#academic publishing is a scam

[lichenaday]

Why do academic books gotta be so pricey I'm dying over here. 80 gotdamn dollars for a regional macrolichen guide, and 169 for a book about lichen substrates and that's secondhand :'0

Capitalism.

But really I don't understand the price tags on all scientific and academic publishing. The prices are so ridiculously inflated and I don't know who benefits, but I know that it inconveniences most people--scientists, students, and anyone interested in this stuff.

[choices-binglebonkus]

Still no career, still no internship, oh my god I am so tired.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:

https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/

Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1

The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals

Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.

If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.

Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.

Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/

Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:

https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra

Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979

The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:

https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:

https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/

Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:

https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight

It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/

How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!

https://unsub.org/

The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.

Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

[thatfrenchacademic]

OK so about this "34, unmarried and childless" article about Taylor Swift. Let me tell you about Scam Academia.

TL;DR: some mediocre dude had a half baked opinio nabout Taylor Swift that everyone hated, but like Mother Nature I let nothing go to waste.

Here is the take you have not heard yet, about this opinion: this guy is actually a good case study on how to develop your academic literacy, aka how to recognize a true academic from a scammer who presents themselves as an academic, but is just a crook. In a world of pseudoscience and pretend experts that have enough resources to organize their flat earth conference, let me walk you through the world of Scam Academic, where for a few thousand dollars, you too can claim to be a researcher with a doctorate! Follow me down a rabbit hole that I hate with my whole heart!

Preamble: I have zero skin in the TS game. I don't get the hype, the lore, the obsession with those 2000s bracelet or dissecting every single line or every single song.

But then. Some guy had to write an op-ed stating Taylor Swift was not a good role model for girls ("in the US and beyond"), and it is a terrible take on so many level, but here is the thing. Whiny conservative think-pieces about highly successful women who should get back to the kitchen and think of the children are nothing new. But this one is different.

This one is fucking terribly written. It's just an abysmally written blog post. Genuinely one of the worst thing I have ever read, and I read hundreds of undergrad essays every year for a living. It contradicts its own arguments in every paragraph. It over-explains concepts like it's a high school essay and he's trying to meet the word count. It says "this is a valid question worth asking" but does not actually explain why it is worth asking. It is so, so, so bad.

Conservative writers are usually more the "high brow, drowning you in grandstanding" kind of writers. They are, usually, good technical writers - it's the one thing that helps make their talking point sound legit and palatable. So an abysmally bad conservative writer? Ok, I am intrigued.

The author is one John Mac Ghlionn. I look up the guy on Google and...

Oh.

Oh no, John.

Spewing conservative bullshit at women AND a researcher? You're in my turf now, John. You could have continued to cover UFC Pillow Fight Championships, or alien technology and other riveting subjects, but you had try to connect two brain cells to argue a thing, and slap "researcher" on top of it. Now I'm offended, as a researcher.

1. I am sorry, researcher WHERE?

Ok so if one is a "researcher", it means one conduct "research". and contrary to what backyard conspiracy theorists think, "researcher" is an actual job. It is an actual professional occupation. You get an actual contract, and you are paid actual money. By an actual employer: public (University), private (Think tank, private company), or a mix of both (at Unviersity, but on a privately funded project, for example).

So where does our John Mc Ghlionn work?

Well. Nowhere, as far as I can tell.

John does not list any affiliation. Usually, when they write, academics will state their exact position (Researcher, Doctoral Researcher, Associate Professor, Chief Engineer, Head of Department, Research Director...) and where they work. For example:

That's what it is supposed to look like.

But John? Nope, no affiliation anywhere, on anything he ever published. That's a pretty massive read flag. Research takes ressources: at the very least, time and access to database and documentation, even in social sciences in humanities. You may not need a lab, but you sure as hell need money and full access to JStore at least.

So I thought he was just one of these "I google therefore I research" kind of dude. But then, out of nowhere:

I am sorry. He has a WHAT.

2. I am sorry, a Doctorate from WHERE?

So. One thing to claim to be a researcher when you are just a professional yapper. Another to claim a DIPLOMA.

And not any diploma. A doctorate.

Let's pause. "Doctorate" is actually a really broad umbrella term of all doctoral-level degrees. The most famous (and most prestigious, for better and worse) is the PhD, but a PhD is technically just one of many Research Doctorate of, theoretically, the same level (cue this helpful reddit post). A second category of doctorates are the Applied Doctorates, and while there is Discourse on where they sit vis-a-vis PhD, the easiest is to consider that they are not research-oriented. They are hands-on, practice-oriented degrees. For example: you can practice medicine with an MD. You don't need a PhD. You can still call yourself a doctor, though.

Alright, so which of these does our friend Johnnie has? Or is currently enrolled in? And in which University?

You will notice that John does not go by "John Mac Ghlionn PhD" or even "Dr John Mac Ghlionn", when you just KNOW he is the sort of person that would but that shit everywhere. And no shade here, because I, for one, do put that shit everywhere. Maybe he is just currently enrolled in a program and has not graduated. Fair.

Since John does not list affiliation, I had to switch from academic to internet sleuth, and dig out this article:

But we learn that in 2021, John was a "PhD Scholar" in "Parkmore Institute". "PhD Scholar" is not a title I am sued to, but it's also not raising any red flag: ongoing PhD researchers can be "PhD students", "PhD fellows", "PhD researchers"... It varies from country to country and from institution to institution, so why not "PhD Scholar".

Let's check out the Parkmore Institute.

