all hate to tiktok for taking 'having a space to more openly and actively talk about different cultures' to mean 'cultures are NOT to be shared and we must be vigilantly defensive of our cultures for fear of appropriation, a word that can be applied to any multicultural interaction'. like of course cultural appropriation is a very real problem but ive seen with the access to global multicultural conversation that tiktok provides it's made people TERRIFIED to even interact with cultures other than their own for fear of 'doing it wrong'. like at some point you have to acknowledge that in the real world of the great outdoors, the majority of people are eager to SHARE their cultures. yes there are ignorant questions and biases but also... how do you think those things get unlearnt? i dont understand how deciding that multiculturalism is an elephant in the room instead of a normal thing that should just be talked about and lived with is supposed to benefit anyone? and kids on tiktok are CONVINCED that it's a time bomb of a conversation to have and therefore must be avoided at all costs but like. people generally LOVE their home and their culture and are PROUD of it and want to share it. how have we made it so that showing genuine interest and a desire to understand something so integral to a person's identity is now feared and borderline demonised?
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Did you go to art uni? What were the most important things you learned?
i did yes :) i think the most important thing i learned is to experiment and to put at least a little bit of meaning behind every element of your art piece — that’s why i got so into animal motifs and flower language, i think they’re such a lovely way to present stuff! but honestly my course was very lenient, it was mostly about you doing you and tutors giving you advice where necessary!
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Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class.
Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules.
But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point.
I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009.
But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end?
Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:
And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out
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Man, knowing that I'm less than two weeks from my last final is really shaking me because I have so many things I said I'd do after I graduate and they're very close now!!!
One of them is going to be leaving all the discord servers I don't talk in and also pruning following / friends lists like hell and back. This will allow me to finally come off invisible on discord, and it'll be nice to have discord statuses available to me again ;~;
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most of the time i feel like im just an average person like i know im really lucky to be living my dreams working a job i love in the city i always wanted to live in like i know im a very lucky and privileged person bc most ppl don’t get any of that but most of the time i also forget it’s not just that like most ppl in my hometown never get out and don’t even go to college and like even in my family im still the only one to ever attend university and move to the city which is just crazy like it’s so crazy to me to think im not really average specially not where i come from which is idk so weird
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stars!! re: your tags on the post you rb'd about wizard uni/wizard tech school: may i recommend Year of the Griffin, by Diana Wynne Jones (the woman who forced Tolkien to keep lecturing instead of fucking of to work on his books by continuing to attend his terrible uni lectures) as a book leaning hard into the wizard undergrad lyfe. One of the main protags is a griffin from a loving family of human wizards (this book is loosely the sequel to The Dark Lord of Derkholm, the fantasy pastiche) and the book follows her and the ragtag group of friends she makes at uni as their various unique problems interfere with the process of studying magic and making friends at university. It's been a while since I last read it but it features terrible profs obsessed with going to the moon, a pirate invasion, philosophy of magic debates in the cafeteria, and a really sweet moment in the middle of an action-packed climax where the main protags have to talk out their feelings to fix the big magical life-threatening problem. I highly recommend!
(wish I knew a book that went the wizard trade school route, but alas. if you hear of a book like that please tell!)
tumblr I need a "mark as unread" option for my inbox because the moment the little dot went away I forgot this ask existed. oops. sorry verso I read this and appreciated it and then forgot to reply 😅
(the wizard uni/trade school post)
That book sounds amazing, thank you for the rec!! The post made me really hungry for like, relatable-to-my-current-life uni shenanigans but with magic, and now I'm so curious what Undergrad Life(TM) adventures this book contains and if any of them will resonate. Either way it sounds like it's full of very fun shenanigans. (Now what I really need is a book about wizard art school. Someone should write that.) Anyway, thank you verso, this is going on my tbr immediately :)
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what does it mean to average 2:1 or 2:2? I don’t think we do that in America
okay so the uni grading system here is done based on percentages. the pass mark is 40%, which americans ALWAYS hit me with 'only 40???? easy!!!' so id like to clarify the content/exams are very difficult and the marking is very mean and generally it's really frustrating when people respond this way, like why tf would we have such a low pass grade otherwise it's a dumb assumption to make but anyway. you do about 6 modules a semester (on average, some courses have more/less), and each module will give you a final grade, and then the average of all your modules from both semesters will give you your final year grade. they're all marked by the same system, which is:
grade of less than 40% = fail
grade of 40%-50% = third class honours (called a third)
grade of 50%-60% = lower second class honours (a 2:2, literally said aloud as 'i got a two-two in my exam')
grade of 60%-70% = upper second class honours (a 2:1, said as 'i got a two-one'). this is what im PRAYING for.
grade of 70%+ = first class honours (just called a first). this is the highest you can get, so even if you get 90% you'll have the same grade as someone who got 72%. this is also what i mean by the exam system being really tough here, bc most people are just grateful to get a first.
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