recently saw a comment section full of people, primarily women, talking about loving living with their best friend and being sad about having to live separately one day. some people talking about missing living with their best friend, some talking about “getting” to live with their best friend “until” they find partners. saw one person mention that moving out to move in with a partner felt like a divorce. it makes me so genuinely sad… all these people recognizing the joy they can find living outside the norm, letting themself live with a friend instead of a romantic partner, but still feeling like they have to live with a spouse eventually. like it’s not even a decision, just an inevitability.
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to raise money, Wikipedia should do that thing CNN did where they sold shirts with headlines on them. I would kill for a shirt that had the article title and Wikipedia layout for Homosexuality in Medieval Europe
how to get through grad school without losing your mind
I'm in my third year of my PhD, here's what's worked for me:
First and foremost: DO NOT attend a grad school that is not paying you to be there. At minimum your tuition should be covered. Universities run on the un- and underpaid labor of undergraduate and graduate students. Often times a (STEM) professor will have students operating lab equipment and processing data that they then take and present as their own. This is generally considered acceptable practice, but mostly depends on your funding source. I, personally, am self funded, meaning that my paycheck comes from grants that I proposed for and submitted for me. Many graduate students are funded by their supervisor, who will have them working on projects that aren't necessarily their own. As a warning to students in this situation, you will still be expected to manage your own projects on top of this outside work. Being a TA is also a way you might be funded, and it's my opinion that everyone should do that for at least a year.
Optimize your working hours, working location, and workstations for you. There is a balance between the expectations of your supervisor, your funding source, and your own preferences. For me, this means using the pomodoro method when I'm having a hard time staying focused, working from home on the days I'm planning to write to reduce the likelihood of being interrupted and voluntold for tasks, taking an actual lunch break, and having all the amenities of my desk at home also in my office.
Citation manager. I use Zotero and have made it a point to religiously utilize the folders and tag function. I use folders to group by project, and subfolders for individual pieces of writing for a project and tags to group by subject matter
DON'T let the first powerpoint you make be one for a committee meeting or another important presentation. Build a slide library of things like introductory material and figures of your own data. Take photos of any instrumentation you use, of the places/things you're studying. When you have this already set up, making a presentation takes maybe half an hour, and you get a ton of practice making slides
KEEP TO A CONSISTENT POWERPOINT THEME! Having slideshows that are formatted identically makes you memorable AND makes the scavenging through your old presentations to make a new one much easier.
Your powerpoint theme should be uncluttered (should not visually detract from the information you're trying to present)
MAKE YOUR FIGURES IN THE SAME SOFTWARE (when possible). Having more consistency just adds to making your stuff nice to look at.
There will eventually be a point in grad school where you're freed from the responsibility of taking classes (usually the third year in a USA 5-year PhD program). If you were spending 3-5 hours per week in class, try to still spend 3-5 hours interacting with literature (either papers or grad-level textbooks).
A lot of supervisors say a good rule of thumb is reading one paper every day, but I've found that's a wildly loose guideline. Here's what I did: I was given a set of papers that were seminal to my subject matter. I then took their citations and started reading those as well. You can (and should) also do this with any papers your supervisor publishes.
Google Scholar is a good way to find papers, but doesn't let you sort by number of citations. Beware bad papers.
Snacks are crucial. So is exercise. Sometimes a break should be a five minute jog around the building and a granola bar.
Come up with some sort of literature note taking method. I built myself a template for each of the types of papers I am reading (for example: literature review vs method development vs field study) that helps me extract the most relevant information for MY purposes. If you really like powerpoints, you can do this in there (good for Ctrl+F later on), but mine is pen/paper because I remember stuff I've physically written down better.
Steal figures you like from other people's papers for comparative or introductory purposes during presentations (cite them on the slide, obviously). Add them to your slide library.
If you use excel for your figures, we shouldn't be able to tell. You can build figure templates. Do that.
Defeat imposter syndrome by remembering that you don't actually have to be extremely smart to get a PhD (or a masters degree). You mostly just have to be stubborn. (One of my housemates is the stupidest person I've ever met and she somehow got into grad school. That said, she's not very stubborn, so she's having a really bad time.)
Set up weekly meetings with your supervisor. This will ensure you have accountability for your progress, and time to address any roadblocks, ideas, personality clashes, and equipment malfunctions in person. If your supervisor is stubbornly unavailable, see if one of your committee members might be willing to step up. Take notes at those meetings. Not everything you talk about you'll be able to address immediately, so it's good to have a record of what you talked about.
Try not to let problems remain unaddressed for more than a week. (If you can resolve them within that first week, too, that's also ideal.) For example, we've been trying to delineate lake catchments in a place that's so flat there's not really any true catchments to delineate. It took nearly 9 weeks of bringing it up at the weekly meeting for us to finally realize we'd been trying to answer the question the wrong way.
