Let’s Talk Expertise

This will anger some people, like my age post did, but it also needs to be said and is about something I have been seeing consistently. If you are in your undergrad and taking major courses, you are not an expert on the subject material, let alone the profession itself. You are a student who is just building their foundational knowledge for your chosen field. You have not accumulated enough knowledge on the subject matter to speak from a place of expertise, nor have you learned enough to parse through the nuance of your chosen field or reached any of the milestones to be considered as such. There’s a reason why we actually have an expertise system here in the USA that is paired with the legal system and our government employment system. If you go onto a government job site and look at their listings you will see some combination of Degree, Degree + Experience, Degree + Equivalent Experience and Amount of Time. What does this mean? It means that if a job is asking for someone with a Master’s degree in a specific field they will consider individuals with the appropriate degree, but they will also consider people with a Bachelor’s degree and the equivalent amount of time and/or experience in their field that makes them as knowledgeable as the MS candidate. The reason for the Time/Experience component is that not everyone pursues a graduate degree, but that does not mean they lack the knowledge required. However, there is an equivalency in Time/Experience to those graduate degrees and the special knowledge they impart. This gets even more complicated in higher levels when a position is asking for a PhD + 10 years of experience, that means a BS might be right out unless they have 20+ years of experience and an MS might need 15-20 years alone. In my time as a professor I have seen scores of undergrads present themselves as their major professions when they haven’t even finished their junior year. Sometimes it’s benign so that they can puff up in mixed company. Other times? Not so much. Several years ago I saw an undergrad present themselves as a psychologist that was “recovering traumatic memories” and got a multitude of people falsely accused of various violent crimes. This culminated in several court cases where the student had to admit they were falsely representing themself as an expert and therefore falsely producing “evidence”. In light of the ongoing conflict I have seen a number of blogs on here present themselves as historians/experts on various related subject matter, while openly admitting that they are undergrad students and/or do not work in any capacity relating to the material. The latter can be fine up to a point, but if you are not working in your field and it comes to being an expert according to the GS and/or Daubert Standards, you most likely are not making the cut. The person regularly publishing papers and working as the profession will be considered the expert over you. If all you have is a few papers to your name and no other activities relating to the subject…well it’s not a good look to be considered an expert. “AVTP this is elitist! Not everyone can go to college/grad school on *subject matter*” That’s right. Not everyone can go to school for psychology, history, ecology, polisci, let alone go and make it their career. These people are not experts then. Plain and simple. You don’t get to call yourself an expert because you listen to podcasts or do deep dives on Wikipedia. (And note, this is not about the blogs who are posting about how they did a hyper fixation deep dive on frog naming nomenclature when they were in high school. I am talking about the persons who are presenting themselves as knowledgeable authorities and using phrases like “As a *insert specialist field here*” while they pick courses for their sophomore/junior/senior year.)

This is a friendly reminder to never, ever publish your book with a publishing company that charges you to publish with them. That is a vanity press, which makes money by preying on authors. They charge you for editing, formatting, cover art, and more. With most of these companies, you will never seen a cent of any royalties made from sale of your book. A legitimate publishing company only makes money when you make money, they will never charge you to publish with them. If a company approaches you and says "Hey, we'll publish your book, just pay us X amount of money," tell them to go fuck themself and block them.

Remember, kids: money should only ever flow FROM your publisher TO you.

Here's a very well-maintained resource by the SFWA (Science-Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association) that lists contests/editors/small presses/etc. with predatory behaviours:

Go forth and publish safely!

