It Took Me One Minute To Read This,,,,

2/100

ah yes lmao, I forgot to update yesterday and now I forgot everything I've done then. I'm pretty sure I did some Romanian though??? Idk lmao oopsies

Free Education Resource List

Coursera - a generally good platform, from what I’ve heard. Like most other things, you can’t get actual certificates for free, but the courses *usually* are. Here’s a list of the ~1400 courses where everything but the certificate is free. This list has some pretty enticing courses, like an intro to classical music composition, Greek and Roman mythology, Russian history, astronomy, physical chemistry, and a lot more. The enrollment option you want is called Full Course, No Certificate.

YouTube - Never underestimate the power of things most people have access to. YouTube is an incredibaly powerful tool when it comes to learning things, particularly for things like science and math. My favorite educational channel is Crash Course, which might sound cliché because literally every AP World History class ever uses them, but I’ve literally spent hours watching their videos and taking notes. Just watching a bit of the biology series got me to test out of a lesson in my online bio course this year, which was super helpful.

Another good resource on YouTube is anything art. My favorite surprisingly education channel for drawing specifically is DrawingWiffWaffles, because she explains what she’s doing and why as she’s doing it.

Wikihow - another good resource people make over look because it seems obvious. Material on here I would cross reference with something else, because this can be edited by anyone (I’m pretty sure) and it can get a little shady, but I know there was a physics article that helped me understand electrons so much better.

Math Is Fun - a really solid, simple resource for math, particularly if you struggle a lot. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the site and their use of comic sans, there’s quite a lot of information to be found here. It helped me learn calculus, of all things.

Wikipedia - Once again, since anyone can edit this I would cross reference the information you get here with something else, but in all honesty this Wikipedia is my go to for literally everything. There’s unbridled power and pure, unabridged knowledge here, and I will milk it for everything it’s worth. I’ve used Wikipedia for everything from factoring quadratic equations (something I have a strange amount of trouble understanding) to astrobiology to linguistics to the Bohemian Reformation (which resulted in me writing an essay for my history teacher that *almost* saved my grade).

Local libraries are also usually very good centers for learning. I know the one in my town holds a lot of in-person classes (not at the moment) and provides card-holders with a free membership to Universal Class as well as some other online education platforms.

Anyone and everyone can reblog with stuff I missed!

hey so i made a massive database of 900 (and counting) sapphic books, sortable by age, genre and rep! take a look if u feel so inclined (and maybe retweet my tweet?). there’s a submissions page if u catch any i’ve missed (or any incorrect info on them), but pls do check i’ve not just sorted it in a way you don’t expect!

holy fucking shit op this is raw emotion

Any suggestions/inspiration for a STEM-focused, dark academia aesthetic? I'm something of a reformed humanities student finishing an engineering degree this time around.

I think STEM in Dark Academia is an underappreciated aesthetic. The humanities seek to understand what it is to be human, and this is a complex venture indeed. But studying STEM means you seek to understand the world around you. And my God, are there mysteries to be uncovered. Let’s go down the list together, shall we?

SCIENCE.

Latin words fall from your lips as easily as a prayer, and isn’t there piety in this? Devotion, worship? There must be, for you to be able to dig your hands into the breathing body of the world around you and have it speak back. Messily scrawled chemical equations are practically tattooed onto your arms and hands, and sometimes you wake with the molecular structure of a human red blood cell drawn carefully on your heart with no memory of putting it there, but it moves with the pulse of your heart. Bubbling beakers and plumes of emerald, cobalt, violet flame. Faded lab coats. Hair cut short or pulled back neatly, not a single tendril hanging down. Dirt under fingernails, sleeves rolled up and out of the way. You know poisons, toxins, you know the pump of blood through arteries, you know how close we are to death, and you know how it feels to hold the hand of human long dead, still cold from the cooler. Death hates you, because you are helping humanity evade it.

TECHNOLOGY.

Lines and lines of code stare back at you from the over-bright screen of your monitor. You know, you know that we could be more, that the future is a few keystrokes away if only you can organize your tumbling thoughts and the wall of symbols in front of you. You like the way robots move; tiny, carefully planned, yet oh so jerky motions that can’t help but remind you of when a baby deer takes its first quivering steps. You think humans were like this once, in the beginning. You think the movement in a motor resembles the inner workings of a human heart. You imagine the veins that pump blood through your body as wires on a circuit board delivering electricity from one place to another. Leather shoes laced as tightly as possible, tiny blueprints doodled on the soles. Bronze bells hanging from a bedroom window, a crumbled silk shirt. How far can you push at the boundaries of what is possible before something breaks? Will it be you or reality that gives first?

ENGINEERING.

