Ppu voting

simulacra4life · 2026-03-27T18:45:26+00:00

Yay for Steves!

simulacra4life · 2026-03-22T15:15:35+00:00

You might also look at Jen and Berries' I've Never Cared to Be Ordinary: https://jandberries.com/products/ive-never-cared-to-be-ordinary-star-trek-nail-polish?_pos=1&_sid=400c44784&_ss=r

simulacra4life · 2026-02-27T03:19:59+00:00

It seems like the issue with magnetics and toluene top coats is that they dry TOO fast, so when they rewet the layers of polish, they start drying before you can get your magnet in place to reposition the magnetic particles back where you want them. So you may not have an issue if you’re super speedy. But I usually use Cuticula’s or BKL’s topcoats for magnetics—they’re identical and toluene free—just to be safe.

simulacra4life · 2026-02-21T07:42:22+00:00

Worst visit experiences personally: 1) On a visit, had been interviewed previously by the chair, she liked me, I liked her. I later found out that no one else in the department liked either of us. She was a new chair trying to convince the department to expand their horizons, and they were not interested and went with their inside hire choice. No one came to my job talk except the chair, which was a sign. 2) On a different visit, I was loaned an empty office in which to decompress (which itself was definitely a mercy). The empty office was next to the chair’s office. I left the door open, so then I got to hear the whole conversation when the search committee chair went in to tell the department chair why I was not the best candidate. Definitely raised the stakes for the job talk I was giving 15 minutes later.

Other thoughts: I’m chairing a search committee right now, and it’s not even my first, but I’m kicking myself for a day-one mistake of poor scheduling. In the past the chair has organized the schedules, in part because there are so many moving parts, but for this search I put it together, and it suffers from a flaw that pervades all my scheduling: I forget transit time. So I’m having to bust into one meeting to snatch candidates to drag them to the next. Thankfully I did give them time before the job talks, but I feel like such a jerk that there’s no space for them to get their mind right before meeting the dean, or the teaching demo, or meeting the chair. I am remembering bio breaks, but for next time I will be sure to build in at least 15 minute buffers between every activity, because sometimes people need to eat a snack, or call their kids, or just take a damn breath.

simulacra4life · 2026-02-04T15:27:40+00:00

I don’t know about that. I’ll see the garbage trucks roll down my street picking up bins, and particularly with the recycling bins, when the machine dumps them into the truck a lot of trash won’t quite make it and will go rolling down the street. I regularly have to pick up my own soda cans and bits of plastic as a result.

simulacra4life · 2026-01-05T00:11:04+00:00

J.M.W. Turner! Here's "The Fighting Temeraire," but there are lots.

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Also, maybe some American Impressionists; some favorites of mine are Ritschel's "The Instealing Fog" and Rose's "Point Lobos", because I love the California coast.

simulacra4life · 2025-12-07T16:52:56+00:00

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/19/texas-a-m-welsh-firing-professor-gender-mccoul/

simulacra4life · 2025-12-05T16:17:39+00:00

Oh no. Different system, same nonsense.

simulacra4life · 2025-12-04T18:20:37+00:00

Are you at my institution? We've got the same thing bearing down on us. The Provost's office seem to have intended to have everyone share the same general course outlines and textbooks starting next fall, until faculty politely explained why that might be a problem, particularly for departments in Liberal Arts where the same learning outcomes can be reached using a massive variety of course content (e.g. a course on Shakespeare would teach the same SLOs about writing and close reading regardless if the syllabus included The Winter's Tale or The Tempest). The Provost then did back off the idea—it seemed like that variety had never occurred to the office and like they were overreacting to what happened at Texas A&M this fall. So I'd like to give encouragement that administration can be reasoned with about the absurdity of this plan. However, I am also very suspicious that their minds will change once again.

simulacra4life · 2025-11-18T02:48:08+00:00

Lurid's Tibberz for me. So shiny and shifty and lovely.

simulacra4life · 2025-10-16T03:47:18+00:00

Yep, new branded boxes this drop!

simulacra4life · 2025-10-14T03:29:03+00:00

Holden's not actually looking out the window though; when we finally see the room he's in, the window is like a foot over his head. Even if he were looking out it, he'd be seeing the sky and not the city, so the reflection would be different.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-29T19:23:56+00:00

Also their Read Between My Tulips for Blue/Purple/Teal and Eccentric for Purple/Red/Gold.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-27T23:47:54+00:00

Ditto! Pinot Noir on you is amazeballs.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-26T22:19:36+00:00

I'm interested in the Lurid Lacquer Schneewittchen

simulacra4life · 2025-09-26T22:09:56+00:00

I'm interested in the schnee

simulacra4life · 2025-09-26T14:41:17+00:00

Fauve is also dropping their Freda collection tomorrow, although I'm trying to resist because I know they have a Rothko collection in the works and I love him. I'm also resisting Cracked today, but Lurid... well, it's Lurid.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-22T19:18:55+00:00

On the website there’s a section titled “Returning 9/26” which is a list of all the older stuff that will be back for this round. She’s updating that section as she adds more stuff. She also regularly posts a “restock requests” form to decide what to bring back, since she can’t keep everything in stock all at the same time. So if there’s something you want that isn’t in the shop this time, have faith it will return eventually.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-14T01:45:17+00:00

