#management dissertation example

[girderednerve]

i am now about three-quarters of the way through my book about credit cards (plastic capitalism by sean h. vanatta), which means i have gotten through a good part of the early credit card fraud stuff, and i have two main thoughts about it, which are: a) this shit is completely fucking bananas and b) the supernatural guys making their living by credit card fraud is much funnier than i realized

the reason it's very funny to me is that credit card fraud started out being sort of not technically illegal, because credit cards were novel technology & weren't immediately directly covered by the law. banks that issued credit cards were committed to unsolicited mailing as an advertising strategy, beginning with the bankamericard launch in 1958. i knew that credit card junk mail is a big old thing but i didn't realize that they just mailed out ACTIVATED CARDS???? like tens of millions of them over fifteen years???? so people, obviously, stole them out of other people's mailboxes, because the intended recipient didn't know it was there to contact the bank and cancel the card, and it was more or less a free money card. banks for some reason did not foresee this problem, and struggled with combating it: in rabidly pursuing market share, they neglected to ensure that they had adequate infrastructure to respond promptly to fraud, which was technologically difficult anyway because credit card processing went through the mail. law nerds will at this point go, "oh? it went through the mail? well it sounds like credit card fraud was, if nothing else, perhaps covered by the notoriously broad mail fraud statute," which credit card companies did successfully convince a few federal prosecutors & judges to pursue. [FUNNY TO ME because by the time that supernatural decided to bring up how dean's revenue streams are basically all illegal, i.e. season three, which aired in 2008, it was transparently illegal to steal someone's credit card and unsolicited mailing of activated cards was banned, but banks still mailed preapproved credit card applications, which dean would steal and fraudulently fill in, so. you know. mail fraud!]

actually for a while one of the circuits decided that credit card fraud necessarily used the mail, so anyone with a fraudulent credit card could be found guilty of mail fraud out of hand. some hardworking defense lawyers elsewhere managed to argue successfully that their clients were, in effect, too incompetent and careless to have ever considered how credit cards worked, and thus had no criminal intent with regards to the mail. some people walked away from thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges on the defense that they were clueless. beautiful. (sidebar, the book spends in my opinion objectively too much time on case law, probably as a symptom of having begun life as a dissertation, but it's also pretty funny, so i get it.)

because credit cards were processed through the mail, all of the advice for criminally using credit cards was like, 'don't spend more than a thousand dollars in one place, and use out-of-state cards, because those banks will be slower to realize what's happened.' really funny shit, honestly. because the whole enforcement system was, extremely on purpose, deeply regional! usury laws were set at the state level; fraud laws varied by state; federal courts mostly didn't think it was their problem, unless prosecutors thought credit card fraud was being used to fund organized crime, which it sometimes was; individual credit card companies made different investments in internal fraud prevention (american express went long on this, apparently). the whole system of interchange between banks was super slow & pretty goofy, because the system for interstate credit cards required an issuing bank to work with a local agent bank through a whole wacky series of relationships. for example, a bank americard might be issued by an omaha bank, and mailed to a consumer in minnesota (as occurred in the landmark marquette case!); the consumer would take their bankamericard to local merchants, who accepted the card at point of sale, then sent an invoice to the omaha bank through the mail. the omaha bank would pay the merchant, minus a service fee, charge bank of america's account through the fed's system, and then veeeery slowly bother to process and mail the transaction slip so bank of america could charge them. the unprocessed transaction slips, which at one point accounted for millions of dollars in 1969 money, was called "float." this shit is so stupid. i can't believe they did that. they did change it up in the early '70s, by restructuring how the interchange system worked. but it still ran through the MAIL. you can see why those guys were all hyped up on the idea of mainframes, not just to cut labor costs (it was also to cut labor costs: margins on early credit card programs were very low or often negative because the processing labor was so high).

there was a huge regulatory fight where credit card companies wanted to keep doing stupid shit and make the government responsible for enforcement, and the government wanted to apply consumer protections and not shoulder the expensive project of fraud enforcement. the post office must've hated those guys, they caused so many problems & kept acting like it was USPS's fault that the credit card fraud was happening. the reason i bring this trend up is that that's the story of financial regulation in the united states: private actors want the right to innovate around the rules, and then hand over the responsibility for the risk generated to the state, which is to say to taxpayers. i was, nonsensically, astonished by how set the playbook is. it's easier to see why the crypto guys keep acting like this is going to work out when you know how much shit finance guys have historically gotten away with.

there was a lot of back-and-forth about interest caps, too. consumer groups wanted cheaper credit; some people pointed out that cheaper credit required lenders to only service less-risky borrowers, which meant that credit availability for lower-income borrowers would dry up. the obvious solution, i.e. just providing social goods to lower-income borrowers, was off the table because we had to be Tough on Communism. labor unions were really into consumer protection, because they understood the availability of cheap consumer credit as clear to driving the demand that sustained union jobs. really american perspective! the american economy was more or less uniquely reliant on private credit to effect social policy.

anyway it's very appropriate stupid crime for the winchesters to do, because it points to the fragmented regulatory environment in the united states! which maps neatly onto their whole rugged individualism thing! and it's also coded as clever in a lazy, petty-crook way, which works really well for their whole deal. did this sidebar need to be there? yes & i make no apologies. well. very little apology.

if you have read something fun about financial history please feel personally invited to tell me about it!!!

[crispyanonart]

Back on my SDV propaganda: I need y'all to hear me out about Gunther.

(dissertation below // Ginger Island spoilers?)

I feel like he's pretty much forgotten most of the time but he has so much potential and it's the one character that I would love to see becoming romanceable. He manages the library and the museum! He's into literature and archeology! Hello?? Long haired, bearded, bespectacled, curated vintage wearing, academic, classy af man??

Some personality headcanons: Gunther is hardworking and responsible (took on the museum and takes care of ancient books and artifacts all by himself, which is no joke), obviously not very extroverted or social, incredibly private and aloof but always kind, soft spoken, gentlemanly to the point of being a little old fashioned. He's very nostalgic and also a bit of a hopeless dreamer - something that he only lets slip once you get to know him better.

