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@eleanorblue
yes i do ship those characters but i ship them in an infinitely more aroace way than you will ever be able to comprehend
they're not "dating" they're not "a couple" they're intrinsically connected and intertwined with each other for eternity. they're bound together like the stars. get with the program
i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick itās a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
fabulousĀ
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where youāre coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
#HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY
the problem with the Pitt, and also my favorite thing about the Pitt, is that I went to school with every single one of these goddamn characters. Iāve worked in the lab with every single doctor who walks onto the screen. I know them so fucking well and they just keep being themselves and I want to scream āTHATāS WHAT I THOUGHT YOUāD SAY YOU DUMB FUCKING HORSE who is also a very intelligent and some degree of emotionally stunted ER doctor.ā
and itās infuriating and perfect all at once
Easy, breezy, beautiful...... doctor girl + text posts
skyās the limit
maybe itās just the time change but somehow this is one of the funniest things Iāve seen in my life. I laughed out loud reading it on the shuttle to campus this morning. I canāt stop giggling when I think about it.
some truly shocking whiplash from finishing a 54K word fanfic about the trials and tribulations of a group of children and immediately pivoting to a dense and technical critique of a relatively obscure statistical genetics paper
dont know how to say this without sounding like one of those "people are too soft these days" motherfuckers but some of you are incapable of interacting with anything that does not coddle you & makes you feel Good about your own Goodness. if you know what i mean
also i said it in the tags but i feel it needs reiterating: watching tv is not activism. fighting over fictional stories is not activism. attacking people for not interacting with fictional stories in a way you deem Acceptable is not activism. you are being annoying & i personally dont want to play toys with you anymore
I have not posted here in years but frankly I need a forum to bitch about my dread of returning to teaching after leave that is not connected to my real name. Between when I went on leave and now weāve, you know, gallomphed merrily into fascism, the slow-burn dismantling of higher ed has been accelerated with rocket fuel, and undergraduate use of GenAI has apparently exploded.
And now I get to go teach GSS classes in the South and try to convince students that the whole point of being here is to learn to do your own goddamn thinking, not outsource it to fancy Autocomplete, brought to you by plagiarism, wasted water, climate damage, and rich racist cis dudes who give autism a bad name.
Oh, and also, weāre paying a lawyer way too much money to get backup documents (powers of attorney, inheritance stuff, etc) in case Obergefell v. Hodges falls.
So this is all delightful.
Iām starting my PhD in a field that one might describe as being, uh, under attack, except that description doesnāt feel strong enough. And let me tell you, the whiplash I get from looking between the coursework from a year ago and our Current State is DRAMATIC.
āWell, this might have been a feasible goal once, but now itās really just a pipe dreamā and āYes, I fully understand (and I AGREE) that addressing one specific facet of this problem in one specific this is a worthy pursuit, but thereās no longer any funding for ANY part of this problem so what are we even talking about.ā
And then thereās the goddamn AI.
In my orientation, the academic ethics guy said very clearly that we are not to use ChatGPT or AI on any kind of assignment whatsoever. The response, from a room full of graduate students at a pretty darn good university, wasā¦disturbing.
āBut itās so useful!ā āIt saves me so much time!ā āI donāt have to do XYZ by hand anymore!ā āItās just like a calculator!ā āYouāre not letting us use the tools of the future!ā
No. No no no no no. Everyone shut up. Stop using AI. Do your own goddamn work, you are graduate students, what are we doing here, do you understand the impact youāre having on the environment??? If you wouldnāt ask a friend to write a paper for you because thatās obviously cheating, why would you ask a machine?
Also itās not ACCURATE. Recently at my job I googled the major genes involved in Parkinsonās disease, and the stupid automatic AI told meā¦the brain is the top gene. The brain. A whole organ. Not a gene at all.
Anyway. I commiserate and sympathize, is what Iām saying. Best of luck, in a truly non-sarcastic and honest sense. And throw any students who use AI into a lake.
What will Osiris the Cat eat in our new apartment in our new city, where weāve moved against his wishes for my PhD?
The canned wet food heās eaten for the last five years: ā Absolutely not, how dare I suggest such a thing
New special cat food I ran out to get from PetCo: ā Have I lost my mind?
Special cat treats from his vet, which he loved like three days ago: ā He will sniff these, but then he turns up his nose.
Friskies party mix cat treats: ā Yes, but only if heās in the right mood. Otherwise he runs over to me when I get them out and then walks away ā
A broken up hamburger from Five Guys, purchased in desperation by me this evening as hamburger is like his third favorite food in the whole world: ā He actually skirted around this rather than go near it
Canned baby food (Gerber baby chicken and gravy): ā ā ā ā ā YES!!!!!
CATS.
you teleported to your main special interest! will you survive?
yes
no
results
NOT THE BUBONIC PLAGUE FOLKLORE OF NORWAY IN 1349 šššššššš
I'm not doing much better at the Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vent bestie.
