Tag: meta

Hello folks! I am about to apply to PhD programs again for a third and final time this year, so I am currently working on my applications. In the meantime, I am also continuing to work on the historical fiction novel that I already announced that I am writing, which is still progressing, although it is going slower than I hoped it would be at this point.

I had intended to write posts this fall discussing the reception of classical antiquity in the Netflix series Kaos and the movies Megalopolis and Gladiator II. I wrote the majority of a post about Kaos, but I never finished it and, by this point, the series has already been cancelled and I think that the public has already moved on from it, so I doubt anyone would care about my thoughts on the series at this point. Meanwhile, Megalopolis and Gladiator II both mainly involve reception of Roman history, rather than Greek, and, from what I’ve seen, both have received mostly negative reviews, so I haven’t worked up the motivation to see either of them yet, let alone write about them. If any readers are still interested in my thoughts about these pieces of reception in media, let me know in the comments below.

I am, however, very excited about seeing The Return, which is a film set for theatrical release tomorrow that is based on the second half of the Odyssey (the half after Odysseus has arrived back on Ithaka that modern adaptations rarely devote much attention to). I promise that I will post something about it after I’ve seen it, but I may not get it posted until after December 15th, which is when the first round of PhD applications are due.

Hello everyone! I apologize again for my lack of recent posts. I am still devoting most of my available writing time to working on my novel, which is slowly, but surely, progressing. I am no longer confident that I will have a complete draft by the end of 2024 due to the amount of revising I have been doing, but I am still expecting to have a complete draft by sometime in early 2025. Regarding this blog, I have had a post about Netflix’s Kaos saved as a draft for months now, but I still haven’t finished it. I am also hoping to make posts about Gladiator II and The Return, which are both coming out in the next few weeks. I have also been seriously considering the idea of trying to start a YouTube channel for a while now, but I know very little about video editing, I’ve been focused on my novel, and I haven’t gotten around to it.

Like many Americans and others around the world, I am filled with despair over the results of the 2024 U.S. elections. I thought about writing posts about the election both before and after it happened, but I feel so burned out over modern politics right now that I couldn’t bring myself to write them. Even so, I want to let all my readers know that I am currently safe and, although I expect that the situation in the United States will become much worse over next four years, I believe that I will be personally relatively insulated from the worst of it.

Related to this, I would like to announce that I am planning to delete my Twitter account in the near future, partly because I don’t like Elon Musk making money off of me and partly because the site itself has become so toxic and completely overrun with pro-Trump ads, right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi accounts, and AI and cryptocurrency grifters that it is virtually unusable. The vast majority of the people whose content I was actually interested in have already left. The good news for those who want to follow me on social media, though, is that I already have an account of BlueSky. My handle on that site is @spencermcdaniel.bsky.social. If you want to follow me on social media, you can follow me there.

In the meantime, I am still planning to apply to PhD programs for the third time next month. This time, I am going to apply to more programs than I did the first two times and hope that I will have better luck.

I apologize again for my dearth of recent posts. I am hoping to get at least one real post published before the end of this month and eventually to get back to posting more regularly. There are various reasons why I haven’t been posting as much lately as I used to, but a major part of the reason is because over the past few months, I have been doing an enormous amount of reading and I have been devoting nearly all my writing time toward working intensely on the historical fiction novel I have in progress.

As of the time I am writing this update, I currently have over 36,500 words (110 pages) of the novel written. I previously had even more written, but, as I discuss below, I decided to cut the entire second part of the novel, which made my current draft much shorter than the previous one. My target length for the first complete draft is between 75,000 and 90,000 words, so I am a little less than halfway finished. Although the book has been through a few different titles in the time I’ve been working on it and the title may end up changing before it is finally published, the current working title is Mother of the Gods.

Continue reading “An Update on My Novel in Progress (June 25th, 2024)”

I would like to apologize for the fact that I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month. In this post, I would like my update my readers on several recent events that have taken place in my life. The first event is that, unfortunately, I did not get into a PhD program for this year (although I came very close to getting into the classics program at UCLA). This has contributed to me being rather depressed for the past couple of months. The second event is that I passed my master’s thesis defense with honors and have now officially graduated with my MA in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. The third event is that I am now writing a historical fiction novel set in the ancient world.