Also his story could be really interesting because what if he's related to Professor Snail?? His son, for example (this is out of pocket but they kinda look alike...from afar lol). Maybe Snail raised him surrounded by books and archeological collections, thought him all he knew, maybe little Gunther really looked up to him. But the professor made knowledge his biggest life mission, and kept traveling to different sites, staying gone for more and more time, until the day he didn't make it back home at all. That could be why older Gunther decided to come to Pelican Town and take on the hopeless empty museum, following his father's footsteps. Plus we get a wholesome reunion once Snail is freed from the Ginger Island cave and they can meet again 🥹

(Bonus regarding in-game ships - HE NEEDS TO DATE PENNY, PENNY NEEDS TO DATE HIM. please. She deserves someone reliable and gentle that buys her books, come on. He would secretively gaze at her while she teaches the kids and feel very guilty about it, ignoring the fact that she got a massive crush on him since the day he arrived in Pelican Town 🥺 AUGHH they would be such a cute couple)

[witchyintention]

Where It All Began: The Ancient Roots of Witchcraft

Witchcraft didn’t appear out of nowhere like a mysterious cloaked figure under a full moon. Its roots stretch deep into the soil of human history, sprouting from the primal desire to understand, interact with, and occasionally charm the forces of the natural world. In essence, witchcraft was humanity's first attempt to make sense of life’s mysteries—birth, death, illness, and those pesky harvests that sometimes failed to cooperate.

Mesopotamia: Magic at the Dawn of Civilization

In the ancient lands of Mesopotamia, magic was woven into everyday life like the intricate patterns of a Sumerian tapestry. Priests and priestesses doubled as magicians, using rituals to appease gods or ward off mischief-making demons. The Assyrians and Babylonians developed complex systems of divination, like hepatoscopy (reading the entrails of sacrificed animals) and astrology, where the movements of celestial bodies were believed to influence earthly events. Think of these practices as ancient spreadsheets for managing cosmic chaos.

One standout Mesopotamian magical figure was the āšipu, or exorcist. Armed with incantations and symbolic objects, they combatted evil spirits with the confidence of someone holding a holy water squirt gun. Their spells were recorded on clay tablets, many of which have survived, offering us a peek into their magical toolkit.

Ancient Egypt: Spells, Deities, and Afterlife Insurance

Move over Cleopatra—Egyptian magic deserves its own red-carpet moment. For the Egyptians, magic (heka) wasn’t just a tool but a divine force that existed before creation itself. Gods like Thoth and Isis were thought to wield heka with unparalleled mastery, inspiring humans to follow suit.

The Egyptians had spells for almost everything: curing snake bites, securing a prosperous journey in the afterlife, or even ensuring a good hair day (yes, beauty magic existed). Amulets were their magical multitaskers, offering protection, health, and a little pizzazz. The famous Book of the Dead was essentially a magical user manual for navigating the perils of the afterlife. If reincarnation were an obstacle course, the Egyptians were determined to ace it with cheat codes.

Greece and Rome: The Birth of Western Esotericism

The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t just dabble in magic—they wrote dissertations on it. In Greece, philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato explored metaphysical concepts that later influenced magical thought. Pythagoras, for example, wasn’t just a math guy; he believed numbers had mystical properties. So next time you curse algebra, remember it might have been a magical tool at some point.

The Greeks also gave us some of the earliest grimoires, such as the Greek Magical Papyri. These texts were chock-full of spells, invocations, and recipes for crafting magical potions. They even included tips for summoning deities or spirits, proving that ancient people also loved a good life hack.

Meanwhile, the Romans took a more practical approach to magic, using it for love, revenge, and keeping those pesky neighbors in check. Curse tablets, thin sheets of lead inscribed with hexes, were buried at sacred sites to call upon the gods for justice. It’s basically the ancient equivalent of subtweeting someone, but with higher stakes.

The Far East: Mysticism and Balance

Across the globe, ancient Chinese and Indian traditions were also steeped in magic and mysticism. In China, Taoist practices incorporated rituals, talismans, and alchemical experiments to achieve harmony with the Tao, or the natural order of the universe. The blending of spirituality and practicality was key, with many rituals aimed at promoting health, longevity, and prosperity.

In India, the Vedic texts described rituals and hymns to invoke divine powers. These practices evolved into a blend of spirituality and mysticism that still influences Hinduism and other traditions today. The emphasis on balance and connection to universal energy feels remarkably modern, doesn’t it?

Shamanism: The Universal Foundation of Magic

Before the rise of organized religions, shamanic traditions thrived across cultures from Siberia to South America. Shamans acted as intermediaries between the physical and spiritual realms, often entering trances to seek guidance or heal their communities. Whether they were chanting, drumming, or consuming psychedelic plants, shamans were the original multi-class characters—part healer, part mystic, part community leader.

The tools of their trade—herbs, bones, and natural objects—laid the foundation for many magical traditions that followed. The use of sympathetic magic (the idea that like affects like, such as using a doll to represent a person) can be traced back to these early practices.

Magic Across Africa and the Americas

In Africa, magic and spirituality were deeply intertwined with everyday life. Practices like Ifa divination in Yoruba culture involved intricate systems of symbols and interpretations, revealing paths to healing, growth, and understanding. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica, civilizations like the Maya and Aztecs used rituals and offerings to communicate with their gods, often centering around natural cycles like the harvest or the movements of the sun and stars.

The connection to nature in these practices wasn’t just poetic—it was practical. By aligning their magic with the rhythms of the earth, ancient people ensured their survival and fostered a sense of harmony with the world around them.

The Bigger Picture

From the rivers of Mesopotamia to the temples of Egypt and beyond, early witchcraft and magical practices were about survival, connection, and understanding the mysteries of existence. These ancient roots remind us that magic isn’t just about casting spells—it’s about fostering relationships with the forces that shape our world, whether they’re gods, spirits, or the natural elements.

Now, when you light a candle, hold a crystal, or write in your journal, remember: you’re participating in a tradition as old as time. How’s that for a little magic in your day?

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Here's the thing with Jane Austen-Elizabeth Gaskell comparisons:

I don't think the intuition that relates them in readers is wrong. Gaskell has read Austen and it shows. I'd even go as far as to say that Gaskell is writing within the same ethic-political framework as Austen -one that is concerned with human flourishing as stemming from an ideal of fulfilled humanity based on an assortment of intellectual and moral excellences, that is, a form of virtue ethics- and I am in fact attempting to write a dissertation on this! *clown shoes noises*.

The problem is when influence and fundamental agreement is treated or understood as imitation, or worse, pastiche. "North and South is Pride and Prejudice + [insert Victorian element here]" is a fun joke, because comedy so often relies on exaggeration, but as an actual description it isn't quite right. North and South pays its homage to P&P with some elements, but it is not an AU retelling. The themes, character arcs and motivations are very different. There is a referentiality, but it is the referentiality of conversation.

Gaskell says "I see Darcy, and I see the ideal Darcy represents in the context of his community of practice (rural, pre-industrial England), as The Gentleman. He has power and he has authority. But how do we make sense of a similar figure of power and authority, but dissimilar in everything else in the context of his own community of practice (urban, industrial England)? What constitutes the ideal of The Man?" It isn't Thornton's points of coincidence with Darcy but their points of drastic contrast that motivate the socio-psycho-moral study of the character. And so on and so forth for other elements of the narrative.