Ok, they are not a traditional university, but they appear to be more of a postgraduate institution: offering only higher level degrees, not undergrad courses. Once again, not necessarily a red flag. They are usually very heavily research focused, and embrace the "research" side of academia more than the "teaching" side. In Germany, the Max Planck Institutes are research-only institutions who deliver PhDs. They conduct cutting edge research, in part because their researchers rarely have to spend time teaching.

But that is NOT the Parkmore Institute. First of all, let's see what programs they offer:

None of them are legit.

And I mean, none of them are recognize as even Applied/Professional Doctorate by the National Science Foundation (US based). And while a PhD in Human sexuality would be perfectly valid, but I'm going to on a limb and say I have some serious doubts about "Bodymind Healing" as an academic field.

These are not legit academic degrees.

What they are, is an excellent money-making opportunity for anyone working at the Parkmore institute. Students will pay, at the very least:

And 60% of this goes to their " faculty mentor". The Parkmore institute provides no research fund, no desk or office space (they are entirely digital), no access to any resources or library, not even a Zoom account. There is also no mention of any timeline: how long a PhD take to complete? Who knows. 6 months ? A year ? 5 years? What are the requirements to graduate ? Who knows ! And I would need to pay $200 to get in touch with them, so I sure as fuck won't know any time soon!

But let's get back to our friend John. Remember that he stated, in that 2021 publication, he was a "PhD Scholar" at Parkmore ? Well that's a shame because Parkmore does not deliver PhDs. Ain't that a bitch.

ALSO. Parkmore helpfully has page with all their Doctoral Recipients! And guess who is NOT HERE ! That's right, our Johnnie !

How can this be ? Well, three possibilities:

John is still not done with a PhD. After 4 years ? In a crank university where I am pretty sure I can submit the first draft of a litt review and graduate ? Nah

John never completed the thing. Boo, that would mean that John is lying, when he says he has a doctorate. Bad, bad.

John did graduate, and obtained his doctorate in [scrolls back to check] psychosocial studies, and then was not put on the website or was withdrawn some time before today, as Parkmore institute ended their affiliation with him, as per this bit in their application form

A shame, really. If John had been affiliated with the Parkmore Institute, it would give a shred of legitimacy to anything he writes to anyone just skimming.

Now, I would love to get in touch with the Parkmore Institute and ask to see John's doctoral work, which they DO have, since the application for also has this very interesting section:

(definitely very legit, very normal).

But I am not sure how I would even phrase that request without transparently going

"hey, would love to see what bullshit research is being done over there, since one of your graduate decided to go all Handmaid's tale for the last 2 years".

If anyone feels like sending that email, I am begging you to keep me in the loop.

3. Back up, back up, what's up with that article?

Remember the article where he was listed as a "PhD Fellow"?

Well, about that... No. Welcome to the world of predatory publishing, one more cog in the Bullshit Academic ecosystem.

First: not at article. It's a "commentary". Could be worth something ia good journal, but still would not be a piece of research. But that is the least of its sins.

Its sins are being published in a journal called "Sociology and Criminology-Open Access", by a publisher called "Longdom". Longdom publishing has a bunch of journals on a lot o different fields, with the particularly of being predatory; they will publish absolutely anything you send them, as long as you pay their Article Processing Charges:

There are entire lists of Predatory journals on the web, you can find on here and another here , Longdom Publishing is in both.

This is how John can publish this last minute, Redbull-and-weed-induced essay in an actual journal, with an abstract that, I kid you not, finishes with "Please find the paper attached." He slapped together a shitty essay about people in India are poorer and therefore more likely to exhibit psychopathic traits and therefore engage in corruption, purely base on vibes. It does not even deserve be given any consideration, not even to be debunked. There is nothing to be debunked. This would be a failing grade for a 1st year intro class.

CONCLUSION

On the surface, John Mac Ghlionn is the poster boy of failed edgelords who really wish they were Jordan Peterson, but unfortunately are just Doug, the guy for 10th grade who failed the Literature class and decided it was because litterature was too woke today anyway.

Beneath the surface, John is a case study in Scam Academia, and the proof that no matter how bad actual academia is, Scam Academia can always get worse.

A quick checklist to go through whenever someone claims be a researcher, an academic, a fellow, a doctor, a PhD or anything of the sort:

What is their affiliation? Is this a legitimate organization?

Do they have a PhD? Another doctorate degree? From where?

Have they published ? Where is it published?

[fereldanwench]

A Personal, and Final, Reflection on A Certain Fandom

Having spent the past week and a half away from the Tumblr side of the C*b*rp*nk community after a resurgence of old wank (not hashing out the details–IYKYK), I heavily weighed the pros and cons of saying anything else. Ultimately, I decided for my own peace of mind and ability to fully move forward, I do want to say a few things (or a lot of things, given how long this is). This blog is my personal archive first and foremost, and I think writing a “final chapter” will help me find closure. I’m also choosing to publish this because, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think my mistakes and subsequent revelations might be good learning experiences for others, too. 

Like many of us, just by the nature of when this game was released, I entered this fandom during a very fragile, tumultuous time in my life–Well, sort of, let me back it up a little: I actually initially entered it during a great time in my life. It was July 2021, I had just enjoyed about 6 weeks off from work after quitting a demanding job that had sucked the life out of me for almost 10 years, and I had started a promising new job. I even bought the game with the first paycheck from said new job!

Unfortunately, while I had been told that this position was temp-to-hire, not only was it not a path to a permanent role, but because I completed all the work in my contract over a month sooner than they anticipated (early September vs late October), I was being let go early because they had nothing else for me to work on. I was literally told over the phone, “You did amazing work, you got us caught up through November, but we don’t have anything else for you.”

