It's finally here! After what feels like 70 billion years, Ruby has finally unveiled her latest ode to incompetence and uploaded the second entry in her 'Dissertation Diary' series. Not that you'd know that from the title.
Ruby's in such a giving mood and her brain's so feeble that she doesn't even wait until the video has started to offer up a kernel of ineptitude, and fucks up the title royally.
'Come on a Solo-Research Trip With Me (studying 100 year old letters)'
First, she displays her patented inability to use capital letters in a correct, or even consistently
incorrect way. This is the chronicle of how one puddle-brained ignoramus tried to write the world's greatest dissertation, and even the title of the video betrays how feeble a grasp she has of the basic language she's studying.
Why is the text in brackets/parentheses not capitalised? Who the
duck knows? Ruby uses the statistical probability approach to the English language: If she pronounces words and uses capital letters, grammar, punctuation and every other aspect of English in a wildly different and surprising way every time, she's bound to be right eventually even if just by accident and the law of averages.
But she also has no idea how titling an ongoing series works.
The first episode in the series had a similarly incorrect approach to capital letters:
'The Dissertation Diary (entry one)'
But it was at least clear that this was the first episode of a clear-cut series. That might be the first time she's ever done that, and it's something I've been saying she needs to do for the longest time - delineate her videos into clear, distinct series (vlogs, hauls, ad features, tea tastings and so on) with similarly clear titles, instead of mashing every single video idea together into an overflowing kitchen sink of hastily chopped and tasteless vlog chunks, each video indistinguishable from the last.
'The Dissertation Diary (entry one)'
'Come on a Solo-Research Trip With Me (studying 100 year old letters)'
It's like if, when naming the Shrek series, a studio executive was like, "'Shrek 2'? Far too predictable! It'll make it just too damn easy for parents and ticket-buying audiences to know exactly which movie they're about to see and which other movie they need to have seen first! Let's call the second movie 'Come on a Big, Exciting Adventure With an Ogre and a Donkey (the ogre has marital problems)'! That'll get asses in seats!"
Onto the video, and Ruby can't even get through her first sentence without awkward, shoddy editing.
"HALLO, it's Roobee--[JARRING CUT]--AND WALCOME tyoo thee SACKOND entry in the Dissertation Diary," she says. And new and future viewers will be like, "Wait, I need to have watched previous entries?! The title made no mention of this, what the
duck?! I didn't sign on for this
tit! I'm out."
Ruby launches into a manic, sped-up ramble because she's feeling VARRY lucky right now, because she emailed a request to the University of Texas Library for access to some of their digitized archive material and they actually responded!
This has less to do with luck and more to do with it being their job, and Ruby received the exact same treatment any other person making a request would have. But in her mind, the university (and the universe) recognised how VARRY SPASHULL she is and what an important impact her dissertation will have on future scholarship.
She's more excited that she didn't have to pay than anything else, because the last thing this money-hoarding Scrooge wants is to give money to underfunded libraries.
She mentions that she's wasted some time writing a pointless timetable. The date is marked 30th January 2022, so it's been nearly a month since she filmed this.
Reminder: The last dissertation video was allegedly filmed on 19th January (though it was another 'numerous days of footage under the guise of being a single day's hard work' ruse). Even with her usual deceitful editing trickery to condense weeks of progress into a fabricated 24 hour vlog, she's still no further ahead here.
Generic, royalty-free piano music plays as Ruby pours tea in her grimy kitchen, there's timelapse footage of clocks, Ruby lights candles and the audio levels are all over the place as the loud crack of Ruby's SYOOPAH SUSTAINABULL gas lighter sounds like a gunshot yet again. It's indistinguishable from all her other videos.
On her desk, there's a notebook with a section titled 'Dissertation: January's End'. There's no indication whether this his her faux-lyrical title for her dissertation, or just her twee, weird, overly dramatic way of titling her notes from literally the end of January.
There's a selection below titled 'BRAIN DUMP'. I'm not sure how this is any different from every other platform for writing and speaking that she uses to
tit out all her unfiltered, nonsensical babblings, but it's hilariously barren of thoughts.
She's also clearly not using her PONKIN' PRODUCTIVITEE NYOTEBOOK that she ALWAYS uses.
Ruby shows timelapse footage of her screen - she's trawling the internet for material on Cicero to crib from and compiling it all into Notion. She stops off at YouTube to figure out who Cicero is and why she's decided to write about him all of a sudden.