Something similar happens with Wives and Daughters and Mansfield Park. Gaskell says "I understand the point about how a bad early education can fix a character in such a way as to make moral growth or reform impossible through example or exhortation. But what do we do when that person remains intimately connected to us?" Cynthia resembles Mary Crawford, but the angle of approach is different because the question is different (and the environment of transplant is different as well).

There are of course other works of Gaskell where the conversation is tenuous or completely absent. There's no romance plot in Cranford, but we do kind of see in the Cranford amazons the gossips of Highbury. There's no Emma here, no Mr Knightley, no magnanimous rich neighbor to help. The question is how do they manage to live the same virtues of generosity, patience, forgiveness, etc, between themselves.

Austen's novels are mostly occupied with the directly moral: it is about the concrete individuals and their close connections in society, and how virtues and vices in this or that person affect themselves and those around them. The communities of practice, and therefore the ideals of fulfilled humanity remain more or less the same (with some variations, of course). In Gaskell the scope is political, if anything because of Gaskell's unfamiliarity with Austen's socioeconomic environment, and familiarity with completely different ones. So she's taking Austen's general framework, and investigating in which ways the differences in the communities make for different ideals of human flourishing that still relate to the same core virtues.

[eponymous-rose]

It's another busy week, so I'm gonna do one of these again because it genuinely helps me keep track. Today in a nutshell!

Worked on some e-mails over breakfast - mostly coordinating for dinner tonight (I 100% did not forget to make the reservation, I promise, I just uhhhhhhhhhhh definitely didn't forget, that's for sure, and thank goodness for no particular reason that they happened to have one table left at 6PM), happily agreeing to write some reference letters for my PhD student's postdoc applications, rescheduling some meetings, setting new meetings, meetings meetings meetings. Oh, and booking tables for a couple of card shows this month! Off to work!

I get in a little later than I'd like and rush downstairs to the lounge to make my mug of tea pre-class, where I run into a student who just defended his PhD last week. I'm on his reading committee, so we agree to set up a time to go over my (honestly quite minor) comments on his dissertation. I also run into our incredible facilities guy, who follows up on some technical issues my students ran into over the weekend, hopefully resolved - I have five groups of three undergraduate students running their own weather stations all across the metro area of our city!

No time to enjoy the tea, so I leave it to steep a hilariously long time and rush back downstairs to teach my class! This year's students are truly exceptional - apparently over the weekend they all discovered that the Mac version of the data collection software for their weather stations is no longer supported, and they all independently coordinated to get PCs into the hands of all 5 groups. Let me tell you, when you're expecting to have to spend the first 20 minutes of the class troubleshooting and are instead greeted by a quiet, expectant two rows of faces, it's a great feeling.

Today's lecture is a topic I'm really passionate about - teaching students the "why" behind a lot of the statistical methods they've learned in the past (these are college seniors) and working on building a pipeline for exploratory data analysis. This isn't explicitly part of the syllabus, but my gosh, the quality of the final reports has improved sharply once I introduced these lectures. The students participated a bunch and happily launched into think-pair-share groups without my having to coordinate them. This is my sixth time teaching this class, and these students are far and away the best I've encountered. I am also very, very bad with names (and have a lot of anxiety about calling someone by the wrong name) but managed to successfully use an example in class in which I rattled off four students' names in a row, no effort needed. Phew.

As a side note, this has always been far and away my least-favorite class to teach, and this was the year I was gonna change that - I brought it to a curriculum development workshop last year and even presented on it at an education conference last week. But... dang, having strong students truly makes it effortless to enjoy teaching this class.

Back to my office, which smells like the double-spiced chai that has been steeping so long it's probably quadruple-spiced by now. Delicious. I have an hour until my next commitment, so I try to get ahead on grading the homework assignment my students handed in on Friday (all 15 of them handed it in on time!!!!). I also realize that this is my last block of free time until dinner, so I run downstairs to heat up my soup for lunch.

After getting through four of the assignments, it's time for a weather briefing (we have a team for a national forecasting competition), which means it's mostly just time for technical difficulties, but we make it through in the end and wrap up a bit early - back to grading! Students are doing great on this assignment overall, which is gratifying, but I make a note of a topic some of them are struggling on so I can mention it during Wednesday's class.

Weekly hour-long meeting with one of my Master's students! He talked about how he's taking a course on pedagogy to help with his work as a teaching assistant this quarter (!!) and he's been working through my first round of revisions of his very first first-author scientific journal article and had a few clarifying questions. I recommended some off-the-wall papers in the communications literature that I think would dovetail well with some of the discussion in his paper, and he was really jazzed to get to explore those. We also decided to get him set up with a million core-hours on a supercomputer so he can start on the next phase of his research - he promised to have the paper ready for the next set of revisions by the end of the week, so while I'm working on that, he can get familiar with the new system. I am also reminded that I really need to come up with some more substantial funding for him - currently he's working on a fellowship, but that runs out after three years.

After he heads out (a few minutes early, more grading time!) I get an e-mail from a scientist in Switzerland - she and I are working on getting her out here for a two-year postdoc job studying lightning with me. She's made revisions on her application for funding, so that's another thing for me to read over this week. I'm also reminded that I have to get back to an Italian grad student who wants to come visit my group for a year. Still figuring out the logistics on that one...

I also need to get back to a forestry service colleague of mine about getting the university my share of the funds for our fast-approaching field work using brand-new radar tech to study wildfire smoke plumes. I really, really need to get back to him this week - I think we're planning on flying out in April to start.

ALSO also this week, I have some pretty intense revisions of my own to deal with - I've been given this opportunity to write a huge review article, and I finally got it done back in December... only to learn that they want it to be about half that length. I'm going to take a swing at carving 5,000 words out of that behemoth.

AND a colleague and I are working on a resubmission of a grant to study thunderstorms in really unusual places, and I promised her I'd have a complete draft for her to read by the 7th. Phew. Good thing my week is only front-loaded with meetings.

Whoops, no more time to grade/read e-mails and schedule in my head. We have someone here today interviewing for a job on our faculty, and I'm one of the search committee members! Better dash downstairs to catch the candidate's talk. We have five two-day interviews planned for the next four weeks. Ouch.

Awesome talk by the candidate (we're very lucky to be spoiled for choice even in our very specialized field - we've whittled 86 qualified candidates down to five), and I launch straight from that into a student's PhD entrance exam. At this stage I should mention how much I genuinely loathe our PhD entrance exam, which is a pedagogical and logistical nightmare all around. This was a very popular opinion, which is why we as the faculty voted unanimously to completely change the process last year. Why are there students still taking this horrible exam???? Fuck if I know, man. At this point, it's voluntary to opt into it, and I am baffled and deeply frustrated at how many faculty members apparently encouraged their students to take it. Anyway, the student does a great job and we muddle through somehow, and now it's back up to my office to do some cramming on small-talk topics before a colleague and I host the faculty candidate for dinner!