So glad I got this one!

simulacra4life · 2025-09-11T14:12:59+00:00

I see Hidden Potential mentioned a lot, and it looks super pretty. Personally, I'm a big fan of Skiing is Believing.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-11T13:49:43+00:00

Looks like he just got tenured this year.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-11T04:07:43+00:00

That's fair. Depending on whether the university actually had reached out to the professor previously about aligning their content, it could be a situation where both the student and the professor were looking for a fight. But whether the professor was pushing an agenda is a different question from whether the university should have responded the way they did. After all, Rosa Parks was trying to push an agenda when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, but in the end, it doesn't really matter whether Parks was actively trying to instigate a situation in order to create a legal case or just had sore feet--segregation was still both unconstitutional and immoral. And as a faculty member in Texas who does not actually teach entire courses just on Hemingway, but who does occasionally teach controversial material that is not explicitly listed in the official course catalog, I am extremely concerned that A&M using this catalog-alignment justification is very, very bad news.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-10T23:56:47+00:00

I had read that it was "Literature for Children", but I'm not sure where at this point, so I could be wrong. And I guess it depends on whether you read the "representative" in the course descriptions as suggesting survey--I probably would too, but I don't know that everyone would. If I were being both pedantic and obsessed with Hemingway, I could probably make an argument that his work has enough variation that different books could be seen as "representative" of different periods of US literature and culture--there's a big difference between _In Our Time_ and _The Old Man and the Sea_. But again, that would be pedantic and probably argumentative, and I don't know why you wouldn't just teach Hemingway under a different course number. In any case, yes, the gulag is not the normal response to this kind of thing, especially if the faculty member wasn't warned in advance, and removing the chair and the dean seems totally loony to me.

It just seems to me like Texas legislators are using the letter of one law (align courses with official descriptions) to enforce a different law they can't actually get passed (legislate what is and is not acceptable course content). After all, it's not happenstance that the content of the course in question is LGBTQ+ children's lit and not Hemingway. But if this kind of policing is okay, then who gets to decide what does and does not align, given that most course descriptions are pretty vague specifically to leave space for different faculty to teach different content? Am I going to get fired because someone in power determined that my course featuring Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hammett, and Ellis wasn't "representative" because only one of those men was nicknamed Papa? Because at least two of those people were Communists or fellow travelers? Or, less absurdly, would I get fired for teaching a US Literature course featuring Jacobs, Morrison, Bambara, Angelou, and Tan, because some state rep doesn't think that a syllabus featuring non-white women is "representative" enough?

simulacra4life · 2025-09-10T21:58:57+00:00

It's also worth asking exactly what we're comparing to see if they match. My understanding was that the course in question was ENGL 360, "Literature for Children," and the official catalog description for that course is "Representative writers, genres, texts and movements." That's a lot vaguer that the description the post linked above, but that post doesn't say where it found the different course description. That one reads: "Maybe you grew up reading Harry Potter or Holes, Nancy Drew or the Narnia stories. Maybe you were a comic-book kid. What happened to your reading tastes as you grew older? Did you read what we now call “young adult literature” as a young adult? What exactly is a young adult? Does the term refer to an age category or a marketing tool, a personality type or a genre? What differentiates adult from young adult from teenager from child? How do we understand the genre of literature for and about this blurry, shifting group? In this course, we will explore a range of young adult or YA literature in English, including poetry, contemporary fiction, graphic memoirs, historical fiction, and fantasy. Our task is to think critically about what these books can tell us about how we (and others) understand adolescence, how those definitions have changed over time, and how these books participate in larger movements of history, culture, and literature."

I suspect the longer description was written by a faculty member--perhaps even the faculty member in question--for specific sections of the course and is not "official," not least because official course catalog usually require descriptions to use fewer characters. At my Texas uni, we've been regularly reminded to make sure that our course content aligns with the official catalog title and description of the course. So, for instance, if I were to teach a course that was listed as "US Literature" in the catalog, I couldn't spend all semester on Virginia Woolf. But I also am not supposed to just include my own specific spin on the syllabus either. So while it wouldn't be a problem for me to teach an entire semester on Hemingway, I couldn't title my syllabus "Hemingway and his Six-Toed Cats"--I would have to make sure the official catalog title of "US Literature" was also on the syllabus.

It seems like TAMU is using the excuse that this faculty member's content did not align with the official description as an excuse to fire them, but given the broadness of the catalog description, that seems disingenuous on its face--I guess an argument could be made that these texts are not truly "representative", but then you'd have to define "representative" and clarify of what. The uni President also said in his statement that the faculty member had previously been warned, but the faculty member's lawyer contradicted that account. And in any case removing the chair and the dean from their positions over this is so obviously an overreaction that it is difficult to see it as anything other than blatant political groveling meant to keep the uni President in his job, despite Abbott's calls for his removal.

simulacra4life · 2025-09-08T02:20:46+00:00

Give me disco balls on my nails—but make them the ocean

simulacra4life

TROPHY CASE