Y'allllllllllllll. I've submitted my doctoral portfolio for dissertation chair matching! In 6 weeks, I'll know who my dissertation chair is and in 8 weeks, my research kicks into high gear!

I kinda can't believe this milestone is already here. For a multitude of reasons. Alas, I have a new course starting up today, so I don't have time to dwell

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

Sobbing uncontrollably reading through a dissertation about the college experience of students with ADHD. It is like reading a report about my life that just says over and over "My experiences are real. My hardships are real. I am not lazy, I am not dumb. My struggles were not my fault, and they were not a moral failing. The failure was with the system, not with me."

Here's a line that got me in particular:

"Hotez et al.(2022) compared the health, academic, and non-academic capacities of a nationally representative sample of U.S. first-year college students with ADHD and without ADHD. Students with ADHD self-reported lower academic aspirations and more feelings of depression and overwhelm, ranking themselves lower in their general emotional health. The fact that students with ADHD scored in the highest 10th percentile for many non-academic traits, such as artistic ability, computer skills, creativity, public speaking, social confidence, self-understanding and understanding of others, compassion, and risk-tasking, suggests that this population has strengths that are frequently underappreciated in academia."

(the paper is a thesis called "Understanding the Collegiate Experience for Students With ADHD" by Gia Long, 2022)

went to check my paper copy of Dracula to see if I had any annotations that would be of any interest for today's entry. all I'd done is draw hearts around "I am the train fiend"

(oh newspaper archives my beloved)

A little bit of heartbreak for Valentine’s Day…

A Little Bit Yours - JP Saxe / The Beatles: Get Back

Okay, random question but in the panel where Lan Zhan & Wei Ying are riding side by side, why is Alan Zhan’s horse sad? Is Little Apple bullying him? :(

PS: I check in daily for your posts, OBSESSED 😭

Alan Zhan (patron saint of when the substitute professor gets your name wrong).

Very important question for you all today:

they should put snipers in lecture halls and if u talk over the professor they just straight up shoot you

Starting back to work (and school) for the new Year with a sunrise that's showing off feels right.

fanfiction is so powerful...instead of letting things in my academic career bother me, i can just write about how phd student eren jaeger is my lord and savior....

academic rivalry but it’s me pushing the kid who’s better than math than me down a flight of stairs

Today I taught a friend that even if you aren't educated at a higher level, you don't have to let that get in the way of getting academic resources on your special interests.

Universities serve an important purpose, for sure. But the main advantages they possess when it comes to distribution of information comes down to access to resources (be they texts, labs, galleries, tools, documents, etc) and guidance (via tutors, teachers, etc).

So if you can't actually get into higher education, you might find accessing information difficult, as it is behind a paywall, textbooks cost upward of a few hundred, and even the information you can access might not be in a format you can clearly understand.

What very few people realise is that you can bypass all of that by finding the contact email of an academic in the field you are interested in, and asking them if they can send you any information on the topic at hand.

Case in point, a friend of mine in HEMA happens to be a scientist in a field that's become highly relevant since 2020. Not naming them here, but you can find a lot of their work online. I don't really understand their field, but I asked if they would either direct me to where to purchase their publications, or if they could send me any. They told me they'd just send it for free, and would for anyone that asked. This person has worked on some very interesting stuff relevant to current world affairs, they work for a top academic institution, and they'd just *give me* stuff you'd probably have to pay to access, just because I asked.

Academics are nerds, and they like to talk about their field and subjects. If you can find one that aligns with your interests, literally just ask them anything you want, and they will probably hand you what information they have. I cannot stress how much they probably would love for you to do that. Better yet is that of you don't understand the language they use for a certain topic, chances are they will give you the abridged version just to let you be included.

So if you've ever felt like you wanted to learn something but couldn't find a way to access the information, this is the sign you should absolutely contact a person in that subject and (politely!) ask them if they can send you a resource on said subject.

the fact that riz worked so hard to keep straight A+ grades all year only in the matter of like, a week to complete two nigh impossible tasks to, essentially, ensure all that work didn't matter and ace his grades anyway would legitimately keep me up at night at his age. I hope he gets like, a fucking medal or something. or, yknow, more cash from the school. he deserves it