#uni thinking process

[tchaikovskym]

Me: oh yeah!!! I will definitely extend these parts of the discussion as my thesis advisor advised !!!

Me when I actually had to do it: *wrote 3 sentences extra and called it a day*

[why-the-heck-not]

understanding academic concepts got me blushing swinging my legs giggling

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[buqbite]

Halo

[eyes-of-nine]

truly what a guy

[stellewriites]

A Helping Hand

throwing my hat in for @the-californicationist’s nameless challenge!

600+ words, sfw, gn!reader, no content warnings it’s all fluff. don’t forget to guess who you think it’s about 🤭

you first met in uni.

it was a couple of weeks in, so you were settled into your classes and confident with the subject matter so far. you’d made friends with your roommates and had checked out the area of the new city you were in. it was all going well.

your current class was in a lecture hall, though the discussion was nothing too important; just going over the reading syllabus for the year. they’d already emailed it out during the summer so you pretended to take notes on your laptop while pulling up wordle.

one of your new roommates had gotten you addicted, it had become a light-hearted competition between you both as you got to know each other before finally meeting in person. they’d finally upped the stakes at the start of the week with a bet and you were determined to beat their average by friday - after all, loser would be paying for drinks on saturday when you all went out.

this day’s puzzle, however, was stumping you. you didn’t want to just guess aimlessly, visions of free drinks seeming ever further away, but you just couldn’t figure out the word either.

F_ _ _R

you stared at the screen unblinkingly, thoroughly distracted from your course and the discussion around you until a hand holding a slip of paper appeared at your shoulder in your peripheral.

you took it hesitantly without looking back and unfolded it. you stared at the word written scratchily across it in disbelief.

FOYER.

fuck. how’d you miss that?

you typed it in and heard a satisfied chuckle behind you when it was correct and pursed your lips to hide your own smile. you figured you should thank the guy at least, he might’ve just won you free drinks after all.

you flicked your eyes up and found the professor busy facing the board and took the chance to swivel in your seat to look up at the one above yours and the handsome man that currently claimed it.

“thanks,” you whispered, your smile turning flirtatious and less guarded when you met his pretty eyes.

“don’t mention it,” he said with an easy shrug, his voice warm.

“oh? you don’t want a favour in return then?” you asked, coy. “you might’ve just won me a bet with a friend, so i owe you.”

his shoulders shook as he huffed. you realised it was a laugh, just muffled behind a surprisingly fond smile aimed your way and a want to keep quiet in the lecture hall. he was clearly charmed by you - and likely the view he had down your shirt as you leant forward against the back of your seat, equally enamoured.

“i could maybe think of some way you could thank me,” he acquiesced, smile turning sly. “better concentrate on the front of the class for now though.” he nodded forward.

with a look over your shoulder you noticed the unimpressed look your professor was sending you both. you sent them a contrite look as you sat back properly and stayed quiet for the rest of the lecture, not wanting to cause a fuss and make a name for yourself too early in the year. you did like this subject after all.

you just liked handsome, helpful men too.

you bit your lip in an attempt at calming your smile and the excited noise that bubbled at the back of your throat when you got a second note passed over your shoulder by a now-familiar hand not ten minutes later. you kept your eyes facing forwards as you took it, wanting to play it cool.

that went out the window however when you opened the note and felt giddiness override it.

coffee after this? it read, followed by his name and number.

absolutely, you thought.

[khorart]

the only man i'd kill myself for

[greenerteacups]

What do you think as Hermione's career would be post battle of Hogwarts? To me her being minister for magic really doesn't make sense. She does not have patience or tact to wade through murky waters of politics 😭😭

So hard to say! The Trio are so, so young when we leave them, I find it almost impossible to project their futures farther than a few years out. The job that suited me at 17 would be radically unsuited to me now. That's why of all the Trio, Ron's ending strikes me as the most realistic — he jumps straight into the save-the-world business again, burns out, realizes he's actually Done The Fuck Enough, Thanks, and pivots into a low-stress career where he gets to see his family a lot. Feels accurate! The others are weirder to me because they do seem to just... pick a lane and stay there.

