Personally I think StudyTube will rapidly go down the drains and completely fizzle out. We see the same happen to other YouTube categories. Take the so-called Beauty Gurus. The original crew has long since stopped making them. They got on with their various careers, married, have families now. But there are a few that can't quite let go and it is pretty cringe watching someone like Tiffany D, well into her thirties if not nearing 40, or Tarababyz, constantly hauling things because their lives are so empty and they need to feel that immediate satisfaction of buying something new, that passes within the day. While decluttering your makeup collection was a thing before Covid, not being able to go out in public or have to wear a mask really kicked that movement into full gear and almost everyone got a reality check. Now they have either left YT or found another odd obsession to vlog about. The Kawaii movement started to get big a long while back, but walking around in little girl clothes when you are in your late 20's was also cringe, so unless you live in Asia and do it as an actual career, it is shortlived. I don't think the US ever really got into studytube. It seems to be mostly a UK phenomenon that we watch from the sidelines, but overall have no interest in mimicking. Who knows what the next "aesthetic" or "trend" will be, but I am sure Ruby will try to hop on it, fail and like many other YTbers, will find herself lost in the real adult world with very little to show for it.
There's a youtuber, The Lady in the Library, I think she calls herself, who talks about doing her PhD. I was initially a bit turned off because she talks in a very pretentious manner, but then she's done some brilliant videos about not being the smart kid at school and going into academia (like, her even going to university was apparently a surprise), and mistakes she's made during the process of her PhD so far. She's like the really honest version of Ruby.
I don't know that I would necessarily call her a studytuber, as I don't think she does the study with, and she doesn't do the vlog style that those of them still in the space do, but her content is much better than that. Much more realitistic.
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Haha, not sure. I would have thought the women in it who really enjoyed the likes of Cheltenham would be more like Ruby.
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The new video was very pleasant. We all know Ruby isn't a good actor or liar. You can tell when she's not enjoying herself, or when she is. It was very nice to see how happy she was around Jade.
A good debate isn’t about simply presenting what you’ve prepared, it’s about responding to what has been said by the opposition. That’s where the skill lies. But skill, coherent words, and Ruby are not often seen in the same sentence.
Omg Spencer's creepy British twin's kid POV
Yes
It totally reads like a fanfic I would have written when I was 15, throwing in random metaphors and fancy words to sound smart.
Like a humid prepossessing homosapian
Arguably Ruby's most watched Youtube video of all time, and her Bible so to speak. She said she's not Christian, and for a good reason. It's because she's a Watsonian:
Because it’s hard to romanticise working… look at PaigeY. She lost a lot of views and following when she started posting work related videos and now she is back to study with me videos. Ruby can milk this till she is at least 30 so what… 6-7 more years? After that she can buy another property and become a full time landlady lol
"Accidenally Wes Anderson" Did anyone else notice the missing "t"? Also, super-extra studious Ruby brought her book and ipad to a family outing. Who does that?
She needs to get on the Aciclovir. I didn't use it for ages because all the advice says it doesn't make it go away any quicker but, by God, it makes the whole process so much more manageable.
Seems to be an uncommon medicine here, all the Americans I've talked to about it rave about it though, and they're right.
She hasn’t talked about her application, but we took some sneaky screenshots - I don’t think she proposed a dissertation topic in it. She got an essay topic approved on the 5th try last autumn, but I believe that was for a module, not her diss. (Still a bit of a red flag though.) Just to make it clear, when I said she was looking up quotes about ”starting over” in her insta reel, I just threw it out there that I hope it’s not about her diss. It would be really alarming if it was, and I’m sure there’s been enough handholding available for her that that’s not the case. More than likely, it was just a poorly chosen quote.
Personally I would be kind of freaked out if someone had a bunch of pictures of me on their wall and a candle, like a shrine. Doesn't Blakeney find this a bit cringe?
Watching her video, I'm pretty sure that she has been rotting in her room most of the time that we have not seen her film. If she was super productive she would not have missed an opportunity to show us. There was also a moment when she said "I try to go out of my room at least every other day" - and knowing her that is an exageration so probably means that she goes out to do something useful like get a coffee or food but not to have a mindfull relaxing walk.
Either that or she went back home which IMO is one of the reasons why she hasn't been filming anything because she doesn't want people seeing that she has been spending more time at home than at Oxford, but IMO I still believe that there is another reason as to why she hasn't been filming anything for the past month.
Honestly it's sad hearing her say that she has digestion issues, because of course she does with how restrictive her diet. I wish she would get the help she needs for her ED.
Because she's incredibly lazy and incompetent, her new video intro includes the overly familiar sights of Oxford's RadCam and the sounds of wind smashing the shit out of her camera mic.
She could've just cut the source audio for that shot, since she's overlaid royalty-free plonking piano music over it, but instead she left the abrasive noise assault in, then cranked the volume of the music as high as possible to try to drown out the noise.
