like the thing that always makes me insane about the way people talk about academia on this website is that it’s just so sentimental and individualised, like at all times they are just talking about themselves and how special they are for having this elite knowledge and even the idea of thinking of university as a mass industrial racism factory whose societal function is to regulate class reproduction makes them insanely mad because it means having to think of themselves within a social location that isn’t merely specialest little guy on planet earth. Most people I speak to in the academy, who have the highest levels of education and most elite credentials in the country, are some of the most dull, unremarkable and boring people I’ve ever spoken to. Academia is an incredibly alienating place but I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met who have identified the actual causes of that alienation correctly. I have been in academia long enough to have learned the lesson that university is only incidentally a place of learning, because the primary incentive structures that drive universities are not “making sure students get the most beautiful well-rounded and objectively true education” and talking to people who actually believe that unironically is like talking to people who think Starbucks’ mission statement of nurturing the limitless possibilities of human connection is what drives all of their business decisions

Eventually they all come back for some of this crazy hole….. I'll be here in my rocking chair

ID: Caravaggio’s painting of Thomas and two other disciples gathered around the risen Jesus; Thomas is putting one extended finger into Jesus’ side wound. The second image is a photograph of contemporary people recreating this painting: three people, presumably men, gather round a person with top surgery scars; one person is extending a finger to touch the incision. / end id

The insane parallels of Barry consciously trying not to expose John to video games the glorify war and combat to the point where he doesn’t know they exist, to Barry then striding through a Walmart where he buys these assault weapons and carries them out in open sight among all these parents and children not even batting an eye at the sight while they continue their shopping, to Fuches shielding John’s eyes and telling him to look away so he does not have to see the horrors of death strewn around him (to perhaps spare him the way someone should have spared Barry himself), only for all of it to be undone in those final moments as that film both frames Barry as a hero on account of his actions (defending his family) and reveals that he’s been given honours while it’s Cousineau who’s in prison and John sits there, falling prey to the glorification of violence that the show has been critiquing all along. That everyone around him tried to avoid for so long.