Cue about 6 months of recruiters ghosting me, exhausting interview processes, demoralizing rejections, and scam upon scam upon scam, all culminating in me returning to the job I had been so happy to leave a year earlier. And while my old coworkers were ecstatic to have me back, I couldn’t help but feel like a complete failure. I took what I thought was a calculated risk, I thought I could do something better for myself, and I couldn’t. It’s something I’m still struggling with today, honestly.

On top of this, I also experienced a debilitating physical health episode in January 2022 which led to me being effectively bedridden for about 3 weeks. [CW: Menstruation, sexual health] I’m not sure of the exact cause–maybe a bad reaction to emergency contraception, maybe unsafe menstrual underwear, but it resulted in menorrhagia so severe I fainted from blood loss. My insurance had literally just ended, another wave of COVID was hitting, and I didn’t want to risk getting infected sitting in an ER for hours only to rack up a few thousand in debt to get a blood transfusion. So rest, iron supplements, and lots of meat and spinach and orange juice was the best I could do.

All of this led to my world becoming very small. I wasn’t working, I could barely do my hobbies or see my local friends, and simple everyday tasks like showering drained me of all my energy. When I was stuck in bed and could barely keep my eyes open for more than a few hours at a time, gossip was a welcome, low-effort distraction from the physical pain and fear that I might either have to put myself in thousands of dollars of medical debt or risk lifelong damage (or worse) from the blood loss.

I also found myself having groups of friends in a way I’ve never experienced before. I’m extremely introverted (even online, though less so than IRL), I have social anxiety, and the handful of times I have been “in” a group I was never really in it. I was always on the outskirts and usually just close to one or two people, max.

Regretfully, this set the stage for me to get caught up in the culture of rumors and speculation that permeates this fandom more than I think it has any other fandom I’ve been a part of.

Academically, I know about things like groupthink and tribalism, and I could see how those influenced the groups developing in the fandom, but I had no direct, personal experience with those phenomena. I think in conjunction with the other struggles I was dealing with, I ended up being incredibly susceptible to an us-versus-them mentality, which led me to feel justified in being unkind to people I knew had been unkind to my friends, even if deep down I knew what I was doing was antithetical to who I strive to be. 

I don’t share any of this for sympathy points or to smear anyone else or to avoid accountability–I still chose to act like an ass on a couple of occasions, and regardless of what I was going through, that was still inappropriate. I’m still responsible for my own behavior no matter what’s going on. 

But I do want to contextualize my fuck-ups for two reasons:

The first reason is ego-driven, full-stop. Not even gonna gloss it over. I can’t defend being an asshole nor do I want to, but I think it’s normal and healthy to look back on your mistakes and go, damn, why the hell was I acting like this? 

Even on my best days, I can be very stubborn and self-important and pedantic and judgemental, and I certainly can’t say that I’ve never inadvertently offended someone–Sometimes a joke might not land as I hoped. Sometimes I get tangled up in my own thoughts, burdened by an excess of nuance and details, and I express things poorly while I try to account for all sides of things. Sometimes I can get a little too opinionated about blorbo stuff. Sometimes there might just be a full communication breakdown or an insurmountable personality clash–But I can also confidently say that I have acted with good intentions in this fandom far, far more than I have with spite or because of petty rivalries.

And when I did get caught up in the drama and gossip and the wank? I was literally at the lowest point I’d been in a very, very long time. 

Again, because I feel like I can’t say this enough, that doesn’t make acting like a dick in a Discord server any more excusable, that doesn’t mean I didn’t hurt anyone, and that doesn’t mean that someone I hurt during that time has to forgive me or stick around for me to grow. Hurting someone because you’re hurting is still not okay. But I’m pretty sure every single one of us has had a bad day (or two or three or 365 or–) and made an isolated bad decision (or two or three or–) because of it–None of us deserve to be wholly defined by those moments or denied a chance to learn from those mistakes and be better.

And I think the most important takeaway for me personally is that I have learned from these mistakes and I have not repeated them. Some of these mistakes even helped me realize that I needed professional support for my mental health, and they played a role in my seeking medication and therapy last year. I still have a lot of work to do, but the silver lining to all of this is that I am in a much better place today than I was 2 years ago (even if this year also fucking sucks for non-fandom reasons and I would still very much like a goddamn break.)

The other reason I wanted to share my journey of navel-gazing and healing a wounded ego ~*self-discovery*~ is I think there’s a very good chance my story might sound familiar to others in the fandom. Maybe someone else can learn from my hardships and mistakes, too. Maybe you too were dealing with chronic fatigue or mental health issues or financial stress or isolation or all of the above and then some, and it led you to fixate on things that were harmful to you, to form unhealthy relationships with equally hurt people, and to act in a way that you know doesn't reflect who you are. The past several years have been so hard on so many of us, and I think we’ve all brought a lot of pain and misery into the community even if we weren’t trying to.

A somewhat shameful realization I had last year was I could recognize that kind of behavior in other people, but I completely missed it in myself. I could see how people were making this fandom their whole world and how it was so damaging to them, but I was doing the exact same thing and I just let it go completely unchecked because I thought I knew better. It was a brutal lesson in the pitfalls of pride. 

--------

So I was initially thinking at this point, I would take the time to address a few specific lies, rumors, and insinuations that have been said about me over the past couple of years. Because while I was a jerk in a couple of situations, most of the things said about me are exaggerations, if not outright fabrications.

And I did start writing a lot of that out, but as I was doing it, I was just overcome with a huge feeling of OH MY GOD I just don’t fucking care anymore. As one of my dear, long-time fandom friends has pointed out, there’s a great line about just this kind of thing from one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite games: “Why should it [bother me]? They don’t know me. I know me.”