This is her new intro. She's chosen to start each new entry in her "chill study vlog" series by activating your fight-or-flight response with all-out aural abuse.
"Hallo it's Ryoobeee and TYEUD--[ABRUPT EDIT]--AND WALCOME BACK tyeu anuth flog."
Irony overload: Moments after this, Ruby brags that she got up early to work VARRY HARD on ADDITTING. Zero attention or effort was paid in editing this or any other video. She just aggressively and absent-mindedly smashes video and audio clips together like a hyperactive child playing with toy trains.
It's not just the audio that's completely messed up, either. Ruby includes shots like this one, where she's messily blurred 1/5th of the screen, presumably to avoid showing what's outside her window.
Let's unpack the incompetence.
Ruby has already doxxed herself countless times in essentially every single Oxford vlog. She's shown the view from her window, her room number, her building, the route to her dorm, and so on. Security for people with online followings is a valid concern, but all the more reason for her to pay attention to what she's filming, rather than include crap like this and paste over it with blurred boxes long after she's doxxed herself over and over.
The curtains are closed. There was no reason to blur the shot.
Why, of all shots and angles, did she think this was worth filming to begin with? A gloomy shot of a blank wall, some musky bedding and the back of her head. But cinematic genius that she thinks she is, she put no thought or effort into what she was filming, blindly shot this, refused to delete it and instead turned it into a blurred, distracting mess.
The distracting blurring continues. This is an angle of her room she's already shown many times before without censoring. It's a bit late now. And, again, with the bare minimum of common sense and planning, she could've chosen different angles that didn't point out the window and that she wouldn't have to awkwardly blur after.
Meanwhile, she will quite happily invade the privacy of others by filming in private study spaces and dining areas, using the people who are just trying to study and eat in peace as unpaid extras, not bothering to blur their faces, get consent or obtain permission from the university in general to film in libraries, etc. Even in this video, she picks and chooses who she blurs out at random.
Ruby insists that she was OPP AT FOIVE THARRTEE-FOIVE and got MOCH MWOAR DONN THAN SHE THWORT SHE WUD. Her poker tell squint is on display, though: She didn't do a damn thing.
This being a sponsored video wasn't enough for her. She had to cram in an undeclared ad for Manilife (who regularly gift her products) as she eats a baby-sized portion of gruel for BRACKFSST.
Ruby yammers about how she AWLWHEYS LOFFS TYEUU LISTEN TYEUUU ACADAMICK TAXXTS WHAN SHE'S WALKING and blathers about "irresponsible reading". It's all a flimsy pretence to shoehorn the sponsor service in.
The ad floodgates have opened. Ruby shills Crosstown donuts again and says she's going to give these freebies to her SAMINAR group later. Then she crams the box into her Kanken backpack. Assuming she didn't just take them out right after this shot and bin them, this self-proclaimed genius thought that carrying them round all day with the box held vertically would be a good idea.
Her seminar group have to suffer through her pick-me attention seeking and incomprehensible word soup contributions to each meeting, now they get to fight over the obliterated remains of a half-dozen smashed donuts (that are at least a day or two old). HOW VARRY KOIND.
She goes cafe-and-library-hopping, spending a few minutes at each location in another attempt to look exceedingly busy while doing nothing at all.
Again, blurring of other people's faces is completely sporadic: The person by the door in the background warranted blurring, but nobody else was afforded the same courtesy. People closer to her go unblurred, people wander into frame uncensored. An utterly lazy mess.
Ultimately, Ruby doesn't care about other people, much less their privacy. If it affects her, then it's important, but if it affects others, she doesn't give a shit. She just slapped some kind of blur on a public shot as a lip-service half-the-bare-minimum effort because she's aware that she's been criticised for it before, yet still won't actually ask permission or put in the effort to blur faces individually. And god forbid she just stop filming in communal study areas, there'd be no value in her attending Oxford if she couldn't remind people she's at Oxford.
She's at the library again and doesn't appear to do any actual studying. Instead, she appears to spend the entirety of her short time there just repositioning her camera; there are four different angles of her just taking off her coat.
And thanks to her paying zero attention in editing, you can see the discarded remnants of these camera reshuffles, since she forgot to delete the unneeded setup footage and there's a random blink-and-you'll-miss-it barrage of frames at 07:33 with Ruby manhandling the camera:
She then sets the camera up for more angles of the library, this time capturing other people who came to study but are now the unwitting, unpaid background cast in this shoddy make-believe circus that Ruby's the malnourished ringleader of. She included multiple angles of one poor person, no effort is made to blur anything.
Meanwhile, nothing of value has happened. It's just her lazy pantomime version of studying, moving around a lot and multiple changes in location and camera angle in a vain attempt to give the illusion of productivity in lieu of anything actually being done. She offers no real information about her day or her course or what she's studying, while instead parroting things she half-heard and didn't understand during lectures.
She offers up yet another 'no shit, Sherlock' pearl of "wisdom": If a digital service goes down, you won't be able to access that service digitally.