With Hermione, you could spin her a couple ways. You could say that she leans into her bookish side and does research or teaching, which is not my preference for a couple reasons (namely, I don't think Hermione would like academia as a profession; she finds her classwork interesting and enjoys intellectual validation, but she'd be stifled and wasted in a DPhil program, and she'd be infuriated by the administrative politicking of your average higher-ed faculty). You could say that she gets disaffected with politics and ends up as a barrister or a lobbyist of some kind, but if anything that requires more political finesse, because you don't actually have institutional power, you're just handling the people who make decisions and trying to persuade them of your goals. This is not Hermione's preferred method of influence. She's not even particularly good at persuasion, she just happens to be smart enough (and right often enough) that people take her ideas seriously.

Or you could say her brashness fades with the years into a softened flavor of tell-you-like-it-is honesty, which some politicians actually do successfully trade on; as we see in British politics today, you don't have to be all that charming or clever to get ahead, you just need to be really driven and well-connected (which Hermione completely is; she fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the first postwar Minister and her bestie, the Literal Messiah, runs the Auror Office.) But I don't know if Hermione especially wants to be Minister, after the war. She's just watched years of horrendous bureaucratic incompetence plunge the country into a violent civil conflict. She's had not one, but two Ministers of Magic try to bully or shame her friends into complicity with fascism. Her view of government is... likely extremely dark.

But Hermione also isn't the kind of person who sees her life as a quest for happiness. Babygirl has a savior complex that makes Harry look selfish. (She basically kills her parents — yeah, obliviating is a form of murder, #changemymind — "for their own good," and justifies every batshit, vindictive, mean-spirited move she ever pulls on the grounds that it "helps" one of her friends.) She is a mean, lean, dragon-slaying machine, and she needs a dragon. After Voldemort, the Ministry is the no. 1 threat to muggle-borns and non-wizarding Beings. As a war heroine with basically infinite political capital, I'd be surprised if she didn't try to do something there. That said, Hermione is so vivacious and dynamic that she could potentially grow in a hundred different directions; it's possible that all of this, while true of her at 18, becomes completely inaccurate by 22. That's why I'm not too fussed about any particular fanon interpretation.

[suddencolds]

~

[kindafooey]

god fucking dammit. fuck me running. okay. I'm watching the serialized version of Louhimies' Unknown Soldier because I literally have nothing else to do with my life and uh. when I found out the fandom is shipping Lehto and Riitaoja, I was like. okay purely based on the book sure sure yes I can see the potential for sexual tension between the two, they do have that weird polar-opposites-forced-to-interact kind of thing going on and they do get a good handful of scenes together building up that dynamic (and their death scenes being linked is a really beautiful detail too). I was a little taken aback by the fact that Hietanen and Rahikainen isn't a popular ship because their relationship is a lot more pronounced in the book and checks a lot of standard ship dynamic boxes, but seeing how they're not really portrayed as a duo in this adaptation at least (and I'm guessing the fandom feeds more on the visual media than the book itself?), it kinda makes sense ig.

...but holy fucking shit if the sexual tension isn't present in the TV show. it's straight up underlined is what it is. I had to watch the scene where riitaoja falls to the ground from exhaustion three times because I couldn't believe my gay old eyeballs. the fucking. gentleness with which lehto lifts him up after taking his anger out on him? the fuckibgbng. lingering almost regretful touch on his back as he starts stumbling forward????????? bit out of character even but oh my god. aku louhimies can rot for all i care but that man desperately wanted those two fictional soldiers to fuck. im giving him exactly one brownie point for that. (also i can't deny that this adaptation is a really beautiful one. worst person you know made a great piece of art type beat. devastating)

[ghostdrinkssoup]

// omori spoilers

honestly I really love omori’s character. he’s often seen as the villain but I think he’s more nuanced than that. for the majority of the game he suffers from dissociative amnesia and doesn’t remember what he did to mari, and so is simply watching as everything collapses after basil disappears. and it’s interesting because we play as omori longer than we play as sunny. omori is the first one we meet too, so we quickly become attached to him because he’s us. when you’re playing as omori it’s unlikely you’d see him as a separate character from yourself, even though you don’t get to identify with him the same way you can with sunny (by choosing his name, for instance). but because we spend so much time with omori you can’t help but feel the same tie to him that sunny likely does.

