sister of the primordial darkness

lauren || 28 || she/her || year 2 math phd who likes drawing pictures of complicated algebraic objects; NO LONGER ACADEMICALLY HOMELESS ||

[generating-functionology]

intro

hi so i'm a Mathematics grad student in the US and this is my personal blog. currently we are living in an indomitable hellscape and i'm just trying to survive at this point. some of my lore so far:

INTP-T (supposedly)

I AM STAYING IN ACADEMIA (as of 4/16)

i fw dark academia (the concept, the lifestyle, and the aesthetic of it) and also cyberpunk-themed artwork and discourse

i am trying to eat healthier and exercise regularly & make myself into a more mathematically rigorous person

undeniably my favorite music genre is irish post-punk. shit never misses

i'm also a language whore, my favorite languages to learn about are russian, icelandic, and irish gaelic. i'd say i'm most proficient in russian, which isn't really saying much because i'm not very conversational/speak it with a big ol' stutter.

i was formerly a linguistics student in undergrad. i think honestly i'd like to return to the field at some point, whether it be in a minor form of study or what have you.

[academic-vampire]

𝔞𝔱 𝔥𝔬𝔪𝔢 𝔦𝔫 𝔪𝔶𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔣

[aslutsdiiiary]

Me this weekend

[jamsandsuch]

took my engineer brother around the engineering building on campus today. every time we came across an empty lecture hall he’d write a ridiculously difficult formula on the board and add ‘warm up. hint: use lecture notes from last class” and giggle and run off

[generating-functionology]

So this week I noticed that I was still huffing and puffing on long runs, and thus I did a 5.3 mile hill workout instead, which concluded by the creek :D

I thought it would be a lot worse than it was. The hill itself is almost half a mile long. There's a farm at the top which has a rooster who yells every time he sees me turning the corner sucking air.

Overall it actually hasn't been a very productive week, though some highlights are:

Started incorporating algebraic geometry studies into the routine (Fulton)

Ramping up the Disco Elysium playthrough for therapy reasons

Hanging out with the cat

Finally getting a start date for summer work LOL. Bonus points for my ex no longer working there so now I don't need to worry about running into him

My brakes EATING SHIT

Getting distracted from my target summer book with Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, which I DID consume in a single day

Seeing Obsession finally. Though I struggle to mark this as a highlight because it was so unnerving that it took me like four days to recover from it. Inde Navarrette better get a FUCKING OSCAR NOM for that. Oh my god. I think I was really arrogant going into it having finally conquered Hereditary. There really is nothing scarier than having a male friend with a crush on you and no intentions of letting you say no. From experience.

The plan now (today) is:

Work my way up to trying a CTF because I'm super rusty now. My RE skills are atrophied.

A page or two from Fulton and a page or two from Munkres.

Do stuff for my manager (fill out forms etc.)

Write a chapter.

Calming yoga??????

Disco :))))))))

[catchymemes]

[midnightinshadow]

[academic-vampire]

𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔰𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔦𝔱𝔶

[sadclowncentral]

i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the world’s oceans and sea in various states of sinking.

this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.

anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you:

[sadclowncentral]

no you don't understand. i do international regulation of emerging technologies for a living. this WAS me stress dreaming about work

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[rudjedet]

And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.

They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?

I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.

AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and to make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.

[generating-functionology]

I'VE BEEN SAYING THIS NOW I DONT FEEL EFFING CRAZY AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[academic-vampire]

𝔞 𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔩𝔬𝔰𝔱 𝔦𝔫 𝔭𝔞𝔯𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔢

[generating-functionology]

So today I only went 5 miles instead of 8 b/c my legs were still tired from Tuesday. Still, I managed to get some pretty shots of the creek and saw 2 mallards!

