#also fun fact she had a phd in library science at one point. i like that about her i think we should talk about it a little more

[ikiprian]

Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School is a popular YouTube series. Tucker Foley is a star student.

Barbara Gordon's Cram School posts free online courses for both coding and computer engineering. Think Crash Course in terms of entertainment, but college lecture in terms of depth. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flock to it— students who missed a class, people looking to add new skills to a resume, even simple hobbyists. It’s a project Barbara’s proud of.

Sometimes, when she wants to relax, she’ll even hop in the comments and spend an afternoon troubleshooting a viewer’s project with them.

User “Fryer-Tuck” has especially interesting ones. Barbara finds herself seeking out his comments, checking in on whatever this crazy kid is making next. An app for collecting GPS pings and assembling them on a map in real-time, an algorithm that connects geographic points to predict something’s movement taking a hundred other variables into account, simplified versions of incredibly complex homemade programs so they can run on incredibly limited CPU’s.

(Barbara wants to buy the kid a PC. It seems he’s got natural talent, but he keeps making reference to a PDA. Talk about 90’s! This guy’s hardware probably predates his birth.)

She chats with him more and more, switching to less public PM threads, and eventually, he opens up. His latest project, though, is not something Barbara has personal experience with.

FT: so if you found, hypothetically, a mysterious glowing substance that affects tech in weird and wacky ways that could totally have potential but might be vaguely sentient/otherworldly…. what would you do and how would you experiment with it. safely, of course. and hypothetically

BG: I’d make sure all my tests were in disposable devices and quarantined programs to keep it from infecting my important stuff. Dare I ask… how weird and wacky is it?

FT: uhhh. theoretically, a person composed of this substance once used it to enter a video game. like physical body, into the computer, onto the screen? moving around and talking and fighting enemies within the game?

FT: its been experimented with before, but not on any tech with a brain. just basic shields and blasters and stuff, its an energy source. also was put in a car once

FT: i wanna see how it affects software, yk? bc i already know it can. mess around and see how far i can push it

BG: […]

FT: … barbara?

BG: Sorry, thinking. Would you mind sharing more details? You said “blasters?”

Honestly. Kid genius with access to some truly wacky materials and even wackier weapons, she needs to start a file on him before he full sends to either hero or villain.

[OR: Tucker is a self-taught hacker, but if he were to credit a teacher, he'd name Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School! He's even caught the attention of Dr. Gordon herself. She's full of sage advice, and with how she preaches the value of a good VPN, he's sure she's not pro-government. Maybe she'll help him as he studies the many applications of ecto-tech!]

#she does end up sending tucker a PC lol #and after she learns he has experience supporting a superhero team maybe pushes his name forward to WEs outreach program for r&d potentials #picks him up by the scruff and says MY coding buddy #also fun fact she had a phd in library science at one point. i like that about her i think we should talk about it a little more #also tucker was making a ghost reporting & tracking app for amity parkers #dpxdc #dcxdp #barbara gordon #tucker foley #prompt #kipwrite

[snowdice]

Gaps in His Files (Part 7) [Relabeled; Refiled Series]

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Relationships: Logan/Patton

Characters:

Main: Logan, Patton

Appear: Remy, Virgil (but only in the epilogue)

Summary:

Logan Berry has learned many things the last 10 years: a lot of math and physics, a bit of humility, and how to be a hero being just a few. Through his education, his experience teaching, and his exploits as the superhero Bluebird, he’s changed in a lot of small and large ways. He has recorded these changes in well-organized documents and files. He’s even had to create two new file designations: a red one for files about his moonlighting at Bluebird, and a light blue one dedicated to his boyfriend, Patton.

When Bluebird is targeted by a memory device and all of those 10 years of progress suddenly disappear, Patton Sanders and Logan’s extensive files are left as his only resource to get those memories back. But what is Patton supposed to do when there are clear gaps in his files? And what does he do when he is one of them?

This is set 25 years before Sometimes Labels Fail though it’s story is completely independent of it and it is not necessary to read that one first.

