Ruby Granger #41 Poor Blakeney, being replaced by ChatGPT

[gossip_guy]

I dunno. I don't think anyone gets onto a Masters course at Oxbridge without having some kind of talent or aptitude, right? No matter how many times they try.

She's just put a lot of her abundant free time and money into looking good on paper. She also had the benefit of a Masters being infinitely less competitive (especially the degree she chose), along with her course not requiring an interview and her having a spare £30-40,000 to waste on it.

Her CV will look impressive to someone unaware of her history of embellishment and dishonesty. On paper, all the wildly exaggerated experience and accomplishments that she secured purely through nepotism, wealth and influencer privilege will probably paint a picture of someone intelligent and with a huge passion for education and literature.

She has a First-class degree to show them now, and they'll naturally have no idea that she relied almost entirely on other people's work (and grade inflation) to get it. A carefully curated personal statement highlighting all the degree-relevant stuff on her CV (like the Emily Dickinson free tours that she spun as work experience, or her nepo job at her old private school), plus namedropping Oxford lecturers she's met/Googled would've done the heavy lifting to get her accepted.

But there's no evidence of intelligence or talent in anything she does online that I've ever seen, and that's her putting on her best performance to look intelligent. Literally every time she speaks, she says something objectively wrong, profoundly stupid or utterly nonsensical. If this was undergrad again, she'd be rejected right away because an interview where she can't choose (or steal) her words very carefully would highlight what a Swiss-cheese-brained moron she is (the exact problem she had when first interviewed at Oxford and got rejected). The only thing she's remotely good at is cheating the system.

 

[bookworm39]

10. Yikes. Just hearing her say the best thing about making dinner for everyone is that she gets to eat what she wants, not what her parents want. That control of food screamed ED to me like nothing else we have seen from her yet.

You know how you can get to eat what you want to eat? Move out from your parents' place and find your own place to live. You're an adult, Ruby, not a 5-year old who has to eat her veggies before she can have pudding.

 

[gossip_guy]

Also wtf is a college dad?!

I'd never heard of it either, apparently it's a mentor support system of sorts where they match you up with "parents" who've been there a while and one or more "siblings" from another degree subject. Seems like a good way to meet a few new people who know the college without the pressure of having to go out of your way to make new friends if you're not overly social, but naturally Ruby didn't bother even when all the effort was made for her.

Seems like that pizza meetup was their first "family" meal, so at least Martha will be relieved to know that Ruby doesn't want to know her college sibling, either.

 

[bookworm39]

How pretentious can she get? That random Wittgenstein insert, omg. Looks like I'm not the only one who picked up on this.

 

[Redrose97]

I do wonder how many people have died in that bed being honest. It just feels so creepy that she replaced her double bed for that bed , especially when there was already a bed exactly like that in a spare bedroom. She showed it off in her video when she got the new bed I think

 

[JustVibing]

Speaking of lazy: Cant believe her new video, its a new low even for her standards.
Isnt this like the 3rd video of her listing almost exactly the same "bookish" activities?
"Cook bookish food"
"Learn poetry by heart"
"Learn the Raven by heart"
"Wear bookish outfits"
Literally the same shit over and over again, except the little bits of crap she made her viewers tell her.

 

[Satisfying Click]

Is she confirmed to be at Jesus college? Her accommodation looks like one that is slightly out of the centre. I’ve seen a similar room in another post grads TikTok. Don’t want to give away locations but it was a very boozy rowdy area when I was there.

Holding out for a Ruby rant about endemic ethanol use

 

[Griftwood]

I know I always have a hard time getting the title right when I really, JANUINELY have read and enjoyed something.

 

[gossip_guy]

Is she hard of hearing? Ouch my ears hurt with her manhandling all that ice and literally everything she touches/moves (mugs, setting things down, etc). Can she not hear all the CLAMOR she's making? I haven't heard anyone make so much noise when moving things around since my brother was like 3 years old. (he also had zero hand movement coordination back then.) Is she older than that? Can't possibly be.

She definitely seems like a horribly uncoordinated and noisy oaf, which isn't helped by malnutrition doing a number on her hand-eye coordination. She's constantly dropping things, spilling things, misjudging her aim, etc. But I think her videos make her seem even louder than she is because she's always holding her camera directly next to the things that she's carelessly banging around.

Then she's not paying any attention when editing her videos and doesn't give them a proof-watch to check for issues when she's done. She has multiple opportunities to see if there are audio issues.

Every time she shows her editing timeline, you can clearly see multiple shots where the audio peaks way higher in places than even her loudest dialogue. You can also see clearly see that she's cutting from silence or very quiet shots directly into the middle of loud noise in a new shot, resulting in all those unintentional jump-scare cuts of noise that her videos are filled with.

She has absolutely no excuse for not being better at it. Those instances can be plainly seen on her editing timeline, she'd be able to hear them when checking transitions on her timeline and she'll be able to spot them when proof-watching the final video. But she's not bothering to do any of that. She's doing this as quickly as she can with absolutely no quality checks.

She's not looking at what she's doing, she's just blindly slapping footage together and cutting in more or less the right place, give or take several seconds (hence all the mid-word cuts). She's not checking if clips are in the right order, so we often get especially weird, time-jumping continuity errors. She's not checking the audio and balancing the volume, or even making sure that her added audio elements aren't overlapping or in the wrong place, she's just mindlessly dragging audio tracks onto the timeline, so we get her talking over herself, music drowning out audio and fake birdsong playing loudly indoors.