A delightful dinner all around - my colleague is someone I was initially intimidated by (she's a giant in the field) but with whom I have since bonded, so we had some fun banter in the car and I think it helped the job candidate relax a little. We had some fun big-picture talk (and some less-fun big picture talk about news that dropped as we were eating) but mostly just talked about how much we love this part of the world. Good food, drink, and conversation. On the car ride home, I managed to troubleshoot a problem my undergrad research assistant was having with getting access to the supercomputer he needs for his project. Phew.

That's a long day, but good stuff all around!

[revclver-jesus]

How do you feel when people say that Takaya is just using Jin and Chidori?

{{ You mean like that one hot take that drove me up the wall? lmao I am going to give you the full blown dissertation here i go-- let's call this essay

The Most Commonly Misunderstood Thing About Takaya's Character: or Why Team Strega Is Not Literally A Cult lol

When people say that Takaya is just 'using" Jin and Chidori, what they're implying in most contexts is that Takaya is incapable of forming attachments and his motivations are fairly shallow-- essentially Takaya is not a complex villain and should be dismissed as purely selfishly motivated and malicious. He's a "simple" villain.

Now I realize....... that I might be biased as that girly that's written him on a dedicated blog for multiple years now, but purely objectively speaking, removing all my own headcanons, using only the information provided to use in canon? It's just thoroughly false, tbh!

First I'll go into why he isn't purely selfishly motivated and then I'll explain his relationship with Strega because I can prove the motivation with just Reload as an example, let alone the novel. Takaya, in Reload especially but even in the original game, I would argue has a full blown character arc off screen. At the start of the game he does appear to be more selfish, he has no real motivation and is just living out the last of his life doing underhanded assassin work-- nothing's really challenging him. But as the story progresses, Takaya begins to express a meaningful ideology-- he develops a greater concern for the world around him and expresses a full blown motivation. He says, in protest to the choices of the protagonist in one of his social events, and I quote: " Choosing to turn a blind eye towards your own power, to the grief of the fallen, to the unchosen and the unloved." Its clear he is not talking about himself here, as he mentions grief for the fallen. Takaya is expressing that he feels grief for something-- he is sorry about something that has happened to someone else, and it bothers him enough to nearly scream about it.

I think, often times, people dismiss what Takaya says as insincere almost automatically without any indication that he doesn't mean the words he's saying besides perhaps being vain and dishonest in other scenes, but these social event scenes are clearly meant to be interpreted as him being unusually earnest. By the end, Takaya is not just trying to keep his own power, but, as he says " this is not just my will but the will of all people. " which all culminates into Takaya's final character arc moment, where, in his final boss, he says the line " I will throw away my pride! " before using an evoker instead of trying to summon without help, implying that he is finally sacrificing his ego to better fight for what he believes in. If he was fighting for a positive cause, this would be a heroic moment, but it is still concrete evidence that his motivation is no longer meant to be seen as purely selfish. He is now fighting for " the will of all people ". He cares about the " the fallen, the unchosen and the unloved."

So what about Jin and Chidori? To put it simply, Takaya is not some puppet master that breaks them down emotionally and treats them like tools. They're his friends, and he happens to have a leader's personality, so they follow him, much like the protagonist he is designed to mirror. Its a lot easier to guess how he feels about them when you don't assume the worst and look at all his canon interactions with them. And even easier to tell if you can manage to read any english translated pages of their strega-focused novel ( which we can assume is fairly canon since Reload references it with the child turned into a large shadow ).

In the novel, as far as I've seen ( its only partially translated ), team Strega is extremely informal and lighthearted around each other. There is no sign that they fear Takaya, as they are willing to tease each other and disagree. The opening scenes of the book quickly establish a sort of family-like dynamic, with Takaya having an older brother-like role. He teases Chidori ( in a bit of heavy handed foreshadowing ) that she will understand why people fall in love when she's older-- of which Chidori sort of says gross and "as if" and rolls her eyes at him. Jin, being the narrator perspective, shows no sign of intimidation when around Takaya, something that would bleed through into their every interaction-- especially the establishing scene introducing the cast-- if that were the case. I feel, even if the novel is not canon, the writer would be instructed not to write Takaya so friendly if he was meant to be a heartless manipulator regardless.

In the game, the most manipulative thing he ever does to either is when Chidori is pulled back into Strega. Takaya tells her that there is nowhere else she can go and reminds her that death is not to be feared in a way that sounds like he's repeated this mantra often enough he knows she can guess it. This seems spooky, but the tension is immediately alleviated by the flippant and kind of sassy way that Chidori assures them she remembers Takaya's advice. This is not how you talk to your cult leader and this is not a cult, this is something closer to a gang or a club-- at worst, a coven of witches ( considering their team name is "witch" in italian.). They simply have an in-group and out-group sort of mentality, a shared since of identity, and a shared view of the world to go with it, which is to be expected when you've been openly shunned and mocked by the average person ( as seen at the start of the first scene with Shinji ) But this scene, when compared to all their mundane and lighthearted interactions, doesn't imply anything more severe than the leader of your misfit club reminding you why we don't hang out with the normies. You're "one of us" and a level of loyalty and commitment is expected when you otherwise always act as a group.

Yes, he is very cold and indifferent to the sight of his team members getting hurt-- or hurting themselves, for that matter, but the reason for this is obvious. In Reload, Takaya plainly expresses that he is feeling attachment ( for the protag at the moment ) but is avoiding his own capability for attachment intentionally. That scene was meant to establish that he can feel attachment, that he isn't as cold as he pretends to be, to encourage the viewer to see him with a little more nuance. What causes a man to force himself to be colder than he really is? What can cause an avoidance toward emotional attachment? Maybe...... watching 100 children die after being orphaned and stolen away to live underground for years? lmao

And so, when Takaya watches Chidori do self harm or literally sacrifice her life, for one-- he's not going to parent her, they don't have that kind of relationship, and he would be a hypocrite if he tried to encourage her not to do what she wants to to her dying body-- and two, of course he doesn't mind if Chidori dies, he's expecting that to happen anyways. His one greatest gift is his uncanny ability to accept death and the death of others. Mourning you openly is not how he expresses emotion. Especially when he sincerely believes death is a blessing. Its just the way she died that he's a little annoyed by. ( And why shouldn't he be honestly-- the girl threw her life away on the first nice guy she met at the mall just to make his work harder from his perspective, lmao ) BUT. In the comic version of that scene, Takaya does let himself be cut across the chest purely because he hesitated to shoot when he saw Chidori's spirit protecting Junpei. So... that might imply something.