Notes: Superhero AU, memory loss, past child abuse, past child neglect, unhealthy ideas about ones place in relationships, emotional suppression, self-deprecating thoughts, medical procedures mentioned, very brief unhealthy views of sex

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

After Logan finished eating, Patton showed him his office. First, he was given his personal and work files which were familiar in organizational structure even if they had years’ worth of new information in them and his work files had a new subfolder for teaching instead of being purely for schoolwork. Yet, the thing that most interested Logan was the new file designation which Patton retrieved for him by finding a key in a hidden desk drawer compartment and using it to open a secret compartment in the wall. The files there were red and completely new to Logan. Thankfully, they still had quite a bit of structure that he was able to pick up quickly and there were easy to read tables of contents with understandable subsection titles.

He flipped curiously through the first few. They reflected the story Patton had told him earlier in content as well as form. The beginning files were either blue for work or plain white since his foray into superherodom had started from an academic source.

Though he had not known Logan at the time by his own admission, Patton’s knowledge of his early days of being a superhero were perfectly accurate based on the files. That combined with his knowledge about where the files were in the first place, stroked Logan’s curiosity regarding the man even more. Logan was not a trusting person, at least he had not been at 18, and he imagined not much had changed in the last 10 years. So, he had to wonder what it was about Patton that had made him willing to share so much about his life and clearly heavily protected aspects of his life at that. He did not imagine he would share his exploits as a hero with just anyone.

And, if it were just his exploits as a hero, perhaps he would have even understood that. It was good to have an ally, especially one with useful skills such as a doctor. Yet, Patton’s knowledge went deeper than even that to things more personal, ones not in these files or any of his others. He knew things about Logan: his favorite color, why he prefers some fabrics over others, and stories that had never left his lips in his current memories.

Why? He had to wonder. What made this person so different than everyone else?

Certainly, he could see the appeal of him as a romantic partner in the theoretical sense.

He was a doctor which was useful considering Logan’s superhero status likely led to physical injuries sometimes. In addition, that was a well-paying, respectable job, though it did have an unpredictable work schedule. Achievement in that field spoke of enough intellect to be on par with Logan even if they were in different areas.

He was also clearly adequately skilled in other things. He had managed to find Logan and get him back to his apartment and seemed to have enough emotional control to do what was necessary in the situation.

This was someone he imagined his parents would have likely expected for him as a romantic partner (if they expected anything at all). Though, Logan did have to worry that if they were both not particularly emotionally expressive then there may not be a good balance in the relationship.

Logan watched as he flipped through one of his personal files to get a picture from his college graduation to show him with practiced ease. He was comfortable around Logan’s organizational system, he noted. That was something no one had ever bothered to be before. Most people either tolerated or scorned the way he kept his files, but Patton knew his way around it almost as well as Logan himself, better in fact when it came to the new red files, fingers always flipping to the correct pages in seconds when Logan asked questions.

It was nice to have someone care enough to learn it.

It felt as though something shifted marginally inside his chest at the thought of someone being patient enough to learn how Logan organized his life. To do so was to basically learn how Logan’s mind worked. He… hadn’t known that was something he might want.

Oh.

That, he suddenly knew with clarity, that was why. Or at least part of why. It had to be.

“So,” Patton broached suddenly, likely catching him staring and wonder why, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Logan blinked at him. “You already know me. Better than I do myself at the moment.”

“Sure, but I’ve only known versions of you that I’ve known.”

“Yes. That is typically how reality works.”

“Well not today,” he pointed out and… fair point. “Plus, maybe you’ll start to remember more if you start talking about yourself. Like when you’re trying to remember the title of a song so you sing the lyrics you know until you get to the point where they use the title in the song.”

Logan considered that. “That sounds like a rational strategy to try. What should I talk about?”

“Well, I know a lot about the events that happened in your life, but not really what you thought about them at the time. What are things you like and dislike in your life right now. You know,” he paused, “what are things you find annoying? Stuff like that.”

