#thesis :V

[beazt]

finished the first full draft of my thesis. 🤓

28 pages, 6564 words, 40k characters

[kyodelika]

never letting him live that tag on his underwear down

[jakkenpoy]

[onegroovyrose]

The Arclights would like to battle!

[racingliners]

No thoughts, head empty, Seb Vettel.

[xolaanii]

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM FALSKAAR -> The Dread Coast [mod]

[perenial]

What are good books about explorers, if I may ask? I'd love to get into some harrowing survival (or just trying to survive) stories.

HI ok these are all heroic age antarctica-centric bc that's all i've had rattling around in my brain for a solid year and a half now so if anyone has non-polar recs pls feel free to throw em in the replies lmao

if we're talking harrowing survival there's nothing more fucked than shackleton's trans-imperial expedition aka endurance and the ross sea party. the classic here is endurance by alfred lansing (and ofc south by ol ernie shackles but i feel like his own account is less approachable to a first time reader) but i also highly recommend the lost men by kelly tyler-lewis for the ross sea party half of the story that often falls to the wayside.

and we can't talk abt shackleton without getting into scott & the terra nova & the race for the pole which WILL take over ur life if u get into it lol. the worst journey in the world by apsley cherry-garrard is required reading (and so is cherry by sara wheeler, possibly my fave biography of all time), and for a more general overview a first-rate tragedy by diana preston is the absolute gold standard. for amundsen ask @roaldamundsen there's the last viking by stephen r. brown which i haven't read yet but i've heard v good things about (nb: u may be recommended roland huntford's books when it comes to amundsen. read them if u want but he's got a Thing against scott which in turn distorts how he approaches amundsen but then again every polar biographer wants to make tender romantic love to their special little guy so)

OH and we can't forget the northern party aka six guys in a hole (NOT sexy) (well–). there are banger first-hand accounts (especially raymond priestley's) but weirdly enough my fave when it comes to this part of the terra nova story is a polar affair by lloyd spencer-davis, which is technically abt the sex lives of adélie penguins. it was the first book i read connected to terra nova and although it leans more popular history than rigorous biography or historical analysis it rly primes u to understand the fricative relationship between the expedition's two intertwined objectives – scientific advancement and imperialist glory – that were the root of most of their issues.

outside of endurance & terra nova i'd be remiss not to rec The gateway book to antarctic history, the madhouse at the end of the earth by julian sancton. i should have put this first bc this is genuinely one of my fave books of all time, polar-related or otherwise. it's a comedy it's a tragedy it's an adventure it's an insight into colonial ambition (although imo this aspect could have been pushed further) it's a romance for two specific guys it could easily be a musical it might be adapted into a tv show or movie in the near future?? it's an absolute trip i rec it to anyone who stands still enough to let me shove a copy in their hands. read madhouse NOW

finally i want to give a shout out to the australasian antarctic expedition which in comparison is less insane than everything else here but it's entirely possible the guy who was once on the australian $100 note ate his dog handler. so like. read alone on the ice by david roberts

(ps. for more boat books see @jesslovesboats's banger posts ✌️⛵️)

[jawz]

The Substance was easily one of the best movies of the year imo… loved the directing, the acting, the writing, the costumes, the cinematography (all those stark angles…), the outdoor shots, the INTERIORS… the way men were written and visually filmed, the way we don’t stay in a room after the main character leaves just so we can hear what everyone else thinks about her - it is HER narrative - I fucking love women directing horror esp. body horror. This is not even to mention the anti-cosmetic modification/injection/surgery themes which are… 😳 Universal was scared to release this film and backed out!!!! GO SEE THIS (but be warned it’s Extremely gory - all I’ll say is haters of excessive CGI in horror will NOT be disappointed in the creativity on display here)

[idiopathicsmile]

there is a level where i'm delighted that Fall Out Boy wrote a continuation of We Didn't Start the Fire. both because it exists, and because more songs should have sequels.

the meanest thing i can say about it is that the nicest thing i can say about it is that it exists.

[teal-fiend]

high energy and somewhat neurotic pred

[hanayanaa]

regarding the symbolism of V's glasses:

(plain text in read more)

** addendum: when she gets posessed in the middle/end of episode 5, and she's on the ceiling, her glasses fall off, because...gravity, duh.... but it symbolizes the loss of her true self in that moment, as well as telling the audience it's V that got posessed without having a character say it. the loss of the glasses also represents a loss of innocence, as she's actively being traumatized there, since she's still conscious, but unable to control her body as Solver uses her.

after N gives her back her glasses, she comes back to her senses, therefore returning back to her true self.

oh, the glasses she had during the sentinel fight were the same ones she had during her worker drone days by the way, if you look closely at the frames, the damage is the same! she had them this entire time....

pic 1:

discord message:

idk why but the glasses still on her mutilated fucking body hurts me so bad

like almost a representation of her innocence, or her true self

.....

brain blast

bc every time she has the glasses on or they're shown, she's her true self, or is coming to or revealing her true self

in EP 5 when N puts them on and she slowly comes to, and in EP 6 where she drops her defenses and is genuine to Uzi