you’ll notice that the game often takes advantage of its medium to liken us to the characters. because we also aren’t aware of what happened (unless you saw spoilers before playing, which ruins the effect) we can relate to omori’s pursuit of the truth since our unfamiliarity with the story mimics his amnesia. thus, it’s his relationship with the player that characterises him. everything we feel is also what he feels. our confusion, curiosity and dread are all things he experiences as his world begins to crumble, because basil glimpsing the truth and disappearing into black space disrupted sunny’s rejection of reality, and therefore forced omori to become aware of the dream he’s stuck in. he discovers all this at the same rate the player does, and the fact that the game implies that omori has tried and failed to accept the truth time and time again showcases how powerful sunny’s denial is and how difficult it is for him to challenge his own safety mechanisms.

and what’s tragic is that omori is a safety mechanism too, although he probably doesn’t realise that either. at least not until we stop playing as him and become sunny instead. by the time we confront omori during the final battle (strange, because we’re essentially fighting ourselves) he’s fully aware that he’s the god of this world, and that his main purpose is to maintain sunny’s unhealthy coping mechanisms. he embodies all of sunny’s self-hatred and guilt, but only because sunny genuinely believes he’s a monster, which is why omori becomes one. if sunny were to forgive himself, it would contradict the safety mechanisms he has in place and he’d fall into cognitive dissonance. there would be no reason for omori to exist anymore. it’s the same reason everyone other than omori begins to forget basil as the game progresses, because the purpose of headspace is to forget the truth and everything that contradicts the imaginary world sunny created for himself — one where he never did anything wrong and childhood lasts forever and his sister is alive and still loves him.

ultimately, even though omori is a parasite he’s just trying to keep sunny safe. he’s sunny trying to protect himself from his own trauma. he’s not evil, and I think this is clear based on how sunny ends up defeating him. it’s not through violence, since omori will never succumb. instead, it’s through forgiveness and self-acceptance. it’s sunny going out of his way to change his worldview and untangle himself from his own damaged psyche, proving that he no longer needs to escape from the horrors of the truth. their final embrace signifies this, because omori also personifies the extent of sunny’s suffering. if he is to forgive himself, he must also forgive omori. likewise, if the player is to forgive themselves (as omori), we must also forgive sunny

[tchaikovskym]

Done with thesis. Only corrections and revisions from now on. Hallelujah yeehaw I'm so happy. I actually can feel joy in this world.

[liesonthefloordramatically]

sorry, I will keep kvetching about work to a minimum, but the extent to which everyone in my department is like, "we love and support you as a junior scholar <3" without doing anything to materially support me and ADDITIONALLY I have to chase them around to make sure that things are actually being done is. unhinged.

[wayfayrr]

I hope life eases up soon man, take care of yourself

Thanks mate <3

stuff's starting to gradually get better now, actually let myself feel feelings after bottling them till it popped

just kinda turns out that throwing yourself into something so you're numb to the other things can really burn you out :') So I'm trying to find motivation to write and answer asks again, I'm hoping it'll be soon but idk atp

[atissi]

if you are 1) currently in a university where your student healthcare covers hormone therapy, and 2) in a good financial, emotional, and social position to start hormone therapy, i would recommend pursuing it. because in my experience, it's a huge pain in the ass to get an endocrinologist once you're on your own

[joannaliangart]

and, hold (2024) series of 3 books made from walnut shell, hazelnut shell, and scarlet runner bean pod. woodcut prints and poetry.

About the wonderful magic, hope, and love that is a seed.

---

Was introduced to the fun and beauty that is those lil diy Staples stamps back in my democratic multiples class, and was happy at the chance to use the one I bought haha. Was a little tedious putting in all the lil letters for each word, but stamping it was sooo satisfying

this ones cute and fun! Enjoyed carving the lil bean stamp C: I just used some scrap wood, it was kinda. a struggle lol And was my first time trying to make a woodcut but they turned out not bad I think

partly inspired by the word Encased, with its various definitions being:

be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling).

provide (a spirit) with a physical form.

include or contain (something) as a constituent part.

Twas the first project I made for my art+text studio course!