@selenite0 has a full presentation about shady publishing contracts, this might be something to add to that

A Brief Account of Why Vampires Are Romanian (or Rather A Not-At-All Brief Account of How They Actually Aren’t)

So, in the 1720s-30s, some villagers in Vojvodina (which is now a part of  Serbia but was then a part of the Hapsburg Empire’s Kingdom of Hungary) had what they perceived to be some vampire-related problems and some Austrian military doctors came by and documented their decisions to solve these vampire-related problems by digging up dead bodies and attempting to violently de-vampirize them via beheadings and stakings and other sundry forms of mutilation. Some of this documentation came to be published in newspapers and periodicals across the rest of Europe, and suddenly the rest of Europe was all like “Whoa! Vampires are a thing!” and they found said vampires terribly interesting and promptly wrote political satire about the parasitic upper classes metaphorically sucking the blood of their underlings. As one does.

Eventually, in 1746, a French priest named Augustin Calmet wrote a big treatise on demons and ghosts and all manner of other spooky stuff, in which he included a lengthy discussion of vampires. He called it Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al., which you will probably observe as not containing any reference to Vojvodina or Serbia at all. Like pretty much everyone else writing about these events, Calmet just categorized the experiences of the Serbian villagers as being a thing that happened in Hungary because technically they did happen in what was Hungary at the time even if they didn’t involve any Hungarian folk beliefs.

And so for the next century and a half, vampires were Hungarian. While Lord Ruthven (”The Vampyre,” 1819) is something of a fluke, given that he’s just Lord Byron if he were an immortal hemophage, a very sizable chunk of the vampires that you actually see throughout the nineteenth century’s literary vampire tradition are debauched Hungarian nobles. You might not recognize names like Alinska (La Vampire ou la Vierge de Hongrie, 1825), Marfa Sergeyevna (“The Vampire,” 1841), Marian Gregoryi (La Vampire, 1875), or Count Vardalek (“The True Story of a Vampire,” 1894), but they are all Hungarian vampires, and they probably all irritated the actual Hungarians of the day who tried very hard to explain that -no- they didn’t actually have any vampire myths (apparently Arnold Ipolyi was cheesed off about this as early as 1854).

Now, while you might not have read any of those obscure vampire texts I rattled off, you probably do recognize names like “Carmilla” and “Dracula.” But wait, what’s that you say? Dracula!? Isn’t Dracula supposed to be Romanian? Isn’t he Vlad the Impaler, vovoide of Wallachia (AKA old school Romania)? Doesn’t he live in Transylvania, which is in Romania?

Well, here’s where things get interesting.1 First off, back in 1897, when Dracula was published, Transylvania was -you guessed it- in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, and like Vojvodina, people just tended to round Transylvania up to being “some part of Hungary” even if the vast majority of people living there were Romanian. Romania existed, but at the time Dracula was published, it had only been an independent state for fifteen years and Transylvania most decidedly was not in it. Bram Stoker, who never went to Transylvania in the first place and did most of his research via really condescending/racist travelogues, constructed the fictional Transylvania within Dracula by copy-pasting in bits and pieces of books that were not only about Transylvania, but about Hungary and the area near the Carpathians in general, nabbing whatever he could find that sounded cool so long as it was nebulously in the region he was describing.

And one cool thing he found? From one book, titled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, we know that he took notes about a historical Wallachian voivode whose name was given as “Dracula.” This book doesn’t, however, mention much else; it certainly doesn’t mention any of those completely metal stories about a guy impaling people or nailing turbans to emissaries’ heads; it doesn’t even use the words “Vlad” or “Impale” anywhere near this Dracula’s name; and the whole story of this Dracula (and his father, also a Dracula) takes up all of three pages. Don’t believe me? Go check. Right here. Through the miracle of GoogleBooks, you can experience the entirety of Bram Stoker’s known sources on Vlad III in the next minute or so.

So yeah… there’s not much there. It is seriously not outside the realm of possibility that Dracula is called “Dracula” because Bram thought it was a pretty cool name that he erroneously thought to mean “devil.” As for the tiny snippet of historical context that got shoved into the book (that part where the Count mentions somebody who “crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground” and had an “unworthy brother”) this definitely does refer to the itsy bitsy, super small blurb on Vlad III that’s in Wilkinson, but it’s not in any way clear that Dracula is actually meant to be identified with this personage. I could go into more as to why this is so murky, but it’s something that has already been hashed out in sort of awkwardly excruciating detail here by Hans de Roos.2 The short version is that there’s a historical “Dracula” mentioned in the text who clearly isn’t Vlad, who doesn’t seem to have a real world equivalent, and who makes an awful lot of sense to read as being the Count.

