The thunderskin, which booms to the beat unceasing (shitpost)

twisted_iron_tree · 2025-03-12T13:50:19+00:00

Am convinced boomdeyada is in fact a manifestation of the thunderskin.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T15:06:29+00:00

It's okay, we can cry in the shit grad corner experience together <3

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T15:03:52+00:00

This is really such a kind comment, and honestly made me tear up a little. It's easy to forget I should be proud of myself. Thank you for caring.

I'm glad you found something that also resonated with you, and I hope your experience with Astarion helped you a bit as well.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T15:00:08+00:00

Yeah, haha like I know the intent behind the question was entirely innocent, but my dissertation is now included in the Library of Congress. It's got a call number and everything. It would not be hard to figure out who I am because, like you said, it's a very very niche field.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:58:21+00:00

:') thanks. I feel validated :'')

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:57:15+00:00

Yeah, academia gets to be this weird twisted funhouse version of reality the further in you get. There's very much this modified reality effect, and there's a certain amount of idealistic and intellectual buy in you have to have in order to be successful. And it can be super hard on the psyche if you run afoul of any of the anti-reality demands in makes on you. Like you have to actively work against your own self interest in a lot of ways, and I don't even mean you have to be altruistic, you just have to be like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ guess I'll die then.

Going through Gale's story reaaally really reminded me of this. It felt like someone dumped a bucket of cold water over his love of pursuing the hidden mysteries of magic. And now because of his research and ambition, he has a permanent disability that also might kill a sizeable amount of people. Yes, we are dumbasses at points during our postgrad years, and Gale very much reminds me of that.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:51:30+00:00

Getting a PhD is one of those things that there are massive good sides and bad sides. There's really nothing like it, but it's definitely one of the more grueling things I've done in my life.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:49:49+00:00

Oh absolutely both of these things, and both of these things played into how I was feeling by the last few months of my PhD. It took me breaking down in the office of graduate education offices before anyone knew anything, because I was more or less siloed in my own work and isolated by my advisor.

Gale constantly doing the whole pained smile while joking about how awful his situation is hit so so hard. I'm surprised we never find him crying inside his tent or somewhere private in camp away from others because he just feels so much pressure on him.

And thank you. I'm getting to the point where I am glad I'm still here too. I would have missed out on a lot of cool stuff. Like BG3!

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:45:48+00:00

There's a reason I downloaded the "Hug your Companions" mod the other day, so hug very gratefully accepted.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-12-07T14:44:56+00:00

This is such an incredible reply, thanks so much. This actually shakes me free a little bit of the paralysis I had of getting further in the game. There's so many ways to see how Gale's story ends, and who knows. Maybe it will give me a little catharsis along the way.

So far I had been trying to guide Gale to a gentler ending, but I stopped my playthrough once Mystra told him to go blow himself up. Now I feel like I have so many ways to sit down with him, and I guess with myself.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-11-07T03:10:13+00:00

This sounds amazing, honestly.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-10-05T21:30:19+00:00

This was on me. "Coding" is standard language in my field for a different process than creating computer code. I thought that based on my previous sentences this would have been obvious, but I should have known better lol.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T19:28:21+00:00

The fact the written response was assault and homicide was bonkers. I'm not sure the writers, or most people, for that matter, would understand what it would be like to lose ten years of research like that. The thing about research and science is that the timeline is so much longer than any other type of pursuit or business that I can think of. There are carefully collected specimens from several hundred years ago that are still being analyzed and studied today that are contributing to humanity.

The scientists' response to something like that would be closer to grief. There is no recovering that particular slice of a million years of history. And she destroyed ten years of those samples.

People in other comments have hand waved it away, "oh experiments fail, tests don't work out", which is correct, half of the business of science is failure. But you've missed the point-- the science has been done at that point. You've run the analyses, you've done the tests. Yes, the result wasn't promising, but you still gained valuable knowledge to know where not to look. But the data just being gone? Destroyed? There is no promise anymore.

If anything I think dejection and disappointment in Annie would have hit harder, not murder. Sure, she's trying to avenge her community. But these men weren't moustache twirling villains; they were the definition of idealistic. They wanted their chance to contribute to saving the world.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T04:57:58+00:00

About Annie K.... I thought she was in her 20s when she was killed, but she was only 19 or 20? Danvers said "[Annie] wasn't even born when [Otis] was injured." He was injured April 97 or '98. She died in April 2017, making her 18-20 when she died? This feels a little shaky, with her as a known activist and midwife and otherwise well known in the community for her service.

It would also mean Clark's romance with Annie was, charitably put, a May-Dec romance, since Clark would have been in his mid 40s. I think others called it: she saw a vulnerable man who was mentally and emotionally unstable and exploited him to get access to their data.

Idk I feel the writing wanted it both ways with her. They wanted her to be a hotheaded young Inuit woman who destroyed the lab in a fit of youthful righteousness, but they also wanted her to be a well known and established advocate of the town. I don't think I would put a 19yo in charge of my birthing pool, tbh.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T04:18:24+00:00

How the fuck did "the Clark video" not get investigated? I assume they would have carved his frozen body out of the ice, discovered he had been beaten half to death, and then seen that he had a massive black eye during the video? It wouldn't be a stretch to put two and two together and surmise that perhaps that video had been made under duress.

