watching porn and paying for sex will fix you

And it ended up not really being suitable for my purposes, as it goes. But part of the book is actually devoted to Kenelm, the author’s oldest son…and man, his dad loved him.

Kenelm seems to have had a fairly typical upbringing for a young English gentleman, although he is a bit slow to read. At twelve he’s sent to board at Stoneyhurst College—often the big step towards independence in a boy’s life, as he’ll most likely only see his parents sporadically from now on, and then leave for university.

When he’s sixteen, however, his father moves the whole family to France, so Kenelm gets pulled out of school to be with them again. Shortly after the move, his dad notices that he seems depressed. Kenelm confides in him that he’s been suffering from “scruples” for the last eighteen months—most likely what we’d now call an anxiety disorder.

And his dad is pissed—at the school, because apparently Kenelm had been seeking help there and received none, despite obviously struggling with mental health issues. So his dad takes it seriously. He sets him up to be counseled by a priest—there were no therapists back then—and doesn’t send him away to be boarded again, instead teaching him at home himself.

And his mental health does improve. His dad describes him as well-liked, gentle, pious, kind and eager to please others; at twenty he’s thinking about a career in diplomacy or going into the military—which his dad thinks he is not particularly suited for, considering his favorite pastimes are drawing and reading. He’s excited about his family’s upcoming move to Italy, and he’s been busy learning Italian and teaching it to his siblings.

Henry Kenelm Beste dies of typhus at twenty years, four months, and twenty-five days. That’s how his dad records it. That’s why his dad is telling this story. It’s not an extraordinary story—Kenelm’s story struck me because he sounds so…ordinary, like so many kids today. And he was so, so loved. His dad tried hard to help him compassionately with his mental health at a time where our current knowledge and support systems didn’t exist. You can feel how badly he wanted his son to be remembered and loved, to impress how dearly beloved he was to the people who knew him in life.

I hope he’d be glad to know someone is still thinking of Kenelm over 200 years later.

no one is spending enough time complaining about writing

hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about "the tenure clock"

grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i'm sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can't get a PhD only taking classes

everyone has too much money. but also if it's set in the US there's an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for

relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged

"I got so angry that ISIS was disrupting the research." -> Said on record to a journalist in the actual middle of an interview.

fifa kills whales 💔

Wyland has said any financial recovery from the suit would support public art, ocean conservation, and environmental education through his foundation.

“this isn’t true because the ex-friendship that traumatized me ended explosively after they were mad at me and never told me why” that’s not good. they shouldn’t be doing that

“i don’t think this is true because my current friend group is constantly icing me out until i figure out what ive done to upset them and properly apologized without being told” hey thats not good. they should not be doing that

(Jewish) pride month day 15 (im sorry): Simeon Solomon

Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) was a Jewish-British painter & prose poet associated with the pre-Raphaelites. Jewish culture and queer love are major themes in his work. Many of his paintings depict scenes from the Torah or of Jewish life. His older brother, Abraham, and sister, Rebecca, were both also artists and he began learning to paint from Abraham. Their mother was also an artist. Solomon studied at the Royal Academy, where his art was exhibited. Solomon was arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for engaging in sexual relationships with men. This would unfortunately have a large impact on his career and contributed to his alcoholism.

Simeon Solomon Research Archive - Home

Category:Paintings by Simeon Solomon - Wikimedia Commons

Painting above: Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, watercolor, 1864

Isaac and Rebekah, watercolor, 1863

Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, watercolor, 1963

Ruth and Boaz, 1862

Offering the First Fruits of the Harvest, watercolor, 1864

Carrying the Scrolls of Law, 1867

Love Dreaming by the Sea, watercolor, 1871

A Hebrew Girl, 1874

Allegorical Self Portrait, 1873

Man in a Turban holding Lulav and Etrog, 1886

A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies, 1870

A prelude by Bach, 1868

King Solomon, 1872-4

King Solomon sitting in Judgement, watercolor, 1881

David, no date

The Lemon Seller

Pastoral Lovers, 1869

If you were studying the human age from the vantage point of a distant posthuman future, you'd still be liable to find:

Artificially shaped bits of glass, terracotta, marble, gold, inox steel, etc. If exposed, these are going to be worn by erosion fairly quickly, but if buried soon enough they will endure pretty much forever. of course, this doesn't mean they're going to be excavated before the bit of crust that contains them is destroyed by tectonic events. Various plastics may survive, although they are close enough to organic matter that I expect eventually bacteria will evolve to eat it.

We're leaving behind a truly bizarre amount of skeletons, thanks to our habit to bury or embalm dead bodies. I'm not sure how much longer the burial itself will be recognizable -- perhaps we'll look just like the boom of Lystrosaurus just after the Permian Extinction. Cattle and chicken bones will also probably abund, and future paleontologists might wonder why these animals increased in size but shrunk their brains and horns/spurs. (Especially since the most abundant skeletons have massive braincases and dainty little jaws.)

Our epoch will be marked in the geological record by a thin layer full of all sorts of weird stuff -- jumbles of rare metals, exotic organic molecules. nuclear fission products -- that future chemists might still be able to recognize, even if any solid object is destroyed. The layer is global, like the iridium deposit left by the Chicxulub impact, so much of it should survive even if erosion and subduction destroy most of it.

It should also be possible to notice atmospheric carbon dioxide fuckery by checking leaf anatomy in plant fossils, composition of layers in ice sheets (if they have existed continuously!), and fossils of calcium carbonate-producing organisms such as bivalves and foraminifera, but it might not be obvious that it was an artificial event and not e.g. a supervolcanic eruption.

I see this rarely addressed in this sort of discussion, but we are absolutely wreaking havoc on biogeography. Paleontologists will see rabbits and camels suddenly appear in Australia, pigs and chicken in America, land mammals in New Zealand, and so on -- and that's not mentioning crop plants! The mysterious appearance of monkeys in South America 30 million years ago can be explained by rafting across a much narrower Atlantic, but this would be far too much all at once.

A couple relevant links:

Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011): properties of the geological layer of our times