#i do not need to write a religious dissertation

[underwaterbanshee]

So I really feel like the first part of tonight's episode (fhjy 8) was a great reminder of what Cassandra went through as Galicaea's followers attempted to murder her the first time resulting in her transition into the Nightmare King. I wonder if that was when her partner was also murdered or if they did them dirty first just to see if they could.

Or if it was the other way around. I don't have a clear idea of when the Nightmare King happened, just when the demon was sealed into Lydia's chest and those could be three very separate and distinct events.

I personally believe Sol and Galicaea are at the very least complicit. It seems to me that while divinity can direct their domains, they are still influenced by their followers. And toxic followers can, at the very least, show up in toxic aspects of their gods? Maybe?

I may not care for Tracker's opinion and apology tour for Galicaea right now but I absolutely believe that the proverbial bitch in her lap is dangerous--not only to Tracker's goals, but to Kristen and Cassandra.

I cannot wait to learn more about Ravena, Lucy, and our Unnamed divinity. Also, let's meet some vultures, 'cause why not?

[monstersinthecosmos]

Little Drink as edging and MURDER as orgasming is the most mindbendingly hot and truthful parallel to ever be drawn. Just. Cannot get past it

 Yes, YES!!!

Like I know I’m Marius Brained and everything but even when I’m reading TVA and in Armand’s POV I am always like, god this must have been killing Marius. 🥵

The Devil’s Minion era (once they warm up to each other) and Venice Era are really the only times in canon we get to see a prolonged courtship between a vampire and human, yeah? But the books constantly tell us about how killing & drinking is the ultimate form of intimacy. (Notice me being very very mature and not devolving into an Asexual VC dissertation LMAO pin that for later). I’m not counting Lestat & David as a prolonged courtship because David was Not Interested and they weren’t sharing blood before Lestat finally turned him, and still David’s turning is explicitly described as rape and written to be erotic. But the overlap of Venice & Devil’s Minion is too obvious to ignore and we see the way the human/vampire relationship finds ways to translate their interspecies erotic desires by sharing sex acts (for the human) and blood (for the vampire).

STILL! 

The Little Drink isn’t all they need! Like they’re not just taking a little sip and fucking off for the night — Thorne describes it as being a bee going from flower to flower! Drinking from many many people! And the books tell us that it’s not ONLY the blood itself — it’s the murdering that’s the truly intimate and most special act!!!!! 

So anyway just.

Taking little sips for years and years ! The blue balls, my god. And finally getting to take him all the way!!!!!!! God. 🥵💦

Especially like reading B&G and knowing that Armand was like, Marius’s 3rd choice rebound during that time period LMAO. He wanted Botticelli and had to leave Florence to not kill him! He wanted Bianca and had to remove himself from her social circle to not kill her!!! 

This is my favorite Marius quote in VC, when he’s feeling like he’s going to murder Bianca — 

For a moment, I thought my powerful self-control would be lost. I would embrace her, whether or not she would have it, and take her rapidly by force from the very middle of her warm and safe rooms to the cold and fatal domain of my soul.

He finds Armand because he’s trying to like ethically source a fledgling (great job buddy that’s the worst anyone has ever done it) by choosing someone who’s on borrowed time, anyway! Blank slate that he can groom for vampirism!!!!!! 

I was just talking to @apoptoses today about how the concept of “this sounded cool until I actually tried it” comes up a bunch in VC — we were talking about Daniel romanticizing murder until he actually had to do it LOL — but same for Marius thinking he can just mold a trafficked boy to be a good vampire. So it’s not just like, Marius having a relationship with him and taking little sips as a fucking aperitif for The Act but like, he almost immediately changes his mind and doesn’t want to do it !!! He’s willing to deny himself !!! 

Gosh where’s that other thing he says in TVA…

“I’m coarsened by human blood. It's always the fact. Only in starvation do I find an ethereal purity.” "Ah, and you turn me from penance at every juncture," I said, "towards the senses, towards pleasure."

Just, oof. Especially for Marius who, from what we can tell, is a little more into humans than most of the cast? Like he’s someone that craves social connection and wants to be around them all the time. Even when he was alive and he was traveling to meet and study people in taverns. So I think there’s just a lot wrapped up in this ! 

I shared this a couple weeks ago but I wanna share it again because I think it will make everyone understand VC better and we’ll all write better fanfics for it LMAO it’s based on Hellraiser but it's the topic of eroticism in religious penance !!!!! Very excellent. 

But the eroticism of suffering! Of denial! Inside the universe of Written By Crazy Catholic Lady VC we also have to talk about how eroticism is the kill & the blood and how abstinence is akin to starvation - how it’s something actually painful.

Anyway I’m gonna leave it here I think because I’ll talk all day but I was poking through TVA and B&G for some quotes about this and I’m just !!!!!!

Marius on Armand:

I had never experienced such pure intimacy with a mortal, except with those I meant to kill. It gave me chills to have my arms around this boy, to press my lips to his cheeks and chin, his forehead, his tender closed eyes. Yes, the blood thirst rose, but I knew so well how to control it. I filled my nostrils with the smell of his youthful flesh.

"He is irresistible, but what am I to do?

Armand on Marius: 

"Amadeo," he said, his lips on my throat as they'd come a thousand times, only this time there came a sting, sharp, swift and gone. A thread stitched into my heart was jerked all of a sudden. I had become the thing between my legs, and was nothing but that. His mouth nestled against me, and again that thread snapped and again. I saw him staring, beastlike, from his chair, as if some ravener had come into him and banished all his civilized faculties and left him thus, hungry, with glazed eyes and reddening mouth, the glittering blood finding its myriad little paths over the silky margin of his lips. He rose, a drugged thing, and came towards me with a rhythm of movements that was alien and struck the coldest terror in my heart. His fingers flashed, closed, beckoned. I ran to him. He lifted me in both hands, clutching my arms ever so gently, and tucked his face against my neck. From the soles of my feet up my back through my arms and my neck and scalp, I felt it.

"Master, Master, Master, I love you." "Yes, well, that's not so unusual," he whispered. He didn't stop his kissing. He lapped at the blood. I writhed under the weight of his hand on my backside. "But the question is, Amadeo, why do I love you? Why? Why did I have to go into that stinking brothel and look upon you? I am strong by nature ... whatever my nature ..." He greedily kissed a large bruise on my thigh. I could feel his sucking at it, and then the tongue lapping it, eating the blood, and then his blood coming down into it.

And this from TVA when he finally does it:

He bent his lips. A sense of dreadful awesome finality swept over me. "You will die now to be with me in life eternal," he whispered in my ear. "Never for a moment must you really fear. I will hold your heart safe in my hands." His teeth cut into me, deeply, cruelly with the precision of twin daggers, and I heard my heart thud in my ears. My very bowels contracted, and my stomach was knotted in pain. Yet a savage pleasure swept through all my veins, a pleasure which coursed towards the wounds in my neck. I could feel my blood rush towards my Master, towards his thirst and my inevitable death. Even my hands were transfixed with vibrant sensation. Indeed, I seemed suddenly to be but a puppet map of circuitry, all of it aglow, as with a low, obvious and deliberate sound, my Master drank my life's blood. The sound of his heart, slow, steady, a deep reverberating pounding, filled my ears. The pain in my intestines was alchemized to a soft sheer rapture; my body lost all weight, all knowledge of itself in space. The throb of his heart was within me. My hands felt the long satin locks of his hair, but I did not hold to them. I floated, supported only by the insistent heartbeat and thrilling current of all my swiftly flowing blood. "I die now," I whispered. This ecstasy could not endure.

