How to prepare for the next semester

Before the semester starts:

Declutter any space you use for school. Backpacks, desks, laptops, tablets, phones, etc. Get rid of anything you don't need anymore and make sure anything you will need is accessible.

Buy any supplies you need for the next semester. New notebooks, textbooks, pens and pencils, folders, etc.

Put your new classes and extracurriculars, and any appointments you have into a planner or calendar.

Set goals and create routines for the upcoming semester.

During the first week:

Read your syllabus! I know a lot of people skim over it, but it contains a lot of important information.

Log the due dates of your assignments in a planner or calendar. If you want to go beyond, you can even log days you want assignments completed by, which is helpful if you have several things due on the same day.

Stick to your routine! The first week can set the tone for your semester, so this is your chance to give it a positive and productive tone.

Create class study groups and invite your classmates to them. I like using GroupMe for this, but there are several other groups.

Enjoy it! This is going to be one of the easiest weeks of the semester, so just have fun getting into the groove of things.

Encounter: the Docent (?)

Most of what I want to know about ancient history are the absolute minutiae of everyday life for all the most ordinary types of people but not only are there so many physical environments wherein mostly only the artifacts of wealth and prestige survived intact, but what historians and archaeologists and so on DO know seems to have more trouble finding its way into books for laypeople because it's considered either too boring or too advanced to bring to the masses. Which is frustrating to my special interested autistic ass but it's also kind of funny in a way bc if several thousand years from now there are people trying to study our asses they might be stuck with like only remnants of books from the bestseller lists and endless syndicated news about just a few hundred national leaders and celebrities doing the same old shit for decades and wading desperately through it hungry for the occasional insight when they somehow recover your grocery list you saved in Samsung Notes in 2028 or the rare archeological gem of some depressed bachelor's work-from-home bedroom-office that wasn't rendered largely un-study-able by hurricanes and flooding during the Fourth World War or someshit

He is a scholar

Happy Monday, y'all! Here's a German print by an anonymous artist from 1475, and the metadata gives "RUDIMENTUM NOVITIORUM" as an alternate title. According to Google Translate, that means "the raw news," but we trust someone here will be able to confirm or improve on this...

“Your room is a reflection of your mind”

Chaos, heartbreak, and literature haunt my restless mind…

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - An Indigenous woman scholar's prayer

On the topic of wizard character concepts, a slightly older idea of mine, stemming from the discussion of the various schools and what it might say about a wizard to consciously choose them. Specifically, the idea that people might think that abjuration wizards are cowards for clinging to the most protective aspects of magic.

Which, in my head, combined with the idea of tiefling virtue names, and a very traumatised tiefling who named themselves Craven, in the deep conviction that yes, they are a coward.

And, if you’re going to have a traumatised character, you go to Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft and give them the Haunted One background. And not just because it’s one of my favourites, but because, since we’re a wizard, as in a bookish nerd, there’s a pre-made harrowing event that traumatised the hell of us right there: “You opened an eldritch tome and saw things unfit for a sane mind. You burned the book, but its words and images are burned into your psyche.”

So. Our little baby tiefling wizard read a bad book, a bad book that fully scarred them for life and turned their hair literally white, and ever since then they’ve devoted their studies to the magic of protection, and renamed themselves in the full and sincere belief that they’re a coward. I am picturing a rail-thin hollow-eyed nerd literally hugging their spellbook for protection.

But why would a traumatised and self-professed coward go adventuring? Because they saw horrors, vast, incomprehensible horrors, and they know their pathetic magic right now wouldn’t stop a hair of it. If it can’t stop a goblin arrow, it sure as hell can’t stop an eldritch thing from beyond the stars. So they need to improve their magic, and the only way to improve defensive magic is to, well, defend. Plus. All their wards and libraries wouldn’t stop what they saw either. Sometimes the best defence is a good offence, or at the very least entails acquiring enough specific information to create targeted defence. Such as finding and preventing the access point from opening, for example.

I kind of want the book they read to be the work of a scholar afflicted by an allip. They didn’t get far enough into it to actually contract the allip’s curse and become one, but they came damn close. Hence why there was some actual physical transformation as a result. The hair-turns-white-with-shock thing is an old trope, but an enjoyable one, and I want it.

(Look, allips are one of my favourite creatures, they’re cool, shattered traumatised undead who discovered secrets man was not meant to know, and who are desperately trying to share that hideous knowledge to relieve themselves of its burden).

I think we’ll take Eldritch Adept somewhere down the line, for Armour of Shadows or possibly Devil’s Sight. And I’m flipflopping between Glasya and Levistus tiefling, because I think Armour of Agathys might also be a part of their heritage they cling to, but Invisibility would also be tempting for them. (I would love if a DM let my tiefling’s innate spells act like the ones from the updated races, as in I could have them be INT based and also cast them with spell slots. If that was the case, I feel like definitely Levistus tiefling).

So you have this patient, methodical, high-strung, twitchy, deeply traumatised scholar who has self-loathing embedded directly in their core, doggedly out here rattling and shuddering their way through the terror because there’s worse terrors waiting and they’ve got to be ready for them.

Yes, I have a type, why do you ask?

Encounter: giant naked red dwarf that writes with his tail (unless that blue person talking to him is a Pixie or something)

C’s may get degrees but they don’t keep scholarships GO FUCKING STUDY

Abu Aswad Ad Du'ali said,

"There is nothing more honourable than 'Ilm (Knowledge),

[for] the kings are rulers over the people and the 'Ulama (Scholars) are rulers over the kings."

[تذكرة السامع والمتكلم في أدب العالم والمتعلم ص٤٢]

I still am not able to receive the academic scholarship from the government! It makes me stressed that our final examination will be on January 8, 2024. F*ck, I have to pay bills rn. Tsk!

Philippine government, do your thing. I was not able to celebrate xmas and new year. And now, I have to take the exam.