I also really don’t want to run the risk of pulling anyone back into the fray (especially if they’re not even in the fandom anymore or if we’ve talked privately about certain issues) by even alluding to shit that happened years ago.

Instead, I would like to offer three of my big takeaways from the experience of being falsely accused of awful things:

You do not know nearly as much as you think you know about people’s fandom relationships. The one semi-specific thing I will mention is that I had been explicitly named a few times as being in cahoots with people I don’t think I ever even spoke to or that I had already drifted away from–Just because you saw two people existing in the same public space doesn’t mean they’re besties, bestie. Also, friends don’t always have to agree with each other, nor should we be expected to participate in a public spectacle of shaming if we do have a disagreement. People are allowed to resolve their differences privately.  

Not all conflicts/disagreements are inherently abusive or toxic. When you are hurting or dealing with unresolved trauma or starting to confront uncomfortable truths about yourself, the slightest disagreement can feel like a personal attack, but that doesn’t mean it is. Sometimes differences might be irreconcilable, but sometimes they might not be if you don’t automatically assume the worst of someone with a different perspective than you. Sometimes we just need to give the other person a little grace and the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing their best. And sometimes we might need to consider that it’s actually our own behavior driving the conflict and not the other person.

Even in situations when someone has clearly been unfairly targeted/victimized, that doesn’t mean they can’t also be a perpetrator of harassment/abuse to someone else. Victim and abuser are not mutually exclusive roles. I would wager a lot of us are familiar with the cyclical nature of abuse, and to quote a line from one of my favorite movies (admittedly a bit of a flippant line in the context of the film, but it still rings true): hurt people hurt people. Accountability for shitty behavior is never conditional, regardless of the pain we’re experiencing. 

--------

I titled this my final reflection, and I want to clarify what that means:

First of all, I’m not leaving this fandom (don’t everyone clap at once ha ha ha). I’ve been in various online fandoms since the early 00s, and while this has been one of the more challenging communities for me to navigate, it’s not enough to make me give up something I love this much. My blorbos are my perpetual muses, and I feel like virtual photography is the creative outlet I’ve been searching for my entire life. I love this game and hobby too much to stop creating and sharing.

I’m also not leaving Tumblr. While I’ve had this specific account since 2016, I’ve been here since 2010–Tumblr is not just this fandom for me. I have many friends (some I’ve known since my original account in 2010!) from other fandoms, and I’m not losing the best place to hang out with other people who are special to me just because one fandom got a little unpleasant. (I mean, look, I weathered the DA fandom here circa 2012-2015–This ain’t my first rodeo.) I also have a lot of hope for the Tumblr Communities feature, and I’m really hoping the VP community we’ve set up can continue to grow and flourish.

But I am no longer addressing any of this wank. If you have a problem with something I’ve done or said to you and you want to address it with me directly (preferably in a private space just so we don’t keep putting this shit on people’s dashboards), I am open to conversation and apologizing where needed.

Otherwise, this is the last time I’m talking about it anywhere. Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, publicly, privately–I’m done. I’m washing my hands of it. I don’t want to hear anything else about what other people have done or who they’re friends with or who they’re following or what they’re saying about me or my friends or any of it. This bullshit has taken up too much of my time and energy, and I have very important smutty shots to take. 

And I am probably going to continue to be less active in the fandom on Tumblr, at least for a while. You probably won’t see me here much until September at the earliest. This time away has been really good for me, and I think I need to continue with limited Tumblring and making the time I am here more structured. Plus, with some of my other fave video game series returning this fall, my blog will probably shift back to a more well-balanced multi-fandom space. 

I’m also going to need to diversify my dash a little bit more, which means I will likely end up unfollowing some mutuals, particularly if we don’t interact often, if you don’t tag, or if I see any mention of fandom drama–It’s nothing personal, but I know breaking mutualship can hurt a little, so if following me after that makes you uncomfortable in any way, please don’t feel like you have to stick around. I totally get it. Similarly, if it would make you uncomfortable for me to continue to interact with your posts after unfollowing (because I probably will if you post in certain tags), please feel free to block me. 

Okay. Christ, that was long. Shut the fuck up already, right? This is why I can't do social media with character limits. ghdfjgjhkfdgkfdg

Seriously, though, that's it. People are welcome to comment on this post if they want, but I really have nothing else to say about any of this so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just… Well, done.

[cypressmoons]

𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐲𝐬 (alhaitham)

summary: you were a new haravatat student eager to learn all that the akademiya has to offer. you were also a hopeless romantic hoping to find your true love match one day. but when you receive a phone call that puts your future in jeopardy, you have to make a choice...hurry, you only have seven days. a/n: i'm ngl this was 100% inspired by a scenario i ran into when playing the sims today lmao i had never come across this random event before so i decided to play it but it's giving story material!! hope u enjoy.also consider this my official "back from hiatus" post! i've decided to stop being a clown and embrace my creative tendencies so drop a request if you want :)

word count: 1,231

the doors to the akademiya were heavy and solid in your hands as you pushed them open, for the first time as a student instead of a wandering kid with wide eyes.

ever since you were little, all you dreamed of was one day claiming a seat at the tables where countless have huddled, browsing the tomes in the libraries where countless have spent sleepless nights, and if you're lucky, maybe one day having your name published on a paper.

so you began your journey, eager to learn from the best of the best. even as other students pointed fingers behind your back and called you an ass kisser, teacher's pet, try hard, whatever it is they came up with, you were determined to be nothing less than the top 1% of students. your teachers quickly took a liking to you, contrary to what the other students liked to say, and were always willing to spend a couple extra hours after class to discuss the most recent scholarly journals or new books you've read.

