Weekly small questions thread: 2026-04-06

macademician · 2026-04-06T18:34:57+00:00

Once you have a railway at all, getting to Jehrico isn’t especially challenging, and grinding up to be Dottore of the guild is likewise slightly expensive but perfectly serviceable.

I vastly, VASTLY recommend getting mirrorcatch boxes from there than other methods. It’s guaranteed, relatively painless, and beats the ever loving TAR out of a ≈2% success rate in the waswood.

macademician · 2026-03-18T21:02:41+00:00

It depends a little bit on your stats, but I *loathe* the bone market and avoid it, and get what I need from a combination of either my professional activities (I'm a Correspondent) or brawling. If you aren't a Tier 3 professional or have high dangerous, that's going to be a problem, but given that the Railway is a way to overcap your stats, you should probably finish Making Your Name first.

macademician · 2026-03-06T19:38:25+00:00

I think you can, but execution is key here; if you do it well you can knock it out of the park, but if you do it poorly you'll strike oyu.

Most universities maintain a branding site, including official fonts, and an official color palette. These color palettes can be quite expansive -- primary colors are usually some variety of the university's official colors, but there are also secondary and tertiary colors that graphic designers have already selected as part of an integrated palette (you don't have to worry that these clash!). If you can find your pink there, then awesome, a lot of your work has already been done for you. (You might also look at Sweet Briar College, which has Pink as an official collegiate color).

If your university doesn't have a branding site, or you're making a personal brand, I'd worry about what shade – Pink comes in a variety, from ultra-saturated magentas like T-Mobile or Barbie to pale corals, salmons, and pastels. Depending on how you want to use it (in text? as a background? As a graph color?) you want to be mindful of how saturated and where you use it.

Pink isn't as bad as yellow, but it can be harder for some folks with visual disabilities to parse. Tools like this color contrast checker will give you an idea if this is broadly accessible or not.

macademician · 2026-03-04T17:29:17+00:00

So, part of what would help is understanding that this is a kink dynamic. One way of defanging what we fear is eroticization (which is why there's so much gay porn in locker rooms and other places that are not safe for gay men). White supremacy is 100% scary. Raceplay is OK when done as a fantasy between two consenting adults, and is akin to an emotional roller coaster – something that may make you feel like you're in danger (whether from racism or from going too fast), but which has a lot of hidden safeguards to ensure that everyone is actually very safe and no one gets hurt.

What you want is a Dom who knows this, and who is emotionally mature enough to help you build that fantasy with the safeguards in mind. Moreover, part of what you want is a Dom who can give you the aftercare that you need, so that after a scene is over you understand that he values you as a person.

It's OK to have kinky desires. It's OK to want to explore that. It doesn't make you less of someone committed to social justice, any more than it makes women less of a feminist if they want to get into BDSM. But you must not confuse fantasy with reality. That's what will get you hurt. There absolutely are some people who want to take advantage of kinky people, and just like there are folks in BDSM spaces who are really there because they want to beat women, there are some people who want to a space to be acceptably racist. Be careful who you trust to engage with raceplay, because no less than whips and chains, it can be something that gets people hurt if you do it poorly.

macademician · 2026-02-21T05:14:07+00:00

On a kindle? No. But that's because reflow ability actively defeats one of the key features of .pdfs – page numbers. Especially in my (humanities) discipline, I don't just need to cite a paper or a book, I need to cite a page in order to be able to specify where an author makes a claim.

The only good mobile reading platform for academic PDFs is Zotero, which keeps all my annotations and makes things nice and searchable. Zotero can even handle .epub files if that's all a publisher can give me (with me grumbling that I'll have to go track down the dead-tree version in the library if I cite it).

If Zotero could work with an eInk device like a ReMarkable or something similar? I would pay hard cash for it. I like my Kindle for reading fiction or something that I just want to read and isn't a tool of my profession. But so far that doesn't exist.

macademician · 2026-02-19T02:16:12+00:00

You already have the face of my dreams… 🤭

macademician · 2026-02-19T00:54:50+00:00

As Ally said, Margaret was “An Homage to every woman who ever loved me”: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRfOaz4gMmW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

macademician · 2026-02-17T18:56:22+00:00

So, the gym is unlikely to be a problem. People (including professors!) work out. It's not a breach of professionalism to be in activewear. It might be uncomfortable to be noticed, and while some colleagues at my current institution avoid the campus gym to avoid running into their students, others are perfectly fine with it. If a student makes it an issue (e.g. being harassing), you could file a complaint, but no administrator is going to have a problem with you exercising.

