dainty-studies-blog

[dainty-studies-blog]

We need to get a little uncomfortable for a minute. But it's ok. You have to be uncomfortable in order to grow.

You're going to fail. You're going to disappoint people and yourself. You're going to have moments where you're so overwhelmed that you're curled in a ball crying and frustrated. You're going to miss important milestones. You're going to drop the ball so many times things seem impossible. You're going to fail. You're going to be mean. You're going to be a bad person at points. It's life. It happens. You just need to understand that it happens. And on those days where you want to dissappear and never be seen again because everything is too much, your brain is going to amplify all these faults and failures and make them seem worse.

Babe. We all go through this. We ALL fail. We ALL make awful choices and fuck people and ourselves over. We ALL will have moments where we are the villains. Where we completely fail a lot of people in our lives due to bad decisions. It will happen. Probably multiple times. What matters is that you recognize these things and make appropriate changes in your life to help make sure that next time isn't as bad. Maybe start learning time management so you're not stressed constantly and blowing up on everyone. Maybe find a healthy outlet like painting or the gym or cooking. Find small, simple joys to make life better. It's going to suck. You're going to be the bad guy. But that's not your entire life.

It's uncomfortable and hard to sit with. Sometimes things are your fault. Sometimes you make bad choices and they fuck your life up and fuck others over at the same time. It happens. You can't change the past, but you have the power to change your future. You can change your future. Talk to people. Find yourself outlets. Learn skills. Things get better, but they only do so if you put the effort for them to do so. I love you. You're trying. And that's all you can do. And one day you'll slip backwards and feel so defeated but when that happens, you'll have many tools to help you get even further. I promise babe everything will be ok.

[dainty-studies-blog]

July 9 2023 | ☀️

My entire TikTok feed is full of people decorating their kindles, and I caved. This gave me a serotonin boost.

[dainty-studies-blog]

Oh my god Wisconsin's governor just used a line item veto to secure school funding increases every year through 2425. He struck out a line so it now reads "through the 2023-2425 school year". He's allowed to do this lol

#strikethrough as a superpower #track change THIS

[dainty-studies-blog]

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

#ooo same same #jane austen is an awesome writer #but i only read them because they were required for lit class #Little Women though? at least 6 times because that's my jam #and bread and butter #22 total

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the top ones, are terrestrial crustaceans, ie have gills, require sufficiently watery air to breathe, etc while on the bottom, those are insects like you’d expect, and the two are NOT RELATED!

i love rollie pollies and evolution does too

#congloblate???? #thank you i love it

[dainty-studies-blog]

Its 2am

you know what that means

FROG TIME

#dr scherz would you accept @'s asks or submissions #on 'is the frog cute?' #that's a whole sideblog right there

[dainty-studies-blog]

Romantic academia:

Going on study dates to pretty libraries, fighting to find a seat next to each other.

On discord listening to them go through a powerpoint the night before their big presentation.

The Arts/Humanities one proof-reading the STEM one's motivation letters/long emails.

Reading through interesting research in bed together, sharing the one phone screen.

Alternating between who is the one making tea for the study session. (Bonus: matching study mugs)

Study breaks include marveling over some super niche knowledge acquired during the study session.

Emailing an article as a pdf, and titling the email "I thought you'd find this interesting :-)"

Celebrating together when a big assignment gets done. Setting a timer for a cuddle break when the assignment work gets too overwhelming.

Bonus: I'm a native Lithuanian speaker, and my bf really really likes the research done by a Lithuanian father-son duo. Before knowing they were related, he (with a straight face) asked me is 'Pyragas' a common last name. I laughed out loud and he was super confused, until I told him this word translates to Cake. No, Mr. Cake is not a common last name at all ahahha

#AHHHH THIS IS SO CUTE #forwarding articles and grants i think people will be interested in is my academic love language

[dainty-studies-blog]

Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

[dainty-studies-blog]

A scientific parody of Do you wanna build a snowman? from Disney’s Frozen. Lyrics by hyacynthus and myself. Vocals by me. A music video may be forthcoming.

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Just putting this out there to let people know to watch what they post because you can be found and if you think that the government can't do this ...

Well, you better think again!!

[dainty-studies-blog]

This video is so fucking good.

I feel like this is such a good video for holding someone's hand through understanding. not that anyone should have to have their hand held to be kind, but for people whose folks--without hand-holding--will not put in the effort to get it, this video existing will really help ease that burden by providing something that will do some of that work for them.

I particularly think it will be helpful to show people who are generally trans affirming, who intend to side with trans people on trans issues (would probably need the issue's existence & relationship to transness stated explicitly, but would support the 'trans rights' position once they realized the issue existed), but who do not really understand why. they would do it because they believe they should.*

*(which is great! so much better than many other people. BUT allying yourself with someone just because you feel socially that "you should" without having an analysis of why, can leave you so vulnerable to propaganda that preys on the areas where the bond of solidarity is only simple social pressure. Reactionaries can present a new explanation, that might convince you that, maybe, the social pressure around you is in the other direction. maybe the thing you "should" do socially, is to break the line of solidarity. They can manipulate people's perceptions of which side is the social good. If it's just social pressure holding you in solidarity, fash can EXERT social pressure and create social consequences. If it's not grounded in analysis & understanding how trans struggle aligns with your values, then the solidarity is just so vulnerable.)