this includes, even to your own surprise, the scribe of the akademiya and haravatat's finest.

there was nothing attached to your purely academic relationship. alhaitham would leave a book or two on your favourite library seat with little slips of paper tucked between the pages, scribbled with his thoughts on why they were a worthy read and your name always printed in neat script at the top. when you were finished with them, you would return the note to the mailbox outside his office, your own interpretations of the book written on the back of the same paper.

it's not how most people conversed about scholarly matters, but it's one that worked best for the two of you.

the scribe has clearly taken a liking to you, and you are not oblivious to the whispers when you tuck yet another note into his mailbox. you hear them speculating what is so special about you, about how they haven't seen the scribe talk nearly as much to anyone else, and it always gave you a brief rush of superiority as you head down the hallway to your next lecture, knowing that a good friendship with the akademiya's brightest mind would surely challenge your understanding of the material, in a good way.

what you did not see coming, was how this "good way" was open to interpretation.

you had just returned to your residence from a frustrating lesson on deciphering king deshret's runes when your phone rang. the voice on the other end was unfamiliar, almost robotic in a way, as they informed you that you were to receive a large, undisclosed sum of money as inheritance from some faraway relative you had never met.

you were suspicious at first, of course, and you had questioned the stranger's identity and how they came to find you, but something told you that this was not just another telemarketing scam, that there was more to it than potential identity theft and murder. you vaguely remember your mother mentioning family living in the rainforests bordering caravan ribat, perhaps it was one of them?

hearing your hesitancy, the voice spoke again, this time with an almost preposterous proposal.

get married within seven days, and the money is yours.

"it's what they mentioned in the will," he added unhelpfully.

you almost started yelling at him. just where were you going to find a partner, let alone a spouse, in seven days? whoever this relative was, they must've been insane - cursed by aranara magic, hit their head on a tree, fallen down four storeys into a rock-

then you started to question if the stranger was a mind reader as he reminded you that you were deeply in debt.

you rolled your eyes but didn't deny it outright. it's true that studying at the akademiya had put a huge dent in your pocket, and if you wanted to further your studies - which you surely did - you would need at least another few years worth of tuition.

you pinched the bridge of your nose for a few moments to gather your thoughts. there's no way your dead relative, or this "lawyer" of theirs, would know if you file for a divorce as soon as you get the inheritance, right? the will only said "marriage", not "staying married". yes - it seems you had found a solution to your worsening financial situation.

"fine. give me seven days."

"you got it, then."

you tried not to think about what sounded like a knowing smile in the man's voice when he hung up. you had seven days, and it was starting now.

it was strange, really, how the first person you thought of was alhaitham.

but, how in the world would you explain your sudden display of affection? it would be the ultimate form of disrespect if you ever disclosed that your liking to him was based out of a desperate attempt to not go broke. alhaitham was not stupid, and neither were you. but the more you think about it, the more he seems like the perfect candidate: smart, kind, caring, with similar academic interests and always catering to your every need.

you rise from your seat, deciding that you would allow yourself one day, not a minute more, to test the waters and see if alhaitham was really the one.

and if he isn't, you still have six days to find a husband. surely there is got to be someone in this vast city ready for marriage no matter the circumstance? you have heard enough parents pressuring their children to get married to know that there are more than one anxious bachelor out there, tired of the constant questions.

there's no time to lose. you check the clock - it's barely past seven - and you know alhaitham is still holed up in his office, working through the mountain of papers that only seem to pile up higher each time you visit him.

the walk to the akademiya feels shorter than normal, frantic, even, as you write three thousand different scripts in your head like the main character of a dating sim game, complete with dialogue options and green (or red) indicators of how much relationship you've gained (or lost) with the male lead. you almost want to laugh at yourself. even in this dire circumstance, you still find a way to make up some scenario of the romance bar instantly shooting to 100 the moment you open your mouth.

reality is often disappointing, and you're about to learn it the hard way.

"just leave them on my- y/n."

you had not given yourself the opportunity to pace in the hallway or debate the practicality of your methods in fear that you would give up altogether. so when you appear in the doorway of his office, still catching your breath from sprinting up the stairs, alhaitham is surprised to say the least.

"alhaitham."

you nod as a greeting and clear your throat, and he pauses his reading to look up at you.

"everything alright? you look rather...flushed."

if you weren't flushed before, his comment is enough to make your skin heat up to an extent where an amurta scholar would be concerned for your health.

you force aside all the noise and doubts in your head, shutting your eyes before blurting out:

"how would you like to get married?"

there's definitely gonna be a part 2 so don't worry hehe i just like leaving you on cliffhangers <3 anyways drop a comment if you'd like me to tag you when i post part 2!

masterlist

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jewish Institute for Liberal Values

Published: Jun 10, 2024

We need to talk about American universities🧵

This is Johannah King-Slutzky, the Columbia grad student who demanded "humanitarian aid" for students protesting Israel on campus.

Have you wondered how a supposedly educated person could make such an absurd and tone-deaf request?

While many people go to college and receive a rigorous education, it entirely depends on the field of study.

This is Johannah’s focus in school:

This kind of academic jargon may sound impressive to a layperson, but it is actually intellectually bankrupt.

Jargon is often a hallmark of pseudoscience.

Charlatans frequently use jargon to deceive people into buying their snake oil - a term used to describe a scam.

Johannah’s academic focus belongs to a family of identity and culture-focused studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We call it activist scholarship.

It is a form of snake oil.

Influenced by Marxist Critical Theory and postmodern thought, activist scholarship focuses on power dynamics, and seeks to drive social change. 

