say what you will about the Habsburgs but I really appreciate how many of them created massive baroque synecdoches of their own neuroses. Charles V drove himself crazy trying to manage an intercontinental empire in the 1500s and then spent his final years in a monastery surrounded by clocks, obsessively trying to get all of them to tick in unison. Philip II was a meticulous and obsessively pious introvert and he turned his palace into a bureaucratic warehouse with him sitting at the top floor, correcting the grammar of his advisors’s letters like he was grading essays. Rudolf II was completely checked out of his role as emperor, obsessively collecting foreign curiosities while wars and religious revolts slowly devoured the Holy Roman Empire, just like the live lions and tigers wandering the halls of Prague Castle and attacking servants at random. All of them (the Habsburgs not the lions and tigers) had debilitating prognathism from centuries of inbreeding to keep their ‘noble blood’ (and to keep their territories consolidated), their bodies falling apart from the sheer weight of their dynastic history and endless pursuit of purity and centralization. It’s bizarrely and tragically beautiful.

dissertation proposal is basically done okayyyyy

last year i had to do a fake proposal for a dissertation i could not write (i was in a compulsory history dissertation prep class even though it is my minor & i cannot do your dissertation in my minor!!) which was 2000 words of total bs that i submitted at like 2am a few hours before the deadline and somehow my puny 100 word philosophy abstract was just as if not more stressful