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Asia, 23, they/them me

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before and after of my little rainbow garden :3

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i did a lot of updates to my island recently... visit if you want :^) the theme is like... town within a state park

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made some impeachment spaghetti who wanna come over

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time for impeachment spaghetti 2: extra saucy 

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it could be fun to be on here if there were no more text posts. too bad i’m creating a paradox by typing this

[joydick]

[kaikim]

[dostoyevsky-official]

The Death of an Adjunct

Thea Hunter was a promising, brilliant scholar. And then she got trapped in academia’s permanent underclass.

To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.

The position is often inaccurately described as akin to a form of slavery. Thea, a scholar of rights, slavery, and freedom, would have been the first to say that is not the case. It is more like the lowest rung in a caste system, the one that underrepresented minorities tend to call home.

From 1993 to 2013, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in non-tenure-track part-time faculty positions in higher education grew by 230 percent. By contrast, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in full-time tenure-track positions grew by just 30 percent. Nearly 80 percent of faculty members were tenured or tenure-track in 1969. Now roughly three-quarters of faculty are nontenured. The jobs that are available—as an adjunct, or a visiting professor—rest on shaky foundations, as those who occupy them try to balance work and life, often without benefits. And Thea wobbled for years.

She was on the tenure track, and then she wasn’t. She had a promising job lead, and then it wasn’t so promising. She was on her way to publishing, and then that fizzled. Meanwhile, her hopes and setbacks were compounded by an underlying reality that many adjuncts face: a lack of health insurance. She was a black woman in academia, and she was flying against a current. Some professors soar; adjuncts flap and dive and flap again—until they can’t flap anymore.

She had a number of ailments that bothered her—her asthma, her heart—and the rigors of being an adjunct added to them. Had she been tenured, she would have experienced a sort of security that tenure is designed to provide: a campus office of her own, health insurance, authority and respect with which to navigate campus bureaucracy, greater financial stability. Without tenure, she was unprotected, at the whim of her body’s failings, working long hours for little pay, teaching large survey classes outside of her area of special expertise. As Terry McGlynn, a biology professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Full professors benefit from the exploitation of non-tenure-track instructors.” Adjuncts often do the work that other professors don’t want.

“Thea was exploited by a system that consumes thoughtful, committed academics like our beloved friend, even as it is reluctant to admit it—color compounding the oppression one-hundredfold.” Academia is not an easy road for anyone to take, but especially not for women of color, and especially not for those who have been consigned to the adjunct underclass.

[dostoyevsky-official]

this is an article i read more than a year ago that has since burned itself into my brain because of how tragic, humiliating, and completely unnecessary thea hunter’s death was. students are paying tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they can’t default on (thanks, president-elect joe biden!). this money does not go to their professors, who are overwhelmingly adjuncts, like thea was. it does not go to a good portion of “foot soldier” bureaucratic staff, it does not go to food and cleaning workers. it goes to a small amount of tenured professors, it goes to athletic coaches, and it goes to the higher administration bureaucracy: georgia state’s president made almost $3 million in 2019, the same as upenn’s president. deans, vice presidents, etc.

so why in the hell are we saddling students with debt, and then arguing it can’t be waved away? lawyers and doctors and nurses can barely pay off on the principal, others with much lower salaries will take their debt to their grave. students are stressed, after graduation miserable and unhappy, cannot get jobs and cannot pursue an independent life. the university is also not a job training center — you do not take a class on romantic poetry because you are looking for employment (and even if it is e.g. for the medical profession, the tuition and debt issues still hold up). historically, especially in antiquity, debts were forgiven (debt, the first 5,000 years, which discusses the evolution of debt as a concept along capitalism’s emergence, or why we got to where we are on non-forgiveness); cf. also …and forgive them their debts). now, some consolidation or refinancing programs worsen the debt/interest load. again, in america, you cannot default on your student debt. there are some public forgiveness programs (ie if you serve as a public servant for 20 years while paying off the principal) but they are extremely convoluted, with mixed results.

the current ongoing student debt default argument is based off chuck schumer’s election day promise that biden will eliminate $50,000 of (federally owned) student debt via executive order. no senate control necessary (although he could very well cancel all student debt just as easily). of course you have typical rightwing arguments of fairness and taxpayer cost (zero), and some economists are making nonsense arguments about how it would hamper economic growth (the aggregate effects would cause significant economic growth), but this is all something said and rehashed before. 

what’s getting to me is that there is now a swath of — allegedly — leftwing people, from the warrenites to DSA to even PSL or whatever the hell camps talking about how this is bad because it would alienate the hypothetical non-college educated conservative. no concrete argument: there is an imagined opposition to a policy not even implemented. which is another thing — how much can you trust schumer or biden at their word — but you’re rejecting the policy out of hand before it gets to any significant stage because you’re contriving some imaginary opposition to it? along the lines of a nonsense culture war? there is a person who had a phone conversation with me about the depression and alcoholism they spiralled into because of their student debt, their apparently useless humanities phd, their inability to find an academic job; luckily for them, they found alt-ac employment. this person is now flat-out embracing this theory. there are many like them in ac-twitter right now, which is astounding — in no sense did they get theirs — there are also some more hard left types, though fewer, arguing about the same hypothetical angry worker.