Other fields of study advance knowledge objectively, but activist scholarship uses knowledge selectively to advance specific social and political goals.

This approach is unscientific because it starts with a conclusion and looks for evidence to support it, leading to flawed research in areas like race, gender, sexuality, society, and culture. 

It’s commonly assumed that college campuses are bastions of practical, fact-based learning, but it depends entirely on the discipline. Some courses are more focused on promoting specific ideologies than imparting knowledge about the world.

Few understand just how intellectually bankrupt and steeped in pseudoscience that many fields in the Humanities are. 

Some disciplines are designed specifically to breed leftist activists, which are not concerned in objective truth, but in their truth, and how it can be applied to better the lives of the identity groups they deem to be “marginalized.”

This sounds like a noble goal, but it often flies in the face of Enlightenment principles, science, reason, and the pursuit of objective truth.

==

When I've been saying for years that these "disciplines" are fake, I worry you might think this to be hyperbole or exaggeration. It's not.

However fake you think they are, they're more fake than that. They're as fake as "Jesus' Carpentry Studies," "Homeopathy Studies" or "Realigning Chakras in Pigeons Studies."

They are fully, completely, fake. Fraudulent. Bogus. And these "students" want society to fund it by reimbursing their college fees.

[onemetricdylan]

Worked up a cover for a science journal publication. All about cellular release and capture of that release

Did y'all know that when you submit a research paper, the scientist (who does all the work and writing and is reviewed by other scientists) has to pay for the privilege of publishing their paper?

Did you also know that when you submit, the journal will then ask you for cover art "to be considered"? Did you know that, after providing the free labor of designing and creating a cover, getting rejected or selected, they then ask you to pay for publishing the cover art they asked for?

it's, like, nearly $2k at the prestigious journals, just to use your own art to promo their journal that they asked for!

Academic publishing is a fucking scam

[thatshitkrejci]

journal recommended i transfer my pub to one of their sister journals which makes you pay $1450 if your article is accepted to cover open access costs. academic publishing an exhausting, demoralizing scam

[s-lycopersicum]

Tired of seeing the same old scams and phishing hooks in your spam folder? Publish an academic paper!

[blairstales]

The Author of Sherlock Holmes Believed in Fairies? 🧚‍♀️🕵️‍♂️

I do not think I would be exaggerating if I suggest that anyone with access to TV or the internet has at least heard of Sherlock Holmes. If somehow you missed knowing, he is a fictional consulting detective in a series of stories, which started publishing in 1887.

"By the 1990s there were already over 25,000 stage adaptations, films, television productions and publications featuring the detective,[2] and Guinness World Records lists him as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history." Wikipedia

Much to the distain of the author (we will get back to that) the stories took the world by storm. Everyone just could not get enough of the cold and scientific detective, and created a massive fanbase constantly asking for more.

The author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, might seem like he would fit your assumptions of him with what everyone shares about him. He had a medical career, published academic papers, and was even called upon to help in real life crime cases.

When Sherlock became a household name, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became annoyed with his own creation. He wanted to kill Sherlock off, but his mother begged him not to. So, tried raising his prices to a rate publishers would not pay, but the publishers complied to the rates and he became one of the best paid authors in history.

Doyle did keep writing, but had another life that people tend to carefully leave out when they are writing about him; he was believer in the occult. That belief proved so strong that it once led him to trust in a scam.

Spiritualism was huge at the time — with parties of séance’s being surprisingly common — and he loved every bit of it. He joined The British Society for Psychical Research(which actually still exists today), started sharing all he could about spiritualism, and eventually it became his main focus. He even opened his own bookshop dedicated to all of this.

Within this urge to believe in the occult, he also believed in the famous Cottingley Fairies, which were faked photos of fairies by two school girls. Doyle was so convinced, that he wrote articles and a book on the subject.

“We submitted the negatives to Mr. Snelling, who was for 30 years expert of the Autotype Co. and Illingworth’s large photographic factory. He certified two things: (1) That it was a single exposure ; (2) that the figures were moving when taken. After getting this opinion, I submitted the negatives to two experts of the Kodak Company. They found no evidence of superposition or any other trick. Several minor authorities have given the same verdict. None have ever been able to pick any hole, though there have been several newspaper inquiries upon the subject. Every fresh fact which has come to light has served to strengthen the case for the honesty of the girls” Spirits and Fairies is a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle first published in The Evening News (Portsmouth) on 5 july 1926.

You might be wondering how one goes from the belief in ghosts to belief in fairies, but it is important to not that the realm of the dead and the realm of the fairies (the otherworld) are sometimes described as the same place. That’s why traditional Samhain(Halloween) customs involved both those things.

People at the time thought he went mad, but it was not all that rare for science-loving people to be curious about the supernatural back then. Even Marie Curie (who discovered the x-ray), and Thomas Edison(credited with inventing several things, including motion pictures), and Oliver Lodge(who helped developed the radio), were all known to dabble in the occult.

As well as that, there are still people today who still believe in both ghosts, supernatural abilities, and fairies.

Belief in these things might see a little crazy to many, but it is important to remember that most folkloric or religious beliefs seem strange from an outside perspective. From Doyle’s perspective, fairies and ghosts were as real as other things — such as bacteria or viruses — we can’t see, which is why he thought it was his duty to gather the science proof that would make the public believe too.

[the-bibrarian]

I remember watching Last Week Tonight’s episode about Turbotax and Intuit and the other vultures who had managed to dilute and circumvent a law that was supposed to help taxpayers, to instead line their pockets by lying to people and scamming them… I remember being so sad. It was a comparatively little thing, not life threatening, but knowing that the entire system is built this way– I don’t know, it was so stark.

