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Just let the man eat Eddie

#reddie #it

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MARWAN KENZARI as YUSUF AL-KAYSANI

THE OLD GUARD (2020)

#*gently strokes computer screen* #the old guard

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no spoons left

ko-fi

#help this is so cute #the old guard

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eddie and richie through the years

comission done for @dangerousbunnyrabbit

#omgggggg #it #reddie

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keep seeing undergrads on social media saying “oh if a prof has a strict no-AI academic integrity policy that’s a red flag for me because that means they don’t know how to design assignments” like sorry girl but that just sounds like you’ve got a case of sour grapes about not being allowed to cheat with the plagiarism machine that doesn’t know how to evaluate sources and kills the environment! I have a strict no-AI policy because if you use AI to write your essays for a writing course it’s literally plagiarism because you didn’t write it and you’re not learning any of the things the course teaches if you just plug a prompt into the plagiarism generator that kills the environment, hope this helps!

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can't do this one as a poll bc there's endless choices but if you're in college/university or went to college/university what's been the most fun/enriching class you've had?

#i took a political science class where a substantial part of the course #as in several weeks #was a simulation of the international reaction to the rwandan genocide with people playing members of the unsc; journalists; the public; et #the goal wasn't to re-enact history but to react within the simulation according to the values/interests/political constraints of whoever #you were playing #and you could only act/react in-simulation based on whatever knowledge your character had at the time #so we had security council meetings and wrote newspaper articles and held press conferences #the lead up to the simulation was weeks of material about the historical context and political theory about #just war; humanitarian intervention; etc #it was extremely instructive and probably the most profound educational experience i had at college #this was years ago and i haven't stopped thinking about it since then #the media failed then so it's great to see we've learned absolutely nothing in the 30 years since then

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For everyone who has the luxury to feel like they can afford to let Trump take office instead of Biden to “teach the Dems a lesson “…

I can’t afford it. My LIFE is at risk if Trump regains power. I am visibly trans and nonbinary. I do not and will never pass as a cis person. I want to get an X on my next driver’s license, which at this point may mean it’s legally risky for me to travel to visit my parents in Florida, since Florida law views ID cards that do not reflect a person’s birth sex as “invalid”. Theoretically I might not be able to get back through airport security, for example. I may not be able to legally drive in Florida. I might not be legally able to rent a car in Florida.

And Trump is Ron DeSantis, but for the whole god damned country.

And that’s just from the perspective of a white trans person. The things Trump did to every minority in this country should not be forgotten. The things he WANTS to do to minorities should not be underestimated. His presidency was just as bad as we all warned you it would be, and his next will be worse.

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it's a weird emotion when somebody goes "doesn't this just shake you to your core and rewrite your dna and change who you are as a person" and your honest experience of it was that it was ok

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God maybe I should just try actually, seriously writing some fic and that will force me to create a specific non-science brain space I have to tend to every day, and then work will be a smaller percentage of what I think of every day and so I will be less annoyed by it, and even if what I write is hot garbage I should be okay with it because there are literally no stakes here. I am an anonymous internet person writing mindless pining and/or porn under a Sylvia Plath handle, none of this is that deep

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Complaining about work stuff, blah blah blah

I feel like an ass complaining about it because there are so many worse jobs in the world, but so far my new postdoc has been not only unpleasant but unpleasant in a way I hadn't anticipated. And that's kind of fucking with my head. My new lab looks excellent on paper. I joined because I respect and admire the professor's work and strategically speaking, he's a professor whose trainees become professors. The job market sucks so badly that your only hope of making it is by publishing big papers in these big labs. But now I've looked behind the curtain and seen a level of sloppiness and disengagement with the actual intellectual work of science that is honestly shocking. Everything is about getting the next biggest, shiniest paper in the biggest journals, which would be fine if it didn't come at the cost of rigor. It's appalling how many times in the short time I've been here I've seen people plowing forward on huge, HUGE studies without the kinds of obvious controls or validation I'd scold a second year grad student for not running. What's worse is that they don't seem to be deliberately neglecting those experiments -- they seem unaware of why they would be necessary in the first place. The number of times I've had to explain basic concepts, basic technical information about experimental design, or mouse models, etc. etc. Crazy. There's a lot of "technical support" postdocs and grad students get, so many of them don't run their experiments themselves, and as a result have very little understanding of how their data is actually generated and how that should contextualize their interpretations (or experimental design further upstream). Instead they can just keep doing more and more and more and more without thinking very hard about what they're doing. I've been holding my tongue a lot in the face of it because no one likes the new guy who waltzes in, thinks he knows it all, and tries to tell everyone how to do their jobs. At the same time, I know, factually, that I do in fact know more and people are Doing It Wrong. It's a hard line to walk.