(What’s also funny is that the turning from Marius’s POV is so much about Armand’s religious ecstasy and revelations - thanks Catholic Lady but also that’s whole eroticism-mysticism thing again. Also the way that Marius treats it like a wedding so. Jsdkgla.)

I’m going to be so fucking honest with you, I was gonna pull a bunch of quotes and I think there were some more I was gonna look up but I got a little too squirmy reading these ones 🥵🥵🥵🥵 dhjkadslg I THINK I’VE MADE MY POINT.

[ihatecoconut]

*asks about your research*

loudly panicking bc that post got way more response than i was expecting

so! in preparation for my dissertation next year (in theory. i may end up changing my mind completely before then) I have been looking at how child labor has been written about by historians, with a focus on newsboys as the most 'visible' form of this labor.

It's actually a really interesting shift, because the starting historiography, from the early to mid 1900s, is highly focused on the reform efforts of groups like the Children's Aid Society. these take very moralistic tones, focusing on 'saving' the children from their conditions, placing emphasis on harsh working and living conditions, and (notably) do not include first-hand account from any newsies or adults who used to be newsies.

now. this changes in the 1960s (ish) with the rise of social history in academic circles, which encourages research from the 'bottom up' rather than 'top down' narratives, which were common previously and tended to prioritise documents from governments/politicians/reform groups. so we see a shift in scholarship from victim-focused narratives to exploring children as active participants in labor, and a recognition of child labor as a subculture with its own norms and practices.

this is the point at which we start to see accounts from adults who used to be newsies starting to appear - these, however, are not unproblematic. they tend to be autobiographies from adults who have since 'made it' in the world and risen to a certain level of fame - obviously enough to be writing autobiographies, although the sections addressing their lives as newsies can be very small parts of the whole. And they are all written retrospectively, as well as being written for an audience, so their reliability is not necessarily perfect.

more recently, scholarship has begun to address this in more detail, starting to look at how we can tease out the stories of the newsies who did not leave a paper trail. in many cases this is through photographs (jacob riis' in particular) and through records like lodging houses in which we may not be able to see their opinions of their lives, but we can see their movements and how they lived their lives.

as a whole, it's a very underrepresented area of history that is not often studied, however that is beginning to change. The continuing rise of social and cultural histories has introduced intersectional analyses of child labor, emphasizing how gender, race, and ethnicity shaped labor experiences. newsgirls in particular are starting to be studied in more detail, with some scholars finding the differences in their lives to their male counterparts.

but. there is still so much to be studied, so many stones unturned, we could look at the racial and religious dynamics within the newsie workforce and how social anxieties about race and immigration effected them. we could look at a longitudinal study - finding a few case studies and tracing them (as far as is possible) through time, investigating their long-term social and economic trajectories to understand the impact working as children had on their lives.

personally, i think that we also need historians to look at newsies the musical as a legitimate form of public history and how it introduces people to this under-explored area of history. and also why the musical was made in the first place when you consider how neglected this area is. there also needs to be an intersection with media history - after all, up until radio became a thing, there was a very long stretch of time where the only way to receive news was through the newspaper or through hearing other people read the headlines, and where were you likely to get both of these things? from the kids on the streets selling the papers.

in conclusion. newsies are an incredibly important area of history that has not been studied, partially because it is difficult to study the history of people who do not leave paper trails, but also because child labor has only recently started to be seen as a legitimate area for study. thank you for your time.

📰📰📰📰📰

v quick tag of everyone else who asked!! @i-got-poisenality @lalarose216 @blue5rose @make-friends-with-the-rats

thank you all for asking!!!!

[idontmindifuforgetme]

i saw ur post on how there isnt rlly a big arab figure, and wow like. i think that if i had been younger and saw just one or two arab people on tv in a positive way, it would have helped me a LOT. like yeah. There ISNT a big singer or character or actor or model that’s arab. And now im sitting here wondering how many kids are going to be sitting and watching tv and just blocking out their arab heritage and culture because then they wouldnt be like their favorite singer or wtver.

Exactly. Exactly exactly exactly. I’ve full chest said this before, but I wasn’t always as attached to my Arab heritage as I am now. I actually grew up pretty distant from it all around, and it’s only in recent years that I started making a concerted effort to delve into it. And I can’t even blame it on my mom tbh, like I grew up in a lax household that allowed for ample self-expression. It was always the outside world that would make a little Arab girl like me question the worth of her ethnic roots—especially when Arabs are painted as terrorists at worst and as monocultural heathens at best where I’m from (hint: the USA). There is so much to unpack w being raised American but being ethnically Iraqi!! Because that means I literally hail from two countries!! A country that’s thirsty and a country that’s on fire!! But that’s a whole other loaded topic I could write a separate dissertation on.

I’d always have toxic thought loops like “I don’t look Arab enough” “I’m not religious but all the Arab girls I know are Muslim” on and on and on. And like I said in that ask, there was never an Arab American A lister for me to kind of have a frame of reference w. This is specifically an Arab issue too I feel like, bc a lot of brown people do have that star-studded figure to look up to growing up. We do not.

It’s kind of why I decided to be that for myself. I don’t need a cool Arab girl celebrity who’s into fashion or music. I’ll be that. I don’t need an Arab academia girl character. I’ll be that too. There’s no such thing as not looking Arab enough bc Arabs are so diverse. It’s okay that I’m not religious bc Arab culture is not solely defined by religion, and even if it were Arabs are not a hive mind and everyone engages w their culture in vastly different ways (which is okay!! It doesn’t make me any less Arab). I’ll literally just discard other people’s preconceived notions and trailblaze my own path!! I’ll be my own Arab girl representation. I refuse to fit myself into any preexisting mold. I like what I like and the rest just falls into place.

I think that’s why I’ve been so vocal about my Iraqi heritage lately… I’m literally healing my relationship w my roots in real time. Even advocating for Palestine is feeding into that in major ways. It’s legit all coming together for the first time in my life. Now I’m so proud to be Arab—to be Iraqi—that the idea that anyone could shame me for it is as incredulous as it is hilarious. Iraq is literally called the Cradle of Civilization & you want to make me feel BAD for being Arab… for being Iraqi… it’s just impossible bc I can’t imagine myself being anything else. I’m so content to have my multicultural background and to be who I am. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

It’s also cool that I have people following me, that they could also be exposed to diverse facets of Arab culture bc of that, but tbh a lot of this is also purely for me. I want the Iraq tag to be flooded w beautiful Iraqi poetry and beautiful Iraqi art and beautiful Iraqi cinema as I familiarize myself w Iraqi culture more and more, bc there’s so much more to it than the Iraqi War stats that pop up when you look it up on here.

