#alle vs grad school

[iam93percentstardust]

it is 5 pm.

19 of my 46 students have not yet turned in their final project, which was due at noon yesterday and counts for a full 10% of their final grade since we don't have exams.

the canvas site has been down since 2 pm because the school's systems are down. more importantly, however, it closes for good at midnight.

this is about to be very interesting

[radioregine]

girl why this person in this school group always so like, covertly condescending ehdjdjddk I been seeing they replies for ages thinking 'maybe im just being autistic' but nah ion wike their communication style

[electricbluebutterflies]

Have I mentioned lately that I hate academic writing style?

[paradife-loft]

skill issue

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

*don't go to grad school out of spite, don't go to grad school out of spite, do NOT go to GRAD SCHOOL out of SPITE!!!*

[downahill]

my mom when im in the right in an argument: did you know that you’re mentally ill and you sound mentally ill and you seem mentally ill and everybody talks about how mentally ill you are?

[feverdreamsandlucidnightmares]

Yknow what? I miss my unhinged undergrad art history and philosophy professors that checked and responded to emails at 3am. It made me feel less unhinged to know we were all suffering sleeplessly. Now my grad professors are like do not even think of emailing me after 7pm. Why do you care when I email you??? You can respond during business hours, that’s fine, but it’s not like emails are particularly obtrusive — why can’t I send it when the problem arises??? Do you not like knowing your work keeps me up all night???

[seokshinedk]

Powering my way through the day with both coffee AND green tea. Today warrants some double-dipping.

[chillinglikeashilling]

I love love love the contrast between first Suvi and then Sworn extending care to Maddy as an untested young Wizard under harrowing circumstances vs. Indri taking on all of these young Witch apprentices with the express purpose of consuming/destroying them once they actually learn any magic.

I love the reminder that for Suvi, the Citadel is her home and school, and also all of the other things.

It's not just the army she's wanted to fight for, it's also the streets and people of her family and community, it's all her teachers, professors, the panel for her Wizard grad school thesis. It's the place where she did a bunch of stupid kid stuff that almost got her killed, and it's where whatever she's going to become with Silver started.

It's also the place that's crushing the life out of her best friend. It's the thing that Morrow was aiming for when he trapped Naram. It's the thing her parents died for instead of coming back to her.

And Indri, by very funny contrast, is just the world's worst Intern supervisor. 0/10 experience, would not get my magic consumed again. Just absolutely the worst.

[iam93percentstardust]

good morning! i just submitted my dissertation to my committee for review before my defense! i am lowkey panicking!

[tolkienpinupcalendar]

Sluttiest Tolkien Character: Round 3

Finrod vs Celebrimbor

(art by Elena Kukanova; Silentium.S)

Propaganda under the cut ↓

Finrod:

I MEAN LOOK AT HIM ?? Jewellery ? Music ? Rap Battle against Sauron ? Getting friendly with humans as soon as he meets them

That man is draped in jewellery in almost every art made, you can't tell me he wouldn't enjoy laying around with only that jewellery and nothing else on him, being admired by everyone around.

Hair, style, the way he just took a crown, also he's definitely the sluttiest in his family. Galadriel is the tough one

He has a recorded relationship/engagement in Aman. Then, after that fell apart, we all know that Finrod was really into anthropology and ~maintaining relationships~ with the kindreds of the secondborn and the dwarves. He's known for keeping all these ~close personal~ relationships.

He just goes up to a human campfire and starts singing. Show-off move. More than that, hippie-at-a-music-festival move. You know what hippies do at music festivals? When they're high on love and peace and roughing it through nature to get to the music festival (and whatever other elvish cordials with Magical Special Restorative Effects they've brought)? They fuck. Then he invites Beor back to his home and gives him a ring and promises to care for all his descendents ever after? Finrod not only fucks, his heart is all slutty with affection. He's a slutty kingdom-ruler, too. Nargothrond's supposed to be a secret, but he just can't keep those doors closed. And then there's a substantial amount of of Finrod/Curufin art and fic. Scandalously slutty! Your own cousin-lover cucking your kingdom out from under you! Finally: you know that in several places in Aman and Middle Earth, some young people got their kink awakening seeing vaguely-erotic etchings of Finrod wrestling the werewolf. You know this.

