#phd hell

[cicaklah]

As a former academic I have chosen a job where I never have to do academic style writing again...apart from on friday, where I had to rewrite a methods section to 'make an argument'.

I did this for years and every time it made my skin crawl. I detest it. It makes me want to be sick. It rips open all those years where nothing I wrote would ever be good enough, that even if it was literally just a statement of fact it had to be backed up in triplicate with other people's research. I don't know why this upsets me so violently. Well I do, it's unprocessable PhD trauma, and it's weird as someone who suffered for literally a decade with sexual violence based trauma that the bullshit of academia has put me in the same place, but to my shame it has. And ironically more people would probably be sympathetic to that than the trauma that defined my 20s.

Anyway my client has emailed good job team the methods section is perfect no notes and now I'm going to look for a new therapist.

Abolish the academy. Quit your PhD.

(the irony of googling PhD trauma and being offered an advertisement for...the PhD programme I was on. They couldn't make it up.)

[alteredsilicone]

the academic gods were merciful and i will be able to take one exam in mid-June and the other in early September.

NOW I NEED TO LOCK THE FUCK IN AND CRAM A 500 PAGE BOOK IN ~2 MONTHS

[pressuredrightnow]

i love how we were scared theyd go full hetero for wicked but the movie turned out to be gayer than the play, and then the deleted scenes come out and it turns out it couldve been gayer somehow.

[aphelionatseven]

being an artist with free will means i can spend an hour of my life making extremely stupid shit like this

[aroacewxs]

how old is rui in this card actually. who's giving the baby a power drill and pliers

do you think papashiro sat his son down and taught him how to use a power drill at the ripe age of 5 that's why it comes with his bright toybox and he can use it with no parental supervision

[monstrousproductions]

Finally finished @thesiltverses. If anyone needs me, I'll be lying face down on the floor and weeping xoxo

[randomnameless]

Why do the FEH devs insist on ignoring Nabatean lore so much?

I recently had a surprisingly cordial discussion on redshit with someone about the "nabateans = colonisers" take, and one of the main points raised was that the game was purposedly foggy around Nabateans/Sothis/their story because it would obviously favor a certain narrative (and thus make another narrative look, uh, not that marketable anymore).

To be honest, we still ended up with a product that had a lead go "this race and its blood* is the reason why the world sucks" and yet that lead is still marketable enough to have raunchy cipher cards and 5 FEH alts, so I actually wonder if, while pissing on that lore had that purpose, it was ultimately pointless since Supreme Leader can still sell goodies despite her incarnation in FE16.

And not only Supreme Leader - but the entirety of WC where we basically have 70% of the cast crying/complaining about their "mixed blood" or lack of and basically adding their 10 cents to the "this race and its blood is the reason why the world sucks".

I mean, can you imagine Sylvain selling any goodies and alts if Flayn replied to his "wah wah people only are kind to me and want to fuck me because I have Nabatean blood :(" by some uncharacteristic "good for you, I have to hide my ears, had to dye my hair, have to lie about my family because if the truth is found out about my identity, I will be hunted and vivisected like an animal and harvested for parts by people who call my kin abominations - just like what happens in the game where the same people who call my kin "abominations" ally with a classmate who calls me a creature and pretends I am incapable of human feelings based on my race".

FE Fodlan's main selling point is its cast of students, for various reasons, but even if I tried to kid myself, Nopes and FEH made it clears : students are the main selling point.

If you spare more time and attention to the Nabatean plot/lore, the students either grow from "likeable" to "despicable" or worse, you won't gaf about them because yeah sure, Hilda might be upset because people expect things from her due to her crust, but it would feel like a "peanut" compared to Seteth's irrational (granted, it's not so irrational since GW exists) fear that Flayn's newest friends would dissect her if they learnt she was a Nabatean, and being conflicted by finally letting her have human friends and form bonds she crave, or protect her due to the trauma from the genocide of their species.

Don't get me wrong, I love peanuts, I mean, not everyone can have a tragik of loaded backstory!

And yet, given how this verse's DNA is "can you fight against the red emperor who uwus about you", they had to add copious amounts of Earl Grey to their games so there's no clear-cut factions :

The "Your alien blood and its influence on the world corrupted it, so I want to reform it under my command" vs "I don't want to die and you oppose me due to my race and side with the people who genocided my kin"

is turned to :

"Your alien blood Crests and its your church's influence on the world corrupted it, so I want to reform it under my command"

"I don't want to die and you oppose me due to my race and side with the people who genocided my kin"

Sprinkle with the cast's hammering here and there that the "reforms" might be needed - but never develop on what they are - and add a few baseless and groundless takes as a toping (basically everything Claude says about tolerance and the general "isolationism/foreign policy" stuff) and you get FE Fodlan where the Red Emperor's war isn't seen as the catastrophe it is in the other entries from the series!

Now, for FEH...

FWIW, the F!F!Billy's trailer had them try to explain that Sothis was a bit pissed about her slaughtered/massacred children when Nopes never gave any reason about why she was pissed - maybe on Billy's behalf bcs Jerry's dead, but come on, she would indeed deserve the medal of the worst parent in the franchise if that was the case, since Billy can murder her daughter without Sothis taking over ! - but given that they cannot write/go against the source game those characters are from.