In any event, we have a bunch of stuff that points to the Count being yet another Hungarian or Hungarian-coded evil vampire nobleman, and some of this stuff isn’t all that subtle… like Dracula literally telling Jonathan Harker that he is a member of a Hungarian ethnic group. The Count also makes a point of mentioning his use of Hungarian linguistic conventions and, if you look in the novel’s original typescript, you can see that the woman with the stolen child was supposed to have referred to her persecutor as “Hungarian” rather than “monster” at one point in the drafting process. Even with all this rather blatant evidence that Stoker was working within the “Hungary=vampires” paradigm, however, Drac’s Hungarianess still isn’t 100% neat and tidy. It can’t be. Stoker’s culturally insensitive collage of whatever spiffy-sounding factoids he could find about an ethnically diverse region with incredibly complex, intertwining Romanian and Hungarian histories just does not result in a well wrought Hungarian character, and we’re left with a confused hodgepodge of Romanian and Hungarian elements. The thing is, though, that said hodgepodge just so happened to become the most famous vampire of all time.

So what happens post-Dracula? Once the stage play and film take off, people start to take elements introduced in Dracula, even ones that didn’t have any precursors in literature or folklore, and decide that these are 100% ironclad things that real vampires™ do. Suddenly vampires all lack reflections; they cringe at crosses; they need to be invited into your home; and they all suddenly live in Transylvania. Also, TWO WORLD WARS HAPPEN, and at the end of them, Transylvania is actually in Romania, and as Dracula increasingly becomes a topic that nerds and academics and academic nerds like to nerd out about, some people examine the sad little dribblings of history Stoker dropped in the text and get the impression that maybe Dracula is supposed to be Vlad III.3 This was a pretty understandable thing to do, given that most people in those days didn’t have access to all the neato primary sources relating to Dracula that I mentioned somewhere above in describing how dinky the Vlad III evidence actually is.4 It makes sense to seize onto tantalizing historical hints within the text and assume that they might be a part of something grander, and eventually Harry Ludham’s completely bibliography- and source-free biography of Stoker lent the claim some additional credence by giving it out as a completely source-free fact. 

What really got things going, however, was Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu’s 1972 In Search of Dracula, which really really really really tried to sell the Dracula is Vlad III angle and succeeded tremendously, all while describing the authors’ investigation into Vlad as it played out in their own visits to historical sites in Romania. The book, in addition to telling everyone very firmly and enthusiastically that Vlad III was totally Dracula, went to the trouble of explaining that its readers could and should totally go to Romania and see all sorts of rad Dracula things there, all while giving some cringey advice on how not to alert the locals as to the fact that they were weird vampire novel enthusiasts who wanted to gawk at historical sites’ relating to one of the country’s cultural heroes because some Irishman ostensibly wrote a book about him biting people. While I’ve come to regard as unnecessarily mean-spirited some of the later scholarship pointing out how crap McNally and Florescu’s scholarship was, their scholarship really hasn’t held up well, and by the time other scholars started noticing, the notion that Dracula=Vlad and Romania=vampires had become pretty firmly entrenched. By the late 90s, there were several books, movies, and even very legitimate and influential scholarly articles working from the premise that Stoker had had Vlad III in mind as the Count and wanted him to be a uniquely Romanian character, and owing to Bram’s strange, patchwork fiction of Transylvania, there were -in fact- a lot of Romanian elements within the text to support this idea. Vampires, which used to be Hungarian before Dracula, and who are even Hungarian in Dracula, eventually became Romanian because Dracula became such a landmark vampire text that people began to take Stoker’s weird blend of cultural elements as evidence of both Dracula’s and vampires’ Romanianess.