I’m a 21 year old girl AND I’m Arab. That’s literally double the self-discovery to work through. Fortunately I think I’m finally cultivating a strong sense of self, so I really don’t think anything anyone has to say could deter me from my path (whether it be in terms of reconnecting w the beauty of my Arab heritage or legit just growing into my own). It’s not always perfect by any means, but I’ve made so much headway. And absolutely nothing could take away from that.

[aritany]

what's the origin story for dgdss? if you don't mind 🥺

oho! well. as it happens, i love telling this story.

if you want to know how my childhood best friend writing a short story about me ended up leading to me getting a big 5 book deal, read on.

tw for reference to self harm and some...... unpleasant commentary (not mine) about it later on, folks.

so.

i was homeschooled until my very last year of high school (yes, like mean girls, except my mean girl dominated the first 15 years of my life and that last year was just blissfully chill) and like many homeschooled children, i was a part of a co-op.

cool, right? it's like School Lite™ where you put a group of feral children in a classroom, except you're all varying ages and grade levels, and also, nobody in the room is an accredited teacher, and nobody seems to have an issue with this.

my mom and her mom were best friends, and we were born around the same time, so naturally, we were best friends too from birth, and we were part of the same co-op all through my elementary and junior high school years.

anyway. i won't air all of the dirty laundry regarding our early friendship, because the whole book deal thing doesn't touch it, and i also think there's no need to be pointing out the behaviour of an Actual Child in retrospect. all you need to know is that we were best friends, our relationship was fraught, and by the time we hit 12-13 it was to the degree that people started telling me, hey man, this is Very Strange Behaviour and You Might Be A Victim, and i had to go do some introspection.

the introspection led to the general conclusion oh shit, but we stayed friends, because obviously. when you're 13, breaking up with a best friend is literally The End of the world, and anyway, there was a lot of good in there too, right?

right?

anyway, things took a turn when we were about 14. i struggled heavily with mental illness and self harm as a closeted religious teenager (who'da thunk?) and i confided in her about a small fraction of what was going on, because she was my best friend. i didn't tell her details, because even then i knew what i was experiencing was heavier than was probably appropriate to burden another kid with (and i stand by it!), but she knew the gist.

several Tense moments resulted, one of which was the day she pointed out self harm scarring in front of other people and asked me what happened, ran away, and refused to talk further about it, so i had to talk to her mom, who told me i should apologize to her, considering my mental health struggle had been so difficult... for her.

yeah, you know the type of people we're dealing with, here.

she was determined to undermine me in front of our mutual friends. anything to make me look worse, in one way or another. anything to step just a little higher. if i was interested in something, here's a public dissertation on why it's a dumb thing to be interested in. if i had a crush, forget keeping it a secret, and forget the notion that it's normal, because it's not, it's stupid, and shallow to have a crush in the first place. if we had a similar interest, here's a dressing down about how all i ever do is steal the things she likes (even if i liked them first).

needless to say, by the time the whole deal with the short story is going down a few short years later, we're on the rocks.

let me set the scene. we hadn't seen each other in several months, due to the On The Rocks of it all, and were meeting up for coffee while our moms were also getting coffee. hashtag classic homeschooled behavior, etc.

we're catching up, and she tells me she needs to apologize for something. i am, as you might imagine, agog, considering the rarity of apologies from this girl. she tells me she wrote a short story and submitted it to her university journal to be published, and that in hindsight she thinks she should have asked for my permission first.

i am, obviously, suspicious. to her credit, she gives it to me to read through and then leaves to go do christmas shopping. it's a muddy-ish faux-deep piece about a narrator who has a best friend struggling with mental illness and self harm.

(oh, you might say. to which i say, yeeeeah.)

in the story, the narrator depicts the struggle of trying to care about somebody who is in pain, referring to the best friend as 'cariad' the whole way through, which is just so weird i'm not even going to touch on it. google it if you'd like. the line that i still remember (and will probably remember until the day i die) is the one where she describes her cariad as feeling the need to use a razor as a microphone.

i honestly don't recall what i said when she eventually came back, but i contained all of the aggression of a piece of pocket lint at the time, so i imagine it was along the lines of oh. yeah, okay. [insert image of the saddest wettest cat you've ever seen]

i never saw her again. we went our separate ways, and that was that. we never talked about it.

(the one upside of it was that my mom, with whom i have a Notoriously Contentious relationship, was outraged on my behalf. that was the first (in many years) and last (ever) time we were on the same side of a battle, so, you know. silver linings.)

but the real indignity of it to me was that my friend never really knew. i never really told her about what was happening in my head. she never knew why i was hurting myself, or how bad it got, because i did everything i could to keep that to myself, and at the end of the day, she thought it was all for attention to the degree she wrote a transparently biographical account of it and chose razor as a microphone as a phrase on purpose.

dead girls started as a way to process the complicated feelings i had about that friendship and then obviously ultimately became a whole different creature in the process. i wanted to write about how it felt to go through that never having had another close friendship to compare it to, and how confusing and nauseating it was to have other people point out shitty behaviour.

it became about healing when you can't get closure. how do you move on when you'll never know why somebody hurt you?

nothing that happens in the book is based on real life events between us, partly because i'm not a hypocrite, and partly because if your work can be traced back to your personal experiences, perhaps you should do what you can to be kind.

'my julia,' as i like to call her (she is not named julia, because, oh my god) is nothing like julia hoskins in appearance or general personality. but the way she made me feel? oh, that's all there. nora feels it the way i felt it.

i wrote dead girls back in 2020, and got agented with it in 3 weeks of sending my first query. we got a book deal for it with a penguin random house imprint 1 year later to the day, and next week it's going to be out in the world, and i'm not going to lie, it feels really damn good.

also, her short story got rejected by her university, because it was bad. so you might lose some, but you win some, too.

[ghnosis]

behind the scenes ghesis

I think I actually ended up interviewing 115 people, but the numbers go up to 120 bc some people were assigned numbers before they withdrew (there's no Nameless Ghoul 63, for example).

I have finished initial coding up to NG65!

if I manage to code 2 a day, on business days only, I'll be done with initial coding Feb 7th.

religious trauma is coming up as a theme WAY more than I originally expected, which is super cool! it also means I need to read more theory loollllll that's a problem for February Rose

the plan as it stands now is to complete initial coding, go back to writing my methodology and lit review chapters, then come back to coding in the spring with "fresh" eyes and do second-round coding. writing my methodology chapter will help prep me for that, I've been reading methodology stuff sort of piecemeal as it comes up.

a few people at the christmas eve party asked me how the dissertation is going and it's so hard to give a bite-size, polite, small talk answer. "I'm coding interviews" doesn't mean anything to anyone really. all I can say is I'm doing it one bite at a time.

[fachefaucheux]

WriteFest! // Day 1 + Goals

It’s that magical time of year again! You know, the one where amateur writers all across the internet take on stupidly ambitious word count goals and drive themselves batty trying to reach them. I am no exception.