i think of thea hunter’s story often for many reasons, partially because we travelled along similar paths. quite literally: i live in the north of nyc and i frequently walk through fort tryon park. since i read that piece there have been moments where i thought that we stepped on the same concrete or that i unwittingly saw the same birds she admired, or that we looked at the same view of the gwb, and then she, a brilliant young historian, died, alone, miserable, in pain, after years of financial precarity, sexist and racist indignity, none of which was necessary. it’s not a direct connection to student debt, but the two issues are inextricably linked. there are people like her, suffering from student debt because they wanted to know more about the world, the people around them, themselves, and/or because they were tricked into the false promise of stable employment after graduation. how many are depressed or anxious, how many live with parents or roommates, how many are underemployed. how many students are additionally stressed feeling the weight of their debt on their grades. how many grovel before scholarships. how many feel regret, how many feel they wasted their years, which should be completely unnecessary. if you are rejecting some of the most feasible options to materially help people — in some cases, significantly — based off an imaginary opposition that would resent it, of what use is your leftism? we should remain stuck in the world as it is because efforts at changing it would be opposed?

[brias-closet-deactivated2021051]

Janelle Monáe for Neu Neu Magazine. Photos by Brandon Bowen

[bacoose]

i can’t believe castiel went to super hell to turn georgia blue

[casualbaloth]

please god let me find these things out normally I am begging you

[red-mercer]

If you go to the circus for news don’t complain if a clown tells it to you

[setdeco]

HANNES PEER, Interior Design, Milano, Italy, 2020

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[zoja-deactivated20210116]

Your thesis is so cringe. I can't even look at you.

[koseliggg]

[butholious]

I Counted Every Flashback In Naruto

As we all know, Naruto is an anime notorious for its flashbacks. I remember being so annoyed at seeing the same flashbacks multiple times in an episode when I first watched it. So way back in July of 2017 I got curious and wondered how many flashbacks there were in total. And yes it took me almost 3 years to complete this. I watched every episode and tallied every flashback I saw and categorized it as well. And now as of July 2019, I have finally finished. And here are my findings:

18 flashbacks about Naruto’s childhood/years in the Academy

47 flashbacks about Sasuke/Uchiha Clan

12 flashbacks about the conflict with Mizuki/Mizuki’s life

56 flashbacks about the Land of the Wave Arc/Zabuza & Haku/Inari & his Dad

21 flashbacks about Itachi

23 flashbacks about the Sasuke Recovery Arc

10 flashbacks about the Uchiha Massacre

12 flashbacks about Kimmimaro

3   flashbacks about the Kyuubi Attack

11 flashbacks about the Third Hokage

7  flashbacks about Iruka/his childhood

3  flashbacks about Kyuubi sealed into Naruto/Naruto’s birth

22 flashbacks about Naruto saying inspirational words/speech

44 flashbacks about Team 7 or members of Team 7

10 flashbacks about Naruto training

12 flashbacks about Naruto having moments with others

31 flashbacks about Naruto & Sasuke having fights/moments

19 flashbacks are misc or I don’t know how to place

98 flashbacks about the Chuunin Exams

32 flashbacks about Team Gai or members of Team Gai

9  flashbacks about Sakura & Ino (their friendship)

22 flashbacks about Orochimaru

24 flashbacks about Hinata & Neji

20 flashbacks about Team 10 or members of Team 10

36 flashbacks about the Sand Siblings & their childhood

35 flashbacks about Jiraiya & Tsunade/their childhood

30 flashbacks about Team 8 or members of Team 8

9  flashbacks about Idate Morino/his childhood

5 flashbacks about Land of Rice Feilds Investigation Mission/Fuuma Clan

7 flashbacks about Kurosaki Family Removal Mission/Ranmaru & Karashi’s past

3  flashbacks about Gosunkugi Capture Mission

14 flashbacks about Cursed Warrior Extermination Mission

5  flashbacks about Anko/her past

6 flashbacks about the Kaima Capture Mission/Isaribi & her life

24 flashbacks about the Star Guard Mission/Sumaru’s Past and family

6 flashbacks about the Peddlers Escort Mission

18 flashbacks about the Konoha Plans Recapture Mission

13 flashbacks about the Yakumo Kurama Rescue Mission

10 flashbacks about the Gantetsu Mission/Todoroki’s past

6 flashbacks about the Menma Memory Search Mission

6 flashbacks about the Sunagakure support Mission/Matsuri 

The grand total of all flashbacks is: 791

So yeah, that’s how many there are. Some of them were rather difficult to decide if it was a flashback or not but I think I did pretty well. Now I’m onto the real challenge-Shippuden. If I don’t upload another list by 2021 then I’m probably dead.

[sasukesgaychangemymind]

The last paragraph has me shook. OP are you telling me this list does NOT include Shippuden.

[asundergrowth]

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when are we going to do something about rich people