So let's trying blogging, I guess...

For a while now, I've been thinking that maybe I need a place to vent without the 280-character constraints of a (now deceased) Twitter microblog. Of course, I cannot hide that this is heavily inspired by Prof. Peter Coles' In the Dark blog, which I read since I was a masters student back in São Paulo in 2013. I do not expect anyone to read this blog, but I will also not hide the existence of it nor its content – as I did to many other tools in the past where I used to write about my thoughts and feelings. Trying to survive in late-time capitalist (potentially post-capitalist?) European academia has not been an easy task. This blog will, hopefully, be a way of venting the everyday horrors, bores, and failures of my attempt to survive this career. 

Or maybe I will forget about it for months, only to return here with false self-promises of making it active again. Who knows?! Who cares?! 

    The truth is that even if this blog survives, academia has decided I am only useful for the next year and a half (more or less). After that, I will be considered too old for any starting grants. Without ever being awarded a starting grant, realistically speaking, I won't ever be awarded any grants and will never be able to find a stable and permanent job in academia. In a certain sense, this blog serves to document my struggles trying to survive whatever is left of academia after the complete cultural domination of the neoliberal way of life (this kind of pseudo-scientific misunderstanding of what natural selection is applied to everyday life). 

    I cannot promise you, my fictitious reader, that any of what I write here will be any interesting. All I can promise (at least myself) is that I will be (trying) to use this space to write my most honest thoughts on whatever comes to my mind. What I can make clear is that I will avoid as much as possible naming people or even making anyone identifiable. Whenever I speak of a situation that involves colleagues and/or hierarchically academic superiors (aka the academic ruling class, those determining if we deserve any research money or even a job) I will change as many details as possible. Who knows, maybe some of the characters or even situations don't even exist. So if you are reading this blog and thinking "Oh he is talking about me!": I am most likely not... Sorry, you are probably not as important as you think.

    Finally, on the name I chose for this blog: for a while my professional and personal social media name has been Cosmonist. So, to continue with the pun, I imagined that a place where I can manifest my ideas could only be called "The Cosmonist Manifest". But nothing related to Marx and Engels's 1848 "blog post"... or is it? Well, I also have to say that you can expect that some posts will be in Portuguese. Some stuff is better said in my main language. You can always translate if you really want to read it. But again, I do not expect that anyone will read this, even though I will share these posts on whatever it is left of social media nowadays.