I’ve been doing word count goal challenges during the last two months of the year off and on since 2001 (really dating myself here, eh?). And despite all the terrible business that’s been going on with the most infamous one, I’m not going to quit a two-decade long habit just because other people are asshats. 

The OG Word Count Challenge helped me write my first “novel” Way Back In the Day, actually. That story was a bizarre fever dream about a guy who found a nuclear warhead in the supply closet of the care home he was working in…and getting rid of it required him to go undercover as vicar and infiltrate MI6??? Obviously, that didn’t end up going anywhere. But you can see glimmers of the same tried-and-true plot devices in it that I’ve been using ever since: a mix of action and humor, the fantastic and bizarre, shady con men pretending to be religious authority figures. (I don’t know why fake priests seem to be a running theme across my stories. I blame Catholic grade school and an overactive imagination.)

Since I tend to favor quantity over quality, I’ve escalated over the years to usually setting my word count goal for November at the 100k mark. But this year, I’ve been confronted with a challenge too insane for me to resist! I do a lot of my drafting on a website called 4thewords that I discovered nearly two years ago (great site, tbh, I highly recommend it to anyone who is more productive when they gamify their life), and this year, they’ve raised the challenge bar to a whole other level. For this year’s WriteFest, the top goal is to write 250k in 44 days. That’s roughly 5,700 words a day, for those of you who don’t feel like whipping out your calculator app.

So, of course, I had to do it.

Is this a good idea? Probably not. Am I still going to try my hardest? You’re goddamn right.

But I am cheating juuuuuust a little. I’m not doing it all on one WIP. This year, I’ll be working on completing Mushroom Picking Season (maybe 20k left? hopefully), the first volume of Canticle (if there’s more than 200k left on that, I’m totally cooked), and making a pitiful attempt at pushing my dissertation to the 25k mark, which is about halfway. (Yes! I do stuff other than write gay shit! My dissertation contains no gay lunatics, sadly. But it does contain an overabundance of (yugo)slavs.) Tally all those up, and you’ve got the 250k, with some wiggle room for just writing some unhinged smut to pad the total when I’m too tired to write anything semi-coherent.

As tradition dictates, I started on November 1st. Not at midnight, because I’m old and decrepit. But at six in the morning. And the results are in!

Day one, done and dusted. Total words: 8,226. For a brief moment, I’m ahead! Only 241,774 to go!

Of course, it’s the second now that I’m posting this. Once again, at six in the morning. I think I’ll try to snag another couple hours of rest before charging into the breach once more. Today’s goal is at least 6,000 words. But probably more, since I owe ya’ll an installment of Niv/Yule hijinks on Sunday. If I get really ahead this weekend, maybe I can even take a very small breather sometime this coming week. (I’m going to need it. For Reasons.)

Stay tuned to see how fast this project goes off the rails! (And snag a sneak peak at some writing snippets, if I’m feeling ambitious.)

[witches-pierre]

I recently have been getting back into divination and witchcraft as a means to try and unpack my rampant religious trauma. It’s been… a struggle to say the least. Some days are better than others, some days I get filled with an intense anxiety that maybe the god of my old religion will turn my life to hell for even daring to consider anything else.

But I now that’s not true; and that along with so many other ideas are so unhealthy.

That little dissertation out of the way; here’s a list of things I did recently that I’m proud of myself for doing. Cause we all need to be proud of ourselves from time to time; especially when dealing with trauma:

• Number one biggest thing! I’ve started doing shadow work! I’ve started to work through identifying my different triggers and it’s challenging to say the least. While I won’t get into it here let’s just say I’m not in the most accepting environment atm. So while I’m working to move out I’m hoping shadow work will allow me the mental clarity to survive just a little longer.

• I’ve managed to record my tarot readings somewhat often; sure maybe the longest I’ve gone is about 4 weeks between them but the fact that I had able to do it at least twice in one month is incredible by my standards! 

• Speaking of tarot; recently I’ve started to get better at interpreting the meaning of the cards outside of using books. I have about 3 tarot books that I read the meaning of my cards from (I like to get multiple perspectives) and recently started interpreting the cards myself, writing it down what I got and THEN consulting my books. More often than not my interpretations tend to lineup with the books. This is uber exciting for me since I have terrible memory and the fact it’s starting to stick makes me hopeful!

• I made my first oil; that being rose oil! And it’s been three months and it hasn’t gone moldy!! (Another incredible thing by my standards!)

• I made my first spell jar! (A protection jar of course) I usually stay within the realms of Knot magick, but I wanted to push myself a little further. I’ve spent months watching videos and reading books (both witchy and practical) about different herbs and ingredients used in this kind of spell work. Now the finished thing sits nicely in the corner of my room hidden from prying eyes.

• I figured out how to make my grimoire aesthetic looking! The key is, you don’t!

Well I mean, let me explain. I realized that the overwhelming pressure of making my writing look good was… overwhelming. So instead I use an old animal crossing themed notebook I got for my birthday. It takes a lot of the pressure off.

And I know what your thinking; Pierre that’s not really a solution! All the witch influencers always say that and then still have amazing looking grimoires anyway!!!

Well yeah; but here’s the kicker, that shitty little notebook that’s an unorganized mess where all your ideas go; that’s your working grimoire.

Think of it like a sketchbook; a place where all your incomplete thoughts and scribbles go. It’s okay to have it look messy cause it’s you learning. Write down work in progress spells; ideas, and the like.

That way when you come up with a spell that has results; or you feel like you’ve studied and gathered enough information on a topic; you comb over that information in that crappy little book; take the valuable bits and then take the time to put them in pretty little book.

I ramble to much about it already; maybe I’ll make a whole separate post on it. And if did it will be linked here

Feel free to join in with your list in the comments!

[imanes]

hi imane! i hope ur doing well <3 i just wanted to ask: what do you do during times of uncertainty? im a uni student abt to go on placement and I've been applying for part-time jobs that's centred around my field but to no avail sadly :/ i wanted to save up at least so i wouldn't stress during placement and everything's so overwhelming.. there are other external factors that's making me feel this way too like a friendship break-up i had few months ago and its affected me quite badly but im starting to pick myself up again. anyways sorry for the rant and i hope ur day is lovely x

hey! just sat down after hours of procrastination to work on my dissertation and i wish i were done already akjdkfgj but it could be worse!! ok it's gonna be long and probs unhelpful but i know that you wanted to vent more than you thought i was holding some solution so I'll just ramble and hope something resonates with you lmao <3

for me uncertainty makes me feel like my life is in shambles, it's hard to cope with things going south and not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel but during my yearly flop era in march/april i had a talk with a friend who's much older, wiser, and more experimented, and basically it helped me put things into perspective and learn how to let go. there are only so many things that you can control so i split my different issues into different categories for a more systemic approach to my problems lol: things that i can actually somewhat control (my emotions, my reactions, my efforts, what i can do moving forward to alleviate some of my stress), things that are out of my control (how people misconstrue me, external stressors like shitty coworkers, refusals from jobs i was applying for) and things (and people) that i don't need in my life. learning to let go of things for me internationally infamous control freak was not easy but it was liberating, idk if you're religious so if you aren't the next part isn't going to be helpful lol but i don't think i should be chasing things because i am exactly where i am meant to be, and if i start clutching at the things that aren't meant to be in my life, it's just my ego getting in the way, and i prayed that Allah just lets me find the place that i would fit better in and that He'd take me away from it if i wasn't going to be doing or feeling good there. i guess the non-religious version would just be to trust the process and understand that things in life wax and wane, whether it be job opportunities or relationships. obviously there's like a plethora of other factors like what do i do if i can't pay the bills and stuff? that was how i was thinking just a couple of months ago when my dissertation was not writing itself and nobody was hiring me! but a few weeks have passed and looking back on it i was starting to chase things again and it made me feel like i was stuck in a rut when in fact it's normal for things to take some time to settle down and for opportunities to arrive.

