Almost Sunday Service

Back in the day, I think I tried to post twice a week - perhaps Wednesday and Sunday? Entirely by chance, my first post this time around was on a Wednesday, so. In the interest of continuing a possible tradition, again today.

Back in the other day (the one before I started a blog), I used to use twitter as a prompt to see whether I'd done or thought anything interesting enough to warrant 140 characters. A blog post is a little more taxing, but it feels like a good thing to attempt. I do have a few years of life backlog to draw on if I get desperate, so even if nothing interesting has happened in the past few days there's always that.

Aaaaaand that's enough awkward shuffling. Past: assemble!

I wrote a PhD. Here it is :)

The award date is 1st April, which I rather enjoyed (also my grandmother's birthday) (not particularly relevant, but still) and - I haven't properly looked at the page linking to it before, but it also claims "Publication status: unpublished" which feels mildly passive-aggressive. Thanks, iffily-formatted research portal, your point being..

I really enjoyed writing it - more than I thought I would (and I had expected to enjoy it), even though I felt I only learnt how to write a PhD a couple of months before I had to stop. I wanted almost immediately (after the short period of desolation and confusion that follows these things) to rewrite most of it, which I understand is not unusual, and a thing that happens when you publish stuff (rewriting, not the desolation and confusion, although probably those too).

Now, looking at it all up there in the anonymity of The Internet.. I'm mostly confused by my font choices. I was apparently feeling conservative and sans-serif at the time. Which is okay.. the whole thing of restarting this blog earlier this week was a write now, style later kind of affair, but it's really not how I remembered the thesis. One of the tricks while writing it that I particularly enjoyed was regularly changing fonts (thanks Amber, I think!, for that tip), which I'd recommend to anyone who's been staring at a document for long periods of time. You put it into a different font, and suddenly it's new and unfamiliar and could possibly be someone else's words, and the editor hat fits more comfortably on your head and change is real and achievable and all is right with the world.

But then, right at the end: Arial. Really? Maybe after going through the wonders of Spectral and Montserrat, in the end I just couldn't decide and went with the most basic option. Past me, it's fine, I guess, but I am judging you. Not too hard though - I had to go on a bit of a google drive delve to remember the fonts, and you named what seems to be some kind of late-stage thesis todo list 'Tod. Ist Leben, ja?' and told yourself parenthetically not to worry about the conclusion until "more nearerer the end," so I get that perhaps it had to be Arial by then.

Next time though: fontjoy.