They tried a bit, with B!Supreme Leader and Hegemongard's FB, but then it stopped (because she had no "new unit" released since then lol) and I can understand why : Hegemongard came out before the Supreme Emblem, and Hegemongard hates dragons who are seen/perceived as gods by some of their human followers. Come FE17, and now Supreme Emblem accepts Alear because they are "one of the good ones". We can come up with HCs and details and talk about what are emblems or if Hegemongard's views were only hers at the end of AM all day long... But imo, Doylist wise, it still feels it's a retcon because the devs from the main games tried to scrap and remove the most "controversial" traits she had.

For the other characters... Well, you see what Marianne is in FEH (but even in her base games), she's one of the few characters who reacts - in a way - to the partial history about relics and demonic beasts and all... only to give sad uwus to Maurice.

FE16 (and Nopes) refused to have any "student" character react to the Nabatean lore/reveal, about what are relics and all. There are no lines, Claude shared some knowledge in the explore section of VW's last chapter, but we don't have anyone muse or think or even talk about what are relics, what are crests, and what kind of fuckery their ancestors or the ancient humans of Fodlan did.

With that in mind, FEH can't do much : either they write Marianne in a retcon-y way like what happened for Hegemongard (and they're not afraid to piss on characterisation, look at Lyon!), or they flanderise her "character" and develop her around 3 lines she had in the game in her paralogue, and continue to give sad uwus about Momo when he was at best a guy who slaughtered and murdered so much that he abused the Nabatean turned into a relic to the point where he turned in a demonic beast even if he had a matching crest, or at worst, had been part of Nemesis's piñata party in Zanado and was something of a genocider.

Tldr :

Why FE Fodlan never gaf about Nabateans : earl grey + the marketable cast has to stay marketable and you can't sell peanuts at the same price you'd sell swordfish

Why FEH dgaf about Nabatean lore : they can't afford to retcon characters + they have to sell peanut alts with the same seasoning they had in their base game.

For what it's worth though, I think FEH is more daring than the base game(s) given how they gave more lines and screentime to Rhea - through her different alts - than GW. And they even designed her Halloween!alt's lines to piss on some of Claude's assertions, while the various FB involving members of the church also - indirectly - reply to some accusations thrown their way in FE16 when, FE16, never gave them an opportunity or lines to explain that those takes were full of dung.

*"but random, maybe she doesn't know that the crests she often decries is "dragon blood"!"

It's highly debatable, especially given what she and Hubert throw to Billy in CF - but even if she doesn't, Doylist wise we still have a character who, knowingly or not, says "this race and its blood* is the reason why the world sucks" and who is never called out on her prejudice. That's more of an issue regarding the general writing though, she has to be a red emperor and took pages from Ashnard's book, and yet, the player must still feel bad and want to romance her, so her mindest/goal cannot be looked at too closely, because, I guess, even the devs thought it would be difficult to romance her (thus sell goodies!) if more light was shed on the "blood from this race corrupts our people" schtick -> which in turn would also make characters whose backstory and gimmick rely on "crying about crests" be way less likeable, thus marketable and able to sell goodies.

[astriiformes]

When I was applying for undergrad, I was fully in my "All my favorite characters are weird smart academic types" phase, because I Iike many undiagnosed twice-exceptional teens had carefully constructed a personal identity around a certain (incredibly harmful) societal idea of intelligence. It totally showed in the institutions I was applying to, too, and in particular, my motivation for choosing them.

This also lead to me making bad choices in the long run and was completely unsustainable, but I will admit that it was helpful when it came to motivating myself to complete my college applications. (Especially considering one of my top schools -- and the one with the most involved application -- happened to be a university that a beloved favorite character had attended but also, it is really, really good in retrospect that I did not get in there.)

I am happier and healthier now and have a much more sustainable image of success in my head, if an imperfect relationship with it, but this also means I have a complicated relationship with the fictional academic archetype and the type of characters I used to love, and that used to be motiviating to me. A lot of my favorite characters these days are ones who possess other traits I admire -- tenacity, kindness, a strong sense of justice, and a desire to change the world for the better. But I don't associate most of them with school or academic success at all; sometimes even the opposite.

All this to say, seeing as I have grad school apps due in exactly a month now. Save me Palamedes Sextus. Save me.

[subwaylesbians]

very very cool context re: make way for cyrus, from sasha hutchings’s (cowgirl’s) instagram. there’s an incredibly interesting article on step and gumboot dance and their intersections here https://encompass.eku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=2&article=1000&context=ekuopen&type=additional for anyone interested!

[cicaklah]

The last one of my PhD friends is doing her viva this week - slightly bittersweet because of the whole PhD hell I went through but never got any of the perks, but that doesn't mean we get to sit around. She's flying back home the next morning, so I can't buy her flowers. So.

I am planning on making 5 more before Friday, one per day. Wish me luck!

[alteredsilicone]

email sent now i can walk in circles until i get an answer that decides my fate

[anghraine]

Nothing like attempting basic division to sharpen my hatred of "everyone is mentally disabled in their own way :) don't let labels define you :) :)" anti psych posts

[finnlongman]

Become a medieval literature specialist, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

Anyway this is how different versions of Táin Bó Cúailnge relate to each other. Clear as mud.

[mortra]

support thistle to help w anxiety

[valyrfia]

so how are your working weeks going i just logged on to my server where i keep my data and code only to find out there was a powercut and the ENTIRE SERVER is corrupted………….

[forevercloudnine]

Riddler's daughter in the "Arkham Academy" storyline from Urban Legends #21-23... I quite like this take on her og look from the last continuity.