to bless the sprouted heads of our buried dead

joan | xe/xem if you're feeling funky and they/them if you aren't | reading things and writing things often (check pinned)

[alwayswithrain]

joan @scalematey's academic/reading/writing/whatever blog! things in that realm. you understand. faq page for more info.

check the tags page for my common topics of discourse/study/beach reads/etc. i read a lot both for work and leisure and i endeavour to do this more than posting. (recently i have been failing at this. so i'm turning my posting into work to dissuade me from posting further.)

you can also find me on storygraph if you're that kind of social media user. also on backloggd and letterboxd!

[alwayswithrain]

im 25 pages into capitalist realism on the plane and i ran out of sticky tabs :(

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (29/05/26)

flying home this weekend so i need to get as much work done as i can! will be bringing my ALK books home with me i think just because i will be writin while i'm home as well. i want to finish journaling today and i want to blast through some of the books i have on my unfinished list and THEN i will feel less bothered about having them in my bookshelf instead of my nightstand

books i wanna finish today: undermoss (got bored and put it down), utama (got annoyed at yisheng and put it down), finn family moomintroll (read one chapter and got distracted by ace attorney). it's not like i HAVEN'T been doing reading this weekend because i've been playing ace attorney mostly and so i've been just reading a lot of dialogue/text LOL but i need to finish my books

i also need to get my newsletter out. i'm trapped under a mountain and buddha's put a spell tag on top get me outta here

supervisor emailed me back this morning to be like ok yay so today i need to email in my claims for funds and i also need to apply for ASEAS membership!

it is currently just past 12.30pm and i would like to have a productive-ish day. i took a break from thinking yesterday mostly because it's been hot and thinking has been hard and also i woke up with a headache yesterday. which means i really need to up my paracetamol stock because i think i'm out? boooo

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (26/06/26)

signed up to TWO mailing lists for two research centres. god bless me

emailed my profs with updates of what i've been doing thinking about. and also my money claims. i hate filling in forms there are just so many of them OTL

ordered a copy of capitalist realism for click and collect so I can go and pick it up from waterstones at some point in the near future. I truly need a hardcopy of this book so that I can annotate it

admin work lock in go brr...... i'm going to go home and read books this weekend. i need to read

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (25/06/26)

haven't been blogging much because i haven't been doing much work LMAO. i had my formal progression review meeting last week and it went really really well! so now i officially get to graduate to the second year of my degree yayyy yippee wahoo!

read this article about competitive pokemon and i'm filing it away here because i don't actually know where else to put it that i won't lose it

need to lock in on writing today and get it together... i haven't been doing much work because i've been busy (with the progression review meeting but also before that with pgr conference). which i presented at and it went well :)

i think i have mostly been TIRED. my therapist says i need to focus on taking care of myself more and taking care of other people less! i'm legit just tired and busy and more tired. i think. despite not doing very much at all (voice of guy who is teaching 6 classes this week??). ok i'm doing a bunch i'm just. feeling disorganised about all of it. brain's not been doing great i've been having a bunch of trigger episodes recently and i don't know how to get better (?). man. y'know what it's not been the worst it's ever been but it's really not been good

[alwayswithrain]

>BE ME >GO TO GOOGLE SINGAPOREAN PRAGMATISM SO THAT I CAN FIND ACADEMIC ARTICLES TO USE FOR MY PHD >CLICK SECOND ARTICLE >ITS FROM HKS STUDENT POLICY REVIEW >LOOK AT THE AUTHOR >ITS THE DEBATE COACH WHO DATED MY HIGH SCHOOL BATCHMATE WHO'S THREE YEARS OUR SENIOR WHO WAS MY BROTHER'S PRIMARY SCHOOL CLASSMATE