Spoilers: It's because one of her tutors wrote a paper on Cicero and she thinks that her showing an interest will curry favour somehow:
https://tattle.life/threads/ruby-gr...lets-all-twirl-in-a-puddle.26839/post-8209317
After that footage, which is bereft of narration and context, Ruby shows off her photo reel:
She flips through several pages of 'The Letters of Lewis Carroll', to show us...something?
A wild and frazzled-looking Ruby reappears as though emerging from a night's sleep in a hedge.
She explains that she's just gone through the "COLLACKTED LATTERS OF LEWIS CARROLL" and "scanned in" the letters she wants to "annotate and link-k-look-at more clyosely". Judging by the warped images on her phone, she didn't scan anything, she just took a half-assed photo of several pages.
"I'm nyow gonna dyoo some more resaarch intyoo Cicero. I don't know much about Cicero's latters, but they're important, syoo..."
Dementia has taken hold already. Despite already showing that she's researched a bunch of stuff about Cicero using the power of Google, Ruby has already forgotten this happened. Oh no!
Ruby, this is your latest reminder that the body requires nutrients for the brain to function.
Along with her brain being shrivelled away to nothing by the ravages of malnutrition, the other option is that she just didn't pay attention in editing and slapped this
tit together the wrong way round, even though she's had a month to carry out the very basic editing she does. But that can't be it, right? She's a perfectionist! Her comment section is filled with praise for her editing skills!
Whether it's cognitive decline, sheer lazy incompetence or a combo of the two, none of this
tit looks good for any reason.
Ruby states that Cicero's letters are important, but doesn't explain why, or why they're relevant to her dissertation in any way. It's likely she doesn't know herself other than her being a transparent suck-up.
She slurps some tea like some disgusting troll, and if that weren't enough, after a brief shot of her scrolling through some more critical material on Cicero, she segues into this:
What does this have to do with her dissertation? Again, she really needs to start splitting this
tit into distinct, separate series.
Her entire channel is an interchangeable mess of half-assed vlogs full of lies, shoehorned ads and continuity errors.
I came here to see you fail at writing your dissertation, Ruby, not hear you disgustingly and violently slurping away like a stray vacuum cleaner nozzle landed in a mug of tea. Take that
tit elsewhere, or at least put an 'anti-ASMR' content warning on,
damn...
And, yes, this is a shoehorned ad section:
She looks at the enclosed note and pulls an "Aw, you guys...you shouldn't have!" face:
No, Ruby. They didn't send you this out of the goodness of their heart. You know this. You were gifted this in exchange for advertising it, which you chose to do in a completely unrelated video to call attention to it that much more.
Surprising no-one, Ruby doesn't properly declare this as a gifted product. Saying Bird & Blend 'sent some tea' is too vague and ambiguous. This is an ad for a gifted product from a company she's advertising. It should be mentioned in the description, especially since she's got affiliate links for B&B in there.
Here's a handy guide to all the advertising rules you keep breaking, Ruby:
www.gov.uk
You were paid with a gifted product. That needs to be declared clearly and fully.
She pulls a bunch of faces that are so over-the-top and performative that I'm surprised she didn't just make them the clickbait-y thumbnail:
I mean...
Unsurprisingly, like every product she's ever been gifted, it's all "SYO GOOD!"
"VARRY chocolate-y, but more beetroot-y than chocolate-y," she says, putting several food critics into early retirement with her astute and descriptive review skills.
"Beetroot is one of my VARRY FAVOURITE foods," she adds, like a five-year old introducing themselves to the class.
"ANNYWAY. I'm gyonna get on with annotating the latters," she says to the camera in the tone you'd use for someone who was derailing your work with idle chitchat. This is
your bleeping video, Ruby, nobody else asked for an unrelated ad break full of slurping nightmare fuel.
Onto the annotating, the first thing that's apparent is that Ruby is viewing these on her gifted Remarkable tablet. Ruby insisted on wasting time using original manuscripts and scans for some reason, but then views them on a tablet incapable of displaying colour, so they'll look far less accurate to the original document and a bunch of the detail will be filtered out.
Her annotated comments are obvious at best, bafflingly stupid at worst.
She mentions that the use of dashes is 'colloquial like child-letters'.
She makes the observation that 'big handwriting = easier to read', as though it were intentionally done for the recipient and not the result of, say, the scan size, or some letters being more cramped to fit on smaller pages, or any number of other explanations. And regardless, it has zero bearing on anything.
She notes than an envelope has been 'ripped open' as though it's the key to some Dan Brown historical mystery that only she can crack.
