I got to say

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A whole lot of kids brought their grades up in class today.

No discipline problems.

Heard good things from several staff members about how pleasant covering my classes yesterday was, and even the ones with things to say were careful to say things like “It was just those two; everyone else was great.”

Found out that one of my least engaged students is really, really good at geography.

My Math Lab kids chewed this problem up and spit it out:

Came home and beat the hell out of some yokai. Tilapia and potatoes for dinner.

And now I’m going to go read until it’s time for bed.

Okay, I lied, I’m going to post an update. I put up this post, with the image below, in late January of 2024:

That’s 72 kids failing out of 134, with 22 kids getting zeroes. Now, this is third quarter– third quarter sucks. My kids’ grades will be worse on January 20 of 2027 than they are right now. So this isn’t a completely fair comparison.

But today was a catch-up day, which is exactly what I was doing on that day up there. And I put a message on the board today, too. And after each class, I updated the numbers. And right now, of my 112 kids who are in my regular 8th grade Math class, I have only fifteen who are failing(*) … and forty-three who are getting an A.

I’m not joking when I say this group of kids is the best I’ve ever had.

(*) That’s less than half the number of kids who were failing at the start of the day.

Stupid brain is stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I called in today, after getting … maybe three hours of sleep last night? I woke up around 2:00 in the morning to take a piss. Not unusual; this happens most nights. Most nights I take care of business, put my CPAP mask on, and go right the fuck back to sleep. But every so often my brain decides that I would be more comfortable if I left the mask off and tried to sleep on my stomach. And last night the mask was occasionally singing me the song of its people, a sign that I’ve let it go a little too long without cleaning the air holes or just replacing the mask, and I succumbed to this stupid, stupid instinct.

I need it to be clear: I will always sleep better with the mask on than the mask off, and there are no exceptions. I don’t know how I survived as long as I did without the CPAP mask. It is virtually impossible to get good rest without it unless I’m deathly ill, and what’s happening under those circumstances rarely counts as “good rest” anyway. My brain convincing me to try and sleep on my stomach without the mask is mental illness. There’s no other reasonable way to describe it.

What’s worse? You would think that after an hour of tossing and turning and being conscious of the fact that I’m not breathing correctly, I would put the mask back on? No. On these nights, I can never convince myself to put the mask back on. I’m always right about to fall asleep, and “waking up” (I’m already awake, and miserable) to put the mask on would be a bad idea.

It would not be a bad idea, it is in fact the only thing that will allow me to break the cycle and go the fuck back to sleep, and yet I don’t do it. Some nights I can pull this mess off and not be a disaster the next day. I could tell within minutes of “waking up” this morning that school was just not happening, and I was blathering and incoherent for most of the day.

It sucked and I hate my stupid broken brain and my stupid broken fat body.

Okay fine you twisted my arm

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy5 Comments

Money isn’t real, so let’s not bullshit: I’m totally ordering one of these fucking things next month. I didn’t realize I was going to until today. Seriously, if you’d asked me yesterday I’d have said buying first-gen Apple tech isn’t always a great idea, I’ll wait another year, and after remembering the launch event and going to apple.com earlier this afternoon I was halfway done with my preorder before I realized that I couldn’t actually preorder yet.

Basically my trade-in (for a phone, remember, that I bought last year) is going to be enough that it makes the unreasonable price for the 256gb model slightly less unreasonable. So … fuck it.

I had something else. Pardon me for a moment, while I stare at the screen.

… yeah, dammit, it’s gone. I can always post again if I remember whatever the hell I wanted to talk about, right? Not only is money not real, rules about blogging definitely aren’t real.

Shit, right! Tomorrow is dead asshole day! I am not especially looking forward to being a middle school teacher on dead asshole day. Most of my kids had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until he got his head blown off, and his entire existence is literally a joke to them right now. I still occasionally will hear kids singing the We are Charlie Kirk song quietly to themselves in the hallway; most of them, if presented with the opinions of the actual smirking shitstain behind the song, would correctly identify him as a horrible person, and then would sing the song again. I continue to believe that him getting shot in the fucking neck three seconds after making a racist joke about gun violence is the most objectively funny thing that has happened in years; the fact that it was a groyper nitwit who did it just makes it even better.

There’s a lot of people online who are promising to convert to Christianity or return to God if It Happens tomorrow; I am not one of them, but you will hear me laughing regardless of where you are in the world, and you will likely hear news stories about the middle school math teacher who got fired for taking off his pants and running through the hallways cackling and yelling blasphemies immediately afterward.

So. Y’know. You’ve got that to look forward to. Cross your fingers.

The onslaught is beginning

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

I got a new R.F. Kuang book today, along with the second installment of He Who Fights with Monsters, and the middle of those three September 15 arrivals is China Miéville’s new doorstop, which is one thousand two hundred pages. And I’m probably going to order the special edition of Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, out September 29, (and 672 pages) because it gives me an excuse to read that series for the first time and the new hardbacks are stunning. However, I need to make sure the other books in the series are getting the same treatment, because God forbid they don’t match.

In other words, now that my lesson planning is finished, I’m going back to my chair, because Warlords of Wyrdwood isn’t gonna finish itself and I need to get to the Kuang book soon. There is Discourse that I’m missing, damn it!

#REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.

I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.

This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.

That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.

Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.

They’re not crooked, I swear

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, WorkLeave a comment

No better use of my Labor Day that I can think of than taking away work from a fine union electrician by installing new lights in the Shitty Bathroom (TM) by myself, and by “by myself” I mean “with the capable assistance of my wife everywhere my fat hands and massive body wouldn’t let me reach a screw.” I did do all the wiring, though, so y’all can use this as evidence when the house burns down. It’s okay, I’m union too.

Turns out the first time we did this job we didn’t use properly damp-resistant lighting, so they both needed replacement. This means that over the course of this weekend I fixed a recliner and wired two lights, so my masculine virility is off the chart right now.

More later, I have a nerd movie to review, and remember: people fought and died for the right to a five-day, forty-hour work week. Solidarity forever.

Not even gonna pretend

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Taking tonight off. Enjoy your Saturday.

EDIT: Ten minutes after posting this, I took out Yagyu Jubei. Who wants to touch me?

In which I forgot the rules

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

So I think I mentioned a bit ago that the first Nioh 3 DLC dropped?

I’ve been focusing on reading after work (and, well, lesson plans) and so I just really got a chance to dig into Hell Rising for the first time today. You can pretty much jump straight into the DLC content from wherever you want, so Idid that, and got through the first area without a whole lot of trouble, and most of that was related to not remembering details of the controls and some bad habits that Rise of the Ronin taught me. The controls are mostly the same between the two games, but there are some definite differences and Nioh is much harder and button-mashing will get your ass killed. Unfortunately my main weapon in the game is the talons, which are a super-fast weapon that, well, tends to be button-mashy.

Anyway, I died in a few places where I shouldn’t have, but no big deal. Got to the first boss. Held my own for maybe a minute. And then the fucker one-shotted me, and not with, like, a massive special attack that I didn’t see coming. No, I missed a dodge and he knocked me into next week with a regular sword strike.

I forgot that the DLCs in previous games may have said that they were accessible at a certain level, but what they really meant by that was be this level, but also have completely beaten every available difficulty level of the base game, and be really good at it, because it’s going to get even worse when DLC 2 drops.

I have not beaten every available difficulty of the base game. I platinumed the initial difficulty level, but New Game +? It is to laugh.

I, uh, have some work to do.