#non studyblr

[studying-egg]

i feel like i need to post this to make it more real and hold myself accountable but ive been away from my studyblr for too long and i’m hoping to be more active as a way of motivating myself at work and also for studying the gre hehe

[the---hermit]

here's a link to the free pfd of Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco. It's a 10 pages long essay in which the author talks about his own experience with fascism and then tries to list the 14 elements that make up fascism in all its historical forms.

[helenstudies]

I love being multilingual. I love reading books so much. and I know most of langblr and bookblr is about academia or classics but my heart is in children's literature. I grew up with my own language and my own country's literature. I get to have my childhood favorite books in my language. and then as I grow up and learn others I get to enjoy other people's childhood favorite books. sometimes I've progressed enough in my language to enjoy those foreign books in their own original language and be filled with joy as I realize how this would have shaped a generation of people. I get to go "what is this word" and look up and have a spark of joy as I memorize a BIG word in a new language. I get to gasp at reveals and twists and turns and fairy tales and romances and horrors of all your children's literature because my language level is still progressing and every new word fills me with wonder. I get to have my childhood and I get to have other people's childhood through my childlike language abilities. I love it. I love reading books!

[galina]

"All images are therefore meaningful and hold significance in some way. But tattooed images, which are acquired slowly and painfully, and which permanently change the bodies of the people who wear them, are perhaps the most meaningful and the most significant of all. As a form of image-making, tattooing seems to get closer to both inner and communal lives than any other." — Painted People, Matt Lodder

[frenchiepal]

22.12.24 ☄️🌠 the bad news, i unexpectedly got a bunch of assignments over the holidays; the good news, there's a cat to provide mental support

[questwithambition]

Getting back into reading + breakfast

[notetaeker]

Jan 6, 2025 - Monday

Started off the new year writing a whole bunch of poems because I was going thru some stuff

Went back home

Got a facial

Saw family I haven’t seen in years (unrelated to next point)

Was in a family kdrama episode (lmao meaning there was some nonsense issue: complete with miscommunication, outbursts, wrong assumptions, dramatic reunion etc I’m rlly Living Life™️ huh)

[moonlight-n-moondust]

day 70/100

finished reading thru discrete random variables notes

finished discrete random variables tutorial (9 qns)

finished dc circuits mcq (44 qns)

i legit don't understand tf is gg on in this topic

they will go thru soon in tuition so gg

ill clarify the stuff i got wrong in tuition on thurs (im so cooked hahahahaha)

got back compre + compo pract

so close to an A rjwkskwksndnwnnewn

i clarified what i need to do to push the last 2 marks so gg

ill try harder for my hw this week

~5 hours 52 min on ypt~ (i wish i didn't suck ass at phy RIP)

[studentbyday]

a meditative november.

Sometimes courage is in forcing yourself to stick with your plan to go slow, progress gradually, and trust in the future, rather than throwing yourself into the deepest end out of desperation to “get ahead,” knowing full well you won't be prepared, which would unnecessarily heighten the chances of failure at something you truly value and don't want to play with.

I've been having to remind myself of this all summer and all semester. It's actually not UNrealistic to go slow to go far. And deep down I know this, but the world we're in sometimes makes us feel so pressured to live fast...sometimes even before we're ready. Which may lead one down the rabbit hole towards the whole concept of sink or swim and survival of the fittest, where if you know you can't immediately speed up because you know you'd sink, you think you're just not fit for life. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it's a real advantage to have that self-awareness, to know your current limits. The time you spend now slowly growing and exploring other ways to get to your dream (even if it may seem to take you further away from it at first) will make you so much more experienced, resourceful, inventive, mature, and ready in every sense of the word than those who choose to hurry.

There are undoubtedly merits to living at a faster pace and I'm sure we're all well aware of it in this world we live in. But what I'm trying to say is that there are also equally valuable merits to living at a slower pace, and for some of us, that's what we need. And so we should give ourselves permission to do that when we can in order to thrive long term. To hell with the societal pressures to do otherwise.

[diaryofaphilosopher]

For those who see history as a competition, Latin America's backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world capitalism's development. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others— the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[tea-tuesday]

i went to the most gorgeous café downtown today and had a latte and raspberry tiramisu dusted with cocoa powder. unfortunately, i am beginning to think about the bar and start planning my study schedule.. but first, coffee❣️☕

[the---hermit]

how I take notes on non fiction books

I recently made a post on my study method, and decided to make a whole separate post on my note taking method. The structure of the notes I write doesn't vary too much from my lecture notes to things I might have to read. A couple of useful informations you might want to know before I start actually talking about note writing is that I am mainly focused on studying history (tho I have had other humanities exams in my degrees), and that I study for oral exams in which the material is mainly composed of non fiction books, but sometimes include articles as well as lecture notes. Somehow I have also failed to mention that I am speaking about HANDWRITTEN NOTES. I only do handwritten notes, I don't work well digitally, so keep that in mind. And with this being said brace yourselves for a very long post. The bullet points I will be making are not really in a specific order and I will be including a few pictures too.

The first step when I am working on the materials for an exam is to figure out in which order I will be reading (and writing notes) the books. This hasn't really much to do with the notes themselves, but it's important to know which of your materials is more general and what other things go more in depth, so that you don't struggle too much while studying. Another plan related thing I always do is to write down each chapter of the book I have to study on my bullet journal and how many pages it is so I can plan my studying more comfortably. If the chapters are very long, and divided in subchapters I sometimes also write those down.