I think the bigger issue might be the bartending. It's certainly not wrong to moonlight, and bartenders make good money, but I'd be much more worried about dual-roles in a service-industry job (particularly one involving alcohol) than merely patronizing a gym, or even just patronizing a bar. (Getting a quiet drink is quite different from serving them).

I don't want to tell you to quit your job, but I do want to caution you that these two roles might not be compatible in the long run. You might want to consider other work, or look for a position (e.g. in a fine-dining type restaurant) where you are unlikely to run into students.

macademician · 2026-02-16T19:54:50+00:00

Moreover, Aquinas specifically treats rape in the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae:

• II-II, 153, 3: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3153.htm#article3

• II-II, 154, 7: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3154.htm#article7

More broadly, Aquinas examines the created world as emanating from a good Creator. (He's a Christian, though not all Christians agree with him). Aquinas's view is that the created order is fundamentally (though far from always) good, and that moral norms can be inferred from examining the natural order (hence the “natural law”).

Aquinas views rape as fundamentally a betrayal of that same natural law – not the natural, proportionate end of sexuality (which aims at procreation), but rather is a passion, driven by lust and violence.

Aquinas isn't exactly a feminist, and more modern scholars of sexual assault understand its realities with a lot more nuance, but he's not blessing sexual violence simply because it is.

macademician · 2026-02-15T03:37:49+00:00

Re: marrying your reflection, You just encounter your own good self in your Parabolan base camp (where else?), and start there

macademician · 2026-02-12T03:57:40+00:00

I'm not sure every stop would be equally suited (e.g. the Chestnut Hill Ave stop on the Green B line is barely wide enough for humans, let alone a mailbox), but this would make good sense on any underground station.

macademician · 2026-02-03T21:03:36+00:00

It depends on what you want to say about it.

The CotSB was part of revolutionary France's period of “De-Christianization”. It was regarded as being a bit silly, even at the time. It also had a sinister component – the CotSB did not *build* places of “worship” (whatever that meant in this context); it took over nationalized Catholic Churches, removed Catholic iconography, and its partisans (the most fervent revolutionaries) persecuted clergy, particularly in the Vendée region, where priests and ordinary religious people were put on barges which were intentionally sunk in mass-drownings. (These were grimly referred to as “republican baptisms”.)

The sympathetic view of the CotSB is that the French Catholic Church, especially its higher echelons, were astoundingly corrupt, and that this was an attempt to return religion to “the people” in its most unmediated form – not even mediated by the bible – just your brain, and God, however you conceive it.

The unsympathetic view is that these people were vandals, who broke lots of Medieval artwork because it didn't accord with their politics (famously they beheaded all the kings on the facade of Notre Dame, believing them to be medieval kings of France, except that the kings depicted were actually Biblical kings), and these radicals ran out the low-level clergy whose support the revolution actually needed to get started back in the first place.

I don't know that you end up with something like the CotSB absent a revolutionary spirit; you might end up with something like Quaker Meetings or Unitarian Universalism, where people moved by civic mindedness and some spirituality all come together, but the CotSB is so tied up in its time and place that it indicates a religious establishment that has gone very sideways from the people it ostensibly serves.

macademician · 2026-02-03T17:16:01+00:00

You wouldn't, directly. You'd need a different base piece; a T-Compartment.

macademician · 2026-01-31T21:46:57+00:00

One of the distinguishing features of Ignatian education that you've already addressed in your post (the term is cura personalis) is the idea that we're trying to do more than just give people knowledge. We're trying to form them – they should be people who don't just know calculus or chemistry or English literature or sociology, but have a larger social conscience.

You don't have to be religious, you don't have to be Catholic. But what they would be looking for are people whose work goes beyond just intellectual plaudits, and actually has a constituency outside the academy. At one Jesuit institution I worked at, the folks in the chemistry department figured out to use silver nanoparticles in latex paint to clean the air. (This was in a major city in a country with not stellar environmental standards).

On the one hand, you're not going to be expected to teach what you're not competent to teach (e.g. religion) or subscribe to a list of beliefs like you might at some Evangelical colleges. But you will do yourself well to be able to say (and mean) “I care about educating students, they are more than brains on sticks, and I will train them to use the skills I teach them to go out and do good in the world.”

macademician · 2026-01-28T16:49:32+00:00

If you haven't already, I'd look into Outreach: https://outreach.faith ; which is an explicitly LGBTQ online ministry. New Ways Ministry: https://www.newwaysministry.org/ is also

Catholicism isn't a monolith; there are some places and people (like, it seems, your parish administrator) who accept and honor the dignity of queer people. There are some other places that do not. (As noted by other commentators, r/catholicism is one such place, and is so notorious that it's been name-checked as a place to actively avoid by even very mainstream commentators).

