Thanks for no fish - blog (not really) closing down

I am writing this post only in part to announce the (likely permanent) closure of this blog, mostly due to lack of interest from me but also from the 1k + visitors in the past two years, none of which found the material worthy of any kind of engagement, comment, or even berating. There is more.

In the next few days I will be applying to yet another postdoctoral position, I'm not sure how many I sent in the past three years but I'm fairly sure I was at 20 when I stopped keeping track. It will be the last one; unless I land it, I will simply not bother any longer with the academic world.

I wish I could tell everyone to follow thir dreams and go for that PhD, but the honest advice I'll give is - don't. Especially a PhD in the humanities.

For four years I waded through the guilt of not being able to pay the PhD myself, relying on family savings, meagre underpaid teaching hours that I had to fight tooth and claw for (nevermind students more junior than me getting double my teaching hours assigned), endless applications for grants that most time didn't even bother to communicate rejections.

The endless desperation at seeing celebrated, world rerenowned supervisors and advisors with little interest in me invest little to no effort in actually giving me the tools to make a career out of that piece of paper. Sure, they're always available for references - as if that was enough in today's academic world. Simply put, they forgot they also were students once; they forgot the difficulties, the struggles, the shame, the self pity. They made it, you can make it too! Just take the reference and don't bother me again, ok?

The exasperatingly long schedules of academic publishing, where even digital stuff has to go through so many loopholes it's old and useless by the time it comes out; this blog was, at least at first, an experiment in trying something different, and it utterly failed. Part of it is surely my fault; the other half, however, is that stuff that doesn't come out in paper form on the usual 5-6 celebrated journals is, and will be for a long time, B-engagement. Two years, thirty posts and *not one comment*.

Expensive conferences I usually had to pay for myself in full or in part, lauded as 'occasions for great networking' playing out like the backstage of a House of Cards episode: those who made it merrily gossiping about everything but the conference's topics, while the bottom feeders like me desperately scouting for occasions to kiss ass.

And at the end, a piece of paper that leaves me with no marketable skills (they'll tell you otherwise but, believe me, in today's world 'being able to argue for different points of view' is not a skill; they just like to make you think it's one), years I could have spent building an actual paying career.

I won't go into what those four years and the following two years of fruitless academic job search have done to my private life, that's a whole can of worms I'm not going to open in public.

What I'll do? I'll get up and start from scratch, building on those few but valuable assets I somehow managed to build up while waiting for my 'dream life' to begin. I'm sure I'll be fine, even with all those wasted years I won't ever get back.

In the meantime, this blog will not be deleted, but repurposed to be what apparently blogs are meant to be - personal outlets for crap no one cares about. Expect random musings, comments on my fiction reading and writing, as well as reviews of one of my main interests - original Japanese doujinshi.