Celebrimbor:

This guy really likes to ~collaborate~, if you know what I mean. Constantly trying to create ~intellectual synergy~ in his work environment. This is the elf so mutually enamored with Narvi that they made the gates to Khazad Dum a monument to their shared affection. Not at all discreet! Slutty move! But his most notorious and torrid affair of all was with Annatar, otherwise known as Sauron. After Sauron joined-- and broke from-- both Aule and Morgoth, Celebrimbor took him for sloppy thirds. Together, they pioneered the field of putting one's literal soul into one's works. Forging with souls together, and not even married! Seriously slutty. Really, who knows what kind of kinky shit he got up to with Annatar and all his Gwaith-i-Mirdain frat bros, in their hippie-tech bro startup-frat-grad school atmosphere of joy in unlimited innovation, hope for the future, and competition. Finally: images of Celebrimbor's corpse strung up as a banner and pierced with arrows are the St Sebastian paintings of the Silm.

[friendlybowlofsoup]

Another Update

Hello Friends,

I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.

It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.

TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)

I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.

Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.

GotRM will be switching over to Twine.

----

OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS

After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.

So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?

And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:

My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.

I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.

The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:

I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!

And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.

I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.

I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.

Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.

And as always, with a lot of love,

FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)

[leonardcohenofficial]

Hi Maddie! Are you willing to talk a little about your PhD journey? All I know is you write a really big paper but I imagine it involves more than that

absolutely! the requirements of a phd will definitely range depending on both your field and subject of your research, but typically involve taking courses that allow you to gain general but high level knowledge of the area on the whole, passing some type of qualifying exam that shows you’re prepared to complete your dissertation, and then writing the dissertation itself, all in a process that can take between typically three years (this seems very short but is fairly common outside of the USA) to a decade. in my program people typically graduated in five or six years; i myself took six years to finish everything up

for my program i took classes in a wide variety of areas, most of which were not directly related to what i wrote about for my dissertation, but all of which were extremely beneficial in 1) learning in areas outside of what i do, 2) helping me feel more prepared when teaching those subjects as part of my TA duties, and 3) allowing me to develop deeper critical and theoretical knowledge that helped me with writing the dissertation itself. i was also really happy that i was able to take classes outside of the theatre department (in the music and literature departments; though the lit class i took was a film class lol), which made total sense given my research is so interdisciplinary. the biggest thing i learned about my research throughout my time is that i very much live in the performance studies world (vs. theatre or drama) which is helpful framing given i write and teach about such a wide range of performance and media forms. my dissertation was much more a performance studies/musicology/american studies project than a Theatre™️ project, but i had a committee that really encouraged me to think across multiple disciplines with my work (and i also got to teach both theatre and film classes, which is pretty cool)

i also really appreciate that my program also gave us so much experience teaching! i taught every single quarter and many summers during grad school, which (while exhausting) not only gave me a ton of practice to build up my own pedagogical approach but made my CV pretty competitive as an early career scholar when applying to jobs. i don’t think i would have gotten multiple tenure-track interviews while still finishing my dissertation had i not had so much teaching experience (as instructor of record!) on there. i also am really grateful that my department also really cares about encouraging phds’ practice within and beyond the department, so i was able to dramaturg and/or direct ten shows within my department on top of a ton of outside gigs at the major LORT houses in town (which was also a really big deal)

the actual dissertation writing process sucks. it’s exhausting and thankless and even if you have a really amazing committee (like i did <3) it is extremely stressful and i do not know ANYONE who has reported a smooth and easy dissertation writing process LOL; however i had really good people on my side (friends, family, colleagues in the department and in arts and humanities in general at school, my faculty, my coworkers at the record shop, etc.) who were so supportive and my biggest champions as i was taking on this massive project. it was a lot but in all honestly even though it took so long, it was not the most difficult academic work i’ve ever had to do (that badge of dishonor goes to the horrendous process of getting my international baccalaureate diploma, which was so awful it led me to go to hippie college with no grades no tests and no majors LMFAO). i am super proud of my dissertation—if anyone wants to read it i’d be happy to send the link!—and even though there are plenty of sections i’ll rework for when i submit it to academic presses for publication, i am really pleased with the work i did and i think that it provides new and (imho) exciting scholarship about topics that i find really meaningful (many of which i’ve loved since i was a kid)

all of this to say, if people have phd, grad school, research, or otherwise related questions or want to chat, please hit me up! always happy to talk about this stuff / offer my very humble advice about any stage of the process <3

[historicity-was-already-taken]

This morning I picked up my paper copy of the New York Times and I was greeted by an extremely graphic article about rape as warfare in Israel/Palestine on the front page. I put the paper down, but it got me thinking about the value of reading about violence. When is reading these testimonies bearing witness to history, and when is it masochism? How do you discern between productive discomfort and unnecessary anguish?

