D&D&Dissertations @danddanddissertations - Tumblr Blog

akindplace

Kaitlyn

saygoodnight2theworld

#me @ me

vespinchloras

“Make people deal with you, but make sure that dealing with you is always a positive and kind experience.”

—Taliesin Jaffe, on what to learn from his character Mollymauk Tealeaf

#quotes #mollymauk tealeaf

athenasdragon

professors who have only interacted with other academics for years: “what do you MEAN you don’t know multi-variable calculus yet??”

professors with small kids: “thank you for not putting the lab equipment in your mouths when I turn my back”

athenasdragon

Bringing this back to share that one time I slept through part of a zoom meeting with my PhD advisor (who has a toddler) and he told me it was fine, that just meant I was a good sleeper

#academia

prokopetz

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

calloutnevvegas

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

#birds #biology

aquaticpaleo

they banned #bone? how quickly they forget

aquaticpaleo

forever remember when a paleontology conference banned the word bone

academicssay

soracities

im screaming i love her sm omg

tikkety-tok

such rage in such a little body

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

yay855

I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.

rox-and-prose

“Slutantions” has me crying laughing

watermite

i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.

“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry

love,

blue”

the subject line was “OW”

xakumi

THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”

themodernsouthernpolytheist

As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.

asortoflight

On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”

whisky-gerblin

Reblogging for the last addition

badgraph1csghost

Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.

Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.

badgraph1csghost

Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.

IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.

It’s even worse than i remember it

omnicat

I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.

fruitpilled-peachcel

this image of Mongolia's best known paleontologist standing in between the fossilized arms of Deinocherius is undeniably the most powerful image in paleontological history

#paleontology #dinosaurs #fossils

detailedart

The Moon, la Lune • old academic newspaper aesthetic

headspace-hotel

thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would….vaguely resemble their own???

People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.

headspace-hotel

like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.

When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.

If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like…idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.

headspace-hotel

It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.

Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!

I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”

It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.

meirmakesstuff

There’s a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” Akiva responded, “it follows from what Moses taught.” Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.

I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?

The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.

When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.

One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, “They’re learning my Torah in there!” We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking “what would reassure my ancestors?”

lazaefair

“The children are using this vast, incomprehensible magical network to mock that damned Ea-Nasir and his terrible copper. Good.”

vrabia

i love to think about how my ipad holds vastly more knowledge than was available to sumerians in 2000 bce, but if one of them saw me scribble away on it with my stylus, they would know what it is! from 4000 years across history, they would recognize this object if they saw me use it! and maybe they’d say ‘you know, we use something like this where i’m from’. and i’d say ‘i know. in school we learn that you invented them.’ and in a weird, convoluted, wonderful and very comforting sense, they invented my ipad too.

wraithsonwingsposts

@hexadecimal00

#geology #geoscience #academia

everydaylouie

statue of our ancestors

stimman3000

we’re really at that point in the year where no one cares about anything huh

krishnadewme

lionkins

wallpatterns-deactivated2019120

My psych professor mentioned swaddling in lecture so I emailed him a picture of me being swaddled in my dorm room and asked if I could get extra credit because it was really hot in there and I got really sweaty and he was like “fabulous, sure”