However, if there is any greater evidence against any who claim that Takaya does not care about Jin especially... Takaya's final words, in multiple renditions of the story including the movies and Reload, are to say that he wishes Jin was with him as he died. If there is anyone that Takaya cared for, at least one single character in the entire game, it is above all Jin Shirato.

In the movies its very obvious, with the sad closeup shot of him looking beaten and washed up as he wishes Jin could be here to see it all end with him. I have the scene as an icon ! Look at how emotional the framing is !

So yeah, that's how I feel, it just drives me crazy when people remember Takaya as just Some Asshole lmao-- he IS an asshole! But he's no Chairman Ikutsuki, he has a lot of complexity to him beyond being the guy who killed Shinji, and not everything he does is black and white. There is highly plausible reason to believe Takaya cared for both of them in his own way, but the ever loyal, best friend, Jin Shirato, especially so. }}

[irrevocablecondition]

hi robyn! did you ever apply to oxbridge for uni and did you get an interview? any advice on that as it’s application season and i’m terrified x

HELLO oh god rough time of year init this brought back memories. giggling over the fact your first thought was a marauders tiktoker 😭 putting this under the cut because it's long but hi yes, cambridge offer holder here

i think my firsttt piece of advice is knowing whether it's truly for you or not! i spent my entire academic career doing courses for them and getting my name known there only to get in and go :/ i don't think this is for me actually. it was more just the expectation, yk? so literally a weekkkk before move in i asked my current uni if they'd still take me and just kept cambridge open as a phd option

that's my first bit of advice! oxbridge isn't the be all and end all <3

the actual application? unique. i know personal statements are different now but i used a different version for cambridge than i did elsewhere that was more,,, academic? more focused on what areas of my subject i enjoy and everything that i'd done with cambridge previously -> the more unique the better tbh, i waffled about the introduction of the printing press (literature degree)

you're also gonna want to put things in that, if you do get to the interview, you can expand upon a lot. AND subject ties! i applied for literature and included other subjects in tandem which they really like

interviews ! they're really not as scary as people suggested actually! i did an entry exam and three interviews, all of them were fine but they do ask the famous questions 😭 i got asked what kitchen utensil i'm most like so yk,,, that's not a myth at all LMAO. they mostly just ask about your personal statement BUT then move onto like "what do you think about this other random book/what about this other topic?"

OH ALSO !! idk if this is degree based or a universal thing but my first interview had a mini test where they gave me an extract of old english and i had ten minutes to translate it.

really unlike other unis your academics are the forefront obviously: they want proof that you care about this subject, proof of what about it you like, and examples of things you've done outside of your classes to facilitate your learning (i.e i did summer schools, dissertation courses, young magistrates, competitions etc etc blah blah blah they love that stuff)

also !! colleges !! there's not too much pressure on what college you choose because if that one doesn't take you but they see potential in you, they'll chuck you into the pool for others to take. i initially didn't get in because the college i chose had a lower deprived quota :/ so they didnt need another poor kid lols but i got into the pool and got KINGS?! which is like,,, i didn't apply there because of how elite it is

so colleges aren't the be all and end all either !! choose what one feels right for you, but don't lose hope if that one rejects you.

idk if any of this was helpful actually it's just the three big things you're told when you apply anyway oopsie but,, that's it really. they really are just like other unis but with a pretty label and prestige.

so my main advice is that,,, (1) it's meant to be difficult ! and if you get further in your application, don't worry if you don't know things. in the interviews they ask you obscure and random questions not because they want to catch you out, but they want to see your thought process !

and (2) it's difficult. it's elite and they get so many applicants, a rejection doesn't define you. which sounds like i dont believe in you LOL but i do !! even getting to this point is so so so impressive and i hope it all goes well !! but if it doesn't? the world keeps spinning and you're no less brilliant without oxbridge

anywayz ! dms are open if you want to yap or need help with anything !! i'm no expert but i've had the post-application sobs and the general AHHHHHH i suck moments and still somehow managed to pull it off

[argyrocratie]

"In his 2002 dissertation, Dr. Pan Yue, the current commissioner of China’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, proposed that a mass migration of 50 million Han people to Tibet and Xinjiang would simultaneously address three major problems confronting China: overpopulation, demand for resources, and the problem of ethnic and religious difference.4 Pan, who became the first non-ethnic minority commissioner of ethnic policy in the history of the People’s Republic of China in 2022, suggested that Han migrants should be considered “reclaimers.” The “backwardness” of the frontier he suggested had become a danger to national security, fostering terrorist and extremist activities. He called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia. Taking elements of each as a model of how contemporary China should further colonize Tibetan and Uyghur lands, he suggests that the Western expansion of settler colonialism in the United States and Russia’s imperial settlement of Siberia, should be combined with the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands. 

Finally, drawing from a model that draws on China’s post-Maoist legacy of state-managed economy and export-oriented development, and I argue, coincidentally mirroring aspects of the economy that provided a paradigmatic example of racial capitalism, Apartheid South Africa, Pan proposed that minorities should be proletarianized through assigned industrial labor. In his study, it was clear that Pan wanted to combine a land grab with the dissolution of the Maoist system of ethnic minority autonomy within a socialist political and economic system. He was thinking comparatively about the world system of global capitalism not as an object of critique, but as a way of understanding mimetically what China’s place should be with in it. 

Part of what this implies, I argue in this book, is that Pan’s “post-ethnic” framework called for the abolition of the limited protections of difference that the Mao era had fostered, and—as to some extent in the U.S., Russia, and Israel—the replacement of civil liberties and autonomous claims for Muslim and Indigenous citizens, with markers of an imagined evil, the figures of the terrorist and the proto-terrorist, the non-secular “backward” other. Recalling Apartheid South Africa’s “color bar,” Xinjiang’s Muslim reeducation and assigned labor system should be thought of as a kind of “Muslim bar,” a legalized racialization of ethno-religious difference that holds in reserve the majority of positions of managerial and ownership power for Han settlers. 

Pan was explicitly looking to the capitalist-colonial past and present, because taking this comparative move seriously is also to take seriously China’s position within the global world system. In what follows I will think comparatively with Apartheid South Africa, and the Marxian world systems theory elaborated by Cedric Robinson (1983) and others that emerged from analysis of it, to show that racialization is an essential part of the global process of on-going original or primitive accumulation.5 This suggests that racialization—as an institutionalized process supported by the police, the law, the school system, and so on—is not simply an organic outcome of transhistorical process or an effect of particular political formations.6 On the contrary, it is a historical feature of global capitalism and the imperial economic expropriation—or legalized theft—on which it depends. 