“I like coffee,” Logan said after a moment of consideration, “and school. Libraries. I like order and schedules and it makes me uncomfortable when things don’t go to plan. I don’t like impromptu things or eating outside. I don’t really like when people are overly emotional or when they cry mostly because I never know how to respond. I don’t like my English teacher because she once had a mental breakdown crying about a dream she had for 30 minutes when a student asked her if she’d graded our papers. Also, she was homophobic. I like math and science and my parents. Though, I dislike when they insist, I try to go out and “have fun.” I especially disliked when they set me up with a date for the homecoming. When I said I didn’t want to go especially with a girl they set me up with a boy for the next dance which was… nice as they attempted to listen to me, but they entirely missed the point. I dislike messes. I like jam. I want to major in math and physics and get my PhD in at least one… that seemed to work out. My calculus teacher was my favorite even though everyone else seemed to resent her, but we also mostly all passed the advanced placement test, so I think it was worth it. Also, she was kind.”

“You had a homophobic English teacher?” Patton asked.

“Ah, yes, did I never mention?” Logan asked. “She made her views known to a boy in the year below me and got fired a month ago.”

“You never told me about that.”

“Perhaps I decided she was no longer worth dwelling on. The man who took her place seems adequate, though I am not in his class. I also like my current English teacher. She says she got her teaching degree later in life and before that used to be a cultural anthropologist. She tells us stories about different places she’s been.”

Patton smiled. “She sounds interesting,” he said.

“Yes, and it is quite an interesting course. It is an extra one beyond what I must take to graduate. We write a research paper over the course of the entire semester.” Logan paused for a long moment. “This does not seem to be doing anything.”

Patton nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fine. We’ll try something else. Maybe we should have lunch first though.”

Logan was starting to feel a bit hungry. “That is a good idea.”

Want to read more? Click below!

AO3 Part 8

#sanders sides #logan sanders #patton sanders #logicality #tsss #superhero au #memory loss #past child abuse #past child neglect #emotional suppression #self deprecation #gaps in his files #labeled universe #relabeled; refiled #adriana writes

[littleeyesofpallas]

Batman shenanigans...

So, I’m the type of would-be writer that gets easily bogged down in plotting and planning and researching minutia more than writing actual moment to moment scenes and dialog, and the rabbit hole I’ve found myself tumbling down most recently has been this…

I wanted to rewrite Jason’s Red Hood origin story; from his death and resurrection, up until his big return.  Under the Hood has a great finale and a memorable confrontation scene between Jason and Bruce, but in all honesty, the plot surrounding it is pretty blase.  And granted, that’s mostly because there were no real long term plans for Jason as Red Hood beyond the big twist, so the initial story wasn’t really written with any solid themes, overarching direction, or character integrity in mind.  But then on top of that things attempting to elaborate on the intervening years (Lost Days, and that weird thing they did in the first Red Hood & The Outlaws) also just aren’t especially well handled.  They tend to be narrow in scope, isolated within continuity, and not especially thematically substantive.

But here we are, at a point in Jason’s character and publication history, where I think there’s just a lot that can be done with revisiting the idea of his Red Hood debut, as well as the events leading up to it, that could better incorporate his character’s themes and personal history.  Something that until somewhat recently had all just felt a little too fresh, still, to really warrant any kind of rewrite and retcon.

The first big question I had to ask myself was, “How long was Jason dead/gone?” because to have gone from a somewhat under accomplished Robin to a credible threat to Batman himself, needs time, even with remarkable circumstances surrounding his training.  So, I needed to figure out how long I really needed/had available to work with for his training, as well as what that training would entail; and part of figuring that out also meant taking stock of all the Batfam events Jason missed while gone.  Basically, I had to figure out what Batfam events I wanted to keep in my new continuity, and draw up a timeline to keep track of them all…

So, taking a cue from the old Superman & Batman: Generations elseworlds comic —in which John Byrne re-envisions the World’s Finest’s superhero careers as if they had debuted in the year of their first issues, and aged in sync with the real world ever since— I anchored my timeline around Jason’s death in 1988 and just started working out fixed measurements from there…

For example, When Jason becomes Robin, Dick had recently retired the costume and gone to college, putting something of a finite age range on Dick, which helps orient his and Jason’s relative ages, and in turn lets me pinpoint their years of birth, and by proxy nail down Bruce’s age if we consider he adopts Dick in Year Two as Batman.  And going off Batman: Year One’s premise of Bruce starting his vigilante career at age 25, it gives me a solid grasp of his age as well.