The lab is so big the PI can't possibly scrutinize every lab member's data. All he can see is the splashiness, the ~novelty~ of the newest finding and whether it supports the hypothesis. The incredible pressure from above to constantly produce makes people sloppy, and the technical support enables them to generate mountains of that poorly powered, poorly controlled slop at an incredible speed.

This seems to be universal once a lab hits a certain size and level of prestige. Thankfully, there seems to still be some level of quality control before publication, because the lab's published work so far has been solid. But the time for running important controls and pilots shouldn't be right before publication, both because it's a waste of everyone's time and resources, and because you don't want to create an anchoring bias from the early, bad pieces of data. One of these days, that anchoring bias is going to lead to shitty work making it out the door. If it hasn't already. There are so many ways data can be unsound that are not obvious unless you can directly see how it was generated.

I knew all of this going in. But it's different to actually experience it. It's soul-crushing in a way I didn't expect. It made me feel crazy for a while, too, as if I was the only one who could see how wrong all of this was, until a tech privately confided that he was also very frustrated by the way the lab operates and had seen all the same problems I had. So I guess I don't feel crazy anymore, just frustrated and disappointed.

People warned me that being a postdoc would be much lonelier than being a grad student because you don't have the same social structure of a program and cohort. I was prepared for that and felt somewhat RIP To You But I'm Different about it because I've never had very high social needs to begin with. What I was not prepared for was how scientifically lonely it would feel, with everyone disengaged and burned out and approaching science like a monkey on a typewriter. Doing science feels exuberant and joyful to me in the same way I imagine playing music feels to artists. And for me, it's also been a very communal joy. Some of my happiest memories from grad school were having lively discussions with my thesis committee, or debating with people at journal club, or emailing data and bouncing ideas back and forth with my advisor. Back then, those things didn't happen nearly as often as I wanted them to, either. I thought they'd be a given here, in a lab that's capital E Elite. Instead, many of the same problems I had with my grad school labmates are playing out on a larger scale here, except now there's even more infrastructure and resources to enable people's incompetence.

I'm sure a lot of my frustration might just be growing pains and that once I'm out of the job/life adjustment phase in six months I'll be better able to regulate my feelings about this. And once I can fall into the rhythm of doing my experiments and writing grants and papers, I'll be able to distract myself from other people's nonsense and just focus on doing my work to my standards. I asked my grad school advisor how he stays sane in the face of this, and he said: even if other people are putting out crap, I know that my pieces of the scientific puzzle are well-made and fit together.

I'm trying to internalize that, but right now, it's hard to see past the nearly endless daily frustration. I remember feeling very anxious and uncertain and out of my depth at the start of grad school, but it didn't feel bad in the way this feels bad. In some ways, I think feeling out of my depth might actually make me feel better right now, because then I'd just be focused on keeping my head above the water rather than on all the things that make me feel angry and disappointed. Also, excitement was the other side of the coin of start-of-grad-school-anxiety. Drinking from the firehose was hard, but once I learned to do it, it became fun. Hell, it was sort of fun even when I couldn't do it effectively. I don't know if "being pissed off about people's scientific standards" has a natural conclusion that is fun or fulfilling. Instead, I'm googling around for biotech or pharma jobs at night, even though I know industry has its own set of problems. It would be easier if I were just all, fuck academia, I'm done about it, but no, I still want to do research and I still want to run my own lab one day. I just hate feeling this way and want it to stop.

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A fascist is a leftist's second-worst enemy, right behind a leftist's true worst enemy, which is a slightly-different leftist who holds 94% of the same political views.

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First look at The Lonely Few @ MCC Theater

#the lonely few #absolutely ELECTRIC #it's not perfect -- it's very underwritten and feels like it needs maybe another 30-45 mins to earn all its emotional beats #but the music just fucking ROCKS #and you don't get a cast better than this #lauren patten and taylor iman jones sound incredible ofc #i sat on stage so could hear them off sometimes which was *chef's kiss* #damon daunno gets a small solo toward the end and kills it

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hopeless time loop. the way out isn’t to save everyone. the way out isn’t to save even one person. the way out isn’t to change anything. the way out is accepting how it happened the first time is how it always will be. that’s how you acted, that’s how they acted, that’s how you would have acted every time if you weren’t given the curse of hindsight. the way out is accepting you can’t fix the past; you can only forgive yourself for it.

#to know how it ends / and still begin to sing it again / as if it might turn out this time

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Messenger! What news have you from the Yaoi front?

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what a beautiful day to not be in high school