@Narson said in Ancient History help for your games or characters:

Oh! Congrats/good luck. Yell if you need anything.

Thank you! I’ll more than likely hit you up for advice at some point and to beg you to scan book chapters for me. Doing a research thesis in Japan is hard with no English libraries near me but I managed, and I’ll manage again!

You know I’m always happy to help!

But Athena in hoplite armour makes me weep for humanity.

Why though? Joke answers only. I’ll start! Obvs because Hoplite Armor isnt impractical enough to befit a goddess. It’s gotta be that weird, lewd FeMiNiNe ArMoR from a porn parody.

… damn, now I’m back on an Exalted kick. Time to see if someone is wacky enough for a DotFA game.

There is nothing a little Sam Neil doesn’t make better, IMO.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This, all the this.

@WhiteRaven It’s a sci-fi horror film from the late 90s. I’m just being silly because it’s early in the morning and work is slow. I actually think Latin is fascinating if I’m going to be honest. My dad took it in college decades ago and I was always interested in it.

There is nothing a little Sam Neil doesn’t make better, IMO.

@Narson Absolutely true on all counts. Even undergraduate programs are suffering from similar, though smaller numbers. It’s a travesty of the highest order.

Oh absolutely, and COVID has not helped. I’ve been writing about ethics lately so this is all stuff rattling in my head. There is something interesting in how, in the UK, the problem has changed. It used to be, pre 2012 or so, that the issue was one of students suffering in silence. You still often see this in the “Elite” universities. Mental Health is still seen as a weakness, a black mark.

In universities, especially more regional ones, the issue since years of awareness etc, is now that services are massively oversubscribed. Students are waiting days and weeks for support, which doesn’t fit with the academic timetable when we have fixed exam periods etc. And as you say, it runs right through (If I remember it is something like undergrads have 3x higher MH incidences than the general population)

@Narson Booze, cocaine, and in two years’ time a reason to keep living. If I’m any judge.

I have to admit, I mostly stopped making those jokes. I made them as a way of coping with the mental health trauma my own doctorate gave, but now I’m past it, and the stats coming out are so frightening, I don’t know. 70%+ of Postgraduate Researchers showing moderate to severe indications of phycological distress. It’s crazy how little support there is. Though I do also try to be very honest about my mental health as well, because the stigma compounds things.

There is some great research out of UEA and elsewhere about supportive peer networks, though they frame theirs around the use of “Guardian Supervisors” which I find rather problematic due to the lack of pastoral training given within supervisory training at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Peer support has helped in my experience and groups I’ve set up, so I do encourage making sure you talk to other PGRs.

@dvoraen
Lol. @Narson and I have spent many a long eve talking each other’s ears off on various topics. Basically it boils down to my stuff is too early for him, and his stuff is too late for me.

I mean, it doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting! Though I must admit I tend to think my ‘OH COOL EARLY STUFF’ thinking goes to like, Anglo Saxons (we are doing stuff on medievalisms atm). Only tend to handle Greeks, Romans etc in an imagined emotional space created by the far right, not the real things at all.

My creds: I’m a PhD candidate in ancient studies and just finished my master’s thesis on Etruscan funerary iconography.

Oh! Congrats/good luck. Yell if you need anything.

It’s not as dead as you think! Even outside of the Vatican there has been a strong push over the last 10-20 years for more spoken Latin and Latin immersion classes as opposed to the old grammar-translation method.

You mean I won’t need to learn the form for how to speak to a table??

Like -tomy and -ectomy meaning two wholly different things. And of all the books I ever had in college, the thickest one I had was the dictionary I had to continually reference that was nothing but medical terminology.

There are times that I wish that it wasn’t a dead language, because it’s one of those languages that I find obscenely interesting. Thanks for explaining that for me!