so basically whether you stress about it or not, literally nothing is going to change except the way you frame it in your head. for me i just continued applying and gave interviews my all while also being detached enough to simply trust myself to find the space that i was meant to occupy eventually, and after many many many rejections i finally found something a week ago, but it took a couple of months of steady job application to get there. looking from the other side of the mirror it's easy to say things like "don't get discouraged!" but it is true that if you keep throwing shit at a wall something's going to eventually stick, hence the power of consistency and of never giving up.

i'm glad you're slowly building yourself back up after your friendship break-up, i know how much it can drag you down but again some people are meant to be with you for a season only and at the end of the day with the effect of time making things more bearable and by working on your self-esteem and knowing that you can do things that you set your mind to, whether it is finding a part-time job or picking yourself back up, in a few weeks you're gonna look back on where you were mentally at when you sent me this message and where you'll be then and you'll thing "well i guess things DO pass huh who would've thought!!" lol life is a cycle of stability and unsteadiness, doesn't matter how much you prepare something's always going to go sideways but another truth is that things fall back into place again and you have to have faith in that, in yourself, and maybe in something else like i am w/ my relation to religion if u need extra help. speaking of help if you have a support system, confide in them and let them carry some of that weight for you!! you'd do the same for them so don't feel like you're a burden for needing help when you are facing instability. wishing you the best of luck and i really hope you find a good part-time job before your placement babe

[ettelwenailinon]

Tag game to better know you

I was tagged by @b1uetrees, thank you!! thank you ☺️💚💚💚

what book are you currently reading?

uuuuuuhhhh many books relating to my dissertation, one that has been very enjoyable and well written that I want to finish after is jacobites: a new history of the '45 rebellion. from fiction books I've been reading the song of achilles since last september, I'm Busy okay 😭

what’s your favorite movie you saw in theaters this year?

I have not been to a cinema in years 😂 but I am going to go and see the barbie movie after my deadlines dtcgtbzh

what do you usually wear?

a shirt (the puffier the sleeves the better), a big skirt, kneehigh stockings, potentially some sort of vesr

how tall are you

recently got measured and 159 cm, 5'2.5'', short king ✌️

what’s your star sign? do you share a birthday with a celebrity or a historical event?

aquarius!! and I had no idea but apparently I share my birthday with lord byron 👀 (probably where my love for puffy sleeves comes from)

do you go by your name or a nickname?

I go by a domestic version of my name as my legal name is too long and I hate it dftgzgzgz

did you grow up to become what you wanted to be when you were a child?

there's always work to be done but I'm happy where I am :)

are you in a relationship? if not, who is your crush if you have one?

@uighean is my girlfriend and we're getting ever so closer to finally live together!! ❤️

what’s something you’re good at vs something you’re bad at?

uuuuuuhhhh good at art (maybe) and bad at. sports. and maths. and breathing.

dogs or cats?

I love both but to have, cats

if  you draw/write, or create in any way, what’s your favorite  picture/favorite line/favorite etc. from something you created this  year?

honestly all the work I've done on my dissertation so far but I can't post it here because I want to keep my professional and private life separate and I do not need people finding my tumblr where I can just be a freak dkfkdkkdk

in terms of fanart, probably this one

what is something that you’d like to create content for?

I mean. beyond evil, when I have the time 😭

what’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

my dissertation and the meow meow from my histories to the point that I tried to find historical rpf do not @ me

what’s something you were excited about that turned out to be disappointing this year?

when I was supposed to go to a museum to take photographs of an object for my dissertation but the day prior I got a message from them that they can't open the safety case it's in, resulting in me loosing £45 because it was too late to cancel the bus and then it took them a month to get a locksmith and they didn't even manage to open it but I was waiting and was stuck with my work 🤡

what’s a hidden talent of yours?

well, it's called hidden for a reason 😅

are you religious?

not in an existing religion sort of way though I was raised casually catholic

what’s something you wish to have at this moment?

money, a place to live with my girlfriend and a phd position with a full scholarship or my dream job dftvttvvyvyyh

and I tag @uighean , @doctor-punkenstein , @hanjuwonsupporter , @fire-burning-brighter , @tiffanylamps and anyone else who wants to do this, no pressure 💜

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ryan Burge

Published: 26 Jan, 2024

One of the most challenging aspects of this job appears simple to those who haven't done it before: crafting survey questions. It’s such an impossible task, especially when you are trying to develop new measures that haven’t been used before in other surveys. To put this in some context, I met with a team of three graduate assistants every other week for an hour for the entire Fall semester just to get a survey in shape to be rolled out to a select group of early reviewers. Sending out that first draft is nerve-wracking because you know that many aspects won't work and will need adjustments or removal. It's akin to typing into a Google Doc, and a collaborator logs in, leaving you feeling vulnerable.

Over Christmas break, I had sent the test link out to some folks that I really trust and I know that they will provide some excellent feedback. I was not disappointed. Our research team met earlier this week to review the feedback and make some changes; we all agreed that this moved us closer to a finished product.

But there’s one comment that I received that I have been thinking about a lot. There's a section of the survey that inquires about spirituality and spiritual practices. Most reviewers had the same critique: they wished for a clear definition of spirituality within the survey. I get that impulse. I really do. But, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that for a simple reason: 

I don’t know that our team could write a definition of spirituality that most people would agree with. It’s very much “in the eye of the beholder.” 

However, I may actually understand spirituality a bit better now thanks to some recent data posted on the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) that was funded by the Fetzer Institute. The National Religion and Spirituality Survey, conducted in late 2022 with a total sample size of 3,651, provided valuable insights into how people perceive the words 'religious' and 'spiritual’.

I know it’s a cliche when I write this, but in this case it’s true: I honestly understand the world a little bit better after doing this data work. It absolutely sharpens my understanding of the religious/spiritual world and how the average person relates to both those concepts. 

There was a question battery at the beginning of the survey that listed a whole bunch of terms (13 in total) and folks were asked if that word described spirituality to them. Then they were given the same list of terms and asked if those described religion to them. It offers a peek behind the curtain of how these words are understood in the general population. 