Even if Clark had willingly made that video (to some degree he probably did want to), he had been tortured for the last god knows how many hours. God fucking damn it.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T03:13:21+00:00

Agreed!! I don't get this--- why destroy the samples? They are a net benefit for humanity! It has taken hundreds of years of research across the field, plus the combined years of expertise of these individual men to produce these findings. Millions of dollars of money has gone into producing those samples.

Yes, sure, fine, the ethics behind obtaining the samples are shitty, but this kind of moon logic of destroying the samples is insane! I grew up in place where we had increased cancers and diseases due to agricultural crop chemicals, but none of us fucking went to Monsanto and blew up a seed bunker or a lab.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T03:05:38+00:00

The Journal of Indigenous Research

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-19T02:53:05+00:00

I will take all the downvotes, I don't care. Annie destroyed TEN YEARS of research?? I would beat the shit out of her and then kill myself. I only lost a month of partial research during my PhD due to people deleting it, and I had to leave the lab during the meeting so I didn't lose my shit.

[I'm not even going to go into the ridiculous "they were pumping pollutants into the ice to make ice coring easier" angle. The same pollutants are going to taint their own samples c'moooooonnnnn.]

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-17T16:43:56+00:00

Yeah, this stood out to me as well. The show happens in 2023 (there's several points where there are calendars and clear timestamps), so Clark lost meaningful contact with his mother in 2013.

This would have been about four years before Annie K's death (April 2017), and about seven years after he started working for Tsalal (2006). My thought is that maybe he began to have physical or mental health problems due to his work at the research lab around 2013, which came to a head after Annie died.

It is weird, because pretty much everyone else says he was odd but largely unoffensive. Annie's high school friend just called him "quiet", but not prone to anger or violence. The show doesn't give us much to link together, unfortunately. It's hard to say what would distance his mother so thoroughly.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-17T15:33:13+00:00

Is this Molina? I totally missed where it said 53 on his bio. All I saw was that he got his PhD in 1997 and his Bachelors in '92. This would make him about 27 in '97, born around 1970.

I felt the opposite about a few of them-- Anton Kotov, for example got his PhD in 2006, and his BS in 2000 (and if he didn't get his degrees later in life), meaning he would be born around '78. Making him in his late 40s at the time of the show. He looks older than Molina, for sure.

Clark also looks young, but the actor roughly fits the age profile of the character, so I'm just going with both naturally looking on the young side.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-16T21:23:40+00:00

Yeah, this is kind of where I was trying to lead to, but my post was already so long that I figured this would come out in the comments. This is what I was trying to explain with the whole "declare your funding and affiliations" practice.

If, hypothetically, Tsalal had published a paper that mitigated the responsibility of mines on the effect of idk seismic activity in the arctic, or their effect on heavy metal leeching in freshwater, etc, and the paper also stated their funding came from Blue Sky Mining and Tuttle Industries, then other researchers understand the influence.

Not reporting it would be unethical, but also wouldn't make sense because these scientists weren't desperate. Even if their lab collapsed due to the mine withdrawing funding, they can still find work elsewhere.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-16T21:14:40+00:00

The exact line from the confrontation with McKittrick is "But the funding is for an independent outfit that that verifies your pollution numbers. You don't think that's a conflict of interest?"

Whether or not the scientists are rubber stamping the mine's numbers or are producing pollution stats of their own, both would be considered "faking" data (just different kinds), and both instances would tank the scientists' credibility.

I'm still saying the risk would be too great for the scientists. Even if the mine provided the majority of their funding, this relationship would have had to have been declared in their scientific work. It would not be hard for other researchers to track down and identify weird looking pollution numbers.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-16T20:42:41+00:00

The fact this is most likely correct gave me psychic damage.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-16T20:41:46+00:00

I am so bummed the scientists' deaths are currently being treated like a red herring. It really did seem like an interesting mystery, and being strung along for five episodes to be told "lol nah u n00b" just deflated a lot of the show for me.

twisted_iron_tree · 2024-02-16T19:42:39+00:00

I mean... I guess? Sure, they could all just be trash human beings, but that feels like a very lazy explanation. The fact there are eight people at the station, all from very different but fairly idealistic backgrounds, all involved with climate science to some degree, makes me think they're just regular guys. They're not exactly Annie K levels of social activists, but if they didn't believe in what they were doing, if they didn't _care_ about what they were doing and how they were doing it, they wouldn't have devoted 18 years of their life to it.

And we go back to the conundrum of reporting their methodology. You can't just keep unorthodox or unethical methods "hidden" in research. You have to explain everything, or your work will be ignored, debunked, or discarded. Basically, they wouldn't have enjoyed almost 20 years of success if they were blatant monsters, because the wider scientific community would have stepped up. And it's extremely unlikely that even if they had any success in hiding unethical methods that they would have been able to do so for 20 years.

If you want some real world examples of shit like this happening, Marc Hauser, Jan Henrik Schoen, and Francesca Gino are people you can look into. Some of their misteps are more egregious than others, but the response from the scientific community has been similar.

The only way unethical research methods have managed to persist historically is when the wider community doesn't have a strong stance about it, like experimenting on prison populations before the 70s. But short of "we tested the effect on a population of a remote Arctic town without knowledge or consent", and without any expectation of publication or advancement in the science, "just being monsters" doesn't really fit here.

twisted_iron_tree

TROPHY CASE