So even if all that has since been debunked on paper, this nevertheless sort of brings us to where we are now. Obviously, there’s a lot of changes in the depiction, perception, and reception of vampires that have occurred in the past twenty years, but we’re still at this weird place where most westerners generally think of vampires as belonging to a country that doesn’t actually have a folkloric vampire tradition… and the reason that we think that is directly related to the fact that for the better part of two centuries most westerners thought that they belonged to another country that doesn’t actually have a folkloric vampire tradition.5 It’s honestly all pretty zany, and while I sort of thought that I’d have a wise, profound, or otherwise satisfying end to this stupid long ramble about how weird vampires’ shifting geographic location is, I don’t really… other than -as always- nobody should really be a tool about vampires. This is not only because one shouldn’t be a tool in general but because there’s a non-zero chance that whatever deep-held truths you hold regarding them have been wrong since before you were born, and it is not impossible that you will live to see the day when somebody totally insists that a supernatural entity you’ve never heard of just lives in your place now and your fave historical figure always was one.

1. Or where they get interesting if you haven’t heard me give this spiel before. It’s that time of year, kids. | 2. Hans is a really nice/chill guy even if I don’t agree with all of his analyses in that document. You might recognize him as the individual who recently brought us the majestic pinnacle of high weirdness that is the recent translation of Powers of Darkness. | 3. Interestingly enough, it might be that the first person to do much with this was Dracula’s first Turkish adapter, who re-imagined Dracula in 1928 as a story about a marauding occidental foreigner from the West coming to get the decent, upstanding citizens of Istanbul… but that’s another story. | 4. They also didn’t have GoogleBooks and thinking of that reality makes me very very sad. :( | 5. Romanian folklore has strigoi, which sometimes are dead and sometimes drink blood, but are really more akin to evil ghost-wizards than vampires from what I’ve heard. Hungarian folklore has the lidérc, which also goes blood-drinking sometimes, but is apparently sort of more like a succubus that is also a chicken… I think. I do know that pretty much every article I’ve read (Florescu excepted) and account I’ve heard from Romanians and Hungarians on the topic of what people typically conceive of as vampires has been roughly “No, we don’t actually have those. Plz stop.” I’m of neither Romanian, Hungarian, nor Slavic extraction, however, so I’m more than willing to be corrected.

Ah, guys, just to be clear, I realize most of you probably know this but I’m seeing it framed….weirdly, so – 

Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns. 

None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two. 

And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.

None of this is to be alarmist or anything, I just got a bit worried about all this talk of $30M in debt, because this is not a one-time deal. 

If you see an alarming post, please make sure it is true before you reblog.

We’re in terrifying times but lets make sure we’re mad at and taking action against the right things, and not sensationalist bullshit made to distract us or make ad money off of our fear. 

Can we please stop validating C-PTSD by invalidating those with PTSD?

This is something I have seen a lot more lately. People are talking about how C-PTSD is so much “worse” than PTSD and I do not think that is a good narrative because it can make people with PTSD feel their struggles are “less than.”

I have also even seen a post that mentioned that one of the differences between the two is that C-PTSD is a life long struggle while PTSD is gone within weeks and months at most. Which is false and promoting a timeline for healing which I think is a big no.

There is no timeline for healing from either. Both are valid and mean that someone experienced something they should have never had to deal with.

This goes for all disorders: Please, can we validate our disorders without invalidating others? 

Because I remember disinformation being spread around the last election and I’m sure Russia will bring it back:

For people with anxiety about filing taxes, here’s what things that happen when you make a mistake on your tax return:

- it gets corrected

- you get a letter in the mail either asking for some additional information or a letter showing the adjustment

- you pay the amount (there’s options for payment plans too!) or get a refund

Things that do not happen

- you’re “in trouble”

- you are charged with fraud

- you go to jail

I know that most people are probably just joking/exaggerating when they say a mistake on their return means they get thrown in jail but when I worked with the public I always would encounter people who believed that would happen and they would be panicking about it. So I like to put this out there every year because if I can even prevent one person from feeling that way, it’s worth it

Also the IRS will NEVER cold call you. If you get an upsetting phone call about your taxes it is a scam.

