#scholarly stuffs

[ashes-and-inks]

I am officially published.

An academic chapter on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood.

It's been over a YEAR since it was accepted on concept.

I am SO excited about it

[kalashnikovlobotomy]

oh well it's probably fine

[anachronic-cobra]

Tell me something about your niche special interest. I'll go first

Plague doctors had existed since the initial major spread of bubonic plague in the 1300s, but the iconic beaked mask did not exist until the mid 1600s when it was invented by royal physician Charles de Lorme of France. Most plague doctors weren't even doctors - typically they were volunteers, whether they had a medical background or not, who were willing to interact with infected patients and were paid well to take census of the living, dead, and infected. In some cases, they would also peddle "treatments" to patients for extra coin. Some of these may have been genuine attempts at treatment, such as bloodletting to balance the humors, but some may have simply been scams to get extra money from wealthy patients, such as injesting crushed gemstones or bathing in mercury.

Actual medical professionals of the time were physicians, who were mainly scholars interested in expanding medical knowledge, and barber surgeons, who were more common as general practitioners. One notable known plague doctor had no medical background whatsoever, he just took on the role after his fruit stand went bankrupt.

[voluptuarian]

I love trying to do historical research, you want an answer to a simple question like "could Jews serve in the British army in the 1880s" and you get back

Jews in the American Revolution

Jews in the American Civil War

Jews in World War I

Jews who fought for Nazi Germany

Thanks, that absolutely covers the time period and country I specifically asked for, couldn't have done it without you

[bunniesandbeheadings]

It’s hard to be a hater against someone who’s been dead for so long. I can’t bully Marie Louise off of twitter. Because of woke. And also because she’s been dead for like, a whole bunch of slutty slutty years.

[worstloki]

Thor: Loki wastes two days reading some tome and I get the lite version in a 5 minute rant when the information actually becomes immediately relevant. I’m the winner here

[impossible-rat-babies]

i care a lot about them going to mt rokkon together

[lesbianwyllravengard]

Just found out I could completely skip doing my final project in my film crit class and still pass with an A,,,, I'm not gonna do that because I actually like my professor but it's crazy how giving myself permission to purposefully write the shittiest paper I've ever written in my life with absolutely no consequences actually makes the assignment FUN

[theladysherlock]

One bit of housekeeping for this year's liveblog: normally I refer to Deryn exclusively with she/her pronouns because that's what the book uses, but this year I'm going to switch it up because I really like all the different gender interpretations that come with the territory of this character. So for any chapters that are Alek's Third Person Limited POV, I'm going to use Dylan and he/him; for any chapters that are Deryn's Third Person Limited POV, I'm going to use Deryn and she/her; and for my own thoughts unconnected to any lines in the text (mostly found in the tags of my posts, tbh), I'm going to use Deryn and they/them.

(When we get to Goliath that might change a bit with Alek's POV but we'll see how I feel when we get there.)

[queenlua]

it's funny how, when i was in college, one of the reasons i decided not to go into academia

was because i did a semester of research with this computational linguistics research prof who i really liked

and the [redacted research project] went totally fine, but i couldn't shake the feeling of "ok tho, this seems to mostly consist of doing some funky transformations on the corpus of The Entire Internet, which is cool and all, but it doesn't feel like i'm... adding... much... to our understanding of the universe? doesn't this feel like Garbage In, Garbage Out to anyone else? sure, it's kinda neat that i can do some funky transformations on stuff i pulled from [basically-Reddit], but that's all it is?"

and then, years later, LLMs blow up and it's like. joke's on me buddy, do you know how much hype you can milk out of doing a couple funky transformations on stuff you pulled from Reddit

[bmpmp3]

when people complain about getting like, a 98% grade on something because it was "so close to perfect" its like. i understand what you're saying on a technical level. but that is a line of thought so far away from my experiences and ways of thinking that i do feel like im from another planet. 100% isnt even a real number to me

[ghostlyheart]

In small joys, I finally hit my reading goal for the first time in a few years! I've been setting it at 12 (so like a book a month) for a while, which is realize isn't a lot but I'm more concerned with building the habit and making it achievable. These are mostly novellas (sub-200 pages), loosely in order of how much I enjoyed them from greatest to least

[voluptuarian]

You know, very rarely do I run into accounts of historical cannibalism that are completely new to me. But I did today and I'm frankly completely taken aback by this

Fro the article: "The Guangxi Massacre comprised a series of lynchings and massacres in the Chinese province of Guangxi between 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution. The official record shows an estimated death toll between 100,000 and 150,000. Methods of murder included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, and disemboweling. In specific areas, including Wuxuan County and Wuming, Nanning, hundreds of incidents of human cannibalism occurred—even though no famine conditions existed. According to records that have been made public, at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands of people having participated in the cannibalism... In 1993, The New York Times stated that the incidents reported from Guangxi were apparently the most extensive episodes of cannibalism in the world in the last century or more. They were also different from any others in that those who took part were not motivated by hunger or psychopathic illness. Instead, the actions appeared to be ideological: the cannibalism, which the documents say took place in public, was often organized by local Communist Party officials, and people apparently took part together to prove their revolutionary ardor."

[isfjmel-phleg]

Here's the tentative outline of the TSG paper, as okayed by the professor whom I've been discussing the project with:

intro to the trend of recent adaptations/retellings reframing TSG as a story about grief

an assertion that the book is really about healing from childhood e m o t i o n a l n e g l e c t (CEN) (my thesis?)

defining CEN and distinguishing it from traditional grief

an analysis of CEN in the text

how this interacts with what these adaptations/retellings are doing

conclusion about the importance of the text’s depiction of CEN and why it’s worth acknowledging/exploring

It's a relief to pin this down and be able to go into this with some kind of focus. I've already got a start on the first paragraph. I'm trying a method of drafting by just constructing the basic argument and then working in all the evidence and research later. My college papers tended to take forever to write because I drafted them with Finished Perfection in mind for each sentence, which is stressful and easy to get bogged down with. We'll see how it works. The paper needs to be completed by October, probably the end of the month at the very latest, but I'd like to get it finished in enough time to fully polish and not have to stress about a tight deadline.

I can do this. Probably. It's been a few years but I might still have it in me.

[whentherewerebicycles]

therapy was “helpful” and I “liked it” and sigh I’ll “keep going”

[youremyonlyhope]

Every day I am more and more upset I didn’t write that research paper on parasocial relationships in social media a whole decade ago.