#non-twilight

I am!

I did mine entirely online. I never once had to set foot on campus. It's expensive, but there are scholarships (and loans :/ ) available, especially if you join your local library association. There are plenty of online or mostly online degrees.

I finished in about a year and a half, doing three classes at a time. It doesn't take long. Most of the classes were fun--I did one on YA lit and we read Twilight and I got to write message board discussions about how I really didn't like the last book and found all the supporting characters more interesting than the main ones--but there were some tedious ones too like statistics and some management courses.

Me, I suspect that the chaotic energy of the past 3 seasons has died down a bit sinc ethe vampires are showing more competency on their own than they ever had while retaining their self centeredness.

I haven't seen the Discourse on this (I love the show but I'm not involved in any fandom spaces), and I'm personally enjoying the season overall.

However, for me, I was disappointed that they set up all these interesting new ideas (Laszlo raising the 'baby;' Nandor traveling, Nadja joining the council in London) and ended on a cliffhanger last season . . . . only to have everything instantly revert to the status quo in like the first five minutes of the new one. I wanted to spend a few episodes exploring the stuff they set up! Instead it was just like "lol we're not paying to shoot on different locations, everyone back to the house!"

I also just don't personally care about the nightclub plotline really. I don't dislike it, I just am not invested. And I LOVE Nadja, I just think she's more fun when she's on vampire councils vs running a nightclub.

I think also that this season especially (and last season a bit too) feels . . . separated. Nadja and the Guide have the nightclub but the others aren't super involved in it. Laszlo and Guillermo are parenting baby Colin, but Nandor and Nadja aren't really involved in that. Nandor and Guillermo were doing the wedding stuff, but Laszlo and Nadja weren't really involved there. Last season had a lot of Laszlo/Colin interactions, but the reason for it was revealed later. But this just feels like everyone has their own subplots and they aren't all involved in the same wacky stuff this season as they had been in previous seasons? For example the one where they were all figuring out the best pair to pose as Baby Colin's parents was hilarious and fun BECAUSE it was all of them being chaotic and weird together, not divided up into their subplots. But it's possible some of these choices will make sense in retrospect, like the focus on the Laszlo/Colin relationship last season.

So I am super out of touch here and I had to look her up. Furthering my arguments that I really am just a giant nerd and please don't ever take what I say as coming from anyone who has the ability to act like a regular human being who has shame, I watch almost no TV. I've heard of The Queen's Gambit, but I haven't seen any of it and looking up her filmography I haven't seen a single dang thing she's in.

So I went ahead and pulled up her recent SNL monologue (another show I only watch when they do something someone wants an opinion about--had to get the Gen Z/AAVE sketch recently because I got a lot of questions about it and I hadn't seen it, of course). I listened to it a few times and took some notes on what I hear, but I didn't throw it into phonetic analysis software or anything. Tiny primer: what you might think of as a vowel is not a vowel. If you're an English speaker, you probably learned in school that there are 5 vowels, A E I O U. And then you learned about "short" and "long" vowels, which have nothing to do with length and is all because it's hard to explain to a seven-year-old who is trying to learn to read that what they're producing is the high front lax vowel. Sidenote: if you really want to go crazy, that vowel /ɪ/ is the one we teach is "short I," but that vowel's tense counterpart /i/ is the vowel we teach as "long E." Yeah. It makes no sense. There are not five vowels in English. There are about sixteen, depending on the specific variety.

Because of this, phoneticians usually talk about vowels, especially English vowels in terms of the Wells' Lexical Set, a series of words that contain the vowel in question. That way, when we talk about the BATH vowel, we can investigate that speakers in England make one vowel and speakers in the US make a different vowel, but that bath, pass, and staff are going to use the same vowel in each English, even though the two Englishes are going to use a different same vowel. Clear as mud? Let's make it even murkier. So English doesn't have five vowels. But Spanish does: a e i o u, and they have a perfect one-to-one correspondence to their spellings. So when Taylor-Joy learned English in London, at age 8, she was probably putting the Spanish vowel system on English vowels. But then she very obviously learned a pretty prestige variety of London English, likely shooting for Received Pronunciation. And my guess is, these two things interacted in really interesting ways.

Impostor syndrome is real and it sucks!!

Two years ago I had to, as a formality, apply for the job I was literally already doing, because I had taken it over when the previous librarian retired a few months before. It was made perfectly clear to me that job was only posted so I could apply for it so everything would be in order in terms of paperwork and again, I was already doing it. But I was still like “what if I don’t get this job? What if they think I’m terrible at it and someone else who works here applies for it and they get it instead?” I was a nervous wreck about it! And then I had to ‘interview’ for it, and I was a nervous wreck about THAT even though it was with the director (who had told me to apply) and assistant director and I was all anxious and worried and then I show up and they’re like “oh this isn’t really an interview so much as a job offer, thanks for filling out the full application you could have just done the cover letter.”