The general consensus that emerges is that people tend to associate many words with spirituality, but fewer terms describe religion. For example, eight of these terms clearly describe spirituality more than they describe religion: clarity, inspiration, love, peace, purpose, transcendence, transformation, and wonder. And in many cases the percentage difference between religion and spirituality is pretty large. It’s thirteen points for peace (68% vs 53%). It’s eight points for love (55% vs 47%) and seven points for inspiration and clarity. The most chosen terms here are peace, love, and inspiration. 

In contrast, there are only a few terms clearly associated with religion: belonging (35% vs. 29%), structure (32% vs. 22%), and values (51% vs. 47%). Eight for spirituality and three for religion. The words that are most likely to be associated with religion are peace, values, and love. Only 17% of folks say that transformation and wonder describe religion, just 12% say that transcendence is a part of religion. I feel like there’s an entire dissertation to be written about that. 

But how do religion and spirituality work together? Folks were asked, “How spiritual are you?” and then were asked, “How religious are you?” They were given four response options ranging from “not at all” to “very.” What I think is fascinating is the result when you put those two questions into a heat map. 

Just 9% of the population identified as both very religious and very spiritual. The most common response was that they were both moderately spiritual and moderately religious, with 23% in that category. In contrast, 12% of the sample said that they were not at all religious and not at all spiritual. Clearly the diagonal line across the middle of the heat map was where most people found themselves - these four squares represent 56% of the sample. 

Only .2% of folks said that they were very religious but not at all spiritual. In contrast, 3.2% were very spiritual but not at all religious. One throughline that I see is that there are lots of people who are not religious but somewhat spiritual, but the opposite is much less prevalent. Almost everyone who says that they are religious also says that they are moderately or very spiritual. It’s almost like spirituality doesn’t need religion but spirituality is an essential part of religion.  

One question I had when I started looking through these questions was: are young people more likely to embrace spirituality and reject religion? And are older folks more attracted to religion and less to spirituality? There’s a decent sample size here so I can answer these questions. 

Among the youngest adults, slightly less than half claimed to be moderately or very spiritual, while the share for religion was about ten percentage points lower. These trends remained relatively stable from ages 18 to 40, with a persistent ten-point gap. But then both lines began to slowly drift upwards among those in their forties and fifties. The share who say that they are moderately/very spiritual moves up to about 50% around 50 years old. There’s also an upward movement among those who say the same about religion.

But then the lines basically flatten off again - from 55 years old all the way to 75 years old. Even among the oldest Americans, spirituality is embraced more than religion. Among those who are 70 years old about two-thirds say that they are moderately/very spiritual and around 55% say they are moderately/very religious. So, spirituality is clearly more popular across the board. And it’s really fascinating how that gap is basically the same size across the entire age spectrum. 

I wanted to end this piece by analyzing a series of questions about whether spirituality or religion has any bearing on how people act in the real world. For instance, folks were asked how much they agreed with this statement, “My <Religion or Spirituality> Impacts My Political Views.” Response options ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. 

Just 13% of people strongly agreed that religion impacted their political views, while it was 16% for spirituality. Thirty-eight percent agreed that spirituality influenced their political views, compared to 30% for religion. Folks were 21 points more likely to strongly disagree with the statement “religion impacts my political views” than strongly agree. That’s not a small difference. For the spirituality question the difference was only ten points (26% vs 16%). 

But, how about their political activity like protesting, attending campaign events, etc? The same kind of gaps emerge here, too. 

The most common response for the statement, 'My Religion Impacts My Political Activity,' was strongly disagree at 37%, with only 10% strongly agreeing. In total, people were twice as likely to disagree as to agree (47% vs 24%). Spirituality fares just a bit better. Nearly a third of the sample agreed that their spirituality impacted their political activity while 37% disagreed. But big chunks of the sample neither agreed nor disagreed with each statement. It just doesn’t feel like religion or spirituality are motivating folks to get engaged in the political process. 

I wanted to show you all one more question that used this format, but this time it was the impact of spirituality or religion on civic engagement which is activities like volunteering their time for a nonprofit or donating to charity. 

Again, a similar pattern emerges, with spirituality driving civic engagement more than religion. In terms of religion, 28% said it drove their civic engagement, while for spirituality, it was 34%. A third of the sample strongly disagreed that religion drove their volunteerism, it was only 25% who said the same thing about their spirituality. Across the board, it’s spirituality that seems to be doing more work than religion. 

There’s a belief out there that spirituality tends to be more selfish than religion. For instance, things like meditation and yoga are more individualistic practices. Meanwhile, religious practices (especially corporate worship) are outwardly focused toward engaging not only with the rest of the religious body but also the community at large. 

But in a great paper published in 2022, Jaime Kucinskas and Evan Stewart tested this hypothesis and what they found largely comports with what I just showed you in the last three graphs. Spirituality is not necessarily selfish. Instead, they argue for what they call, “substituting spirituality.” They describe it this way, “spiritual practice (works) as a substitute for religious engagement among groups alienated from religious institutions, with the former capable of fostering similar proclivities for political action as the latter.” 

I think almost everyone in the United States has heard the term Religious Right, but that seems to be anachronistic given the changing spiritual landscape of the 21st century. It’s not religion that drives political engagement, it’s spirituality. 

==

An obvious question needs to be, "what is the point of religion, then?"

[adrianastrix]

Another thing I'll add here is something that I was coincidentally discussing with a friend yesterday: this kind of issue can only be solved if our science education (and I'm talking BOTH Natural Sciences and Humanities) doesn't rely on teachers being simply a source of "correct" information.

I put "correct" in quotes because guys. GUYS. I was in a comitee for quality control of kids science textbooks (ages 11-14), and Jesus Christ. It was a book written in the Year of Our Lord 2022 and it had a SLUR as an "alternative name" to Down Syndrome. Not to mention information that was BLATANT WRONG when you as much as googled the legal definition of a certain thing, and much much more. We obviously bombed it, but there's the kicker: the only thing our ban ensured is that this textbook collection is out of question for Brazilian public schools. Private schools can use it, if they want to.

Which means that even schools can and, as much as we try, will spread misinformation, even if it's in a small scale. The teacher in the Twitter thread very astutely identified it as a crisis of authority. If education is just a matter of relaying "correct facts", it all comes down to a matter of authority. And the poor teacher feels hopeless because she can't even say, in good faith, that her word is inherently better than ChatGPT or Wikipedia or TikTok because, guess what, she could be wrong. There's no such thing as infallible authority.

There's only one solution, one that Education Scientists (which ARE a thing, I'm one of them!) have been saying since, I dunno, THE 18TH CENTURY: giving kids an education centered in DOING science, not memorizing its products. The teacher started amazingly by asking the kid to "look it up" in front of her. But what she COULD have done, if prepared for this kind of challenge (I obviously don't fault her for freezing when confronted by something for the first time) was to ask for the notebook or cellphone and show the student what she meant by "look it up" and how the results vary. And tell him that NO single source should be trusted, either her or ChatGPT, and when sources disagree, what should be the tiebreaker?