The goal of the notes I write is to fully take the place of the book, so they tend to be very detailed and long. I do this because the very act of writing is part of my study method, and working on things I have written down in my own words is just much better for the type of learner I am. So basically I read the book only once, then it goes back on the shelf and I work exclusively on the notes. This means my notes need to be detailed and well organized.

My method is to read a chapter, underlining important stuff as I am reading, and then right after I am done reading I work on the notes for that chapter before moving onto the next. I do this because it makes the note writing more effortless, I am fresh with informations I just read and I basically just need to skim over what I have underlined.

On underlining, since it is so important. I underline everything I will be including in my notes, it might seem much as sometimes it consists of full paragraphs, instead of key words. But this is okay because my notes I don't just copy and paste.

To create useful notes you need to be re-elaborating the informations. You need to read, understand what you read, and be able to write it down using your own words. That way the notes will be easier to review, they will often be composed of shorter sentences, and by doing so you are also actively making writing part of your studying and not just a mindless activity.

Personally I don't work well with full pages summaries, I need the text to be visually broken into sentences/small paragraphs, and I use a lot of symbols as well as abbreviations.

Symbols and abbreviations are in a way part of your very own language when you are writing notes, you tend to develop these with time, but they are so useful. I personally use different types of arrows, all caps words, position of the text in the page, different methods of highlighting and abbreviations (usually for words that come up often like country names, for example Italy becomes ita, France becomes fr, etc.).

Your notes need to be useful for you, they don't have to necessarily be comprehensible for another person (which means you can and will fuck up sentence structure because sometimes skipping a couple of words makes the notes shorter and still understandable), and they do not have to be pretty. They should be as tidy as possible, but again that might change from person to person, I have some very messy looking notes that make total sense to me. With time you'll learn what works best for you.

I have a visual memory so as I mentioned titles, highlighters, all caps, the placement on the page and other similar things are very important in my notes. I cannot fully exapain some of these things because some definitely only make sense to me in the moment (like the words I choose to write in all caps, or the way I highlight things).

I like to have a clear chapter and subchapter break (so that in case I need to refer back to the book it's super effortless). I like to write those with a red pen, usually the chapter title is in all caps and the subchapter in coursive, but it really depends.

I use only two highlighters in each set of notes yellow for dates, and the colour I associate with the book/the subject of the book (I have synesthesia I don't make the rules when it comes to colours). This of course might change depending your preferences and on the element of your notes you want to focus on. I like to have spacific colour for dates and time periods, because of course while studying history that is a fundamental element. If you are focusing on other subjects you might want to have a specific colour for names, or other elements.

I like to leave a big side margin to add either key words (especially in lecture notes since they might be messier and jump around informations more often), or additional information in a second time (sometimes it happens, after you read another book, or attended a particular lecture you have to add a couple of sentences and I rather have a blank space that never gets used rather than no space at all for emergencies).

I honestly mentioned everything that came to mind right away, but since note writing is now basically a mindless skill I have been practicing for years I surely forgot about something. I might end up adding to this post in the future or write another one. My note-writing method has also changed a lot thought the years from high school to university, it's a skill I have been perfecting for the past decade. This to say that depending on what you are working on things might change, and by experimenting with different things you might find out things that work very well for you. If you have any questions on specific things I didn't mention or that wen't clear my inbox is always open and I am more than happy to help.

Since this post is already very very long I am adding the pictures below the cut

Example of a page of notes before and after highlighting

Example of symbols and structure of the notes and the way I highlight things (in which you'll hopefully be able to understand my handwriting, and in which there might be some spelling errors but alas that often happens in my real notes as well so if there are any it's for the sake of accuracy lmao). If I end up adding informations on the margins I always use a pen of a different color so I can tell which informations I got from what source (ex. main notes from lecture, colorful notes from additional article).

Example of messier notes in which the main text in black are the notes I took during lectures and the additional colorful text was added while writing the materials (I rarely do this, it usually happens when the lectures follow a book precisely, which happens when we have to study books or summaries written by the professor). As you can see I often use post it notes to add more writing space, and sometime I even use them to create visually separated sections. If I end up adding some drawings I also usually like to have them on post it notes so they stand out more (and if you are wondering why the hell would an history student need drawings it's usually either because I need a map or a region/state to mark things out, or when studying for archaeology exams I often needed visual references, for example to identify different types of vases or decorations).

[bartholomewthestudyduck]

10/28/2024

So it's been a few weeks, I had multiple auditions, fall break, and some rest, but this weekend, it was time to actually do stuff again. I worked on some choreography and a warm up to teach tomorrow, and I started the reading assignment for my ballet class. I also voted! Well, I haven't sent the ballot yet, as I have to do mail in ballot, but once I find where on campus I can send mail, that will be done. I'm also finally registered for my classes next semester, and even though I had to change my minor, I'm excited for them.

[galina]

Currently: Pear Nuallak, Pearls from their Mouth. A really unique genre-blending collection which moves seamlessly between folktale, horror, satire and critique at which the centre is an exploration of the complexities of living as diasporic Thai queer artist in modern Britain. This one was a gift from a dear friend and gratefully received.

[mangotalkies]

currently reading (at snail’s pace)

i’ve never juggled between such vastly different, yet equally heavy genres before. one boggles my mind with yet another unexplored aspect of indian history, another makes me realise how little i know about the world, and the last one could’ve just been a twitter thread.

“we said goodbye to our mothers. they’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. they’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. it was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them."

- we, the drowned by carsten jensen

[thinking-emoji]

Again? On a random Thursday afternoon? Are we like, relevant?