Two thoughts and an unrelated video

Thought 1: I think being a young unestablished academic in Cambridge is most like being in an abusive relationship in the way it persuades you that any troubles or sufferings you have are your own deserved fault. (Furthermore sometimes not even your fault because of things you have done or chosen, but because of what you are, some quality intrinsic to yourself.) The middle aged men tell you that something always turns up for the good people -- but they're not an imaginative bunch and it's hard to believe that their assessment of someone as good is completely unrelated to whether something turned up for them. Now I have distance it seems odd how completely I bought into it all. Of course I shouldn't be too melodramatic -- obviously no one ever actually beat me up, and I was brought up in an old-school British way so that I feel that an occasional severe pruning of the self-esteem is probably good for me. (If anything this year might have been an over-corrective; I'm feeling quite smug right now.)

Thought 2: I do like how lyric videos have become the standard way to make some sort of video for a new song before the full-on big-budget video comes out. I haven't watched any pop TV recently so I don't know whether they play the lyric video or whether they still say "the song at number 8 doesn't have a video yet so here instead is a new release by X". It must be a huge boon for graphic designers. The first one I remember seeing was for Cee Lo Green's F*** You. I think in that case it was a way of letting the song loose to see if people liked it, and when it went viral they made a full video with the scansion-compromised clean version. This one's good (I don't get all the references though by a long way):



Unrelated video: Robbie William's new song. That's Kaya Scodelario, again.