One problem of course came from the early days of The Dynamic Duo; namely Robin’s time between the ages of 8 and ~17(leaving for college) which lasted the awkward 40-odd years of publication.  My solution was to scale the years in publication to his two confirmable ages at the time of The Flying Graysons’ deaths(8yo) and his leave for college(age 17); resulting in a ratio of 1 in-world year:~4.44 publication years.

Applying this to the years before 1980(when Dick leaves for college) in turn pinpoints Babs’ debut as Batgirl, which ironically ends up scaling down to the same year Jason first appears as part of The Flying Todds. (I kept the date of his appearance, but opted to keep his later origin story)

Anyway, while this process was fun and all (and hopefully leads to something a little more productive in the future) the bottom line here is that I just wanted to share the timeline I’ve constructed, because it paints a somewhat jarring picture of everyone’s ages, relative to one another and at the time of certain major events.

Now!  Enjoy this harrowing examination of the relative ages of all your favorite Batfam characters, if they didn’t all just hover around the ages of 18-30!

1970: YEAR ONE 

Bruce Wayne is 25 - becomes Batman (parents died 17y ago)

Barbara Gordon is 15 (just entering High school

Jean-Paul Valley is 1

In 1 year…

8yo Dick Grayson will watch his parents will die

1976: BATMAN & ROBIN - THE DYNAMIC DUO

Bruce is 31, Barbara is 21 (graduating with her Bachelors)

Dick is 13 - becomes Robin

Helena Bertinelli is 8 - watches her parents die

1979: BATGIRL

Bruce is 34, Dick is 16 (has been Robin for 3 years)

Babs is 24 - becomes Batgirl

already completed a PhD in Library Science

Jason Todd is 8 - watches parents die

in 1 year…

35yo Bruce will have been Batman for 10 years

17yo Dick will be shot, fake death, & go to college

join the New Teen Titans(?)

1983:  JUST ANOTHER KID ON CRIME ALLEY

Bruce is 38, Dick is 20, Babs is 28

Jason is 12 - becomes the 2nd Robin 

Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain are both 1yo

In 1 year…

21yo Dick becomes Nightwing

1988: DEATH IN THE FAMILY & KILLING JOKE

Bruce is 43, Dick is 25

Jason is 17 - murdered

Babs is 33 - shot and paralyzed

Lucas Fox is born

In 1 year…

Babs becomes Oracle

21yo Helena becomes Huntress

12yo Kate Kane watches her mother and sister die

1990: A LONELY PLACE OF DYING

Bruce is 45, Dick is 27, Babs is 35

Tim Drake is 13yo - becomes the 3rd Robin

Tim Drake & Kate Kane are the same age

Cassandra Cain is 8yo -  just killed her first man

1992: KNIGHT FALL

Bruce is 47, Dick is 29, Babs is 37, Tim & Kate are 15

Stephanie Brown is 10 - becomes Spoiler

Jean-Paul Valley is 23 - becomes Azrael

Renee Montoya is 21 - joins GCPD, partnered with Harvey Bullock

In 1 year…

48yo Bruce will have back broken by Bane

24yo Jean-Paul will become Batman

1995: LOST DAYS

Bruce is 50, Dick is 32, Helena is 27, Kate is 18, Cass is 13

Babs is 40 - forms Birds of Prey

Tim is 18 - retires as Robin, goes to college

based on Unmasked happening while Tim is in high school, but pushing to senior year to accommodate Spoiler’s age

Steph is 13 - becomes the 4th Robin

keeping War Games in ‘04, Steph gets more time as Robin

Calvin Rose is 8 - locked in kennel by his father

In 1 year…

Jason will rise from the dead (with the body of a 17yo)

33yo Dick will relocate to Bludhaven

51 yo Bruce and ??yo Talia will conceive Damian

1999: NO MAN’S LAND

Bruce is 54, Dick is 36, Babs is 44, Jason is “20,” Kate is 22

Tim is 22 - returns as Robin

Steph is 17 - pregnant

Helena is 31, Cass is 17 - sequence of Batgirls

Duke Thomas and Harper Row are 1 

Steph being 10 when she starts as Spoiler is also a little hard to believe, I know.  And her having a thing with Tim 5 years her senior is pretty squicky. (It’s not a big age gap for adults, but the fact that Tim would be 20 when she’s 15 is pretty, bleugh!)

