There are times when your D-List monktress sometimes entertains the notion she has hit the Big Time, and is a srs bsns blogger. And then she does things like checking her google analytics stats...
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Nerd Holiday
I hope everyone had a slammin' 4th of July weekend. Mine was most excellent, as I spent a lot of time catching up on the literature, sleeping, and playing Hellgate: Global. I especially enjoyed the minigame T3fun created called LOAAAAADDDINNNNNNG*. What did you guys do this weekend?
* To be fair they actually fixed everything post-holiday weekend. But I never get logic get in the way of a good nerd rage
March Caption Madness!
Ok minions, the old timers can recall Teh Olden Times when Hermitage tried to launch a nerd scientist showdown, March Madness style. Which failed miserably, but that was back when I was even more D-listery than I am now! You can never keep a good e-fameball down, so I'm back, with a new proposed Super Aweshum March shenanigans activity (which has nothing to do with the fact I have no time to write anything of faux-substance).
Caption Madness!
I shall supply a number of nerdy pictures each week to our contestants to caption and turn into a fountain of teh funnies. I'll host voting each week where the populace can decide who are the Giggle Generators of the week, they will move onto the next round where it shall all happen again. I'm thinking that starting off with the sweet sixteen is the best way to keep it hilarious, but short (and I can only find so many epic pictahs!). So sign up! Or I'll never analyze that survey data.
Ok, we all know that's not true. But I will totally only give you only half as many cross-tabs as I was planning to! Ok that's a lie too. Just sign up, sheesh.
Figure 1: I mean, has your favorite D-List Monktress ever really had a bad idea?
I got nothin'
I haven't posted at all this week, I know you are all morose without your weekly infusion of D-list fuckery, I'm so sorry. But I had to do real work thingies and therefore kind of made it challenging to care about teh internets when my science chased me down and cornered me like a ravenous pack of Hell Hounds. I added a cbox to my sidepanel because Prof. Cynicism did it even though it may be like a ghetto Twitter. It's my personal ghetto Twitter and I loves it anyways. That's it, that's my brilliant donation to your well-being today.
Ok, here are cute babies, how's that?
Death of the GlamourPub
Dear Orphan Article,
For the past approximately eleventy billion years, you have been collateral damage of an epic war between our Awesomesauce lab and GlamourMag. You have been sent across the street to the Big Mansion and had to endure the occupants complaining you were too long, too short, not innovative, too innovative to be believed, and all sorts of fuckwittery. And the cruel, cruel people we were, we didn’t even wipe your tears when you came toddling back. We put you in GlamourPub bootcamp, snapping at you to stand up straighter, display your data more clearly, to tell a more compelling story and forgodssake show them the fucking videos we put together showing how awesome you are.
Figure 1: Declined with reinviation for submission? You're going to go right back over there to show them how awesome you are. And you'd better work. Bitch.
Line break, n00b style.
But it didn’t work. So we just marched right over there and argued with GlamourMagz over all your deficiencies. We didn’t even bother to cover your ears. I’m pretty sure Reviewer #3 pinched your cheeks until they were red at some point and I didn’t even offer you some Bengay. No one ever stopped to think, how is this making Orphan Article feel? I’m truly sorry for that. But it’s over now, my dear, so we’ll patch you up, put you on a Supplementary Info diet, and ship you back out again. But this time to a gentler, kinder Specialty Journal, that will love you for who you really were. And we’ll all love you just as you are.
While wishing in the back of our minds you’d gotten your shit together, of course.
XOXOXOXO,
Hermitage
P.S. People asked the very valid question of when the fuck is my minion horde survey going to close. I guess I'll KO it next Monday, 2/28 and start compiling the data. So go submit!
Beware the Frumious Bandersneak!
PIs, as we all know, are denizens of the Order of Fucking with Your Peon Mind. It is an accepted factoid of lab servitude that to rise through the ranks, one’s PI must be a master of wily subterfuge. But no Elder Monk dark art is more devious than when your PI enters Sneakster Mode (S.M.). S.M. is an advanced, usually last-resort skill, for when the PI is about to lay a burden so great that even their most brainwashed of peons would rise up Give Us Free style.
What the hell is Sneakster Mode, Hermitage? This overwrought mystery is tempting me to read some srs science instead. Alt-tab ye not, because I shall elucidate forthwith! Sneakster Mode is when your PI is actually nice to you.