Produced as a Terrorist

The account of one of my Uyghur interlocutors, someone I’ll call Abdulla,7 and the way his life path was redirected and shaped by the structural factors I describe above demonstrates what all of this means in everyday life. Abdulla was just one of the dozens of Uyghurs and Kazakhs whose stories shape the narrative of this book. Though many of the other Muslims I interviewed and observed came from lower class positions and had less formal education than Abdulla, many of the things I observed in Abdulla’s story happened to them too. His fast transfer from the camp and unfree labor system to neighborhood arrest and a return to medical school, are the primary differences between him and others. And these differences, which can be directly correlated to his near perfect Mandarin elocution and his practice as a physician’s assistant who was just two semesters away from receiving his degree as a medical doctor, demonstrate how finely graded the system of Muslim racialization and how it is reproduced.

Abdulla, like nearly all Uyghurs I met in the city, came from a rural village in Southern Xinjiang where Uyghurs formed a supermajority of over 90 percent of the population. For his first 18 years, all of his life happened in Uyghur. Then he arrived in the city as a college student and was confronted with world of Chinese. The first born of a village teacher, he knew from a young age that he wanted a life that was different from the farmers he was surrounded by. This is why he poured himself into learning Chinese and English, watching the entire Friends TV show on repeat. He wanted a Uyghur version of that fictitious life. To do this he understood that he had to present as urban and secular, he had to shave his moustache, wear clothes from the Chinese shopping mall, and speak in jocular Chinese with Han colleagues. At the university he studied biology and science in Chinese, preparing for a career in in the Chinese medical system. But at night, he and two other friends from villages near his hometown, studied English. In the space of several years, they became so fluent in American pop culture that they started their own English school training hundreds of other Uyghur villagers to speak the language of American TV and imagine a world outside of both the Uyghur and Chinese one they grew up in.  

His students and friends gave Abdulla the nickname “suyok,” meaning he moved like water, flowing effortlessly from one social scene to another, codeswitching, mastering the multiple consciousnesses that are necessary for a minoritized person to succeed in a racialized world. He was a smooth operator. But he was also influential among Uyghur young people, and over time the police began to take notice of him. They sent informants to the night school where he taught to report on things students said and how the Abdulla responded to them. But Abdulla anticipated this, so when he discussed the biography of Nelson Mandela he was careful not to make direct comparisons to the Apartheid conditions that Uyghurs experienced in the city.8 In the private-public space of the classroom they did not discuss the way only around 15 percent of Uyghur college graduates were able to find jobs regardless of how well they spoke Chinese and English.9 Nor did they discuss the stories his students told him privately of the way they had witnessed police brutality and how the same police protected the non-Muslim settlers that had inundated their villages as part of the large-scale migration Pan Yue had called for. 

But then in late 2014 three of his students disappeared from their dorm room, leaving behind their belongings. They didn’t tell their families where they were going until several weeks later when they re-emerged in Malaysia at the other end of the underground trafficking route that took them across the hills of Myanmar where they joined North Koreans and Rohingya fleeing state violence. The police questioned Abdulla for days. Abdulla vowed that he had no knowledge of their plan.

That incident, and the arrest of the parents of his students, the way the police began to search Muslim homes on a regular basis, and the new prohibitions on any form of religious speech, made him quite concerned. He started plotting his own escape. Utilizing all of his connections, in 2016 he managed to obtain a passport and visit Europe and me and other friends in the United States, thinking through the logistics of an international move and what it would take to get his medical training recognized abroad. It would be hard he realized, but it seemed like the only path forward. All he had to do was find a way to get passports for his wife and children and sell his apartment in the city. But he never did. 

In 2017 he was detained along with hundreds of thousands of other young Uyghurs and sent to a closed concentrated education and training center. His travel history, his association with students who the state now regarded as international terrorists, was more than enough for him to be regarded as untrustworthy. Yet unlike most other detainees, all of whom had similar digital dossiers of thought crimes and “abnormal” behaviors, Abdulla had an advanced degree in medical science, he spoke perfect Chinese and could recite all the laws and regulations related to ethnic policies. If the political and economic goals of the camp system were to train Uyghur villagers to speak Chinese and work in factories, why detain and train someone already working in a Chinese institution? 

Fundamentally, Abdulla and the hundreds of thousands of other migrants and farmers had been detained for particular political and economic reasons that had less to do with their past individual actions, though the digital footprint of these actions were collected and assessed, and more to do with their ethno-religious and generational status as young, rural-background Uyghurs. But simultaneously, the cost of producing them as workers was also being externalized to the village communities that had trained them, the families that had sacrificed their livelihoods to send them to school. Even workhouses need doctors. It appears that Abdulla was destined to become a rare Muslim doctor tasked with maintaining and reproducing the system of racialized carceral care. His devalued assigned labor was not in the factory, but for the factory workers and their child. He could never leave the city, instead his future was a permanent state of probation. He could always be sent back to the camp or demoted to the factory or worse. 

2017 Xinjiang :: 1972 South Africa? 

In many ways, discussion of what has happened in Xinjiang resembles discussions of Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Among conservative and liberal proponents of the capitalist world order, both cases are often seen as exceptions rather than limit cases of capitalist logics. 

 However as radical historians such as Martin Legassick (1984), Walter Rodney (1972), and sociologist Michael Buroway (1974) have demonstrated, South Africa was in fact a capitalist state whose economy centered on the production and reproduction of difference.10 South Africa was a paradigmatic example of a state-managed capitalist order that codified a so-called “color bar” (Buroway 1974, 1054) that excluded black and brown people from certain forms of employment reserved for whites. This exclusion along with processes of removing native peoples from their lands and forcing them into external resource dependent, impoverished reserves resulted in two new modes of production. Subsistence living on reserves and a supply of surplus miners from those reserves. The color bar “fixed” in place the contradiction between capitalism and democratic politics, preventing black South Africans from preserving their own wealth, denying them social mobility in the workforce, and strangling systems of mutual aid.

It was from this example, among others, that scholars such as Cedric Robinson (1983 [1999]) and Mahmood Mamdani (1996 [2018]) began to build a general theory of the way capitalist-colonial development works through the production of difference—rather than homogenizing effect of “all boats rising” as national economies grow as a whole.11 By devaluing the labour and possessions of citizens and non-citizens deemed and legally categorized as different, state-subsidized and supported business interests and settler overseers are empowered to accumulate wealth in a fixed, ongoing manner. 

Fast forward five decades and the outlines of a similar “color bar” fix can be seen in motion operating through an anti-Muslim racial regime. As in South Africa, Xinjiang multinational and domestic corporations are deeply invested in maintaining continual growth. The system in Xinjiang relies on a dual mode of racialized capital accumulation in the form of labor and data. In a general sense, the labour theft element of the system relies not only on the theft of the individual worker’s life, but also a theft from the family and community that raised and cared for that worker. By stealing a daughter or son from an Uyghur family and community, the reeducation campaign externalizes the cost of producing an unfree worker. As the state hired 90,000 new non-Muslim teachers with high-school degrees from villages across China, the reproduction of this labor-force was further ensured by a residential school system that would produce the next generation of Uyghur factory workers.  