But the problem is that I anchored her to her teen pregnancy in 1999, and a pregnancy scare at 18 or 19 doesn’t really feel like a big deal, (I mean, it is as a personal thing, but not so much as a publication thing*, if that makes sense?) which made 17 about as old as I could make her at that time.

*Pregnant at 18 or 19 is just, “wow, you’re young, and this was probably a bad idea, and you’re not ready… but you’re also a legal consenting adult and this isn’t some kind of cause for moral panic, just kinda trashy…” territory, and not like a big controversial, 90s-dark-age, comic-selling gimmick, you know?

2001: JOKER’S LAST LAUGH

Joker dies of cancer (not featured on this timeline)

2003: UNDER THE RED HOOD, & WAR GAMES

Bruce is 58, Dick is 40, Babs is 48, Tim is 26

Helena is 35, Steph & Cass are 21

Jason is “24″ - returns in Hush plot

Jean-Paul is 34 - “dies”

Ra’s al Ghul killed by Nyssa ah Ghul (not featured on this timeline)

In 1 year…

22yo Steph will be “murdered”

25yo Jason will return as Red Hood

2006: ROBIN: WANTED

Cass is 24 - begins long process of beating up her family

kills Nyssa al Ghul (not featured on this timeline)

In 1 year...

Cass will take over the League of Assassins

2007: BATMAN AND SON

Bruce is 62, Dick is 44, Babs is 52, Jason is “28,″ Tim & Kate are 30

Damian is 11 - becomes the 5th Robin

Renee is 37 - becomes The Question

In 1 year…

63yo Bruce Wayne will “die”

29yo Jason will don the Red Robin mantle w/Challengers

Kind of like in Arkham Knight, I LOVE the idea of Jason returning to a Gotham where the Joker has been confirmed dead.  So, instead of just going to Arkham and asking Joker what’s up with the new copycat Red Hood, everyone has to legit wonder: Did he just fake his death?/Was he resurrected?  Is Joker back?

I made Jason’s return at age 25 because it mirrored Bruce’s start as Batman. There wasn’t really a good anchor otherwise, but I might nudge that date around, if only because resurrected Jason being “younger” than Tim is super weird.  My other angle here was to determine how long Jason was training for his return, and determine his resurrection that way.  (Comics have made it that he was resurrected within the same year he died, but that feels frivolous to me, so whatever my final version, I’ve opted to let Jason stay dead for at least a full year.)

There’s also the whole 2010s decade, but that’s less relevant to my Jason story’s timeline.  But, yeah... this has highlighted some interesting points for me to play with!  Like that fact that Jason…

…is almost the same age as the Dynamic Duo itself

He’s never known a world without Batman & Robin in it

…is the version of Robin Tim, Kate, Steph & Cass all think of first, since he was Robin when they were kids, not Dick.

And in fact they all would only ever know of Dick as Nightwing.

…got captured and killed by Joker right after Barbara got shot

He DEFINITELY should’ve been motivated to kill Joker by that, instead of the random biological mom smuggling drugs in Iran plot

…was resurrected right around the same time that Damian was conceived, and that Calvin began training as a Talon prospect

makes interesting parallels about different plans to replace Batman all forming right around the same time; with Bruce entering his 50s and having just lost to Bane

…showed back up in the same year that Azrael died

I think it’d be cool if those were more closely linked, instead of Azrael just being shot by a couple of C-listers

…comes back to start a gang war with Blackmask and yell at Bruce about dead Robin issues at the same time Steph gets killed by Blackmask while trying to execute Bruce’s plan to take over the mob.

How can I not take advantage of that for more drama?

Also, not part of my fic, but how cool that Duke and Harper were born in the middle of the Gotham earthquake in Cataclysm?  And with Damian having lost a year to being dead, he’s the same age as Duke, which kinda makes Duke not wanting the Robin mantle a little more interesting.

I find it funny that kids in Gotham are really consistently traumatized at the age of 8 for some reason: Bruce, Dick, Jason, Helena, Cassandra, Calvin...

