Tiny, transparent hand-grenades.

give that knife/sword fight survivor nerve damage. give the character who was shot in the gut a stoma. give that fire survivor lung damage and an oxygen cannula. give that leg injury survivor a cane. give that starvation survivor gastroparesis. give that spinal injury survivor a manual chair or powerchair.

snark

utter and insane levels of devotion/pining (masked by snark)

synonym challenge...

my fill for the @mutualrapport event! tysm to the organizers & everyone who submitted a prompt, this was super fun to work on 💖💖

ao3 mirror

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both

Funny enough this post was prompted by learning this fact about book!DuBois. Looking at Andy Weir saying “Dr. DuBois has three PhDs” straight in the face and going. Dude. No He Doesn’t.

The favorites people are tagging here include Bruce Banner (7 PhDs), Engineer Team Fortress 2 (11 PhDs), and Stanford Pines (12 PhDs), and like, of course that is not how it works, that is not how anything works, but they come from cartoony universes that operate on cartoon logic. Looking at TF2 and going “that’s not how that works” is not the point of it.

Andy Weir is supposedly trying really hard to make everything in his books realistic, or at least plausible. That’s his whole schtick! This is a world meant to be taken seriously! But his aversion to learning/acknowledging how human social institutions work in the name of Not Being Political™ produces some real howlers that are impossible to take seriously. Eva Stratt’s “I can do what I want” permit is the famous one, and the idea that Grace got a personal attack paper petty enough to end his career through peer review really strains credulity to me, but DuBois’s three PhDs in very closely related fields is another. That’s just not how PhD programs work. This is not about any given character’s capability, this is about how PhD programs are not things you just keep adding to like that—once you have one, you go on to do research, write research papers and monographs, not more PhDs. Your PhD already proves you know how to do research! That’s the point of it, you don’t go prove it again, and any subsequent PhD program you apply to will seriously question why exactly you want to! Weir presumably wants to convey that DuBois is both very smart and very accomplished, that Project Hail Mary recruited the best of the best. Instead I look at this and go “this is a fake character and Andy Weir does not know what he’s talking about” and it breaks my suspension of disbelief.

So what could possibly have been in that paper that pissed everyone off SO bad they never wanted to work with Grace again, but the journal was still willing to publish it? The most recent big infamous career-killing take in archaeology was “NAGPRA is basically the same as creationism, and handling Indigenous ancestors’ skulls is this white woman’s right”! It’s hard for me to come up with something believable Grace could publish that’s on that level.

(Also, scientists in the first half of the 1900s could do basically whatever the hell they wanted in a way that does not fly today. Grace meanwhile got his PhD in the 2010s. Which is not to say that academic beefs where people go You’re Stupid And Wrong at each other don’t still happen—Surovell vs. Dillehay’s beef got published this year—but you do have to hew to certain standards of professionalism while doing so. Otherwise your peer reviewers will most likely be like dude you can’t say that in an academic article, revise and resubmit.)

This is why I actually do prefer the version where Grace goes “everyone thinks I’m crazy just because I don’t believe there’s anything special about hydrogen and oxygen” and Stratt responds, paraphrased, “no, everyone thinks you’re an asshole because you insulted your colleague at a conference in front of everyone.” Like yeah that’d do it.

(It’s also why I keep beating the drum that the whole backstory feels way more real and resonant if Grace were a woman—or, as @gaudebo has been writing about, Black! Like yeah the same eccentricities and uncollaborative behaviors that tend to get forgiven in white men do not tend to offer women or people of color the same second chances.)

I still think “dual PhD in biology and chemistry” is the way to go because while uncommon that is the kind of thing that happens in real life. Ton of work. Super impressive. Believable to exist. And while doing his dissertation work, DuBois came across a different idea he also wanted to pursue that was extremely tangential to his actual dissertation research, that would require quite a lot of extra physics research and his dissertation advisor went, there’s a reason the advice is always to narrow your thesis’s scope rather than expanding it. Leave that concept for a postdoc. (This is a very, very normal Thesis Writing Experience.) And so he finished his dissertation, got the PhD in biology and chemistry, and sought out a postdoc fellowship that would let him pursue this side project as a full research topic… and got a lot of baffled “this isn’t your field, though” type responses. He eventually basically became an independent researcher at his university to try to pursue this, but got little support from the physics department because dude you’re a biologist, what are you doing here dabbling in physics instead of getting a bio job. (Was the dismissive attitude and skepticism he faced in part due to being Black? Like, probably.)

I also think he’d be the kind of autistic who found the structure of a PhD program satisfying and straightforward. He knows how the system works and finds self-motivation easy. And he’s already going back to the physics literature and reading up on all the background he needs to pursue this particular research problem that has caught his interest, and figures… I might as well go back and do a degree program in physics if that’s what I’m already functionally doing on my own. His advisor and his committee are willing to back him in this and he basically goes right back into the grad school life, turning his self-directed ground-up postdoc into another PhD program because that has structure and direction and institutional support, and he has a specific research project in mind. Another several years of being a grad student beats job hunting, that’s for sure.

It’s not a normal thing to do, it’s extremely idiosyncratic, but it seemed like the most straightforward way of getting the institutional support for his current specific research interest in physics, and if they’re not going to help him if he’s not part of the physics department / doesn’t have a degree in physics, then fine, that’s what he’ll do.

ART tried to tell Murderbot "I'm not the one attacking you, I'm not in control of my actions, look out." It tried to warn it and was stopped from doing so.