She judgementally leaps to the opinion that the handwriting is 'quick and rushed', even as her own
crappy handwriting looks like she scribbled it with her fingers glued together and a gun to her head.
She notes that the bottom of a page has been torn off or cropped, as though this was an intentional part of the letter's message or some hidden clue, without considering the idea that this letter was just written on some stray scrap paper. It's also a hundred
bleeping years old, and may not have been in the same condition after a century of storage in various places than when it was written.
If Ruby were a crime scene investigator, she'd be the type to slap a post-it note on the corpse that said 'Dead body?' and leap to wild conspiratorial theories for a very simple crime, based on nothing but her own feeble-minded, malnourished imagination.
And that's it for the annotation.
So far, Ruby has yet to actually shed any light on any of the dissertation process. There's no explanation why she's so insistent and intent on using these manuscript scans. There's no further detail as to what her dissertation is actually about beyond 'Lewis Carroll's letters'. She doesn't expand on why she's included Cicero's letters in her research. There's no information at all.
I'm not even sure Ruby understands what a diary is. As a document of a portion of time for Ruby to look back on, this is pointless because she's fabricated the events depicted and fudged the timelines so much. For other people to watch, it's equally pointless as it's just Ruby staring at screens, showing clocks ticking and explaining nothing at all.
After the annotating session, she mentions that she has a dissertation meeting.
"My dissertation syoopervisor is HONESTLY SYO NICE and...syoo...this is a really FON meeting," she says. No mention of what was discussed, what she learned, and so on. Ruby shows her screen as though this will elucidate things, but it's just a shot of her notes from an unrelated children's lit module. Again with the incompetent editing.
Suddenly it's the next day and Ruby's in Cross Keys Cafe.
You might remember it from that time that Ruby spent most of a day taking up a table and a plug socket to herself while ignoring all Covid guidelines and not ordering a single thing to eat or drink:
I think this fan accidentally called out Ruby in the comments :LOL: it’s all she talks about
tattle.life
Here she appears to do the exact same thing, bringing a travel mug with her and seemingly buying nothing.
Ruby starts getting defensive about her archive visit, having clearly read people (likely on here, hopefully from her dissertation supervisor) pointing out what an unnecessary waste of time it is at undergrad level.
"I dyon't TECHNICALLY have to gyo and see these latters," she says, rolling her eyes at her
critics bullies. "Thayr not digitalised, but I-umm--they could've sent photos..."
So there's no "technically" about it. You don't need to go, and if you're already behind and struggling to find a topic to write a clear about, wasting time on a manuscript-viewing trip across the country is pointless. Those letters are available to you online and in print. A manuscript serves no value to you, especially at undergrad level.
"But I wanted to dyoo at least one...archive visit? for my dissertation," she adds. "It's just something I really wanted to do."
She mentions that she's reading 'The Universe in a Handkerchief' by Martin Gardner, a book about Lewis Carroll's word and math puzzles. She's going to have to set her dissertation aside for now, though - she has a creative writing project due tomorrow and it's still not finished.
She furrows her brow, not looking confident that it'll get done or be any good.
But hey, you know what's always a great plan when you're falling behind with everything? Wasting time on manuscript hunts and extracurricular archive trips that serve no purpose!
An indeterminate time later, Ruby reappears, pointing her finger and announcing that she's been writing 'nonsense poetry'. It's a distraction from her dissertation, and by her own admission, not related other than a tangential link to Lewis Carroll's writing.
Ruby tries to justify her meandering diversions as "the cool bit" of writing a dissertation, "like...not necessarily doing things just forrr...umm...which is gonna be relevant for the wahhk, boht ALSO just...FOLLOWING resarrch tangents? And you've got the space with a dissertation to just..
go off--you're fully trying to involve yourself fully in the culture of it--that's how I'M treating it. This is just a PROJACKT that I want to be folly IMMARSED IN."
Translation:
Ruby is in full denial. She is completely clueless as to what a dissertation is or what she's supposed to be doing. She is still wrapped up in her bizarre daydream aesthetic vision of what writing a dissertation looks like. This does not resemble reality in any way.
A dissertation is just a 10,000 word essay with a bit more focus on original thought and more scope to expand on your argument, but it still needs to be a clear, coherent thesis and isn't a license to waste time going off-piste to explore unrelated crap. It is not a dark academia adventure through ivy-covered libraries and dusty archive rooms. There is no dissertation "culture" to immerse yourself in. Just sit down and write the damn thing. If you enjoy it, even better, but that's not a requirement or a guarantee.