FUCK MY STUPID BAKA LIFE

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (15/05/26)

deadline is today at 5pm. i am at 4172/5000 words. this is entirely doable and i am going to lock in after my brain kicks in after i've eaten enough food lol

read this article yesterday and it took me a full hour in the middle of my work time LOL but i'm glad i read it. tara knight is kind of wacky for other reasons not related to this article but this article is a VERY good articulation of stuff i have noticed in countercultural poly-normative circles. even if the people involved aren't necessarily Actually Polyamorous —it's about the division of labour!!! i am lucky enough to have been privileged enough that when i escaped it i had stuff to fall back on. even then it was pretty bad and others are not so lucky. man. man. things have been good socially but also bad in my periphery in ways that are not related to me and i refuse to be dragged into due to being a mature adult who doesn't want to deal with any of that. much to think about here. still thinking

[alwayswithrain]

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (15/05/26)

deadline is today at 5pm. i am at 4172/5000 words. this is entirely doable and i am going to lock in after my brain kicks in after i've eaten enough food lol

read this article yesterday and it took me a full hour in the middle of my work time LOL but i'm glad i read it. tara knight is kind of wacky for other reasons not related to this article but this article is a VERY good articulation of stuff i have noticed in countercultural poly-normative circles. even if the people involved aren't necessarily Actually Polyamorous —it's about the division of labour!!! i am lucky enough to have been privileged enough that when i escaped it i had stuff to fall back on. even then it was pretty bad and others are not so lucky. man. man. things have been good socially but also bad in my periphery in ways that are not related to me and i refuse to be dragged into due to being a mature adult who doesn't want to deal with any of that. much to think about here. still thinking

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (13/05/26)

girl i am in the mines for real. 2458/5000 words. the good news is that that's a lot more words than i had at 3pm yesterday, which is 0, because that's when i decided to start rewriting what i had to say from the start with citations to make everything a lot clearer. the bad news is that i genuinely want to try and finish most of this by tomorrow so that i can submit it on time without losing my mind. but i am persevering. my goal today is to get as close to 3000 words as possible and that's definitely very doable. i just gotta like. keep writing. keep writing. keep writing. friday approaches but i got plany off time etc.

developing new terminology such as "stupidity panic" which is when i think about the number of stuff i have to read and haven't read yet. i need to not get bogged by stupidity panic and keep writing because otherwise i am going to get nothing done. so just. write. read. write. read. it's ok it's literally fine they're not going to flunk me even if it's bad work but it's not going to be bad work it's just a progression review!!!

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (11/05/26)

finished females. really funny book my favourite line was the one with the phrase "universal vagina" in it. i literally can't be mad at andrea long chu she's just getting silly with it. not to minimise her work or anything it's a really good book i think it's just like the kind of thing that emerges from a certain milieu of trans thought (again. cc castration pt i traps, which is a post-females work) and without that context i think it's harder to digest. but definitely very meaningful! and a lot to chew on here

going to attempt to write 500 words by the end of today. had a slow start earlier (read: i had a big cry about an unrelated thing and got very upset earlier today but i'm better now) so i do wanna make some progress at chipping away at delayed rays writing. hopefully!! going to bar and sitting somewhere with an environment with enough buzz to focus on and specific tasks to get done really helped. and i saw my friends #myfriends :)

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (07/05/26)

been mentally very bogged and busy... had phd supervision last week but haven't made much progress in preparing for progression review OTL so i'm just like. chugging along and trying not to get too in my head about it because the work is the work is the work. getting back into reading today but i took a trip to london to meet with my coursemate so we could discuss the panel we're doing together for conference

also i went to borough market to buy cheese and i almost passed out after in a coffee shop due to low blood sugar despite having been snacking on cheese and fruit most of the way. starting to think i might have some sort of problem here but who tf knows

anyway i do wanna finish females (andrea long chu). it is kind of helpful to be honest but there is like this strain of... for the sake of terminology let's just call it "edgy transfeminist work" which this book falls into. and so does castration part i: traps. mostly because of their shared talk about like transfem-incel relations? there's something else that i'm thinking of that i feel like i read/watched recently regarding this but my memory is currently failing me so if it occurs to me in the next however many hours i guess i'll edit it into this post. like it's a really specific strain of transfem art/writing and idk exactly what to make of it

