Born to be a hot oracle of Delphi, forced to be a sad lab grunt

Ingrid | 26 | she/her | grad student | I like art and TTRPGs and stuff

[raccoonmilf]

What they don’t tell you is the more specialized you become in an academic niche, the more opportunities you have for the general public to tell you they know more than you and that you’re wrong about the subject you specialize in/an idiot/a liar/a pharmaceutical industry plant for big lyme disease

[batsandboba]

“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know

[theprophetingrid]

I am begging you guys to do a better job tagging your posts because my feed has been FLOODED with posts from that new Nintendo game, and at first it was cute but now it is entirely too much. I'm playing tag whack-a-mole and now entirely untagged stuff is popping up. I'm losing it, gamers.

[targetedknowledge]

[theprophetingrid]

Damn, if only I didn't eat my twin in the womb.

[fuckmaster-unlimited]

freak in the sheets as well as in most other locations

[theprophetingrid]

I truly wish that online fandom was not as ravenous as it is, because I'd really like to exist in a world where I could post a hot take and have that met with discussion instead of getting hit in the head with a brick on sight. Like, I'm watching what y'all are doing to other people and am just keeping my thoughts in notes app jail.

[theprophetingrid]

Grieving can be so weird because some people will speak straight poetry of support and empathy, and then some people will say something terribly wack like, "Hey, just be glad they didn't die the way my mom did. You got lucky, actually!"

[theprophetingrid]

The Starving Saints spoilers without context.

[theprophetingrid]

Absolution spoilers without context

[theprophetingrid]

I credit my PI believing that I am the best writer in our lab to a childhood spent writing scifi slop on Wattpad.

[the-muppet-joker]

Be wary of the Bits you Commit to. The things you speak in jest carve your reality just as much as those spoken in earnest. One day you're writing Kermit x Joker fanfiction and the next your boss is threatening to fire you because you have been caught looking at Muppet Porn on the company computer for the fifth time. I am Pygmalion and I have found, with horror, that the statue I have sculpted has my own face

[theprophetingrid]

i need to know about the guy above you in your lab. the guy on meth is crazy also. love to see it

I was friends with this guy in my cohort who worked upstairs. He always seemed quiet but sweet. With the way that my building's bathroom situation is, the bathroom genders change with every floor, so all the women on my floor must go upstairs to use their assigned restroom. The floor that my friend worked on.

So, this little demon would sneak in and pop a squat in the smaller stall so that you couldn't see his feet when you came in, but it was locked so you'd have to go into the only other stall, the accessible one right next to it. We're in the States, so we have those terrible partitions that don't reach all the way up/down. He'd then lower his phone below the partition and take pictures of women with their pants down. He got caught after like a year of this, but his PI ran enough interference with things when he was caught that he had time to cleanse his phone, so the investigation was dead on arrival for being a "he said she said."

Thank god, he mastered out because no one would talk to him after what he did.

[theprophetingrid]

So, in my senior year of college I ran a DnD campaign that included one of my roommates. She would excitedly tell another roommate about the events of the story. This second roommate then went and ran a very blatant copy of my campaign for her own friend group. I've been informed that she is writing a book based on this campaign but is changing a lot of very standard fantasy elements like elves "because she doesn't want Wizards of the Coast to sue her."

GIRL, DON'T WORRY ABOUT THEM. WORRY ABOUT ME.

[shouty-y]

Some studies I‘ve done this year ✍️

[theprophetingrid]

A story that perfectly encapsulates grad school culture:

This guy would work 20 hour days, 7 days a week. No one could figure out how he could keep up this pace. His PI pointed to him as the pinnacle of productivity and berated other students for not being like him. Eventually, he got caught stealing mercury from another lab "to banish demons." Unsurprisingly, turns out he was on meth. The school tried to boot him but one lawsuit later they were forced to readmit him, if any lab were to have him. His original PI took him back because, "he was productive," and that's what matters.

Yeah. I bet he was.

[theprophetingrid]

I frequent TTRPG spaces online, and a repeated refrain I'll see is people using AI to make characters and—upon getting called out about it—lamenting that they can't do art. Moreover, it's unfair to expect them to learn just so they don't have to use the planet-destroying theft machine. Stop being mean!

So anyways, here's my friend's and my Vampire: The Masquerade characters. The first one I did in September of 2023 when I first started trying to figure out my style. The second was drawn July of 2025. This entire time, I've been a full-time PhD student (with an internship in the middle of all that). By a generous estimate, I draw maybe one thing a month. Probably less than that on average. Is it the best thing in the world or anywhere close to what I want to be able to do? Not even a little. But even doing this extremely casually as a hobby (less than 20 pieces in this style) I've gotten to a point where I can feel confident using my work in my games.

My point being, I had no art background and very little free time to my name, and I figured it out because I wanted to. I'm very confident that anyone who wanted to could as well if they were to actually bother to try. Don't let these people lie to you and don't let this rot take hold in TTRPG communities.

[theprophetingrid]

Some of you need to put a fraction of the energy you put into hating pop singers into hating the United States Supreme Court.