In other words, the only antidote is showing the kids HOW science is done, HOW you arrive at conclusions, and HOW documental research is done. Science isn't something that Very Smart Geniuses do in their ivory towers to create The Truth. It's science, not a sacred religious ministery. Science is mundane, messy, controversial, and everyone* can do it with a bit of training, just like everyone* can cook or sing or draw with the proper training. [*"everyone", of course, being a rethorical generalization; obviously there are circunstances in which people might NOT be able to do it, or might need especialized assistance that others don't need, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.]

The main reason why our education is stuck in memorization and trying to out-authority the internet has a name: Standard Testing.

It's LEAGUES easier to test for how many facts someone can spew exclusively from memory (you just need a multiple choice test that can be graded by a machine) than it is to test students for their ability of create, research and communicate knowledge (the current optimal way to do it is the whole process of writing a monography/dissertation/thesis).

The whole EVALUATION system holds us down WAY more than the teaching methods themselves, because when you are teaching scientific abilities, you WON'T be sparing time to ensure that all your students are commiting definitions and formulas to mind. At the VERY least, tests should allow students to search for the info they need: this alone already demonstrate that student's ability to research, compare and choose correct information.

The idea that you can compare kids by a test that quantifies the amount of information they have on their heads, and that once they perform well on a test, that info is certified as correct and true is RIDICULOUS. Information on the brain degrades with time, unless you need it constantly. And people who grade tests are human, humans can be wrong. The accepted answer in a test can be wrong.

But we have to maintain the illusion that we can OBJECTIVELY rank students, schools, school systems and nations on how much knowledge they have. Otherwise, how investors will be reassured that they are "top quality"? How private education businesses can boast that they are "the best", thus justifying their price tag? How international banks will "ensure" that the amount of money countries are investing in education are being "correctly spent" (instead of being used to repay them)?

Soooo... ChatGPT is only the tip of the iceberg. There ARE ways for us to solve that problem, there HAS been ways for it since the 18th FREAKING century. But as long as they don't make the money people happy, as long as we expect school knowledge to take the form of a standard list of memorized correct info, we will still be ineffectively fighting the robots.

[sassypotatoe1]

Look when I was still studying media and communication with the goal of becoming a journalist I had very set ideas of what kind of journalist I would become. I was going to be a huge investigative reporter for a national or perhaps even global newsroom. I would never do sport, entertainment would be boring and I would never do obituaries.

I interned with and published under a national newspaper during my postgraduate honors degree in journalism, and I did investigative reporting. I only interned for a month, but I reported on under-the-counter sales of controlled substances being used irresponsibly for the treatment of covid 19, when there was no evidence supporting the substance in question for treatment of even viral infections in general, nevermind covid 19.

I wrote about the government defunding of early childhood education, and I wrote about the riots upon the arrest of Jacob Zuma. I was doing exactly what I dreamed about, I was covering hard news, doing investigative work, and I was publishing under an extremely prestigious newspaper.

Then the month was over, and I fell into crisis. Both my mental and physical health crashed, I tried to kill myself, and I was dissociating so much, for such long periods of time, that I didn't know what I was doing at all for 90% of the time. My friends had to accompany me everywhere, I had to sit on zoom calls with classmates while working on my academic work, my roommate had to hold on to all my pills and give them to me when it was time to take them, and my psychologist had to email all my professors and my dissertation supervisor to get me extensions on my assignments and time off for at least two weeks.

I had to take almost an entire year after graduating to recover, and during that time I reassessed my goals and dreams. When I was sufficiently recovered and felt I could handle life again, I started applying for jobs. I went to my psychiatrist (which I started seeing after graduation) and when I came back the local community newspaper was stuck in our gate. It was pouring rain, but I parked my car, got out, fetched the newspaper and went inside.

I had no luck on getting a full-time job for around a month (I was working extremely flexible hours for an international education news platform in the meantime), so I figured it wouldn't hurt to look for a job to do in the classifieds. Then, there it was. Vacancy: junior journalist, deadline for CV submissions 31 October. I felt like it was a sign. Back then I was still somewhat religious. I submitted my CV as an afterthought in the morning, got called the afternoon to schedule an interview, had the interview two days later and was hired within a week.

At first I was fully intending on using this opportunity to gain a few years' experience for a more prestigious job. Community news is not my thing, I'm an investigative journalist, I'm going to get a pulitzer one day. Then I worked for a few months. Sport is actually fun, entertainment makes the best photos, crime and politics are depressing and stressful, and obituaries are the most beautiful and impactful things one can write.

I mean obituaries are still depressing and sad, I'm writing one now and it's terrible, but there's something so fulfilling in writing about a deceased person the way their loved ones saw them, and the loved ones finding closure through your writing. Nothing else I've written has ever been as meaningful as an obituary or a profile on an amateur in a sport or the arts going to nationals or world championships.

I have the years experience needed to get that prestigious job now, and I'm paid so shit in my current role that I could really do with applying for those prestigious jobs, but I've never felt like I belong somewhere nearly as much as I do now. It's stressful, it's not perfect, the public can be difficult and you deal with them much more directly than at a national newspaper, the workload is much higher because I'm the only journalist for the entire town, but the protests I cover now are 30 people with cardboard signs dancing in front of an institution's gate, not mass food drives to feed communities where riots destroyed all the stores and markets. The crime I cover now is factories storing and distributing expired goods, not a murder suicide.

And the best part? I still make a positive impact through my work. I don't need to burn myself out so severely that I attempt suicide to make a difference. I can interview a homeless painter and put a picture of his mural in the paper, and he'll get commissioned by schools and businesses and rise out of poverty. I can make a difference in one person's life at a time, and it can be enough. And the things I thought I'd hate and refuse to do can be the things I grow to love more than anything.

[psslresearch]

20 Tips for Distinction Grade Postgraduate Research

Achieving a Distinction in your Dissertation is as easy as ABC if you know what to do.

If you are studying in a UK, U.S. or EU University, there are some vital tips that you need to consider.

While full details of the tips and hacks are presented in this ebook, “Dissertation Hack: The Secrets of Distinction”, here are 20 tips you need to take seriously:

1. Study and religiously follow the guidelines of the school

2. Peruse previous dissertation samples as may be provided by your supervisor or the school library to know what the standard is.

3. Avoid plagiarism of any form

4. Never-ever submit a work written with AI

5. Show the balance in your writing and write critically i.e. if Obi stole the Yam, then to have a balance, you need to consider that “the Farmer did not secure the Yam”

6. Manage your supervisor and engage with them from DAY 1

7. Get a standby research assistant from Day 1.

8. Never generate your references with AI, most AI references are fake

9. Choose a “Researchable Topic”, your topic can make or mar your grade.

10. Collect and have a sufficient number of references, at least 80 citations for your MBA work.

11. Work with evidence, not your passion, your experience or your feelings — research work is scientific

12. Your literature review MUST have a conceptual framework

13. Make sure your Literature Review connects with ALL your research objectives/questions.

14. Ensure that your research instrument (Questionnaire or Interview) collects data that can speak to EACH of your research objectives/question

15. Ensure that your methodology is justified i.e. why Questionnaire & why not Interview.

16. Where possible, collect data from different sources to achieve triangulation.

17. Choose a data collection method that WILL enable you to have evidence.

18. “Sweat” the data collected from the field i.e. why use only percentage analysis all through when you can do correlation analysis & arithmetic analysis.