This is her obsession with to-do lists on a grander scale. She loves adding meaningless, time-wasting bullshit to her to-do list so that she can tick it off and feel productive, even though she's accomplished nothing. And here she is, wasting time on irrelevant crap. But she's spending time doing something vaguely academic, so she can fool herself into thinking she's making progress. She's not.
And then she gives a dramatic reading of the poem she's written.
"Nobody knew what colour it was,
was it purple or lilac-y blue?
Was it green as the peel
on the one rinning friel(?)
which is a kind of chocolatey bean!
The mouse with no tail
who had ears full of kale
no whiskers, no fur and no eyes
This mouse with no tail
who was really a snail
said that they were all telling lies.
It's ACTUALLY orange
as tangerine porridge
the kind that you serve with baked beans!
But I suppose that it's easy
when you get a bit queasy
to mix up your orange and green."
Yeah...there's no way she's going to graduate this year, and definitely not with the grades she's hoping for/believes she's entitled to. Between procrastinating from her dissertation with crap like with this and her also having to rely on her creative writing "skills" to get her through a whole other module, she's screwed.
After her
mental breakdown poetry reading, it's a new day and Ruby announces she's going to actually start writing the dissertation that she's been researching for over a year.
And what better soundtrack for this than...In the Hall of the Mountain King. Again.
Ruby has written 700 words and claims this has given her a sense of structure. Umm...it's a 10,000 word essay, Ruby. 700 words of the first section isn't exactly a good blueprint, especially since it's likely gibberish.
She's excited to be making progress, even though she admits she won't end up using any of it in her final dissertation. She's on such a roll, she says she's going to keep writing the next section.
And then she immediately gives up to go make tea.
After supposedly writing another 400 words, Ruby leaves for the station, wearing a beret like a chef's hat for some reason.
She claims she's going to go back home so that she "can more easily travel to Surrey to gyo tyooo the archives whaahr these Lewis Carroll letters are stored".
Average train time (each way) to Ruby's family home: 4 hours 10 minutes.
Average train time (each way) to Surrey: 3 hours.
It wasn't easier at all, she just used it as another flimsy excuse to go home to mummy.
In her family kitchen, she awkwardly zooms in on her laptop to show that she's making huge progress! Only she's quite clearly just written some unrelated gibberish in Notion again. She's actually talking about Genetic Editing, not Genetic Studies (or "Genesis Studies", as she's written).
en.wikipedia.org
She's just spewed word soup on the page and not made anything resembling a point.
So, let's go back to that video title again for a sec...
"Come on a
Solo-Research Trip With Me (studying 100 year old letters)"
If this is a solo trip...who's that with you, Ruby?
If a university student had titled their video 'Come on a Research Trip With Me', the default assumption would be that it were a solo trip. Because that's what you're supposed to do at university level, especially with a dissertation. Ruby still views the world and her place as being rooted in primary school, where the default is that you're doing everything in groups, and if you go on a field trip, it must be with the whole class.
She makes a point of stressing that this is a SOLO trip, as if it's some massive feat of independence for a uni student (who owns her own
bleeping home, no less).
And then her mummy drives her there...
It's hilarious how there's always a family birthday or wedding, or one of her parents just happens to be in the neighbourhood hundred of miles and hours of travel away, to justify Ruby running home every single week or getting chauffeured everywhere by mummy and daddy.
Her mother undoubtedly had no cause to be there other than as an unpaid driver for Ruby and was likely sat in the car park twiddling her thumbs until Ruby needed to go home.
Ruby's at the archive library finally and you can practically sense the disappointment. Ruby claims she wasn't sure what to expect, but you just know she was picturing this:
She wanted to immerse herself in Dark Macademia and the aesthetic "culture" of it, and yet in reality, the Surrey History Centre isn't dusty, tomb-like libraries and grand, Ivy League buildings. Archives won't look like aesthetic Pinterest boards in real life.
Her first stop at the History Centre is a coin-operated-locker room similar to the one at the public swimming pool.
Ironically, she'd have gotten closer to the Dark Academia fantasy if she'd stayed on campus and just gone to the library at Exeter University. But she wanted to be special, and be doing something the other students weren't. She wanted to approach her dissertation like a Dark Academia adventure and aim for Master's level with it. And the reality is very different.
She says her visit to the archives was split into two sessions and she didn't film anything in the morning for some reason. At midday, she meets up with her mum for lunch, of course.