As with Apartheid South Africa, the world is the market for much of the prediction products and consumer goods produced by the unfree workers in Xinjiang. It also participates in the global discourse of anti-Muslim racism. These areas of convergence with the imperial North—through both memetic political relations and a shared global economy—point to the ultimate lesson of Xinjiang. In a world where the power of Chinese corporations and autocrats is unchecked they operate in much the same way as other colonial powers." 

-Darren Byler's preface to the simplified chinesse edition of his book "In the Camps", June 2023

[pseudowho]

Genuine question, how do you manage to balance work and answering questions and writing and ur home life?

-someone struggling with time management as a student

First, please remember these things.

I am likely a good amount older than you, at 31.

I'm on maternity leave at the moment...but as in a previous Ask, I'd say that full time motherhood is arguably just as busy, if not busier, than working, and I do a very busy job (Midwifery).

I am high-functioning anxious, and it makes me wildly productive.

I have been a student and a mother and a full-time team leader simultaneously since the age of 24.

I have no down-time that I don't spend writing, or occasionally reading.

I write very fast-- for example, my drabbles generally take me 30 minutes, I give them a quick skim read for accuracy, and then post.

I have an awful lot of experience as a student studying more subjects than I strictly should have (think Hermione and the Time Turner), while working at the same time (during my University course, we worked 37.5 hours a week utterly unpaid, and had to do more than the standard amount of lectures and essays/dissertations as everyone else, too).

Then I did a lot of continued professional development, on top of being a full-time Midwife. Then I started coordinating full large staff teams.

Then, I have three small children and that requires military precision to take care of them all, and love them, and play with them to a high standard, alone.

The only reason I say all this? Because fuck, since I was 11/12 years old, my life has been time management.

The downside? I'm always stressed. Like, always. I always have something else to do, and I hold myself to insanely high standards, and honestly, I'll probably die of an aneurysm aged 50.

My recommendation? Focus on your studies and self-care first, and write if and when you want to.

Honestly. Please don't ruthlessly bully yourself like I do to myself. Yes, I am time efficient (I often write while I'm bopping a baby on my hip, and intermittently one handed chopping/stirring/cooking dinner), but it's a lot of experience and very demanding.

Sorry...this might be unhelpful.

You're doing brilliantly. You need downtime for your brain to function. Your hobby (if writing is your hobby) shouldn't feel like a job.

Love,

-- Haitch xxx

[sug01s3al]

I'm playing around with some potential puppet designs, keeping them to just one page is more manageable for me so I don't marry myself entirely to one idea and have room to explore other ideas without getting carried away. I'm thinking of drafting a design for a sphinx next ^^!

Puppet rambling under the cut <3

First little design experiment was using a Kelpie as inspiration ( a kelpie made of kelp, original I know lol). I normally start drawing at the bottom of a page and work up, for some reason, so you can see my original design and how it progresses from big bulky horse to spindly strange creature which I ended up liking a lot more. I liked the idea of it being a normal-ish horse from one side and next being this skeletal water rotted creature, equally I like the strange, spindly, more-cat-then-horse-like creature it ended up being so I think the end result would be trying to find a happy medium between the two. As for materials I was looking towards (surprising no one, my favourite puppet designer) Toby Olie who has a wonderful eye for fabric in his work.

First example is 'A Christmas Carol' and the second is 'Wolves in the walls' both of which he uses these wonderful scrappy fabrics to give such vibrant character to his puppets. In particular I liked the sinister quality given to the wolf puppets through the use of hemp material for their fur which is why I would use something similar, either that or well worn calico. Painted or stained a sickly sort of green.

For the hair I would use a rubber of some sort, best case would be something semi-transparent to give the illusion of seaweed. Partially for that seaweed effect but also for the sound, to echo the sickly, off-putting vibes im going for I would want something that would create a strange sound when it moves, something with almost a sticky, heavy quality to it harkening back to the mythos of Kelpies (the whole, you touch 'em you're stuck to 'em thing).

The design then graduated to more of a unicorn aesthetic, something that should be pure and good hearted, a lure to get people to come see and pet it. I favour the stylisation of Amalthea from the last unicorn, lanky but with a strange ethereal quality. And then it morphed in to a more cat like creature... somehow. I think I was more thinking of a trickster spirit for my Kelpie, something that looks kind and alluring to ensnare its prey :3

Part of my dissertation was on the line between costume and puppet so something I always try and include in my designs is this idea of disguising the pupeteer so the puppet take centre stage whilst also marrying their costume design into the puppet character they play. In this instance I was inspired, again, by the idea of the Kelpie attaching itself to its victim and dragging them in to drown them so I had designed the puppeteer to be one of the Kelpie's most recent victims.

[henry239]

https://www.articleshore.com/assignment-help-uae-best-writing-service-providers/

[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.

[kxowledge]

What makes a good review, in your opinion? And, related to your earlier post... whose reviews are you reading as inspiration/motivation? Do you have favourite literary magazine or essay collections with this type of writing? Thank you :)

probably not clear from the context, but I was talking about my diss, which is a literature review in the field of strategy and management so this is v specific (and i'd wager not what you intended? but i might be wrong, so here's my answer anyway)

what makes a good review is (1) interesting topic in actual need of a lit review* (2) comprehensive sample selection (3) new insight being generated (i.e. making a conceptual contribution + bringing attention to a different way of looking at things) and tangible new avenues of research proposed (i.e. including possible research questions and methodology). essentially, something that will reinvigorate the field by generating new interest & act as a reference for getting a good overview of it

I do have resources! again v specific to my field (so for example, these would not apply for lit reviews in the field of medicine which are v v different)

this article on integrative reviews (that's what I'm doing specifically, as opposed to a systematic review) these two articles on sample selection (1 + 2) this CBS course has a good reading list

++ for finding exemplars: International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) & AOM Annals are *chef's kiss*

* as a PhD student (in Europe at least), it's normal to have as part of the final dissertation one paper that's a lit review. this is great and it shows you know what you're talking about AND it serves the purpose of allowing you to learn about the topic itself. however, it doesn't mean that there is a need for a lit review outside of your diss/to be published. so for example, I fully expect to do a lit review at the beginning of my PhD but the point is that it will be helpful for me, I don't expect it to be helpful for others (i.e. it will not bring new contributions most likely

[liskantope]

Back in late 2020 I made a post which mentioned as a side comment the impression I get from a lot of the more aggressive SJ people that writing/saying a lot (e.g. writing long, nuanced, qualifying, and/or perhaps defensive-sounding responses) is seen as evidence in and of itself of being wrong in the argument, specifically the type of wrong that comes from a position of privilege (I thought a little later I wrote a short post focusing only on this, but I can't seem to find it now). The example in the above-linked post is in the strangely-proportioned screenshot, where someone who is being attacked for not bowing down to the Correct political opinions keeps responding with lengthy, articulate, nuanced comments (which include some acknowledgment of her own weaknesses) and is met only more vehement attacks declaring checkmate explicitly on the grounds that her comments are long. The end of the exchange happens when she leaves a comment raising her eyebrows at being attacked for long-windedness, and the entirety of the response is "...you and your privilege". It's a finale that's stuck with me.