Given the choice, tax-prep companies, healthcare insurances, “energy” corporations, even academic publishing… they will scam, steal, wreck the environment or leave people to die, if it means they can make a cent. It’s not all equivalent of course, but it’s the same principle of profits before people.

And if someone tries to regulate or legislate, they will mobilise all their considerable ressources to ensure the law doesn’t pass or is sufficiently mangled so that they can continue scamming, stealing, wrecking or even killing.

All perfectly normal, day-to-day business.

Source

We deserve to live in a society where companies like Intuit cease to exist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

#20yrsago P2P network originates in Palestinian refugee camp https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/in-refugee-camp-a-p2p-outpost/

#10yrsago Irish government updates its Freedom of Information law with exciting new “Computers don’t exist” provision https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/08/12/the-irish-state-wishes-to-uninvent-computers-with-new-foi-bill/

#10yrsago Cops accidentally record themselves admitting they harassed activist at rodeo owners’ request: “God, we’re gonna get sued” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgSfCxq0hdY

#5yrsago Disney (yes, Disney) declares war on “overzealous copyright holders” https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-takes-stand-overzealous-copyright-holders-1134645/

#5yrsago Qanon “codes” are consistent with an English-speaker mashing a QWERTY keyboard https://www.vice.com/en/article/9km87z/qanon-codes-are-random-typing

#5yrsago To rescue journalism, journalists must collaborate to defend free expression, not merely condemning Trump https://dangillmor.medium.com/dear-journalists-the-war-on-what-you-do-is-escalating-eb584529a271

#5yrsago Leaked FBI memo warns banks of looming “unlimited ATM cashout” https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/08/fbi-warns-of-unlimited-atm-cashout-blitz/

#5yrsago Predatory journals aren’t just a scam: they’re also how quacks and corporate shills sciencewash their bullshit https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ky45y/hundreds-of-researchers-from-harvard-yale-and-stanford-were-published-in-fake-academic-journals

#5yrsago The platforms control our public discourse, and who they disconnect is arbitrary and capricious https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/beware-the-digital-censor/2018/08/12/997e28ea-9cd0-11e8-843b-36e177f3081c_story.html

#5yrsago None of the Above won the 2016 election https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/09/new-data-makes-it-clear-nonvoters-handed-trump-the-presidency/

#5yrsago English and Welsh local governments use “terrorism” as the excuse to block publication of commercial vacancies https://gijn.org/2018/08/14/meet-the-man-who-filed-1400-foi-requests-to-prove-data-acquisition-isnt-terrorism/

#5yrsago Karl Schroeder’s “The Million”: a science fiction conspiracy novel of radically altered timescales https://memex.craphound.com/2018/08/14/karl-schroeders-the-million-a-science-fiction-conspiracy-novel-of-radically-altered-timescales/

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

[cazort]

This is a really great project because it serves to address the major scam in which authors get charged money for publishing their work in "open access" journals. They run journals that are free both for readers and authors. If you want to go directly to the project, it is called the Open Library of Humanities. They currently have 30 academic journals and here's the cool thing:

They have a process for taking on new journals. They don't found new journals, but rather, they work with editors of existing journals to move those journals to an open access model. If you know anyone involved in running an academic journal, definitely tell them about this.

[adverbian]

FYI, because this is really so wild that I am not surprised people don’t know:

Researchers do not get paid when we publish academic articles. That is just not a thing.

In fact, we (or more usually our institutions) have to pay the journal a submission fee, and sometimes a publication fee.

If we want our paper to be made open-access (not paywalled), then we (or our institutions) have to pay the journal a very large open-access fee (thousands of dollars).

We are required to publish articles in order to advance our careers — you have to have a robust publication record to get grants, get tenure, get a new job, get promoted.

But we make precisely zero dollars from those publications.

The journals have a very good scam going on. Researchers pay them to get published, and then libraries pay them to access the publications.

Researchers also donate their labor to peer-review other researchers’ submissions. And they donate their labor as editors for the journals.

And that’s just the way the whole thing works.

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[rhetoricandlogic]

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Under My Skin by K.J. Parker

April 27, 2023 Gary K. Wolfe

Under My Skin is the third major collection from K.J. Parker, and like Academic Exercises in 2014 and The Father of Lies in 2018, it’s a hefty one. This is mostly because Parker tends to favor novella and novelette-length stories, and four of the 13 stories here – “Mightier Than the Sword”, “My Beautiful Life”, “Prosper’s Demon”, and “The Big Score” – were previously published as standalone books. Three others are original to this collection, including the longest, “Relics”, which is easily the main new treasure for Parker fans. Finding honorable or reliable narrators in a Parker story is admittedly about as likely as finding Hello Kitty figures, but “Relics” gives us two: it’s an epistolary tale consisting of letters between a beleaguered archduke named Genseric and his old schoolfriend Pollio, a “pilgrim and slave” whose task is to go around purchasing holy relics – shinbones, foreskins, vertebrae, toes, etc. – until Genseric begins to think he’ll “have enough bits and pieces to build my own saint.” The relics turn out to be assets in the religious conflicts Genseric finds himself involved in (and is not very adept at, as Pollio points out), but as we begin to read between the lines of the back-and-forth epistles, tricky questions of faith, loyalty, and betrayal begin to raise some crucial issues that give the tale surprising depth.