I don't expect you to have the answer to these because they are such immense questions and also things vary from person to person, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on the issue as a historian who is outspoken about the effects of secondhand trauma through genocide research. My degree isn't in history, but I'm an aspiring museum professional (if the job market isn't too cruel, lol. I'm open to other careers but I'm passionate about weaving archival materials into public storytelling so *gestures vaguely*). I also have a really thin skin. I tend to avoid graphic depictions/descriptions of violence, but sometimes I wonder what I'm missing by avoiding that.

Anyway! Feel free to answer this privately, publicly, or not at all if you're swamped with other things. Thank you for running such an informative and interesting blog!

Hi! Sorry this was buried in my inbox.

It's a good question, and I'm not sure how to answer it in regard to contemporary, ongoing events, vs. history. I do think that the 24/7 news cycle has exposed us all to an amount of suffering and stressful information that we're not like...designed to be able to handle.

So I'm going to answer you like a museum professional, and use that shared language. Back in 2009/10 I was a Collections Management Intern at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. This was before it opened to the public. While I was mostly cataloging, the staff was great about letting us listen on on ongoing higher level conversations.

I'm putting the rest of this under a cut, for reason which will be clear when you read what's under said cut.

Now, two of the (imo) most traumatic aspects of the history of that day, is 1) the photographs and footage of people who jumped from above the impact zones; and 2) the audio from phone calls and voicemails made from inside the planes, inside the towers, etc.

The museum handled those by making them optional. You want to listen to the last thing a woman in an office above the impact zone will say to her child? Ok. You have to make the choice to pick up audio mechanism, and press play. You want to watch footage of people jumping to their deaths to avoid burning to death? You have to make the specific choice to walk into a cordoned off vestibule, and view that material.

If you choose not to listen, or watch, you're not ignoring those histories or refusing to bear witness. You're fully cognizant of the fact that they happened, and you're simply choosing not to expose yourself to traumatic content. Bearing witness doesn't mean traumatizing yourself for the sake of bearing witness, you know?

I think it's enough to know that certain horrific things happened. Going that next step, looking at them, that's not necessary, and can't be rushed. When I was in undergrad I chose to focus on Ancient Near Eastern History as opposed to WW2 and the Holocaust because I know I wasn't ready to look too closely. I wasn't even really ready in grad school. It's really in the last 5/6 years that I've been able to do it. And I still don't think I'll ever be able to engage with detailed material about medical experimentation. But I know it happened. I know it was horrifying, and that's enough.

So, back to news media. I didn't see/read that article, but what I can say is that I appreciate when newspapers decline to put certain kinds of images on the front pages, and give the reader the option to look or not to look. I also appreciate when you're reading articles online, and you have to click multiple times to explicitly consent to view disturbing images.

[minmin-vs-physics]

Min vs FA24

Now that I'm officially a college senior, I thought a post of what I will be up to is in order. (Especially since I was absconding last week) Gonna take some hard hitters for classes this semester, pray for me.

Intro to General Relativity: FINALLY. I've been waiting for this since before I was a physics major. I know it's gonna be good since my QM prof from last sem is teaching it. (Lowkey wanna switch to the grad version because my QM prof from last sem is teaching it)

Relativistic Quantum Field Theory: Another scary class but still highly anticipated! I've basically been doing QFT all summer, but the class is scarier because formalism. Of course, it will unlock some doors in particle theory.

Statistical Thermodynamics: lowkey im most nervous about this one. another beast of a topic in physics and i rlly want to learn it but idk we don't talk abt it much??? (except abt how much we're dreading it) the whole cohort will come together for this one.

Intro to Sociocultural Anthropology: always gotta throw one curveball in the schedule. not much to say bc im just taking it for a gen ed req.

Computational Physics: I should drop this bc taking four physics classes in grad apps season is kinda overkill. i wanted the lightest sem i could make but still ended up w this kraken. but no math class! (i had to pry out topology) this is the first and only semester i won't have a math class. in addition to courseload i also have

TAing for a CS class: ik my way around it so its not a problem but its still a time sink

TAing for a QM class: this is smth i def just do for the love of it, so another time sink basically but i look forward to it

Research: gotta work on that thesis y'all. i wanna make smth good out of it in time.

Physics GRE: broccoli on my plate

Grad Apps: waking nightmare. but it'll be fine i can drop out and become a finance bro.

but i also wanna make memories with all the other seniors because what? how are we seniors? (im writing this after going stargazing with my friends on a school night.)

[potatoburp]

Lowkey I think this is all gonna come down to the citadel vs the empire.

Like we Know the garrick was made by imperial mages, not citadel mages. The whole motivation was Morrow being like "I was kicked out of grad school but they will have to respect me when I manage to harvest a great one".

And while yes, I do believe the citadel has had and still has questionable behavior with spirits. I think the motivation for the most questionable behavior is in the imperial mages.