Ruby's VARRY happy to be reunited with mummy for lunch after two whole hours apart!
Of all the places in the world, they choose Woking Pizza Express - now famous for being the fake alibi of choice for notable royal child diddler Prince Andrew. Ironic, considering Lewis Carroll's reputation (and Ruby's compulsive lies usually being about as convincing as Prince Andrews' infamous trainwreck TV interview).
"I'm on my lunch break!" Ruby chirps, as though it's some huge novelty to be spending one day not living a life with a wide-open schedule of free time. She and her mum also show off and comment on her key lanyard as though it's some grand, mystical relic, and not something you wear in almost any regular job. Oh, what fun and whimsy, living like the common folk for a day before going back to their manor of filth and swindled charity money!
In the car, Ruby moans that she's looked at three of the eleven letter manuscripts she requested so far and not found any of them useful.
If only there was a way someone could've predicted that this would be the case...
If only there were something like...oh, I don't know...
common sense to tell her that she didn't need to go hunting down manuscripts for an undergrad dissertation that she hadn't even narrowed down to a clear thesis question yet.
If only there were a way she could look at photos, or even just transcripts of the letters first, to see if they'd be of any value to her, before she went looking at manuscripts for no other reason than the superficial element of it.
If only she had a dissertation supervisor to tell her that this was a waste of time.
It's such a shame none of those options exist - it would've saved her mum burning a lot of petrol. And we know Ruby ALWAYS cares about the environment, and NAVVER would've taken a car instead of a train unless her mum was going there on the exact same day already.
Ruby says she wasn't allowed to film any of Carroll's letters, and since almost the whole reason she went was to be seen indulging her Dark Macademia fantasies and she has no real interest in research and learning, this must've been a huge disappointment for her.
Instead she decided to grab some other letters at random that she
was allowed to film, just to get some footage of herself holding letter manuscripts.
Again, if only there was some way she could've found out ahead of time if she'd be able to film the collection of letters or not.
And if you have any interest in Millicent Fawcett/the women's suffrage movement, weep now as you witness Ruby rubbing her perpetually grimy hands, fresh from being coated in grease at Pizza AX-PRASS, all over these irreplaceable Fawcett letters.
The only things she has to say is how she loves how you can tell that many of the letters were written in such a rush - an observation she seems to make about every single letter she's ever seen.
She films herself unplugging her laptop from the floor sockets for some reason, presumably because she's never been in an office or call centre environment, so the concept of a plug socket in the floor must be such a whimsical novelty to her.
"I
think my mum might be parked around here..." Ruby pretends like her mum hasn't just been sat in the car outside the whole time.
"Everyone there was SYO NOICE as well. Like...
SYO NOICE," she says, with a very passive-aggressive tone, furrowing her eyebrows and giving a strained grimace.
Yeah...Ruby definitely hated this whole experience. What a magical day!
And you know she wasn't going to finish a video without a desperate Waterstones plug. This time, it's one that makes no grammatical sense. "I bought these Votes for Women's badges in Waterstones!" So...you bought multiple votes for badges belonging to women?
Reminder: Ruby is in her final year of an English Lit degree and claims to get consistent First-class grades.
It's time to head back to uni and Ruby looks on the verge of tears that she has to get the train back by herself instead of being driven all the way by mummy and daddy like usual.
Damn those bullies online, forcing her to have to get a train by herself like an adult once every several months to prove she's not completely over-reliant on mummy and daddy! How dare they!
On the train back, she shows a final list of the letters she looked at, then mentions she spent the rest of the journey reading and making notes on Cicero's letters. For what purpose? She doesn't say. In fact, none of this video sheds any new light on her dissertation. She appears to have made no progress, she still seems totally lost and aimless and isn't any closer to growing a brain.
There's another ad for PONKY PLURDAHURDAHEE at the end of the video. Last video, she forgot to actually check it before tacking it on, so it ended the video with a 'Before we start this video!" intro. Rather than take five minutes to film a new video, Ruby just took the same reused video, recycled it again and awkwardly snipped out the "and before we start the video" part. So it goes "Jost a QUICK remoinder--[JARRING CUT]--THAT I HAVE a stationery shop". The planner's STILL available (yeah, no
tit) as is the "farsstahll nyotebook" that she keeps talking about.
Just sheer stupidity and incompetence from beginning to end.
Roll on episode three, so we can see the latest collision in this disastrous car wreck.
also interesting how much of the snippet she's shown us is quotes, ie other people's ideas...