I was reminded of this today when an unexpected spurt of activity showed up on my Tumblr: an activist with whom I got into a contentious exchange well over two years ago for some reason chose now to abruptly reblog a several of my lengthy responses with pithy remarks (okay, plus one which includes a link to her own independent blog post about it which I don't think I'd seen before), and a minor flurry of likes and replies followed. I don't care to reblog any of this now, or even link to it, because my getting into that debate is something I'm really not proud of: the topic is not a hill I want to die on, and I dislike my awkward defensiveness and repeated apologies and semi-retractions. If I'm going to spend time and energy arguing something really controversial, I would rather it be a discussion where I can be really incisive and not catch myself arguing carelessly and sloppily and feel the repeated need to step back and clutter everything with caveats and apologies. But, if you are curious, I was defending a YouTuber I respect from being cancelled for being Problematic, and this exchange happened in spring of 2021.

The one new bit of substantive information for me coming from today's activity is the link to a separate blog post written at the time, which further confirms that there's no point in me continuing to defend that YouTuber to this activist: apparently among the list of things that makes this YouTuber's case worse and confirms their guilt are (1) publishing an earlier video which made all of the exact right points but which (surprise, surprise) got noticed by more people than a written article by a lower-profile person from the Relevant Marginalized Group making essentially the same points, (2) acknowledging that the Relevant Social Justice Cause is a good one and including a link to a fundraiser, and (3) momentarily sighing with a slight look of exasperation when first bringing up the accusation of being Problematic in a video. (Sorry I'm continuing to be vague here.)

Continuing to argue with this activist would be a waste of time, since our rhetorical values and norms are clearly too far apart for us ever to reach each other. Looking at it makes me grateful to have found a part of Tumblr that does share my basic notions of how discussions should work.

But what strikes me most of all is how my lengthiness itself is somehow treated as evidence of my guilt or wrongness or privilege or something. One of my lengthy reblogs got met today with a single sentence mocking it as a "dissertation" and managing to weirdly characterize my thesis without explanation, while another later one got met with "Have you considered just.... never talking again? Because you are not good at it." Again, these little zingers were fired off probably within a few minutes earlier today, in response to things I wrote back in spring of 2021.

That's the exact same kind of back-of-the-hand dismissal that I mentioned above having witnessed done to someone else (with the "...you and your privilege" comment). It reads like "This person talks too much, that's how you know they're in the wrong, so no need to address any of their points, if I smack them with a one-sentence response saying 'Haha that just further confirms you're wrong!' then I win."

And it's like, usually I consider my ability at cognitive empathy to be quite good, but it's hard for me to figure out what the other party is actually thinking in a situation like this: I can sort of get my head around not respecting nuance in certain selective situations and thinking the ability to feel nuance is a sign of privilege or something, but I can't quite figure out how they justify these one-sentence blanket dismissals on the grounds that the other person's comments are too long without imagining that they must be aware on some level that they're just being domineering-in-an-internet-way and deliberately going for a cheap and empty slam-dunk. This isn't very charitable, but honestly I have a hard time understanding such people's motives any other way.

[i-am-thornqueen]

Hello im back can you tell me about festivals or celebrations or any other special times the magic folk in your au have? Maybe some we havent seen yet or some that are specific to certain folks? Are there any favorites the main characters may have? Ive been thinking about this for months, your world feels so alive that whenever I have a holiday I wonder if your magic folk have something like it too.

You know just how to get me going on a tangent, don't you? I could write a dissertation, but I'll try to contain myself.

Below the cut, if you please.

Not to make things too complicated, but depending on your species and where you are in the world, magical folks can have hundreds of different practices.

For example, werebeasts. Since they're all post-human, their yearly holiday celebrations tend to continue to follow the human holidays of the place they are from. If they are trying to fit in with their local magical community, they'll try assimilating with local practices. They do have to play a bit of a balancing act with assimilating, though. If too many werebeasts gather in the same place when ambient magic is at its peak, it can drive them out of their skins. Post-humans can get weird around too much magic. They can end up aggressive, fighting each other until they manage to burn the energy out.

Werebeasts only have two... "holidays" (if you could call them that) which are uniquely their own, although its debatable if they actually "celebrate" these times or if they are driven by instinct to participate against their will. Spring Madness is when the the animal spirit of a werebeast comes out of its winter torpor and drives its host mad with fresh energy that unfortunately tends to boil over into animal lust. The height of the madness generally falls around the same time as Beltane in the Spring, and is usually exacerbated by magical creatures around them going into various forms of heat. Their second "holiday", so to speak, is more of a drawn-out affair through the weeks that make up the autumn harvest. It's a werebeast's true rut, when they're instinctively driven to find and impress a partner to spend the winter with them (and hopefully partner for longer than that). You could loosely call it a gift-giving holiday, sort of. Whoever their chosen partner is will be receiving all manner of gifts and attention until they either accept or reject the werebeast's efforts.

Witches celebrate on a seasonal calendar reflective of where they're from. Witches from Europe and certain populations of the witch diaspora in the Americas follow the Wheel of the Year, with roughly eight sabbaths. Some regional variation happens, as one does not expect a German witch to celebrate with the same traditions as a Spanish witch. Fae and many magical creatures of European descent also follow the Wheel of the Year. Witches from other populations, such as those native to the Americas or from the African continent and other such regions of the world practice their own seasonal holidays.

There are also unofficial holidays, similarly in the vein of Tumblr celebrating the Ides of March every year as a joke that's slowly turning sincere. At the midpoint of summer, many young fairies like to celebrate Puck and Bottom night as a way of paying tribute to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. They'll gather in the woods with anyone else whose game and collectively lure humans into the dark to drink and party with them. By dawn, most participants are too drunk to say 'happy puck and bottom night' so it generally comes out as 'happy fuck the bottom night'... which is not not an inaccurate description of the night's debacles.

The magical world is endless in its variations. They're all sorts of holidays and festivals to be had when you have people as unique and diverse as magical folk. :P