Half the Batgirls were in fact grown ass women and not “girls,” when they started in on the vigilante racket and I’m tempted to just combine them with the Batwoman legacy a ditch the weird nubile/infantilism fixation comic creators have on forcing them to hover around 18-20 while all the guys hover closer to 30.

And I’m trying will all my might to fight the compulsion to do a timeline for the Teen Titans, because knowing the Robins’ ages puts a pretty narrow frame on the other Teen Titans’ ages at any given time, but by god the fact that they keep reusing the New Teen Titans roster but for EVERY new Robin is a maddening paradox...

Don’t even get me started on that fact that now I get to go map all the Gotham Rogues and figure out just how long they’ve each been up to their bullshit, and who’s still rolling around Gotham in, like, a wheelchair at age 80, menacing the Bat...

#batman #redhood #bruce wayne #jason todd #nightwing #oracle #batgirl #robin

[humansofhds]

Eliot Davenport, MTS '18

“Recently, I have realized that, at the bottom of everything, I came to the study of South Asian religion and Indian philosophy because I couldn’t imagine not reading Sanskrit every day.”

Eliot graduated in 2018 from the MTS program at HDS and is currently applying to PhD programs in South Asian and Religious Studies departments, where she will continue to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy.

Leaving the Bubble

I am Texan, through and through. I was born and raised in Fort Worth. Same house, same school, same all-the-things for my whole childhood. Religion tied into my life in an early way. When my mom found out she was going to have kids, she thought, “What was important to me when I was small? The Church!” So she immediately started attending again, and my sister and I were raised in the Episcopal Church. My mom worked as the secretary to the rector, so we ended up going to the church school for K-12. It was sort of a bubble of a life.

For most of my life, I wanted to be a priest. Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to do I would say, “I want to be an Episcopal priest,” and they’d be like “Great, except that you’re a lady.” Turns out that I totally could have, but my diocese was very not progressive. It was stagnant. I didn’t know that women could be clergy until I went off to college and I had already changed my plan at that point. I was good at math and I thought I’d just be an engineer, so I moved to College Station and earned my bachelors of science in civil and ocean/coastal engineering at Texas A&M.

Once I found out about female clergy I called my parents and I was like “what the heck, I could have done this!” They suggested that I put a pin in it and try out the engineering thing. So I did—I worked as an engineer in Austin for about five years. But I still always thought I wanted to go to seminary. About a year into the formal discernment process in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, I thought, “Wait, that’s not what I want after all. Turns out I want to study Sanskrit.” And everybody said, “Excuse me, what?” That’s how I ended up coming to Massachusetts in a nutshell.

Serendipitous Encounters

When I moved to Austin to begin my first real job after graduating from Texas A&M, I realized that engineering had taken up my whole life. I just felt like I didn’t have much of a personality outside of my education and career. So I started to do a bunch of stuff, thinking that year that I would do literally anything that came my way hoping that something would catch me and hold tight. One day somebody said that I should go to a yoga class. I initially thought, “No thanks,’ but something changed and I walked into one, some free class somewhere, and it just stuck. It became my thing.

A couple of years later I started yoga teacher training and was introduced to Sanskrit. From the moment we started learning proper syllable pronunciation, I was hooked. I realized that if I intended to be a yoga teacher who said the names of poses in Sanskrit and spoke with any sense of authority about anything related to the Yoga Sutras, then I better be able to read them as a primary source and not just as an English translation. So, at the suggestion of Professor Clooney, I applied to the University of Texas to try my hand at first-year Sanskrit, and three years later here I am applying for PhD programs.

I started practicing yoga in 2012. I became one of those people who practiced multiple times a day, then I started teaching, and then I quit my full-time engineering job all-together. Then I came here (HDS), and it disappeared from my life. I didn’t grieve the loss of this thing that I had loved; it was just that it's time sort of ended for me. I still do it from time to time, and I’ve started doing it more since graduating. Although yoga is the thing that introduced me to Sanskrit, my relationship to yoga is different now. For me it is physical. I don’t buy into the way that people are trying to package a spiritual experience and a bodily experience all at once. After coming to HDS, I separated the philosophy, the language, and then finally the actual physical practice, so when I do it now I do it just to feel good in my body.