If there is one thing I ask from tumblr, one thing- it’s that y'all fucking source check. Just because a post has 200,000 notes doesn’t mean it’s reliable. This site is an echochamber of so much false information it’s ridiculous. Please. Do this one thing for me.

Spoopy Season Safety

Had to address this because I hate, hate, hate, when people online with zero medical or biological credentials write things like this

I spent the last half an hour trying to find any scientific studies that show activated charcoal effects HRT. There are none. There are a few conflicting studies, one study from 1986 claims charcoal interferes with estogen and progesterone in birth control  for up to three hours, and another study from 2001, found no changes after taking 5000 mg of charcoal three hours after they took birth control. I found nothing about it affecting T.  The amount of charcoal added to food items are extremely low also. It’s not going to “flush” your hormones from your body. That’s not how hormones work and it’s not how activated charcoal works.

If someone has any scientific medial papers that actually show it affecting HRT I’d love to see them. But right now this is just scaring trans people on HRT with information that is just straight up based on no solid medical evidence?

Human isn’t my thing, but activated charcoal is widely used to absorb organic toxins and medication from the gut, but it will not ‘flush things from your system’. It is used to reduce absorption into the system. Once you’ve absorbed a medication, it’s all yours.

We use it a lot for toxicology cases in veterinary medicine as a kind of cover-all, and this is a general guide.

So for a non-organic (contains no carbon) molecule, eg lithium, potassium bromide, activated charcoal will do nothing.

For a very rapidly absorbed molecule,e g alcohol, activated charcoal is unlikely to get a chance to do much.

The biggest risks would potentially be taking activated charcoal at the same time as fast acting medications, as they should be absorbed quickly but don’t hang around in the body very long, so you might see an effect from the reduced absorption. Things like anti-seizure meds, heart meds, and some anxiety meds spring to mind.

Hormones are different because they’re not an instant or short term effect, they produce their effects over a long period of averaging doses. Miss one dose of testosterone and you probably wont see a difference. Miss one dose of a heart medication, anxiety medication or anti-seizure medication and you might see a huge difference.

The two studies above are probably not conflicting. There’s this rule of thumb that there’s a window of opportunity of about 1-2 hours to administer the charcoal, and otherwise you’re probably wasting your time. So three hours after contraceptive pills I would expect to do bugger all. I suspect nobody has bothered to study it’s effects on HRT.

So I wouldn’t take charcoal at the same time as any oral medication, but a three+ hour gap is probably fine. And I’d avoid it if you’re on something ‘sustained release’, and check with your friendly neighborhood pharmacist if you take anything life-saving.

But it doesn’t magically ‘flush’ medications or toxins from your system - otherwise it would flush all the natural compounds as well! It simply binds to organic compounds in the gut.

For this reason, you can also use it to reduce flatulence.

PEOPLE:

STOP COMING TO TUMBLR FOR NEWS.

There are live updates happening on most major news outlets. Posts circulating on tumblr are behind the times. If you want ACTUAL UP TO DATE NEWS with a minimum of panic and rabble-rousing then check elsewhere.

Yes, this is as bad as it looks. No, a panicky tumblr post does not have all the information. Prefer verifiable facts to social media soundbites.

CNN live updates

NBC live updates

NY Times live updates

CBS live updates

C-SPAN live video feeds (heads up: these are live and I’m not sure what content might be inside—so call this a violent-content warning)

Reuters article (updating but not a live feed)

Additionally, check your state and local news sources. There are related events already happening at the state/local level—it’s equally important for you to know what’s happening close to home. Be informed!

GO TO A REPUTABLE NEWS OUTLET.