Ah, no, Iām on Broad Street in London in August 1854, following John Snow around as he maps the cases of cholera.
You are faced with some random problem and the only person who can help you is the main character from the last piece of media you consumed (you can also do favorite character if there are multiple main characters). You can stay in this universe or be in the universe of the character, whichever you prefer, but the problem remains the same and the only person who can directly help you is the main character. That character can call on the help of those they know in their media, but when it comes down to it, they are the only person really helping you. How do you react to this situation?
Spin to find out your problem:
Your Reaction:
Literally the best problem and the best person to solve it! Yippee!
With this problem, character will definitely be helpful, this will go well!
Ok, could be worse, this is definitely going to be an adventure, but a fun one.
This problem isn't getting solved, actually more problems will be created help.
Well, I'm cooked, and so is the world honestly. And it won't even be that fun.
So uh. I recently reread The Coffin Quilt, which is a YA novel by Ann Rinaldi about the Hatfields and McCoys. In true Ann Rinaldi style, it is incredibly bleak and it ends with the main character having to make some horrific choice that will have disastrous consequences for someone either way.
Also my problem from the wheel was that I need someone to proofread an email.
Definitely staying in this universe as email didnāt exist in the 1880s and also I donāt want to time travel to the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Fanny McCoy has obviously never in her life seen an email so I imagine sheād be a bit confused. She is preparing to go to the Normal School, so she might be of some help, but the grammar and spelling used on the West Virginia/Kentucky border 150 years ago areā¦a bit different from today.
Might just proofread the email myself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/27/white-house-pauses-federal-grants/
So, the facts are, most universities in the US are kept in business by grants. Professors and researchers apply for grants, grants pay their salaries, their equipment, their space, their travel, and their students. This includes Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, Project Assistants etc. this is true across pretty much all academic disciplines. Often what this means is, the professor does their thing, their TA teaches the bulk of classes, students get taught, all while the university makes a profit.
If you kill grants, you kill all of this. This will give universities the excuse to cut tenured faculty, because the university can't afford them directly. This will cut grad students, because this is the only way grad students are paid for. With no grad students, many classes will suddenly not have teachers. Classes will be cut, teachers fired, and the universities will likely have to increase tuition to make up the difference. Knowing universities, they will not cut the number of incoming students coming in (that's their money!) so now classrooms will be packed to the gills with professors that are both underworked and underpaid.
This is just one segment of the people being impacted by this week of horseshit, but believe me, colleges will be permanently altered.
But isn't this just temporary, you ask? Possibly. Much of this is likely to be permanent, definitely in my field. This is coming from the executive order that includes
So anything that can be argued as "woke", "Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies" will not be funded. You can tell those words are squishy to the point of meaningless, but that's the point. Anything can be squished into those categories. Certainly my ecology work is toast.
Anyway if you see a scientist or an academic or a doctor or what have you, please be kind to us. This is... unprecedentedly bad
jesus fucking christ.
if this stands, it is the end of publicly funded science in this country.
it's also a horrifying precedent that the federal government cannot be bound by basic contract law.
The Trump administration's Monday spending freeze is likely to provoke a crisis over the constitutionality of "impoundment"āone that the jus
In essence, the Trump administration is claiming the unilateral power to at least temporarily āimpoundā tens of billions of dollars of appropriated fundsāin direct conflict with Congressās constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA).
so yeah, this isn't legal, and I'm tentatively hoping that it's insane enough that even this Supreme Court will strike it down, but even if they do it's going to fuck over a lot of people in the meantime.
Friday: got into a PhD program, screamed with excitement, did backflips, et cetera
Monday: this happens
having a cat is so miraculous. this little guy wants to sleep in my bed with me and purr on my chest. itās his favorite hobby. no one told him to do that he just Loves His Mommy
nevermind heās extremely naughty and has terrorized multiple people this morning
My brother and I purchased a Nintendo switch and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for my mother (who is in her sixties) for Christmas. She has never owned any kind of gaming console before or played any video game beyond word games and sudoku on her tablet.
Some highlights:
She immediately despised Tom Nook. āWho is this guy and when is he going to stop telling me what to do? Heās so annoying.ā
āWho are THEY?!?ā āabout Rocket and Iggly, her first two neighbors. She doesnāt like them. Iām going to have to buy some dog and bird amiibo cards for her.
When Tom Nook announced that they would vote on the island name because āthis is a democracyā: āA democracy?! I donāt think so. This guy is calling all the shots! Can I name the island tyranny?ā
She did not in fact name the island tyranny, although we told her she could.
When they made her the island representative: āoh great. more jobs.ā
She got soooo good at fishing so fast, which is fantastic because she was/is really struggling with the controls, having never played on any sort of console before.
āOh, whatās this? Thereās some sort of spider thing, can I catchāaaaaah! Guys, it KILLED me!ā
That obviously was about a tarantula, which we simply did not have enough time to warn her about before it stung her.