I usually don’t get a lot of good reactions when I tell people this story. Overall there seems to be a sense that this undeniably modern avenue into the world of studying religion, South Asia, and Sanskrit somehow indicates an inability to take it seriously. People have mixed reactions to the idea that the billion dollar, stretchy-pants yoga boom could lead somebody into the academic study of religion, but it did for me and I hope others are lucky enough to let it do the same for them.

Learning Curve

Engineering school never felt right. I never really meshed with that culture. Honestly, even when I thought I was going to be a priest, that didn’t feel quite right either. And then I walked into that first class of beginner Sanskrit at UT and I was like “Oh! I found the thing, and it’s not a place, or a particular career; it’s this other new thing that I’m so glad I ran into.” It was a beautiful accident. And I’m thankful for it, every day.

Because my first year at HDS was also my first year in the humanities, my time here was like a compressed undergraduate education. There was a huge learning curve. I mean, my first paper in my life that was longer than three pages was my first paper here at HDS. So, I had to give myself time and space to properly develop an idea of what I wanted to do. Even now I can say more easily what I don’t want to do than what I do want to do, whether it’s in regard to a simple term paper or a future book. My dearest friend back in Austin teases me that I went from wanting to do everything in all the libraries in all over the world to wanting to do something in all of the libraries on one continent, and now I’m trying to shrink it down to one country, one city, and perhaps a single library.

Recently, I have realized that, at the bottom of everything, I came to the study of South Asian religion and Indian philosophy because I couldn’t imagine not reading Sanskrit every day. This whole world didn’t initially open up to me through English translations of Sanskrit texts or even from the mouths of my professors. I became familiar with some of India’s epic narratives and philosophical works simply by reading them in the language in which they were meant to be heard and read. In fact, it was only after my second full year of language study that I was finally asked to think critically about them from a non-language-based perspective. This perhaps odd way of doing things, learning the language before knowing what my academic questions might be, has certainly affected the way I study. I’ve finally zeroed in on the thing I love reading the most: Indian philosophy. In particular I’m interested in epistemology, philosophy of language, theories of sensory experience, and the efficacy of sound as a source of knowledge. I’m interested in not just what these philosophers had to say, but also the intricacies of how they chose to say it. What do they have to say about language and how, in turn, do they utilize language to do so? For a lot of people, it probably sounds like the most boring thing in the world. But this is what’s captured my imagination, so I am just going with it.

Hidden Motivations

In my last semester, I took a class with Professor Hallisey about Buddhism and modern fiction. In this course, it was incredible to me how we were all presented with the same paper prompts and every single one of us wrote on distinctly different topics for each. When we were asked “What is the author of this novel asking us to reflect on?” each of us zeroed in on such fascinating and differing topics that it made me wonder if we’d even read the same book.

In the final paper for that class, the basic question was: Why read fiction at all? I started thinking about how fiction forces us not only to look into the minds of different authors, but also to dive deep into our own brains to see what we’re reflecting on. Fiction is a conduit for us to live other lives and see what in those lives is important to us. I wrote about grief and loss for one assignment and about the human tendency to self-deceive for another. As I wrote the final, I thought back and self-psychoanalyzed a bit, realizing that those topics are things that are always present in my mind. I was totally unaware of this while I was reading the novels and writing the individual papers. All this to say that this class changed the way I want to approach the works of certain Indian philosophers. In addition to looking at what they were trying to convey through their arguments, I want to analyze the ways in which they were attempting to convey it in order to gain insight into their world. Perhaps this insight may be able to add to our own experience in unexpected ways.

What is it that I think I’m going to discover there? I don’t know. But I want to get into their brains and I want to know why they chose to talk about the things they chose to talk about. Who were they? What was important to them? What motivated them to write these difficult, intense, complicated things? The engineering side of my brain wants to break down the structure of the texts, the specific sentences, words, and letters. But I also want to put the puzzle pieces together of what they were thinking about on the surface to see what they may have been thinking about below it. Hopefully it leads me somewhere I can’t quite yet imagine.