(animated emoji of guy slamming the ground)

and the fact she's been carrying them this entire time, her true self never left her

her true self is still there, behind all the layers of hurt and fear, and all her defenses that she puts up

that kind and sweet and shy girl is still there...

the one who loves puppies and blowing bubbles and waving around dumb flags 😭

pic 2:

(replying to previous message i sent saying "ahhh...now that she's lost [her glasses].....")

brain blast..... before she always had them, but she was hiding them on her body, much like she hid her true self in order to protect herself, because she's so scared of everything. But now that she pulled them out and couldn't get them to hide them again, her full self is now always going to be shown, mostly anyway

but the shattering of her glasses means two things:

1) her protective walls coming down, being vulnerable and honest with her friends and teammates

2) her hope and innocence being completely lost. She's in despair. She really, really doesn't think there's any light at the end of the tunnel for her. She's given up. She's given up, and she knows she's either going to be abandoned or die, and that right at that moment, that place of death was the most peaceful option for her solemn scared mind. She would be free from her endless cycle of pain, and her body would be torn apart to never be able to be used agsin. And her teammates no longer care for her, so she's not hurting them by dying in this way, surely. Her and her body are no longer going to be a burden on everyone either. She can finally find peace, her expression at the end is solemn, but in a strange way, hopeful and at peace. Her only hope at that point was to be released from her pain, however.

10.3 hours !!!! 🎉🎉🎉

(referring to the total hours spent literally just ranting about V at that point LOL...it's like at 12 1/2 now)

[beazt]

ive seen you mention some stuff about your thesis, so id like to ask what kinds of research were you doing before? and what was your favorite bird to work with?

still working on the thesis!! I was just about to post an update on it. :) heads up you’re getting more than you bargained for with this ask. lmao

but my thesis research is really my first (not only, see end of this post) foray into research, tbh. Technically didn’t start with a thesis, but everything I did worked towards giving me the data I needed for my eventual thesis. so I just refer to it all as my thesis research. so I’ll just give the rundown on my thesis since I have an excuse lmao

my thesis research only involved working with two species, but I’m only focusing on one for the thesis itself. we work with tree swallows and eastern bluebirds! this is because they’re both highly competitive obligate secondary cavity nesters. I’ll break that down. basically it’s fancy speak for “these birds will only nest in holes that were already made before they came along and they will not nest anywhere else.” researching birds is really hard, ask any ornithologist. they’re small, they’re fast, they fly, they’re smart enough to avoid most traps, they don’t really let you get close to them. you can do behavioral monitoring if you have a good enough population, population monitoring if you’re willing to use citizen science and some mist nets. maybe skein some data from point counts. but anything physiological or reproductive is really hard. unless you do a secondary cavity nester, which nests in boxes that you can open and monitor and trap birds in and even do behavioral trials!

(of course there’s also aviary kept birds, but not all species are well suited for that, it’s expensive, it takes a lot of space, and it’s hard to get approved.)

my research specifically focuses on eastern bluebirds. I did quite a bit of field work before ever coming up with a research question, and quite a bit of bench work. most of my bench work at that point was dissecting nests and quantifying parasites. the general reaction I get to this is “ew, I could never” but I loved it! I love insects and especially parasites. a clean nest with no parasites would only take maybe 2 minutes but a mossy, wet, muddy nest full of parasites could take 2 hours. and we get 300+ nests per year, most are parasitized. so I spent a lot of time doing this!

I was having a parasite quantifying party with the other guy in my lab who works with the parasites and our professor/research mentor, when I was just asking questions about the parasites and stuff. and I ended up asking “do the parasites affect the baby bluebirds color?” and boom, my thesis question was born. you see, no one has studied this question before, because not that many people in the US study bird color, my professor is one of few. but it’s also an interesting question because juvenile bluebirds will retain their flight plumage into their first breeding season. and my prof has shown that differences in colored ornamentation affect mate choice and sexual selection in the past. so essentially, an effect on color could affect their first breeding season as well as potentially affect parental care (not as much research is done on that, because fledglings are hard as fuck to study.)

so I went through as much literature as I could find, there’s very little on the effects of any parasites on bird color, but I went through other things that could affect coloration, especially structural coloration. quick tangent on structural coloration: essentially, blue and green birds do not have blue (or green, except in the case of the turacos) pigment. the blue is caused by some wacky keratin structures that reflect blue light. this is a very different mechanism than repurposing or producing pigments!

I also kept on trucking through those nests. I would arrive at uni (45-60 min drive) every morning by 6 am to dissect nests until my 9 am class.