If you're moving away from your undergrad field of study, I recommend reading some undergrad material for your new field of study within your first semester. Or, if you know what you're doing that far in advance, the year or summer before you start your program. I moved from analytical chemistry to biogeochemistry, and there were terms and concepts from microbial ecology, limnology, hydrology, oceanography, geology, and ecosystem science that I just wasn't aware of. Make flashcards for all those words you don't know, it helps. If you like digital flashcards, use studylib (dot) net, it's like quizlet but has no ads :)
Speaking of ads, I highly recommend switching to Firefox. Here's posts where other people have more eloquently put why this is a good idea and their favorite extensions (if someone asks, I'll share mine): 1 2 3
To avoid google's shitty AI overview: use https://udm14(dot)com/ instead of google(dot)com. They're the same thing, the UDM14 addon to the URL yeets the AI overview into the void, never to be seen again.
Some supervisors will not give you hints for anything. This can be frustrating, but what they're trying to do is get you to answer your own questions. ("It wouldn't be research if we knew the answer," I was recently told, by someone who definitely knew the answer)
Always be on the lookout for funding opportunities. These can be for stipends, lab consumables, payment for an undergraduate assistant, or travel for conferences or field work. The more of this you can bring in on your own, the less dependent you are on the whims of your supervisor for opportunities.
Make an academic twitter (i've also seen that many people have moved/are moving to mastodon or blu sky, but twitter is still the hub). Follow people in your field, journals you like, organizations/agencies you like, but try to keep personal things away from it (also all of my personal accounts for stuff are set to private because i have no interest in an employer knowing things about me). This is one of the best ways to find job opportunities (post-docs, lab management, and phd positions), extra-institutional funding opportunities, conferences, and new papers in your field. Great for networking, better than linkedin.
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Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.
Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.
this is why you should be eating your chips with salsa and guac instead of beating yourself up for not eating a salad with tomato and avocado (unless you are a salad bitch like me then enjoy both of them!)
for those of you wondering if the studies cited above are legit and if so where we can read about them, here’s a link to one of the (more than a dozen!) papers written on the topic of nutrient absorption and how you eat your food:
Previously reported levels of iron absorption from common Southeast Asian meals composed of rice, vegetables, and spices were too low to be
Applied behavior analysis has long been considered the gold standard. Now, people who have been through it are pushing back.
"Based on data gleaned from the nearly 10 million military dependents it insures, the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly called the evidence supporting ABA “weak,” noting there is no research to determine whether the small number of participants who show improvement — 15% — do so because of treatment or simply because a child has matured. After a year of the therapy, the department reported to Congress in 2019, 76% of 16,000 participating autistic children saw no change, and 9% worsened."
Okay before we get anyone on here saying "water is wet", here are some other bullet points about the article.
The article uses proper terminology and actually defines stimming, masking, and many other words that neurotypical people may or may not know (re autism)
The data that the article is based off of includes first hand accounts from autistic people who have gone through ABA. The researchers even used ASAN (autism self advocacy) as a resource! Actual autistic people shared their stories!!! And they believed us!!!!!
It explains WHY autistic people have a hard time with ABA, which is incredible. Not just the fact that it's akin to training a dog, but the psychology of it, and how it's overstimulating and degrading
There's a part that does quote from Auti$m $peaks spokespeople, BUT it's because they're leading into how neurotypical parents see ABA most often as a "saving grace" to get a "normal child" and then goes on to tell more about how autistic children perceive ABA, both during and after treatment
One family's story tells of how a mother noticed her autistic son would actually hide when she went to turn the computer on for ABA therapy (this was during COVID lockdown) and how she realized something was off because of that. She canceled ABA and found an alternative (called Floor Time) where the child actually directs the play, and the therapist/teacher goes along with what the kid wants/does!
There's a really cool bit on why ABA is usually the only thing available to parents, and the answer is Shitty American Healthcare/Insurance Companies!
It notes that ABA therapists don't really have strict training requirements. You can do a quick online course and become an ABA therapist. It does not require a college degree. That should horrify you.
There's another parallel study with its own data coming out in 2025
Honestly, this whole article is a gem. Remember, while "water is wet" studies seem trivial, we need them in order to get our side of the story taken seriously. Research with credible data that backs up what we've been saying is important!
TL; DR?
Huge study with lots of input from autistic people tells us ABA sucks!
Btw when they ask if you have questions some actual good options are stuff like “what’s a typical day like in this role” or “is this job open because someone is leaving or is this a new position”
Your parents are not "narcissists". They're typical authoritarian assholes who treat you like their property because society allows them to.
Your ex boyfriend is not a "narcissist". He's a typical misogynistic douchebag who treats women like shit because society allows him to.