Elton John

I played the piano competitively for a long time. I started really young because The Lion King was my favorite movie. I remember walking out of the film and being like, “Mom—that music! Who wrote it?” And she told me “Elton John!” I said “I’m going to marry Elton John.” She replied by saying, “Do you want to play the piano?” Soon after that I started to play and still do just for fun. Elton John came here last fall when he was awarded the Harvard Foundation’s Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian, and I finally had the chance to see him in person after 25 years. It was amazing.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian

#Harvard #Harvard Divinity School #yoga #sanskrit #elton john #buddhism #Religion #episcopal #large

[outstanding-ocs]

((Art by me. Yay, I finally drew a picture))

Name: Radojka “Rado” Raznatovic

Age: 75 (She will look 33 forever)

Birthdate: December 26th, 1961

Sexual Orientation: Pansexual

Gender: Female

Height: 6'4

Weight: 218lbs

Appearance: Rado is a beautiful woman. She does have has “Raznatovic features” which include a cleft chin, big green eyes, freckles on her face, full lips, black nails, a curved nose, and jet black hair, but her features are slightly softer than her brothers. She has dark, thick eyebrows that are expressive, a chiseled, almost super hero like face, and straight, white teeth that have pointy canines. Her eyes are happier than her brothers. Her hair is thick and jet black, but it’s usually short or neck length. She has slightly pointed ears that have pairs of earrings in them and she’s usually seen wearing dark lipstick with a bit of eyeliner.

Current bio: Rado has had a much different life than her brothers. She was adopted by an older couple that worked as Catholic missionaries who worked in South Africa. They stayed there until she turned 13, then the whole family moved to England, where Rado and her sisters attended an all girls highschool. By this time, Rado was different than most girls. She developed early and was much taller than them so they made fun of her, many of the other girls saying that she looked like a boy, calling her ugly and everything. This is where Rado’s love of computers came from. During her lunch time, she would go to the library so that she could use the computers. After graduating, she decided to do Missionary work back in Serbia, Africa and Asia until she turned 20. She moved to America and she had a job working as a sales woman at a department store. They loved her features and she knew how to do makeup real well. She was approached by a woman who told her that she had beautiful features. That she wanted her to be a runway model for clothes that she was designing. She eventually saved up enough money to put herself through college where she worked real hard and she diligently put herself through programs. She graduated, getting herself a Bachelors in Engineering, Masters in Computer Science and a PHD in IT. She was playing with some children when she met a handsome guy with green eyes. His name was Dorijan and she was amazed by how much they favored one another. They got to talking and she was surprised to learn that he was also from Serbia. They thought it was a weird coincidence, so out of curiosity they got DNA tests done. They learned that they were in fact twins who were separated when they were younger. Having met him, Rado felt that she missed out on so much of their life, so they decided to move in with each other. He had some issues with drinking, and she was there for him, so they worked on getting him sober. After a few years, they spent the time looking for a man who looked just like Dorijan. His name was Mihajlo and they helped him out with a problem that he had. They assumed that he was related to them because he was Serbian as well. They then learned that they had another sibling named Luka who had been brain washed by their real father. They all live together and they work with one another to figure out why there are strange things happening in Nevada.

Personality: Rado is an extremely sweet and intelligent woman. She’s like the “Mom Friend” and she makes sure that all of her siblings and friends are taken care of. Like her brothers, she can kick ass if she needs to, but she’s an extreme pacifist. She’s a bit mischievous and she is also known as the Queen of Puns.

Weird Fact: She has a deep voice and on the phone she can pass herself off as a cheerful Dorijan. She often orders things under his name.

Facts: *She is a much better shot than her brother, but she really hates guns. *Like her brothers, She is Argentinian and Serbian. *She needs only 5 hours of sleep to function. *She loves spicy food. Sometimes she puts Ghost Peppers and Habaneros in her salads, and she still wants more spice. *Her DNA has more Crow in it, so like them she can’t forget a face, and she can almost mimic her brothers voices. *She absolutely loves her boyfriend, Alyosha and she is supportive of his transition. *She has never cursed in her life, except for one time when she called Mihajlo a “MF”.

#her eyes are so pretty #outstanding OCs #queue #submission