Continue reading “A Personal Update (June 1st, 2024)”

Long-time followers of this blog may remember that, two years ago, during my senior year of undergrad at IU Bloomington, I applied to four different PhD programs in classics and ancient history. Unfortunately, although one program—the Graduate Group in Ancient History at Penn—did interview me and seems to have seriously considered me for admission, in the end, none of the programs I applied to made me an offer of admission. As a result, I entered the terminal MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University, which I had applied to as a backup option in case none of the PhD programs I applied to accepted me.

I am now in my second and final year in the program at Brandeis. I am in the process of finishing my master’s thesis and am on track to graduate with my MA in May of this year. In December of last year, I submitted PhD applications a second time for the current application cycle. This time, I applied to six different PhD programs. I had a much stronger application this time all around than I had the first time, including much stronger statements of purpose, a stronger writing sample, much greater experience, significantly stronger Greek and Latin, and an almost-complete MA. I was sincerely hoping to receive better results. Sadly, I now know the results of most of the applications I submitted and I am disappointed to say that, although there is still a possibility that one program may admit me, so far, my experience this time has not gone much better than it did the first time.

Continue reading “Update on My PhD Applications (March 10th, 2024)”

Hello everyone! Some readers may have noticed that I haven’t made any posts in nearly a month. That’s because I’ve been busy this month writing the first chapter of my master’s thesis and applying to PhD programs. Long-time readers may recall that, two years ago, in 2021, during the final year of my bachelor’s degree at IU Bloomington, I applied to four PhD programs. Unfortunately, as I described in this post, none of those programs made me an offer of admission. This led me to go into the MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University, which I had applied to as a backup option in case none of the programs I applied to accepted me.

I am expected to graduate with my MA in May 2024, so I have now applied to PhD programs again for the 2024-2025 academic year. This time, I am applying to the PhD programs in classics at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Princeton University, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of California Los Angeles. As of the time I am writing this, I have submitted my applications for all of these programs except UCLA, which has a later deadline than the others. I think I am in a much stronger position this time than I was last time, I have applied to more programs than I did the first time, and I am hoping that this time at least one program will make me an offer of admission. We will see how this turns out.

This is the post that many of my readers have waited months for: the eighth and final installment in my series of posts about my experience in Greece as part of the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session in June and July of this year. (For those who may have missed them, here are the previous installments: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.)

In this installment, I will describe how I gave my final site report about the temple of an obscure goddess who may be of pre-Greek Aegean origin and whose name ancient etymologists interpreted to mean “the Unseen One,” how some other students and I found a bunch of ancient potsherds in a random hole we dug, how I feared my life while walking to Plato’s Akademia, and how I returned home to the United States, forever changed by my time in Greece.

Continue reading “My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 8”

Hello everyone! Even though I’ve been back in the U.S. for over a month now and the fall 2023 semester has already started, I still want to finish my account of my time in Greece this summer. Thus, this is the seventh installment in my ongoing series of posts about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Monday, July 17th through Thursday, July 20th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth.)

This will be the second to last post in this series; once the series is finished, I will return to my usual research posts. In this installment, I will describe how I went inside the Kasta tomb, how I got heat exhaustion in Thessaloniki, how I visited an ancient sanctuary of Zeus under the shadow of Mount Olympos, how I saw the site of the famous Battle of Thermopylai, and how our bus driver got lost in Athens on our way back to the school.

Continue reading “My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 7”

This is the sixth installment in my ongoing series of posts about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Thursday, July 13th, to Sunday, July 16th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.)

In this installment, I will describe how I saw the ancient site of Delphi and the archaeological museum there, how I saw the hanging monasteries of Meteora, how I saw the tomb of (probably) none other than King Philippos II of Makedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, as well as its spectacular contents, which are perhaps the closest ancient Greek equivalent to the Egyptian treasures of Tutankhamun, and, finally, how I saw the birthplace of Alexander himself.

Continue reading “My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 6”