It's one of the things that annoys me the most about her. She's been doing this for 8 years now and she's never improved even her basic editing skills in the slightest, yet harps on endlessly about her crippling perfectionism and love of LAAAHRNING while lying about how much time and work she puts into editing.

 

[coldestofspirits]

I just hope she’s getting some genuine enjoyment out of it now she’s actually there. As infuriating as I find her, I would still prefer that she benefit from the course and gain from the experience vs hating every minute and it being a totally wasted spot. I don’t actively want her to have a bad time. Fingers crossed she was able to be open enough in her therapy to get some actual coping skills for the year ahead.

 

[lmwfh17]

In Lottie’s defense, she’s actually published several books with a real publisher in Finland.

to me that actually makes her begging for attention all the more embarrassing. why does she as an actual author care so much about interacting with little miss dark macadamia publisher reject?

 

[ariawyn]

She's a great example of how an inability to take any criticism at all really just means you will never improve. Everything she does has to be instantly perfect and gifted and special without her even trying because she's the brightest young witch of her age etc etc, and anybody who critiques her is just a big ol' bully. Meaning she doesn't actually learn anything from what she's doing, because she cannot cope with looking for faults, and therefore everything she does ends up being mediocre and messy.

The audio is off? No it's a CHOICE, she's a CINEMATROGRAPHER GENIUS that nobody understands, she doesn't need to change anything. blah blah.

 

[Whisper2Me]

I was really surprised that she didn't know she was unable to take books out at the library. In the US we all have sections and collections of books that cannot be removed from libraries, whether it is a university library or even a public one, like the reference section. Other people need these books, too, and you can't just grab and hoard them at home. Some are highly valuable or rare and hard to replace, while others, being in multiple volumes would be horrible if a volume went missing. Others have research and papers to do, not just her or her fleeting moments of browsing through a book or reading a random essay. I feel like this ignorance on Ruby's part just shows how she spent more time writing her book and travelling rather than preparing for Oxford, and how little she actually has used libraries throughout her life. It has been more about taking photos reaching for books than actual studying.

I'm still kind of laughing at her whispering and paranoid attitude around Oxford. She is acting more like a tourist on holiday. Wait until classes and work hits her in the face. It can be a hard transition to get back into full time studies after a year of romping around in fields and play-acting. Hopefully with time she will realize her peers are there to study and get higher degrees for their careers, and not filming or taking selfie pictures for their social media platforms. She has dug a deep hole for herself, in that she just doesn't get reality at all and chatting to a camera with complete strangers is the only norm she knows.

If I were Blakeney I would be so weirded out seeing my photos plastered on the wall and labelled as one of her favourite people, the other 3 being her immediate family. So sad to see she has basically no circle of friends, not even a small one. She and Blakeney didn't even see each other for a year. That doesn't come across to me as a firm, healthy friendship, no matter what she says. Her need to have a picture of her on her wall during this short stint at Oxford is just bizarre beyond measure.

 

[coldestofspirits]

Christ, she’s just such an idiot. Everything she says about the period shows how superficial her understanding is - does she really think she can bring herself up to the level of the other candidates in the space of a month? I was physically wincing as I watched that! I know it sounds a bit unkind, and I do honestly try to have some empathy for her in other respects, but it’s just such a waste of time for her to be doing this masters. She sounds barely more advanced than an A-level student when it comes to her actual thinking. There’s no analysis there, nothing she’s adding, it’s all just a cutesy posh-girl YouTuber version of “lol isn’t this bookish thing cool! It’s kinda like this other bookish thing! So random! XD”

That isn’t academia. That’s not the point.

 

[LostGhosts]

Currently hoping for an Erimentha Parker sequel where she discovers she has a long-lost twin: Merryentha Parker.

I volunteer myself as tribute to read the Erimentha Parker sequel even if it kills me in the process

(sorry for my absence y'all my brain decided to be sad for a while)

 

[Thehogonthelog]

For an overnight trip, one (1) night she is packing:
-an outfit
-jumper
-toiletries
-evening outfit
(no issue up to this point)
-a POUCH of teabags
-a book
-a kindle
-2 notebooks
-ipad

"I'm packing quite light"

 

[Satisfying Click]

Is she... on ANOTHER holiday??

Probably, the bathroom is clean

 

[Rumblemumble]

Sorry if this has been said here before, but I was listening to this video while cleaning my desk, and she really just said: "It's a book for children. And it does a really great job of... humanizing people in refugee camps." 8:08 mark.

 

[roobee]

My Gott, pretentious Roobee is my favorite of all bees! She really said--and I'm afraid believed it, too!-- "oh, now we are turning this into proper, like, language philosophy" because she used a much-abused Wittgensteinian term. Today, I saw a raincoat that I kinda liked and asked my friend if I should go for it and whether the price was worth it. She said, no. So, you can say we had a proper discussion of the theory of value in a Marxist vein. (I didn't buy it)

 

[Ilaariaa]

I am also an introvert and I'm quite shy but I know how important it is to be as sociable as possible at first when you join a new social setting. In the first days everyone is new and getting to know each other so there isn't that awkward vibe and pressure of being "the new person" like when you join an already established group. After that it gets easier to naturally fall into a social group to hang out with. If she skips out on these social events that are designed for everyone to get to know each other, she'll feel a lot worse a week or so down the line when everyone else has already become closer and is hanging out naturally without need for organized social events, and she's out of step.