[alwayswithrain]

cataloguing some articles i read today/last night from lausan:

'The forgotten path of Tibetan communism' by Khalden Dhatsenpa (2026)

'Pingpu Indigenous and Han Taiwanese Solidarity with Palestine' by Leona Chen (2025)

'Why China is capitalist' by Eli Friedman (2020)

lausan save me... save me lausan... i think white people (or just generally westerners but especially westerners who consider themselves leftists) would benefit a lot from reading about taiwanese/hong kong liberation and civic movements. the current strain of american empire decline tankieism pisses me off so bad because it's so out of touch with any sort of regional/continental asian politics between china's imperialism/colonialism and any of its surrounding regions or countries LOL

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (28/04/26)

i’m getting an A in making friends something which is reasonable to want and possible to achieve

got my panel allocation for PGR conference and THANKFULLY i am panelling with two other people i know!!! so i’m going to/have messaged them to grab coffee so that we can chat about our topics and preempt Q&A and stuff

going to go to cafe and write today and clean up my work OTL i have a progression review due in two weeks and i need to trudge along. and also i wanna work on my other stuff but thinking has been so hard recently

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (23/04/26)

i spent three hours teaching today back to back again and it really wiped my brain but at least the lessons were productive today. i think one of my tutees doesn't have trouble juggling facts but seems to have trouble juggling opinions...? can't tell what the issue is, will need to consult my orb (read: ask other people for their onions on this and mull over it). 2nd tutee was fine we started on japan which is very productive so we're ahead of the curriculum wahoo

theoretically i'm supposed to have turned in work "this evening" but due to the aforementioned 3 hours of teaching i emailed my profs telling them i would turn it in "this evening" and by this i fully intended to turn it in at like 2am and then i took a nap. and ate dinner. and now i'm actually writing and locked in which is GOOD because i haven't been able to write for the past month so at least the gears are turning OTL

JUST LEARNED THAT MADELEINE LIM LEFT SINGAPORE BECAUSE OF OPERATION SPECTRUM LMFAO this is actually kind of huge for me on the basis of like. it actually presents a point in the queer singapore timeline where queer political activism actually meaningfully overlapped with other forms of political activism in singapore and now it doesn't seem to at all anymore on account of pinkwashing/homonationalism/pragmatic resistance. like pink dot et al is suuuuper divorced from the rest of the political movements in singapore so i do need to do a little more digging into how THAT happened. but this is SUPER INTERESTING

i'm hoping that i'm able to finish my notes on the film and then feed a bit of juice into reorganising my thoughts on delayed rays of a star when i get back to that. i was supposed to do that but frankly i might just go for supervision next week and refer to my paper from when i presented last month instead lmao

[alwayswithrain]

reading singaporean queer history makes me want a lobotomy i swear like. all of this stuff is so TERRIBLY SOURCED. would it kill you guys to link an article or an internet archive link or something!!!!

also there's just so much damn information and it's like yeah i have heard half of this before but the other half is like. if you don't memorise a bunch of names it is so difficult to follow everything. all of these historians seem kind of bad at history can people just publish books and keep them in print jesus christ!!!

[alwayswithrain]

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (23/04/26)

i spent three hours teaching today back to back again and it really wiped my brain but at least the lessons were productive today. i think one of my tutees doesn't have trouble juggling facts but seems to have trouble juggling opinions...? can't tell what the issue is, will need to consult my orb (read: ask other people for their onions on this and mull over it). 2nd tutee was fine we started on japan which is very productive so we're ahead of the curriculum wahoo

theoretically i'm supposed to have turned in work "this evening" but due to the aforementioned 3 hours of teaching i emailed my profs telling them i would turn it in "this evening" and by this i fully intended to turn it in at like 2am and then i took a nap. and ate dinner. and now i'm actually writing and locked in which is GOOD because i haven't been able to write for the past month so at least the gears are turning OTL