19. Connect your data analysis, findings, conclusion & recommendations to your research objective.

20. Start your research work early; you’d be shocked how three months or six months will count down so fast that you will now be working under pressure.

These tips have been taken from my ebook, “Dissertation Hack: The Secrets of Distinction”.

I am Sani Emmanuel and I love discussing research themes. Let’s relate, WhatsApp/Telegram Chat, +234–706–818–0074.

[neil-gaiman]

Dear Mr Gaiman,

First of all - thank you so much for all your work throughout the years. I admire your characters and stories, which accompany me since I can remember, and which have provided me with endless inspiration, as you will read below. I am thankful to have this opportunity to write to you on here, out of all the unexpected places.

Second of all - I am working on my PhD in literature at a Polish university and I am writing my dissertation on the contemporary depictions of the satanic figure (so all the Satans and Lucifers and other demons) in TV and literature. A lot of the material I would like to include in my analysis is either written or co-written by you or adapted from your characters. I was wondering - just shooting my shot here - whether you would be available for a short written interview solely for the purpose of my study. I could wait as long as needed; I would love to hear about the inspirations behind your demons, particularly about their connection to the occult and religious, but even about the choice of their appearance. I believe your commentary would be an invaluable source. Please let me know what do you think about it, on private or public.

Kind regards, Jacqueline

That's such a lovely request. And I'm really flattered to be asked, but in my head helping people with their theses kind of counts as doing their homework. (I know all the ways it's not. But long ago, the first time it ever happened that someone asked me for help with their thesis, I wrote extensive and well-thought out replies to a large number of questions someone sent me. And when they sent me their finished thesis I realized with horror that I'd written about a quarter of it. And decided I wasn't going to do that any more.) Best of luck with your thesis, I'm sure it will be wonderful.

[writingsofmax]

what albums do you think ed/riddler would be into? what would he play for Y\N in disarm?

ANON THIS MADE MY DAY-- i'm putting this all under a read more bc this basically is a dissertation

Okay so I think that there's 3 groups of music Eddie listens to, sad introspective music, harsh angry wall-of-sound music, and then music he discovered in college So if you read his journal there is a lot of (imo) really really sad stuff in it. He writes about how he was born into hell and that the only reason he was put on this earth was to suffer and that no one understands him or will ever understand him, that when he looks in the mirror all he sees is hell/pain and suffering. So when Eddie gets into this state of thinking about being in pain and suffering and feeling out of step with the rest of the world I think that he would be into listening to quiet, introspective sad music. I'm thinking Elliot Smith specifcally and that is because Elliot Smith had some demons, and his songs have a LOT of despair and rage written into them. I think that Edward could heavily relate to a lot of the lyrics in them.

Elliot Smith Lyrics that remind me of Edward: Christian Brothers: Fake concern asks, "what's the matter, man?" And you think I oughta shake your fucking hand. Well, I know how much you care // Nightmares become me, it's so fucking clear

Riot Coming: And I want to tell you that there's a riot coming, like a drug in the water. A punch in the stomach makes sons into daughters. Roman Candle: I wanna hurt him. I wanna give him pain. I'm a roman candle, my head is full of flames. I'm hallucinating, I'm hallucinating. I hear you cry, your tears are cheap. Wet red hot swollen cheeks, fall asleep. Ballad of Big Nothing: Watching the parade with pinpoint eyes, full of smoldering anger. You can do what you want to, whenever you want to. You can do what you want to, there's no one to stop you. Okay anyway, I really could write out Elliot Smith lyrics that relate to him all day long but then this post would be 10 miles long so I'm gonna stop there. Okay so when Edward is in Riddler Mode, he's very manic, he has so many thoughts that they spill out of his head onto every other surface in the room. I think that when he's like that or going into that mode he's listening to loud, screamy, heavy, angry, wall-of-sound type music. Sometimes when your brain is screaming at you and everything is a lot, a lot, a lot, then you need music that will Drown That Out, or help focus the energy by matching it. (in my experience) So this is where My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana comes in. (Some nirvana songs could be in the previous category as well) Lots of songs with heavy guitars, screaming and violent imagery. There's a reason that every chapter title in my fic is a Smashing Pumpkins lyric and it's because they fit him SO WELL. There's a lot of religious imagery that's used in pumpkins songs as well too and that also fits Eddie. Songs and Lyrics that I think fit Eddie: Quiet//Smashing Pumpkins: Quiet, I am sleeping, In here we need a little hope. Jesus, are you listening? Up there to anyone at all?

Tonight, Tonight// Smashing Pumpkins: We'll crucify the insincere tonight, we'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight Zero// Smashing Pumpkins: Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness and God is empty, just like me. Mr. Grieves// Pixies: *sung sarcastically with laughter in it* Hope everything is all right, hope everything is alright! What's that floating in the water? Oh, Neptune's only daughter. <- this whole song is very eddie-core, there's a part where the singer keeps asking "do you have another opinion?" in a taunting sing-song manner as well Debaser// Pixies <- he is this song Something Against You// Pixies Break My Body// Pixies Bullet With Butterfly Wings// Smashing Pumpkins <- he is also this song Disarm// Smashing Pumpkins <-- and this one Only Shallow// my bloody valentine (lots of noise) basically every nirvana song

Alright now onto the third section, music he discovered in college/highschool. So: Every iteration of the Riddler has a SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. Every single one. I think that this would absolutely extend into music tastes and he would have Music Opinions. I think going off the music I addressed above, it would naturally lead him to bands like Modest Moue and Death Cab For Cutie for sure. He is a sad boy at heart. Modest Mouse makes music for people that are sad and nuerotic and I will die on this hill I think that he would also listen to Aphex Twin and more experimental music like that, stuff that itches your brain in a good way by listening to it. I could see him listening to Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada while dinking around on his laptop for SURE. He would say something like, "Yeah I listen to Radiohead but you should listen listen to Boards of Canada they inspired Radiohead." I also think that he would listen to japanese shoegaze/garage rock stuff as well and would dig through record stores and garage sales looking for obscure presses. OKAY AS FOR WHAT HE WOULD ACTUALLY SHOW Y/N in my fic, I think he would go with safe bets like Modest Mouse or Death Cab to talk to her about, and then go into the 90s rock stuff once he was more comfortable but I think he would keep the Elliot Smith stuff to himself because it's more deeply personal. albums he would own/listen to: in utero/nirvana, bleached/nirvana, surfer rosa/pixies, doolittle/pixies, something about airplanes/dcfc, the photo album/dcfc, siamese twin/smashing pumpkins, mellon collie and the infinite sadness/ smashing pumpkins, Westing (by musting and sextant)/pavement, Brighten the corners/pavement, roman candle/elliot smith (basically all the elliot smith albums) loveless/my bloody valentine, Goo/sonic youth Ummmmm ANYWAY Sorry that this is NOVEL I just loveeeeeeeeeeee talking about music omgggggg