She has already paid off her tent and will get her house tomorrow!
She is obsessed.
you know what else fucks me up about the US election? one of the things that has left me reeling in bewilderment and grief this month?
I'm a scientist, y'all.
That means that I am, like most American research scientists, a federal contractor. (Possibly employee. It's confusing, and it fucks with my taxes being a postdoctoral researcher.) I get paid because someone, in the long run ideally me, makes a really, really detailed pitch to one of several federal grant agencies that the nation would really be missing out if I couldn't follow up on these thoughts and find concrete evidence about whether or not I'm right.
Currently, my personal salary is dependent on a whole department of scientists convincing one of the largest and most powerful granting agencies that they have a program that is really good at training scientists that can think deeply about the priorities of the agency. Those priorities are defined by the guy who runs the agency, and he gets to hire whatever qualified people he wants. That guy? The Presidential Administration picks that one. That's how federal agencies get staffed: the President's administration nominates them.
All of the heads of these agencies are personally nominated by the president and their administration. They are people of enormous power whose job is to administer million-dollar grants to the scientists competing urgently for limited funds. A million dollars often doesn't go farther than a couple of years when it's intended to pay for absolutely everything to do with a particular pitch, including salaries of your trainees, all materials, travel expenses, promoting the work among other researchers, all of itāso most smart American researchers are working fervently on grants all the time.
The next director of the NIH will be a Trump appointee, if he notices and thinks to appoint one. NSF, too; that's the group that funds your ecology and your astroscience and your experimental mathematics and physics and chemistry, the stuff that doesn't have industry funding and industry priorities. USDA. DOE, that's who does a lot of the climate change mitigation and renewable energy source research, they'll just be lucky if they can do anything again because Trump nigh gutted them last time.
Right now, I am working on the very tail end of a grant's funding and I am scurrying to make sure I stay employed. So I'm thinking very closely about federal agency priorities, okay? And I'm thinking that the funding climate for science is going to get a lot fucking leaner. I'm seeing what the American people think of scientists, and about whether my job is worth doing. It's been a lean twelve years in this gig, okay? Every time the federal government gets fucked up, that impacts my job, it means that I have to hustle even harder to get grants in that let me support myselfāand, if I have any trainees, their budding careers as well!āto patch over the lean times as much as we can.
So I've been reeling this week thinking about how funding agency priorities are going to change. I work on sex differences in motivation, so let me tell you, the politics reading this one for my next pitch are going to be fun. I'm working on a submission for an explicitly DEI-oriented five year grant with a cycle ending in February, so that's going to be an exercise in hoping that the agency employees at the middle levels (the ones that know how to get things done which can't be replaced immediately with yes men) can buffer the decisions of those big bosses long enough to let that program continue to exist a little while longer.
Ah, Christ, he promised Health & Human Services (which houses the NIH) to RFK, didn't he? We'll see how that pans out.
I keep seeing people calling for more governmental shutdowns on the left now, and it makes me want to scream. The government being gridlocked means the funding that researchers like me need doesn't come, okay? When the DOE can't say fucking "climate change," when the USDA hemorrhages its workers when the agency is dragged halfway across the country, when I watch a major Texan House rep stake his career on trying to destroy the NSF, I think: this is what you people think of us. I think: how little scientists are valued as public workers. I think: how little
This is why I described voting as harm reduction. Even if two candidates are "the same" on one thing you care about, they probably aren't the same level of bad on everything. Your job is to figure out what that person would do in this job. It's not about a fucking tribalist horse race. A vote is your opinion on a job interview, you fucks. We have to work with this person.
Anyway, I'm probably going to go back to shaking quietly in despair for a little longer and then pick myself up and hit the grind again. If I'm fast, I might still get the grant in this miserable climate if I run, and I might get to actually keep on what I'm trying to do, which is bring research on sex differences, neurodivergence and energy balance as informed by non-binary gender perspectives and disability theory to neuroscience.
Fuck.
about half the people I work with are employed by the Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. Which is one of a network of CASCs across the country, funded by USGS (US Geological Survey).
so how long do you think that organization is going to keep existing? I honestly don't know, and it probably depends on how well hidden it is within the sprawling bureaucracy.
Also a scientist. Also a federal contractor. I donāt want to be too explicit about what I do because, to be honest, Iām scared. But suffice it to say the agency I work for is listed in the original post, and uhhhh the mood there isā¦TENSE.
I love love love my job so much. I believe the work we do is critical to the wellbeing of all Americans and also everyone across the goddamn globe. I also know that there are several fundamental aspects of what I study that Certain Individuals believe (or pretend to believe) are fake, and I am terrified of (and enraged at) what is going to happen next.
Right now, personally, Iām just hoping I get into a PhD program so at least Iāll have a stipend if my workplace gets destroyed. But goddamn. What a loss that would be.