JUST LEARNED THAT MADELEINE LIM LEFT SINGAPORE BECAUSE OF OPERATION SPECTRUM LMFAO this is actually kind of huge for me on the basis of like. it actually presents a point in the queer singapore timeline where queer political activism actually meaningfully overlapped with other forms of political activism in singapore and now it doesn't seem to at all anymore on account of pinkwashing/homonationalism/pragmatic resistance. like pink dot et al is suuuuper divorced from the rest of the political movements in singapore so i do need to do a little more digging into how THAT happened. but this is SUPER INTERESTING

i'm hoping that i'm able to finish my notes on the film and then feed a bit of juice into reorganising my thoughts on delayed rays of a star when i get back to that. i was supposed to do that but frankly i might just go for supervision next week and refer to my paper from when i presented last month instead lmao

[alwayswithrain]

reading singaporean queer history makes me want a lobotomy i swear like. all of this stuff is so TERRIBLY SOURCED. would it kill you guys to link an article or an internet archive link or something!!!!

also there's just so much damn information and it's like yeah i have heard half of this before but the other half is like. if you don't memorise a bunch of names it is so difficult to follow everything. all of these historians seem kind of bad at history can people just publish books and keep them in print jesus christ!!!

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (23/04/26)

i spent three hours teaching today back to back again and it really wiped my brain but at least the lessons were productive today. i think one of my tutees doesn't have trouble juggling facts but seems to have trouble juggling opinions...? can't tell what the issue is, will need to consult my orb (read: ask other people for their onions on this and mull over it). 2nd tutee was fine we started on japan which is very productive so we're ahead of the curriculum wahoo

theoretically i'm supposed to have turned in work "this evening" but due to the aforementioned 3 hours of teaching i emailed my profs telling them i would turn it in "this evening" and by this i fully intended to turn it in at like 2am and then i took a nap. and ate dinner. and now i'm actually writing and locked in which is GOOD because i haven't been able to write for the past month so at least the gears are turning OTL

JUST LEARNED THAT MADELEINE LIM LEFT SINGAPORE BECAUSE OF OPERATION SPECTRUM LMFAO this is actually kind of huge for me on the basis of like. it actually presents a point in the queer singapore timeline where queer political activism actually meaningfully overlapped with other forms of political activism in singapore and now it doesn't seem to at all anymore on account of pinkwashing/homonationalism/pragmatic resistance. like pink dot et al is suuuuper divorced from the rest of the political movements in singapore so i do need to do a little more digging into how THAT happened. but this is SUPER INTERESTING

i'm hoping that i'm able to finish my notes on the film and then feed a bit of juice into reorganising my thoughts on delayed rays of a star when i get back to that. i was supposed to do that but frankly i might just go for supervision next week and refer to my paper from when i presented last month instead lmao

[alwayswithrain]

phd patch notes (21/04/26)

general absence due to my brain's inability to function this month sorry guys depression hit me like a truck for reasons of not going outside and then getting sad about it. and also like. the horrors of online interactions. and also just generally the world state. trying not to get suuuper down about it because i got bored of sitting around being tired and sad all the time and i DO actually feel better this week on account of not being PHYSICALLY SICK anymore. i feel like it's taking me ages to recover from being sick nowadays and i think it's something that i didn't use to notice, so i'm wondering if i'm noticing it more now because i have less to do or because i'm actually taking Longer To Recover. hrm. getting older

watched movie two weeks ago (see previous post) but haven't written down any major notes on it so i'm going to switch tracks to do that today so that i can update myprofs that i have actually been doing... something... despite having spent most of my time lying on the floor dying or whatever OTL. and also trying to clean up work on delayed rays of a star which I think will be tomorrow's project, hopefully

sent out newsletter today i'm so brave and true