What is it about the smoothing of clay into shapes that makes humanity stop and say, “This must be what it feels like to be God”? How much more can you feel it, with the power in your fingertips and in the corners of your mind to make things humans could never do? To push civilization past its breaking point and remake it anew, better, stronger, more than God ever did? What is the difference between man and machine, and should you even care in the first place? You are like God alright, you are participating in something divine, something holy. You double check every equation and think about what it means to be alive. You decide that, in the ever moving cogs of this great clock, you will be the first piece that moves, the one that pushes the others to succeed. Pencils stabbed into messy buns, lipstick stains on pale coffee cup rims. Your eyes are sharp and focused, but your thoughts are ever moving and desperate with desire to create, to bound forward into the future you are oh so carefully envisioning, every piece laid out and pinned down within an inch of its life. Children are starving, the world is burning, and you can do something, you can fix this, because if you don't, who else can? Who else will?

MATHEMATICS.

What is math? A meaningless formal game. Above the door at Plato’s Academy were inscribed the words, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” How can it be that both are true? A secret language exists that no one is born into, but is available to all willing to learn. Astronomy, the constant ever cycling of the universe around us, our own home a puzzle piece in a cosmic dance. Meandering lines of equations that are beautiful, beautiful, because you know what they mean and they speak to you, they sing. You write them with calligraphy pens and hang them above your desk, they are as much an expression of the human condition as a Picasso; show our creativity more than a Monet. Hands dirty from dragging them over cramped pages of numbers and graphite dust, equations traced into the foggy glass of your favorite coffee shop, messy hair and bitten down nails, math pun t-shirts under tweed blazers, the theory of relativity scrawled sloppily on your knee, the world around you the sum of shapes and numbers and you can see it, you can hear it.

STEM in Dark Academia is nonstop in its restlessness. There is always more to be discovered, further to push, limits that can and will be broken. There is a darkness to that beauty, a madness that permeates the cracks of every field. A historian could have told you not to make the atom bomb. A scientist can’t help themself from seeing how much destruction is possible.

i got a C in maths then and was pissed

feel this anger, darling? preserve it. keep it. never let it go. give it a room inside your heart. make it part of your soul. bury it deep inside of yourself and never show it to anyone. it's your secret. It's what keeps you going. it's your dearest friend and your worst enemy. keep being angry. keep standing up for yourself. steal everyone's anger. it is yours now.

Astrophysics/Astronomy Recs

Academic Earth: Astronomy (multiple courses)

Class Central: Relativity and Astrophysics (course)

NASA Astrophysics (govt. website)

MIT Astrophysics II  (lecture notes)

Astrophysics and Cosmology by Prof. Somnath Bharadwaj (lectures)

Matrix Operations by Richard Bronson  (maths textbook)

Linear Algebra by Seymour Lipschutz & Marc Lars Lipson (maths textbook)

The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (book)

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil de Grasse Tyson (book)

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (book)

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (book)

The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking (book)

YouTube channels 

~True Love~

If Love is a Promise

Gliding off a forked tongue,

But too unknown and tempting to reject;

.

If Love is Sacrifice:

A debt and inconvenience

Strapped around a life like a millstone;

.

If Love is Provision:

The gift of necessities

Barely and begrudgingly given;

.

If Love is Respect:

A trade of raised voices for silence-

Acceptance and worship of flaws;

.

If Love is a Word

Spoken with false safety

Moments before ears and hearts bleed;

.

If Love is Comfort:

An embrace between strikes-

The fearful blanket of soft words and terror;

.

If this is Love,

If this is what is supposed to sustain Life,

We ought to welcome Death with open arms.

.

~Reigh Lynne

why do your homework when you can *reads the entire hurt/comfort section*

watching good omens for the first time:

rewatching good omens:

You know what. I’m starting a new aesthetic, population me.

Romantic Science, AKA Dark Academia for STEM people.

Thrifting a lab coat and embroidering it with your initials and a little insignia, whose significance is known to you and your lab partner only

Watching The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game and Hidden Figures and basically every movie about historical scientists and mathematicians you can find

Decorating your desk with old slide rules and vintage lab equipment. Your prize possession is a set of vintage lenses you found at a thrift store

Wanting an articulated human skeleton far, far too much

Getting a set of (brand new, NOT thrifted, be safe ppl) beakers to drink from, and putting them directly onto your stovetop to boil water for tea or coffee, because borosilicate glass can survive anything.

Secretly relating far too much to Henry Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein, because you too want to do a gay little science experiment that challenges god.

Thunderstorms and late nights in the lab, the light of the Bunsen burner glistening off of your flasks and scribbled chalkboard equations

Papering your walls with vintage scientific diagrams; even if you know that our understanding of the world has evolved since they were made, looking back at scientific history is amazing

Writing code late at night and feeling, in some metaphysical way, as though Ada Lovelace herself is with you in spirit

Being far, FAR too obsessed with the concept of emergent ai sentience and how it has the potential to be Frankenstein irl

Looking through a telescope on clear nights, whispering the names of the constellations and stars, painting a star chart on your ceiling in a burst of creative inspiration

Collecting and mounting samples from everywhere you can think of to pore over in an antique microscope

Bringing a field journal wherever you go, learning how to draw and label botanical samples, preserving plants and flowers for study later

Dreaming of what undiscovered mysteries lie in the deepest depths of the sea, feeling the thrill of discovery whenever you learn about a new species and one day hoping to discover one yourself

Just. Romanticise STEM.