And then I started doing another bit of bench work where I took the feather samples we collected (2 cm of the tip of the 5th primary wing feather on each side) from the nestlings and taping them to non-reflective black paper for color analysis. and then I measured them! we use a fancy machine called a spectrophotometer to objectively measure the reflectance of every wavelength of light between 300 and 630nm, so through the UV into near infrared. birds are tetrachromatic, which means they have 4 visual pigments in their eyes, so they can see UV! so it’s important we measure it objectively, since we can’t even see it.

not to mention that we have a ton of data we collect on each bird and I had to do a TON of database management to make sure the data was even useable. I won’t even go into that much cause it’s boring, but it’s a lot of reorganizing, hunting down missing data, and scanning for typos, in literal thousands of rows by over a hundred columns of data.

it’s worth noting that I’ve been working on this project for two years. I did all of this for the first year myself, and also caught up a lot of lagging work from previous years and collaborators projects (perks of being an undergraduate research assistant: I got paid to do this). I also measured adult bird feather samples and the tree swallow samples. and then the second year came around. I trained people to do the nest dissecting, feather taping, and adult feather spec work, and some parts of the database management (and wrote/developed detailed protocols for all of these.) I kept some of the work for myself because it’s difficult to do correctly and takes experience, like the advanced database management and spec’ing the baby bluebird feathers. I just recently finished all of the database management for my thesis the years 2019-2022, there’s still a bit more to be done but not super relevant to my thesis. This alone took over 50 hours, total.

and in 2022, in my preliminary data, we noticed a correlation between parasites and baby color, but only for the female babies. (I ended up presenting this preliminary data at a conference.) this is significant because most rearing environment conditions affect the males more than the females. so since I still had a year, we decided to do some more analysis. the other guy working with the parasites was doing molecular work to quantify immune response to the parasites in the nestlings and brooding adult females. so I hopped on that bandwagon and did a ton of work in collaboration with him, and I mean 12 hour days of molecular work, to quantify the immune response of a male and female nestling from each nest and their mother. we did this through enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) which here’s the very basic premise (excluding a lot of detail, forgive me). you extract the proteins of the parasites. then you add the blood of the birds. the immune cells in the blood of the birds react to the parasite proteins. then you add another immune type enzyme that attaches to the active bird immune cells. then you add chemicals which make those enzymes change color. then you use a microspectrophotometer to measure the optical density (basically the inability of light to pass through the solution) of each sample, and it tells you how strong the bird immune response was. you of course run a bunch of controls and then calculations based on those controls too.

then I ran a bunch of fancy statistics and color analysis and visual modeling. :P the visual modeling essentially takes the photoreceptor qualities and quantities across the avian eye to determine what the birds can see, and then the differences between two colors in avian vision. I used it to determine if a bird could tell the difference between a parasitized and unparasitized bird by their color, allowing their plumage to act as a signal of parasitism.

and now I’m writing about all of it. I’ve just finished my methods and results sections today, im probably not going to post about final results until I’ve been peer reviewed and published. but yeah, that’s essentially my thesis.

I suppose you could say bluebirds were my favorite bird to work with. It was really fun weighing and measuring their babies and watching them grow. And measuring the adults too. And taking their blood and feather samples. All of it was so fun. The particularly aggressive parents will dive at you when you’re messing with their babies lol. Ever seen a bluebird aiming for your face? I have.

overall I’ve spent well over 400 hours on this project, and I’m a fast worker. More hours to come with writing and preparing for publication. :p

in the middle of this project (summer 2022) I also completed an REU (research experience for undergraduates) program in Cincinnati where I was studying jumper spiders. That’s where I learned the visual modeling, actually. I spent a little over 400 hours on that project as well, except over the course of 10 weeks. the major difference is that was a full time job just doing research. with my thesis research I’ve been a full time student (15-17 credit hour semesters) the entire time and had a part time job 18 hours per week with a 2 hour commute each day all at the same time. that’s why it’s taken me 2 years to get the same amount of hours dedicated. lol

[dazzelmethat]

Here, have a bunch of Osvald studies. The style is messier than I usually do but i wanted to try out something with him.

[thinenotthee]

Having a normal one about Kogami Shinya at 3AM so have these thoughts I had after my Providence rewatch last month

[pumpkinrootbeer]

Lip Gallagher for 11 seasons: I don't know who I am or what it means to be alive or how to not dedicate myself to caring for others, every downfall of mine is kickstarted by trying to save other people and being incapable of doing so

the characters, the show runners, and the fans for some reason: wow i can't believe he refuses to stop sabotaging himself

[dlstmxkakwldrlarchive]

whenever a lesbian talks about their kpop boy face card i think of cat contest jury saying this is the finest cat i have ever judged… anyway what do u think about the statement: jinki is “classically handsome” while everyone else in shinee is “beautiful” i forgot who said that but it has been said around here

-taenuviel

hmmmmmmerghhhhnnm i can see why they're saying that like jinki's looks are very sharp ig but... jinki, he's 🚬 🚬 i think he's beautiful like a gentle deer you see by chance in a forest, like he's biblically gorgeous a man you'd feed grapes and shield from possible dangerous animals and a siren who would drown a poor sailor after he lured them with his voice & face and the other members they're beautiful too like taemin and key are two fairies, minho's a prince but like not disney/royal like he's a prince that andersen would write & jjong is so handsome he makes ppl do looney tunes body gags