With that said, reading through the comment section, it stunned me that there were actually some conservatives reconsidering their positions after watching, and that makes me wonder if for some (I still think this video will probably be most successful for getting cis liberals to just think a bit harder) it might serve as a first step de-radicalization tool.

(Dropping two example comments below the cut that really surprised me. I'm adding below the cut cause these are still deeply prejudiced people and you don't need to see it. but if you're curious, I wanted to add the screenshots. For anyone who doesn't want to read them, one example that just stunned me was a conservative who, by some grace of the normally fash-acceleration algorithm, was directed to this video after watching Matt Walsh's transmisogynist propaganda video, and is basically expressing that this video gave them enough perspective to make them question their assumptions and reminded them of trans people's humanity.

It's so hard to inspire even a little hiccup in bigoted thinking--especially after just having consumed a whole transphobia special-- & that this could do that even for just one person? genuinely impresses me as a piece of nonfiction art.)

[dainty-studies-blog]

[dainty-studies-blog]

Any tips or hacks on how to go about writing the introduction and the conclusion of an academic text? I have finished the body of the text but introductions and conclusions always stump me. The deadline isn't until october but I worry I will piss away the entire summer agonising over how to do this last damn thing.

The simplest advice is "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em."

I like to start from an extremely straightforward position on writing introductions and conclusions. I'm writing a paper now about the US healthcare system and my placeholder introduction paragraph is "The US Healthcare system is bad for X, Y, and Z reasons and should be changed." My placeholder conclusion is "Now that I have illustrated that the US Healthcare system is bad in X, Y, and Z, ways, I hope we have all learned something and take A, B, and C steps to change it."

Basically I write out the most basic thing I want to say in each paragraph and then embellish it. Sometimes this will actually lead to restructuring the paper a bit as I organize paragraphs to make sure that X, Y, and Z are in the proper order.

I have more trouble with conclusions than I do with almost any part of a project, but one of the things that has helped me with more academic-y texts is recognizing that if you've done your job properly the reader should know why you're making the argument you're making so you don't have to have a rabble-rousing, inspiring conclusion, you can functionally just say "Hope that clears things up! Here are the implications I want you to leave this paper with and my policy suggestions for the future."

Intros are a little easier for me because I just see them as scene setting. Treat it almost like an abstract, if that helps. "This paper is about this subject, here is my opinion on this subject, here is a brief summary of the evidence that supports my opinion on this subject. Here are some considerations to keep in mind, and here is why I think you should agree with my opinion."

Depending on the norms for the subject your intro can also include a brief history of the scholarship around that subject, biographical matter about a person under discussion, or a short explication of theory. I personally love multi-paragraph intros that spend a while getting me up to speed, but I also read literary criticism recreationally so I may be a bit biased. I would definitely say to find some field-specific papers that you liked and found useful to read and see how they constructed their introductions and conclusions and take some cues on structure from them. You can even go sentence-by-sentence and break down what each sentence is saying in the conclusion of a paper you liked ("As you can see from the previous paragraphs on SUBJECT, there is ample evidence of THESIS. We have responded to counter-arguments by addressing ISSUE and OTHER ISSUE. Our findings support THESIS, and you should agree for REASONS.")

Actually you know what that's my advice to everyone having trouble with intros and conclusions: find some intros and conclusions that you like and turn them into mad libs because that's basically what they are. That's a really good way to practice seeing what parts of your paper are unique (to fit into the blanks) and to figure out the structure of an academic intro or conclusion (the frustrating bit that is difficult to write).

[dainty-studies-blog]

dear stats class, thank you for finally actually being the thing to make me become proficient in excel because i am absolutely not calculating that shit by hand (correlation coefficient).

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watching news reels from early on in the COVID-19 pandemic in class and realizing that I still have a lot of trauma from it is not a fun time

#dainty-studies speaks #covid19 #covid #i am not emotionally prepared #gotta study it though #public health

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Heads up: If you consistently CANNOT do tasks unless they are at the “Must Happen Right Now” stage, then you have a disability. 

Most people CHOOSE to put stuff off sometimes, but abled people do not consistently feel UNABLE to complete tasks without threat of consequence.

Maybe it’s an executive dysfunction issue, maybe it’s fatigue, maybe it’s chronic pain– doesn’t matter why, what matters is acknowledging it so that you can move forward. Reach out to resources that are there to help disabled people! Ask for accommodations! They’re there FOR YOU, BECAUSE YOU NEED THEM! Understanding and accepting that you have the limitations you have, and learning what can be done about them, will lead to a much more fulfilling life which you absolutely deserve. 

[dainty-studies-blog]

Share reasons why if the tags if you feel like it

#glasses are fun #but not fun when smushed against your face while playing sports #hence the contacts