And I don’t mean nice as in your PI actually acknowledged your existence as you were walking down the hall. I mean nice as in treating you like a colleague, asking about your mental health, asking about your weekend. S.M. is especially distressing because usually your PI has two settings A) How much have you gotten done? and B) Go do more of it. So you know that when (s)he enters Sneakster Mode some serious shit is about to go down.
A S.M. PI should be avoided at all costs because entering said mode makes PI’s invulnerable to assholery. You cannot tell Sneakster Mode PI that (s)he is crazy, or to go smoke a bowl, or to dump that bullshit in someone else’s prairie. Because (s)he is being so jovial and polite you would feel like you’d basically be nut-punching a small child.
Figure 1: Denial can only save you so long. Because you can't spend every meeting with your PI with your fingers in your ears, you'll get earwax plugs that way
WTB 1337 linebreak skills, phone your local d-list monktress for details
But Hermitage, you say, my PI is always jovial and polite and totes loves hearing about my weekend. Clearly there is no S.M. involved! Not so fast, young n00b, because you and I are dinghies sailing in the wake of the same cruiser. We have the (mis?)fortune of serving those with superior lineage, where Sneakster Mode was literally bred into them to the point they are actually decent human beings who just Happen to Fuck with Your Mind Occasionally. This is some Omega-level PI shit. You are helpless against their mind-jitsu, so you can only hope your Elder Monk-in-Charge uses their gift for benevolence instead of evil.
For the rest of you serving Homo Superior Superiors, you may live unscathed by this phenomenon if you take proper evasion measures. You must employ your best Working Hard and Guilt-Trip skills and pray the S.M. buff wears off before your PI finds you. That or the coffee-machine breaks (*hint**cough*), so that they automatically enter Grumpy PI mode, breaking the spell.
n00b confessions
There is a difference between academic messiness and a true slob. Academic messiness is having two million stacks of papers you’ll never read, assignments you haven’t graded, and maybe an empty package of Hohos lying around. You would think Academia would be more accepting of the ravaging slob masses, we’re absent-minded too! The molding lentils in my tuberware are a totes legit science evolution experiment (lolguys anaerobic respiration mold ftw)! But Academia does not. Academia glares down at you past it’s long, slender and up turned nose before flipping its hair and stalking away. Academia is ashamed of its slob children.
The problem with being a slob is that cleaning is a total dick. Shit you cleaned yesterday quite often needs to be cleaned again today. It is quite possible that you will have to clean something within mere hours of coming into contact with it. This makes no sense to my vestigal lizard brain. If I clean something once I should get some kind of extended stays-clean warranty, there should be roll-over cleanliness.
But the worst is when people try to join the slob dunderhood. People who say ‘oh I’m so messy too!’ but then when you try to bond with them over your joint messiness they start to turn colors and not want to look you in the eye as if you are a rabid animal. That’s when you know they were lying, kind of like when someone talking about how much they love nudist communes and then starts frowning when you take off your pants.
So everyday, I struggle against my inner slob, trying to confine it well guarded and locked locations, kind of like a werewolf. And I know some of my minions are saying, oh Hermitage you are exaggerating. I left a coffee mug unwashed, on my desk, for two years because I was too tired to rinse it out. It grew mold. Mold on 1/18” of coffee residue and ceramic. The only reason my kitchen stays clean is because I’m perpetually pressured to cook for other people and I spend several hours scrubbing every square inch like a lunatic because I’m pretty sure I’ve bred some version of super MRSA that’s going to infect my chicken pot pie and kill everyone and I will be put in jail for biological terrorism. This is the extent of my slob monster that I must keep in check at work.
Figure 1: Oh, don't mind that it's just a roaming dustbunny from the old socks under my desk
Lalalalalalallalala
But it doesn’t work. I think that I’ve been doing a great job and then one day I will look down and realize my desk is covered in coffee splatter, melted chocolate, and spinach flakes. I will spill chips on my carpet and forget they are there until someone comes to ask me for something and then crunches all over them and gives me a look of vile disgust. I used to try to remember to clean everything once a day but that failed so terrifically that I took to retaining piles and piles of paper to submerge my desk and surrounding area in so I would at least look like a respectable mess. But then sometimes I forget and recycle because I want to save the Earth and then I’m back at square one. The only bright spot of the cursed battlefield that is my desk are my multiple plants that I’m pretty sure subsist on the Sun Chip flakes comprising a larger percentage of my desk atmosphere.
I fear for my students if I ever become a PI. Because then I will have a room with a door I can lock and a minifridge full of volume that I can stuff with rotting foodstuffs. Can you make reservations in advance to be on Intervention? In the meantime can people stockpile Febreze coupons for me?