Your boss is not a "narcissist". They're a typical classist dipshit who thinks workers' entire purpose in life is to generate profit because society allows them to.
And even if they happen to be a "narcissist", that's not what gave them the power to get away with abuse.
So stop blaming mental illness and start blaming society's normalization of abuse. Stop acting like someone has to have a mental illness in order to do something cruel when ordinary people have been doing atrocious things since forever.
Pathologizing abuse, whether it’s in the home or the workplace, whether it’s physical or emotional or sexual, stops us from being able to recognize the hegemonic structures that make abuse so universal. It is not aberrant, it is completely normal, and that should spur you to action
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people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.
The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.
I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.
Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.
I don't mean to be rude, I'm just autistic. It's right there in my bio. I get cadence and tone wrong sometimes, I misunderstand social cues, I laugh inappropriately, I can be painfully direct, and I’m embarrassingly earnest sometimes, but I genuinely don't ever want or mean to upset anyone, or make folks feel uncomfortable.
Do tell me if I've upset you, and I promise I'll do my best to improve and not make the same mistake again. If you think I'm being rude, I can guarantee that's not my intention, and I would truly appreciate correction from you because I honest to goodness have no idea that what I've said or done could be construed that way.
Anyway, I just wanted to float that out into the void.
Contemporary Japanese light novels and classic American sci-fi are basically evil opposites when it comes to their titling conventions: both titles will be long and rambling, but the former will be a prosaically descriptive phrase that lays out the story's entire premise, while the latter will be a line from a poem the author liked that tells you absolutely fucking nothing.
The Eccentric Alien Spaceship That Helped Me Murder The Despicable Businessman Who Murdered Me First!, by Iain M. Banks
I Was Born On Mars, And Now I'm Running A Sex Cult To Teach My Earth Friends Telekinesis!?, by Robert Heinlein
The Emperor Of The Galaxy Appointed Me Steward Of Its Knowledge After I Predicted Its Downfall, But Then Something Happened That I Couldn't Predict!, by Isaac Asimov
I Accidentally Became An Accomplice To The Rogue Artificial Intelligence That I Was Hired To Prevent From Overtaking The World!?, by William Gibson
The Misanthropic Supercomputer Who Permanently Erased My Mouth!, by Harlan Ellison
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i wish so fucking bad that schools would teach even the most basic nature and wildlife literacy. bc what they teach now is how we get these godawful lawns and monocultures and an endlessly growing list of extinct animal species. like i can’t even count how many times i’ve been trying to explain to people why mosquitoes/moths/bats/flies/wasps/etc are so important and people have gone “but that’s what bees are for (pollination)” or “birds can just eat other things” or “things decompose on their own”. it has to be in the dozens. nothing makes me as upset as when people simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact (fact, fact, fact) that every single organism has its purpose in nature and there is *nothing* that is “pointless”. ignorance like this is what leads to barren monoculture lawns and deforestation and “pest control” and devastating invasive species and expanding extinction/endangerment lists. i just wish schools would teach that every animal and plant has its place, and *nothing* needs to be exterminated as a whole, *especially* native wildlife. but of course capitalism can’t thrive on proper environmentalism so i guess we’ll just have to deal with this.
humans aren’t pointless actually we’re here for a reason. we’re here to make art and bake bread and tell stories and see ourselves in each other and to notice that our tears and the ocean taste the same. that and ecosystems like forests do best when we’re there to forage and use the resources there because humans are a part of nature too and like i said each and every species has its place and its role in the ecosystem. go look up some cave paintings or whatever
I cannot stress enough that humans were meant to live.
I don't mean survive, I mean fucking live.
We were born for love, art, baking, sure, but we were born to goddamn live.
I wasn't put on this earth because of some incomprehensible reason via eldritch space deity or whathaveyou, I was born from a biological process called two humans fucking, and that's the goddamn story. I was born, and now I'm alive, that's the shtick. I have a purpose here, and the goddamn purpose is to eat, live and then die one day just like every lifeform on earth. I have a part to play, a cog in nature's machine, a piece on the puzzle. As humans, we are not pointless or fucking meaningless and I hear one more goddamn person say that I'm punching them in the goddamn MOUTH.
I was born to live. To wander the grass, keep a bloody garden, eat, drink, make merry and art and to fucking LIVE! And by god & devil alike, come the oceans of roiling blood and storming hells, I'll keep fucking living because that's my purpose!
All of this, plus, as many indigenous communities show, humans are also a keystone species, essential to the growth patterns of many plants and animals (by harvest and cultivation of things like the paw paw and as predators controlling large mammal populations) and the maintenance of particular ecosystems (such as through controlled burns on the prairies). We are not inherently parasites—we are not othered, aliens to “nature.” Some people chose that role and force others into it, but we can change that.
We are meant to live for ourselves as one beautiful puzzle piece in the pattern of this planet.