The elaborate political maneuvering and masterfully sardonic tone will be familiar to readers of the earlier standalone novellas, each of which explore some aspect of Parker’s trade­mark alternate late-medieval to early renaissance Europe, with its scam culture of tricky sorcerers, fraudulent philosophers, magical artists, brutal but clumsy soldiers, and doughty peasants – as though the whole early Renaissance were some­how in the hands of the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. But Parker is also adept at describing institutions that somehow manage to preserve and provide continuity in a way that seems sur­prisingly credible, if a bit haphazard. The major such institution is the Studium, a kind of blend of Plato’s academy and early universities, but Parker doesn’t overlook the importance of religion. In “Mightier than the Sword”, monasteries and their libraries are attacked by mysterious pirate bands called Land and Sea Raiders, and the nar­rator, a legate who is the empress’s nephew, is sent to investigate. Each subsequent monastery he visits provides additional information while deepening the mystery of who the raiders are and what they want, and by the end the various politi­cal and family intrigues – such as the empress’s disapproval of his proposed marriage to a cour­tesan he’s enamored of–begin to fall into place in ingenious and unexpected ways. “My Beautiful Life”, allegedly dictated by the narrator, who is unable to read, to a servant, details, with many digressions, that narrator’s cynical and ruthless rise to power from an impoverished childhood in a remote mountain village, through a career of professional thievery, eventually blackmailing his way up a corrupt civil service hierarchy to a position of power; it’s perhaps the most complete portrait of one of Parker’s familiar scoundrels.

The narrator of “Prosper’s Demon” essentially makes his living as a freelance exorcist, driving out demons even when this may result in serious harm to the victim – but he is sometimes pos­sessed by those same demons. His uneasy alli­ance with the Prosper of the title – who promotes himself as the most brilliant man who ever lived and doesn’t believe in possession at all – results in a razor-sharp exploration of the conflicts of faith, reason, and pure ego. The other most brilliant man who ever lived is Parker’s familiar Saloni­nus, not only the world’s greatest self-proclaimed philosopher and alchemist, but also the greatest composer, playwright, poet, mathematician, and scientist. We met him in earlier Parker novellas, and he’s back in “The Big Score”, in which we learn he was such a terrible businessman that he’s constantly in debt and on the run. Here he fakes his own death and hatches a scheme with a skilled forger to “discover” one of his own origi­nal plays and sell it for a fortune (the play itself sounds suspiciously like Hamlet). This may be the flat-out funniest of the novellas here.

Saloninus also shows up, under a fake name, in “The Thought That Counts”. (“I won’t tell you my name, because you’d recognize it im­mediately,” says the narrator, but then goes on to claim authorship of books elsewhere attributed to Saloninus.) Here he finds himself in court, de­fending a young peasant woman who has become a successful portrait artist whose subjects often become catatonic after the portrait is finished. He brilliantly defers accusations of witchcraft by invoking the quite modern medical notion of strokes, but in a later story, “Portrait of the Artist”, we hear from that same young woman, or someone very like her (she’s one of Parker’s few female narrators), many of whose subjects also suffer strokes. Her real motivation, like that of so many Parker characters, is simply to get filthy rich – in this case in order to finance an iron min­ing operation on property owned by her family.

While the often comic digressions are one of the delights of Parker’s narratives, they can also distract a bit from the central plots, which often involve a mission or assignment of some sort. Two of the most linear plots appear in “Habitat”, in which the narrator is more or less blackmailed into finding a way to capture a live dragon, and “The Best Man Wins”, whose nar­rator is commissioned, by a young man clearly untrained in battle, to forge the strongest sword in the world. The actual reason for needing the sword is the story’s main twist, but along the way we get a good dose of another characteristic Parker feature – a fascination with how medieval engineering actually worked, in this case a de­tailed explanation of how to forge such a sword (“Prosper’s Demon” gives us similar instructions on how to cast a giant bronze statue.)

In addition to “Relics”, the other two original stories here are departures from the familiar world of the Studium with its sketchy academ­ics and cynical priests. “Stronger” almost has elements of an alien invasion tale; for centuries, the powerful inhabitants of the nearby Black Island have demanded an annual tribute of 24 young people from the narrator’s city, supposedly as a sacrifice to a bull-headed god who arrived long ago. When the narrator decides to visit the forbidden island to rescue the love of his life, he learns a good deal he hadn’t expected. Not sur­prisingly, given the hardly selfless motivations of Parker characters, the story also involves an elaborate scheme on the narrator’s part to make his family wealthy through a lumber business. “All Love Excelling” is perhaps Parker’s most di­rect satirical approach to Christianity, presented as a kind of dark sitcom about the frustrations and annoyances faced by the family of a famous messiah and savior, who’s always busy with raising the dead, casting out demons, walking on water, turning sticks into snakes, etc. The narrator, the messiah’s son, is a painter who even gets a Sistine Chapel-like gig. Another Biblical allusion is in the title of “Many Mansions”, which features another scholar (they refrain from call­ing themselves wizards) facing down a powerful witch, though the most interesting aspect of the story consists of “the Rooms,” top-secret psychic spaces, each with its own characteristics, where scholars can either hide out or conduct business such as exorcisms. Finally, “The Return of the Pig” takes us back to the world of the Studium, where three rivals for a tenured professorship set out to undermine or murder each other, while dealing with the revenant father of one of them, who has reincarnated as a huge feral pig. Like several of the stories, it takes place largely in the Mesoge, a hardscrabble region of dirt farms and dire poverty which serves as a reminder that affluent institutions like the Studium and the wealthy monasteries come at a price paid by the general population. The more we learn about Parker’s increasingly complex fever-dream of European history, the more disturbingly familiar it becomes, and the more we understand what really lies behind all those cynical, opportunistic, and wildly dishonest narrators, as appealing and hilarious as they might be at first reading.