Werekat @werekat@mastodon.acc.sunet.se
Humanities scholar, tech geek.
Current header image is by Yuumei, check her out! https://www.yuumeiart.com/
Joined Sep 2018
I have to say that this is very accurate.
Thank you, the good people at Existential Comics!
Oh, lol, this is probably a very old joke, but I've only just come across it:
"UNIX systems are very user-friendly! It's just that they pick their friends carefully."
Ukrainian micro-folk tale; rape Show more
2000 words today. Primarily notes and citations. There's a reason I don't really like relying on them all that much: it's way too easy to pad out your wordcount while mostly being a parrot. On the other hand, as a reader I am always interested in direct quotations, because a direct quotation and an argument based on it help me get into the writer's mind and logic. But as a writer? I hate putting them in. I feel like I'm not doing my job properly. But them's the recs, and so I acquiesce.
It has been half a day and I have added like four pages worth of footnotes. At least if by page we mean editing industry standard page. Which is apparently somehow not a thing here. "A page", my ass! How many words? How many symbols? Anything other than an arbitrary measure that changes with every font and line change!!!
I mean, we literally counted how many words per page in a published thesis to figure out how much the local publishers normally fit on a page. Turned out to be 500.
Having been brought up in multiple academic traditions is both an advantage and a disadvantage. In the Netherlands it took me a few years to unlearn the borderline obsessive citation style I borrowed from Ukrainian academia (which borrowed it from the German tradition). Lo and behold: I come to Sweden... Which also has a German-derived style.
Don't know whether to laugh at the irony or be irked at the completely opposite types of writing advice in different academic traditions.
Best spam ever: you have been left a will, bla-bla-bla, and then: "According to her, this will donation is to support your academic Duties and to assist individual researchers that wish to pursue their research interests."
I nearly shed a tear. XD
Overconfidence is the root of all evil. Exit at wrong station because you didn't bother to check and miss the first 40 minutes of a ceremony you traveled almost 5 hours to see. Resounding 'meh'!
"I aten't ded" - just travelling a lot. Not for work, for once, although I did get to see a lot of cool temples, and am now travelling on a high-speed train to meet a colleague who I am dying to talk to. :)
One of my favorite thing about Bernard, Wutich and Ryan is the completely workable sass that is not really sass. Take the following definition: "Informants are research participants who tell you what they think you need to know about their culture."
This is 100% true, and why teams of anthropologists can fare better than a single anthropologist. By providing informants with a range of easy heuristics for "what does this person need to know" the team gets a wider range of responses.
The curse of the prepared dungeon master: if you have a fully prepped session SOMETHING will happen. You will have the mother of all headaches. A player will not show up. Something. :P
"Who was it that said that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic? They should add that sufficiently popularized science is indistinguishable from religion."
- via Rotten Kepken, but I have no idea who was the original author of this quip.
In the "Guide to psychiatry for the dissenting thinker", the author gives an interesting piece of advice. Summary: if you're being evaluated for mental soundness and they ask you about why you persisted in having "strange" ideas, say: I just wanted to be cool; I wanted to be famous; I wanted approval and didn't understand how serious things were.
The idea is to make yourself seem shallow, stupid, utterly uninteresting from a security perspective. Ordinary. Normal. A parrot.
Small victory of the day: my Swedish tutor says I am her most disciplined student. This is seriously a victory for me, because l often have way too many projects on my plate and inevitably have difficulty keeping them all going at pace. Keeping one up steadily for so long, even with the inevitable hiccups, feels good. :)
Sometimes the best thing one can do for a particular activity is simply to take a break from it. One of the groups I run was forced into a bread by scheduling, almost a month and a half long, and... Yeah. I actually feel enthusiastic about it.
Also I have 5 weeks before the next break point, and the time limit is also helping me keep my perspective. Time limits are lovely, useful things.
Link for the link pile: an anthology of Samizdat literature.
A guide to psychiatry for dissenting thinkers.
http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/bukovsky/psychiatr.html
Is a non-totalitarian socialism possible? http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/orlov/1083933185.html
Oh come on! Is there not one single decent idea that CAN'T be turned on its head?!
If Reddaway is to be believed (still just researching this myself), punitive psychiatry started as a way of not letting people go to labor camps. Yup. Get them a diagnosis, get them out of unfair imprisonment -> can't get them into prison? Slap a diagnosis on 'em, administer heavy-hitting drugs.
Soviet Union: where idealistic ideas go to die.
Interesting aspect of post-Soviet upbringing: I have an instinctive aversion to using tools that are marketed to a demographic. Particularly if it's a politically important one.
Anything that is created to give an advantage to a group (benefits, a useful tool, whatever) can turn into an instrument of oppression in a flash. Its user base becomes a list of targets.
The infamous "nationality" graph in the Soviet passport was originally instated to provide benefits.
Humanities scholar, tech geek.
Current header image is by Yuumei, check her out! https://www.yuumeiart.com/
Joined Sep 2018
