Many of those who pursue an academic carrier, me included, become a bit territorial along the way. That can be a bad thing, of course. You can begin to deny that people outside academia have brilliant and innovative ideas too, including in your own field. You can cease to reflect on yourself and your work and fall prey to déformation professionnelle and general hubris. Or you can lose track of what you know and what you don’t know, to publicly inject your undercooked opinions into fields that are, at most, precariously related to your actual field of scientific knowledge. But becoming a bit territorial can also be a good thing if you use it to call out those who adorn themselves with academic merits they’re not entitled to. For the latter, we can differentiate three major categories. In the first category, you’ll find outright frauds who swindled their way to academic honors, like this utterly unperturbed serial liar and terribly racist woman that the German SPD (Europe’s most useless major political party except for British Labour) deemed fit to become the capital’s mayor. In the second category, you’ll find those who do have an academic title but, with no follow-up studies or scientific research or teaching under their belt, overstretch their purported quality knowledge into purely imaginative realms, like this author of popular non-fiction books who calls himself a “philosopher” in the academic sense, which he isn’t, and a “professor,” which he isn’t, and who argues publicly in this non-existent capacity against anti-Corona regulations and vaccination requirements and for the Ukraine to give in to Putin’s invasion forces and roll over and die. In the third category, finally, you’ll find those borderline charlatans who adorn themselves with titles that might not be outright fraudulent, but suggest a scientific background and rigorous thinking that they utterly lack. A good example would be this management and trend consultant who, while having failed to complete any academic degree, calls himself “future researcher,” promotes climate-crisis denialism in his publication (just read that particularly insidious last paragraph), and published in early 2020 an utterly unsubstantiated, utterly research-free open “post-Corona letter” that everyone and their aunties and uncles felt the need to share, about how in our post-pandemic future—excuse my French—the sun will shine out of everyone’s ass.

Yes, that’s a lot of accumulated anger I was unable to vent during the week because I was too darn busy. Still, I published a few things, most of which I had pre-prepared the weekend before. There’s a post on the current state of my Voidpunk project; a linked-list item on SMBC’s “old dank pub” as a brilliant metaphor for liberal education; 16 photographs outside and inside the gigantic bronze Kamakura Daibutsu on Flickr; Optimus Prime in Pingyao on Glass; and on Instagram two Genshin Impact-related posts at betweendrafts and one on Tanabe Gou’s manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Temple” at voidpunkverse.

For your entertainment, finally, here’s the ingenious solution to the Trolley Problem; another cute little lunch bunny clip; and this two-minute long cat experiment that’s too awesome to miss. Game recommendations will resume as soon as I have time enough to sit down and remember what the words “game” and “playing” even mean.

חג פסח שמח to y’all, or an enjoyable mid-Ramadan, or Happy Easter, or relaxing holidays, whatever it means to you and what you make of it.

J.