Ruby casually reveals that her "studying" amounts to just getting AI platforms to do the work for her - in this case she's getting Genei to read an essay and summarise it for her so she doesn't have to bother reading or forming thoughts or opinions for herself.
She only has her Kanken with her, yet magically manages to produce an entire water bottle, charger, iPad, MacBook, books and more, despite that donut box barely fitting in the bag. It seems incredibly likely they were shown off for the ad and the act of performative kindness and got binned before she left her room. But in the wildly improbably event that they didn't...
Audibly smiling a smug smile while she's narrating, Ruby informs us that she's GYOWING TYEUU GRAB AYYY CWOFFEEE. She's avver syoo proud of harrsalf for continuing to pretend that coffee-drinking is part of her identity now. Meanwhile, she shoehorns in an undeclared ad for BARDEN BLAND, including a shot of their store sign/logo for no reason at all.
"And hyeehh we aree at moiy SAMINAHH," Ruby says, over a shot of some cafeteria food.
It must be logistically awkward and pretty disruptive to hold seminars stood in the lunch line during peak lunch hours, but who am I to question the choices of the geniuses at AWKSFWUD?
In a shocking twist, Ruby didn't throw the donuts out and manages to produce the box for a repeat ad!
The donuts being 2+ days old and stale likely helped them maintain some structural integrity, but they still look totally fucked, with brown, melted toppings smeared all over each other and the box like Mummy Bones has had her hands in them during a dog walk.
Yet another half-assed product ad where Ruby makes the product look completely unappealing.
After another lip-smacking diatribe about the "beyeeeeuteeee of physicol bocks" and Ruby unconvincingly announcing that she's "SYO ACKSOYTED" about her dissertation, she goes to "stoddy with somm frands". She laughingly says they didn't really do any studying.
It's good that Ruby's actually spending time with people, since she certainly doesn't seem to be getting any enjoyment out of being at Oxford beyond that. But naturally, she acts like an insufferable, spoilt brat, filming people (other than her "frands") without their permission in a private study area and seemingly being a disruption to people there to actually work.
Other people at Jesus/Oxford shouldn't have to worry about being on camera when they just want to get some studying done in a place reserved for that.
And that box of donuts that she gave to her seminar group is also back and is sat on the table.
Ruby smugly announces that she's going to a symposium. After years of being corrected, she's finally got the word right.
But with her limited number of brain cells, for new information to be retained, something else has to go; while she learned the word "symposium", she forgot when the actual symposium was, so she arrived several days early.
Concidentally, Ruby says she didn't have a "conventional dinner" and just ate a VARRY VEEEGAN CWOSSAUNTTT.
Sum total food for the day: Half a small jar of oats, possibly a donut bite and an off-screen croissant. She's being especially blatant with her ED habits lately.
Perhaps if she tried eating a full meal every now and then, she wouldn't struggle to form sentences, remember basic things or summon the energy to do anything at all without getting tired and/or cold.
After a rambling gibberish lecture about the EPHEMERAL EPHEMERALITY OF AWLL THAT IS EPHEMERAL (Ruby's next book title: 'Effie Moraliti and the Wizard's Jewel'), Ruby calls it a day until the next sponsor ad deadline.
This is a sponsored video. Someone paid her for this utter mess.
Even the octopus is over her
In that last bit of the video she says adULT when the English pronunciation is ADult? She must be spending a lot of time with her Canadian friend
OT: I read the "Schuld und Sühne" translation by Josef Hoffmann and liked it, but I have other Dostojewski books in translations by Svetlana Geier, as far as I am aware she translates the title as "Verbrechen und Strafe". It´s the same case with "Die Dämonen"/"Böse Geister"/"Die Bessessenen", same book, different translation of the title. I don´t speak Russian and I´m not an expert in any way, but apparently the original russian can´t be translated exactly into German in those cases. In the case of "Schuld und Sühne" the title is way too morally connotated, whilst the original russian title uses the legal terminology. "Verbrechen und Strafe" on the other hand, which is the german legal terminology, lacks a certain ethical weight which the russian terminology does contain. So I think there´s no right or wrong answer. I personally prefer the title "Schuld und Sühne". All in all a really fascinating topic imo
It totally is. I speak no Russian as well, but I find it so interesting that they changed the to some extent iconic German titel. Out of curiosity I just googled the translator and there’s a documentary featuring her. So I know what I’m going to watch tonight.
I still don’t understand why Ruby didn’t choose a Masters program she could milk with part time attendance? I know her course in particular isn’t a part time course but you’d think she‘d pick something she could milk for content longer.
The masters that I did at uni consisted of both full time and part time study with full-time lasting 10 months and part-time lasting 2 years, however at Oxford all of the English masters courses are full time which would explain why she couldn't choose a masters programme that consisted of part time study.
Did anyone else notice the missing "t"? Also, super-extra studious Ruby brought her book and ipad to a family outing. Who does that? 
