#liminal academia

[eldritchboop]

For all of you who do this…

May your coffee always be strong and the correct temperature, your pencil lead never break, and your laptop always have enough charge.

[eldritchboop]

The problem with being an educator is that you never stop being an educator.

I'm currently doing a mandatory 40 hour training through work and it is KILLING me because the quality of the training is just atrocious.

Beyond just the basic technical stuff (quizzes that don't work, broken links, stuff that crashes, graphics that are inconsistent, typos), I've hit so many things that drive me nuts.

Reading the slides to you.

Making you open a handout to advance, but then immediately reading it to you.

No way to go back and review a section without repeating the entire, hour long module.

~*~ Sparkling ableism ~*~

Reading an entire. Slide. of code citations to you. One at a time.

Examples that make you choose wrong answers to advance the slide.

Images with tiny arrows (less than a quarter inch long) on the screen that change the answer.

Images that directly contradict the point being made. Please explain to me how a spacewalk has falling hazards that will be mitigated by a railing.

I'm reporting the ableism, but the rest is just...bad design. And based on the statistics, this training has been around for at least a decade, probably closer to fifteen years, without updates.

If I was this bad of a teacher, I wouldn't have gotten hired back. It drives me nuts that this is official training that my company paid for.

This is why you pay for professional curriculum designers, friends.

[ghostlywriterr]

Abandoned Villa Sbertoli. Tuscany, Italy

[404gallery]

Hive

Buy artworks here [Sponsor]

@404.on.computer [bsky]

[eldritchboop]

There is no conspiracy. Seriously. Stop that.

We cannot retroactively assign sexualities to people. Maybe that "pair of women portrayed in the same way as husband and wife" considered themselves what we'd today consider lesbians. Or maybe they were aroace. Or bisexual. Or maybe they were queerplatonic. Or maybe they were combining assets in a way that made sense for them at the time. We. Cannot. Know. Gender identity is complicated. It's culturally nuanced. As a scientist, I cannot conclusively state how people in the past viewed themselves and I can barely provide a view of how society viewed them. But I can provide you the context in a neutral way. Neutrality isn't inherently bad.

Same with your "ritual significance" jokes. Or your "we didn't even ask a local" jokes. Many scientists ARE locals! They are embedded in and come from the culture they want to study and interpret. They have the context and nuance.

I'll laugh at the overwhelming white cisheteropatriarchy of science any day. But I find it interesting that these critiques of how "stupid" social scientists are have gotten more vocal now that more women, queer people, and historically excluded groups are entering the fields.

One of the more frustrating things about the particular kind of anti-intellectualism directed at the humanities here and on places like tiktok is that pointing it out makes you seem like a killjoy.

No, I actually didn't find your "historians will say they were just friends" joke funny. No I don't think speculating that old photos are in black and white to make them seem older is harmless. But I seem uptight and "not fun" when I say these things.

[mournfulroses]

Chelsea Wolfe, from She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She "The Liminal,"

[ultraviolencesaints]

[2k17-xanax-girl]

Imagine you live there every year from October to April

[eldritchboop]

This is why I teach a unit on the eugenics movement. It isn’t graded. But after I horrify them with sterilization and how inaccurate IQ tests are (we take a historic one and I watch them fall apart)…

I post my list of all the eugenics-related commentary I’ve pulled in the last few years.

It’s still happening, friends.

I feel the need to periodically remind people that Idiocracy is a eugenics movie.

One of the things that eugenicists believe is that it is bad for society when the “wrong people” breed.

The entire premise of the movie is that “stupid people” kept having kids while “smart people” didn’t have kids, and it ruined society because stupid genes propagated while smart genes died out. This is eugenics propaganda.

I know people will read this and their response will be “actually it’s satire” but the movie isn’t satirizing eugenics. It’s satirizing anti-intellectualism, and consumerism, and it proposes eugenics as a solution.

When eugenics was first conceived, it was used as a way to justify inequality. The idea was that people who held privilege were able to do so because they were smarter and genetically superior to lazy and stupid people who don’t have privilege. Obviously this is bad and wrong, but it is also the core lesson of Idiocracy.

The movie literally ends with the main character becoming president and having ��the smartest children in the world.” Because he and his wife have smarter genes than everyone else. The proposed solution for the things that Idiocracy is satirizing is for the smart people to have children that can be in charge of the world.

I know it’s fun to use this movie to dunk on anti-intellectualism and the MAGA movement, but we need to stop. When you quote and reference this movie you are spreading eugenics propaganda.

[nekoo3001]

Night

[fablofi]

Lime, 2024.

[eldritchboop]

Imposter Syndrome: They want YOU to peer-review a paper? Yeah, it's in your methodological wheelhouse, but it's not like you're that good at this. This person probably knows more than you do - how will you provide meaningful critique of their work?

...Reads paper...

Someone is WRONG in the journal queue. *types furiously*

[eldritchboop]

Seriously, babe, don’t come into my biocultural house spouting transphobic nonsense.

[guardcanine]

Sources: † , †

[fehck]

[aestheteasteria]

I love you...but it's time to wake up...