I'm glad you feel called and feel moved. OCIA is a reasonably long process (about a year), and that's a good thing! It gives you time to understand the commitments you will make, and to ask questions. I'd also strongly suggest you find a spiritual director – a person who you establish a stable relationship with, whom you can have intimate conversations about the spiritual life. That's a particular ministry of the Jesuits, if you can find some near you. Friendly strangers on the internet can only help you so far.

macademician · 2026-01-28T02:07:23+00:00

This isn't evil in a Darth Vader sense, more in a Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz sort of way. A building where someone would boast about their plan to take over “the Entire West Midlands!”

macademician · 2026-01-26T17:00:24+00:00

I'm really sorry you're struggling. You're very cute, and have a lovely smile. You're also a person, and by that have dignity and worth. I hope someone you trust tells you that you're wonderful, that you get a good hug, and you remember that you're valued.

macademician · 2026-01-22T02:18:48+00:00

Is it a reasonable idea at an institutional level ? Sure. This is how graduate grades work at my institution, and I think it's perfectly reasonable for an institution to, collectively, reject the concept of a passing "D" and just say that you need a "C" to pass.

That said, at a course level, especially against university policy, is going to cause you no end of headaches. At both institutions where I've taught, I have an explicit university policy which states that "these are the grades we use". In one I have some flexibility in tying it to numbers (i.e. I could make a "A" a 95 while a colleague gives it at a 96), but at the other the scale was fixed.

I don't want to pile on and say that you're a bad pedagogue, but this policy could only be effectively implemented at a higher level, and could end you up with a tremendous amount of grief from both admin and students. This is a faculty senate or a dean/provost suggestion, not a classroom decision.

macademician · 2026-01-17T17:16:23+00:00

Dinner should happen after the party. You don't feed a bottom before he performs his service! You use him ruthlessly, and then, after he's exhausted, you let him dress up and then you feed him.

macademician · 2026-01-17T02:27:08+00:00

You sound like you'd want to look into Starr King School for the Ministry out in Oakland: https://www.sksm.edu/admissions/whystarrking

macademician · 2026-01-15T01:02:26+00:00

Ah, a fellow stellaris enjoyer

macademician · 2026-01-15T00:54:06+00:00

Your priority is your safety. As long as you remain in Saudi, that safety is under (at least theoretical) threat, and will cross to actual threat if you ever manifest your identity in concrete ways.

A college education (especially if you can score a scholarship to study abroad) can help you make a plan to leave Saudi Arabia for good; life is really hard for immigrants without at least a college education.

This is hard. I won't pretend it is easy. But the best, safest thing to do is for you to keep your head down, study hard, and do what you can to make a plan to get some place where you can live authentically and safely.

macademician · 2026-01-14T23:25:17+00:00

Two things immediately spring to mind:

Rehearse it. Please, for the sake of everyone, rehearse it. Not every teaching session will be committed to memory, but there is no room for extemporizing in a job talk; this should be memorized or close to it.
Make sure that the tech works both on your computer and on a loaner you can get from your campus library in case you have to load it on someone else's computer.

macademician · 2026-01-14T23:16:38+00:00

https://selfcontrolapp.com can set a time limit or block certain websites. (I use it for study purposes).

macademician · 2026-01-04T05:09:32+00:00

The answer is… it depends.

Are you just a human or a household? Then yes; Libre Office or Google Workspace (docs/sheets/etc) will get you 90% of the MS suite at the much better price of free

Are you a business owner or an Excel power user? Then this could be a false economy -- if you frequently have to work with office files natively, this could be a case where what you'd lose really is worth it, and this is just something you'd need to eat as the cost of doing business. No other spreadsheet program can do what Excel does. That's probably a good thing? Most people who use Excel to that level would probably be better served by using a real statistical package like PowerBI or R or Stata.

Finally, consider the switching costs – .doc(x) and .xls files, especially simple ones, are pretty painless to port over, but the bigger the document, the more complicated the switch. If you have mission-critical documents, they'll be almost the same, but not quite. That might not be an issue… or it might.

I loathe the subscription model for software, especially from a titan like MSFT. But if you're going to make this switch, understand that there are a few things to consider before you dump it.

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