There Will Be Typos @clearancecreedwatersurvival - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
There Will Be Typos
@clearancecreedwatersurvival
Caitie. 30s. She/her/hers. Interests include classics, socialist theory, queer characters and a variety of fandoms (wot, merlin, tlt, danmei, yoi, one piece, dunmeshi, etc.), witchcraft, horror, science, cults, animanga, social dancing, figure skating, and niche fandom drama.
My politcal opinions range from: decentralization of power in social structures should be an essential human ethic and direct action agains't property to protect humans and ecosystems is always justified to yes it is praxis to vote strategically in US elections and it's cool when DSA endorsed candidates win.
Juggling hyperfixations. Prone to rants and rambles. If I follow you it’s probably because I thought your url was funny. Queue is untagged and only occasionally empty. Obies, irl friends, and mutuals encouraged to say hey. PSA: —idol inspo— is a tag for a dystopian novel concept I’m working on. Which is why there’s weird and horrible stuff with that tag on it. PSA PART 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i spam wheel of time stuff every wednesday if you don't want to see it blacklist the tags 'wot' and 'wot show'
if i were a respected british actor with any principles at all i would simply not agree to a project whose earnings will have material consequences for trans people but maybe i'm built differently
INTEREST CHECK TIME — i've been considering running a group Wheel of Time rewatch (inspired by the recent @/gallifreyrelisten) with the idea being to watch one episode per week and post discussions, art, fic, memes, etc related to the weekly episode which would be collected & archived on a dedicated event blog. i know that recently when shows get cancelled, there's a tendency for the fandom to slowly die out and i want to try to buck that trend a little. i've also seen many people on here say that they haven't watched the show since the cancellation and i thought this might be a nice chance for people to get back into the fandom a little OR for new people to join if they haven't seen the show before (and maybe signal to the powers that be that there is still a large audience for the show).
however — i've never ran any sort of fandom event before and i'm a little scared that people might not participate so i wanted to run an interest check first so without further ado....
would you participate* in a WoT group rewatch?
YES!!!! i love this idea so much that i would help run the event! (cool! dm me!)
YES! i would love this and would participate every/most weeks!
yes! i would participate some weeks depending on the episode/my schedule
i'm interested but i don't know if i will end up participating
i'm not sure if i'm interested (what, if anything, would change your mind?)
i'm not interested
i don't go here but i like pressing buttons
Remaining time: 6 days 13 hours
(*participation means posting in any capacity under the event tag — it can be low effort like a meme or a reaction post or as high effort as fic & art. lurkers are very much welcome but i want this to be a community event, not just three bloggers talking to the void)
again, i'm not promising this will go anywhere and if it does, i'll probably take at least a month to set up a blog, queue some posts, and get some hype going for it so the earliest this would probably start is mid/late-September.
If you haven't heard this before, just a heads up: it is good Tumblr etiquette to use a "read more" on longer pieces of fic. Makes scrolling through tags and participating in events more reader-friendly and takes almost no time to do!
I think the reader's response to this post is probably going to either be "That's incredibly minor" or "Holy shit YES I'M ALSO PROUD", depending on people's personal experiences with academia, but:
Today I am incredibly proud of one of my students.
In the interests of disguising identities, let's call them Ceri. Ceri is one of my third year undergrads (meaning their final year, for anyone unfamiliar with UK uni systems.) They transferred to us last year, and within two weeks I was giving them the contact info to get to Student Services and get themself screened for ADHD; they have some mental health struggles, but I clocked pretty quickly that they STRUGGLE with procrastination, and punctuality, and attending 9am lectures in particular. Naturally, as is the way of my people, it took them a further four months to remember to go to the screening. Lol. Lmao. Rofl, in fact.
But, they did it eventually! Their screening lit up like a Christmas tree at the ADHD section, and they got a free laptop and optional one week extensions and a study support worker named Claire. This has helped tremendously, and although mental health + until-then-unsupported ADHD meant their academic profile had slid sideways somewhat, with the new tools available and a couple of resits they passed the year and hit this year running.
Until, that is, the last fortnight.
Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.
Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.
Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.
"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"
I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.
Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.
"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."
This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.
"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."
Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."
(It was good potato. I am a hero.)
So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.
"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.
"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"
"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."
And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.
And Tumblrs
Tumblrs
Let me FUCKING tell you
They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -
They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.
You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"
I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.
"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."
They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.
But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?
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