s history. In the past, we have seen the show make monsters out of the fears ...

This week’s Friday post is my 9 month review of the My 2015 project. It is also by coincidence my 25th post on this blog and we’re back to the same subject as my first ever post on here back in February. I’m going to look back on how it has changed things and how I’m feeling after the first nine months of the year and I’ll be looking ahead to the last part of 2015. I have to mention the fact that as this project was the first ever post on Stay Blogitive, it is probably one of the reasons this blog started in the first place. I suppose this means that without it, I wouldn’t be posting right now and the last 8 months, 25 posts and 1400 pageviews might never have happened. When I think of it like this, it really puts into context just how much the two are interconnected and the impact that My 2015 has had on my life. I think I’ve said it before, but I gain a lot of positivity from watching the box fill up and seeing how much more full it gets every week. When times have been ...