Altogether stuff is actually very calm right now. I'm still chugging through Munkres. My goal today is simple. Be a blob. Or blob-adjacent. The books at the bookstore yesterday were kind of meh. Everything feels very gimmicky lately, and I was unimpressed by a lot of stuff I tried to like. Not to diss on BookTok. It just feels like I'm constantly being sold entertainment that is underbaked and overhyped.

I really, really want to like RF Kuang, for example. I did really adore the premises of both Katabasis and Babel. But her writing style is very condescending to me. Which could mean I'm genuinely illiterate, but whatever. It feels as though she is trying to impress a very specific intellectual audience, and it sort of turns me off. It distracts me from the genuinely interesting magic systems that run on linguistics/logic/physics.

Who knows, maybe I'll run back to Babel once I see the light. My roommate actually quite likes RF Kuang's stuff, so I wonder if I'm just dumb because it does not resonate in the way I want it to.

[generating-functionology]

Yesterday was actually pretty productive. I managed to get through a lot of general topology with minimal issues. We're still a bit over halfway into Chapter 2 of Munkres. My goal is to study Chapter 3 relatively soon (like next week.)

Listened to the Noah Kahan album and couldn't get through it (not because it was bad but because I'm a crybaby); really liked the new Gurriers single. Journaled. Doodled.

And obviously I got sidetracked with Gaelpilled content but I did wind up learning a bit more about the sociolinguistics of Ireland.

Today, however, is very wet, so I can't hike or run :/ and I'm not super pumped for the gym so i'm gonna take it easy. i may find myself in a bookstore (where I have no business being) later.

goals today:

bother workplace about hiring

go to therapy

grocery shopping because i put it off last time

get through product & metric topology sections of Munkres; metric stuff shouldn't be too bad because that was all covered extensively in my real analysis coursework

keep reading thru The Slynx

also in elden ring i'm kind of taking a break from trying to kill malenia because i haven't figured out how to dodge waterfowl dance successfully so i'm gonna switch over to Disco Elysium for comfort

concluding this post with the following Kneecap lyric

"Fuck the Duolingo bird, he be talking some shit Stick this on repeat and you'll be fluent in getting lit"

what a line lmfao

[kristina100000]

youtube comment of the day

[generating-functionology]

Harry DuBois moment

[nibmoss]

[generating-functionology]

Something I have observed by trying to obtain audio of Irish speakers on the Internet is that a lot of Irish speakers don't always agree on pronunciations, which does make it kind of confusing to speak new phrases. There seems to be a lot of gatekeeping within the Irish-speaking community. As far as I'm aware, Irish is required in public schooling currently.

There are heritage speakers, who regularly have used it since childhood and communicate in it comfortably. And there are also heritage speakers who are embarrassed to speak it, I guess for fear of seeming...idk, backwater? Not fashionable? Not good enough? As a result their Irish Gaelic is a little different. And depending on which camp you belong to, you might be judged as a linguistic-gentrifier for speaking the language only as it becomes fashionable. Or at least, that seems to be a fear people have. There is resentment among some fluent speakers towards those who at first rejected the language as embarrassing, who are now trying to relearn it.

It's interesting because I've been trying to figure out some Gaelic pronunciations for a while now (I first got curious about it in high school) and it seems everyone has a different opinion on how to say various words. It could just be people arguing on the Internet but also I'm wondering if this is, on a deeper level, more of a "country colonized by the British for hundreds of years grappling to recover its national identity" sort of thing. Idk

editing to say i have now learned about munster/ulster dialects LMAO

editing again to say i think i'm just dumb and my googling skills have atrophied

editing a third time to say I've discovered Gael Phonics by Kneecap which has resolved a lot of this question lmfao

[aeolianblues]

I know there are like 2.5 Gurriers fans on this website but for those that ARE you’ve got to see this super cute photoshoot the band did recently

Creative direction and photography by oliviadansphotography on IG, please please go like her post!

View this post on Instagram

[generating-functionology]

Just found them. I'm obsessed. Literally listening to their most recent album on repeat ad infinitum