Asides

No one likes me and that may be good

During my PhD, I have been concerned and a little jealous that I haven’t been able to connect personally with any of my professors. I am either their age or older, I live an hour away, and, to be fair, I don’t have the best personality. But when I see other students getting asked for favors, or editing, or other research work, I wonder what I’m missing out on and how that will affect me in the long run.

Lately, as I watch my colleague being taken advantage of by a professor with favors and tasks while not fulfilling their part of the deal, I’m a wee bit grateful that I am ignored. I AM VERY MAD AT THIS SITUATION BECAUSE MY COLLEAGUE DESERVES SO MUCH BETTER.

So I’m typing up my notes on Sorry to Bother You when…

I noted that apparently horrible real-life person Armie Hammer’s Steve Lift had to be based off the “WeWork” guy, so looked up Adam Neumann, clicked on his wife’s Wikipedia page and then found this:

Her father had a direct mail business and spent a number of years in prison for tax evasion.

Rebekah Neumann’s Wikipedia Page

Because, of course. That’s all.

What about an NFT of a tulip?

“It’s a Ponzi scheme. When there was tulip mania, at least when you lost all your money, you still had a tulip.”

Dennis Kelleher

I watch cryptocurrency drama from the nosebleed seats. I have some shallow understanding of the system and, I’m not ashamed to say, I rely on my students to fill in some details for me if I’m curious and they’re willing. If you keep hearing about FTX and wondering what’s going on, this piece in The Atlantic by Annie Lowrey will give you an idea of the most recent meltdown.

Ultimately, the issue is me, but until I come to terms with that…

I tend to shake up my tech tools and apps when I want to procrastinate. Lately I’ve approached this a bit more maturely, explaining (lying) to myself that I’m trying out something new for a while in the hopes of simplifying my workflow. When I saw our library was offering Zotero free for students, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve been using Paperpile religiously for years and thought it might be good to see what else is out there.

Zotero’s interface, for some, is dated, but I found it endearing. For the last few months I’ve been adding RSS feeds and readings from my comp exams to see how I like its features. Overwhelmingly I loved the ability to mark sources as related to other sources – a big help with the films I’m viewing to see which articles I’ve read in relation to them (their titles are not always clear). What I really hated was their filing system and the inability to add it to my Google Drive without some headaches.

Ultimately, that and the need to be hardware independent was what made me come back fully to Paperpile. While I will miss the relation feature, I spent many years without it and since Paperpile doesn’t seem to be implementing something similar anytime soon, I’ll make it work.

Yeah, that’s it. Not really a review, just letting everyone know what I’m doing instead of reading and writing. 🙂

How am I supposed to perform academia if I don’t have time to Tweet?!?

One of the problems with committing to a new public-facing medium is that you get busy and overwhelmed and it suddenly feels abandoned. Two days since I posted here and my instinct is to just quit. The endless scroll is the problem. It’s always hungry and it’s never sated. As meager contributor, even I’m susceptible. When the dust settles and the archaeologists of the future dig through the radioactive waste, our archive will be nothing but “sorry I haven’t posted” posts and Tumblr.

In case of a “weird pipe mishap”…

My latest work order: “The pipes in Office 003 are making the strangest noise. It’s not consistent, but if I can capture it on my phone, I will. Normally there’s a gurgle here and a hiss there, but this sounds like something out of this world. I would like to not be the victim of some weird pipe mishap. Granted, as I’m writing this, the sound seems to have stopped. Suspicious.”