In response to this video, I posted the following comment:
You will note that that comment has 4601 Likes in 8 hours, which is a pretty good number! I don’t mind getting lots of likes on comments. However, right after taking all of the screenshots I needed for this post, I deleted the comment. Why? Because the dumbest fucking people on Earth found it,and I cannot believe the pure bullheaded illiteracy on display in the many responses to this comment. This is just a sampling, guys, and the number of people who seemed to think that I literally meant human beings boil is absolutely staggering. Have a gallery:
I can’t decide which is worse: the “we don’t really boil” people, the “ONLY AT SEA LEVEL” pedants (the variance in boiling temperature is about 7% from sea level to the top of Mount fucking Everest; shut up), or the people who don’t seem to understand what fevers are. My favorite is the person who claims to have had a 106 degree fever for two full days; 106 degrees is a five-alarm, get-your-ass-to-the-hospital-NOW fever. 106 degrees will kill you stone fucking dead. Then there are the people who thought that I meant that people would … literally freeze into a block … at 0 degrees? Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.
I mean, beach_lily really thought “Literally not true” was something worth saying. You’re right! Of fucking course people don’t literally boil! What the fuck is wrong with you that you thought you needed to point that out?
I’ve said it before many times, and I’ll say it again: it should be painful to be this dumb. Your brain should shock you or something. You should pass out before you finish expressing thoughts this dumb. I am absolutely willing to live by this; I live in daily, constant fear of actually being as dumb as these people seem to be. This is “democracy is a terrible idea” level dumb. These people’s votes count!
I haven’t watched a World Cup game– sorry, match— yet, and it is entirely possible that I’ll make it through the whole thing without watching any of them, but I still have Strong Opinions about who should win. To wit:
Oranje!My team is the Netherlands. Why? I have no clue. However, I have been consistent about this for at least three World Cups now, including at least one that they did not actually participate in. I think I just like saying Oranje.
Sorry, not you: If the United States is one of the two teams, I am for the other team. Because to hell with patriotism right now.
Iran, because Iran winning the World Cup would be fucking hilarious;
Africa unite: If the Netherlands or the US are not involved in the game, but a team from Africa is, cheer for the team from Africa. If two African teams are competing against each other, choose the team with cooler uniforms. EXCEPTION: South Africa. See below.
All other games matches: No Netherlands, no US, and no Africa? The preference list is as follows:
Curaçao, because I don’t even know where that is;(*)
Haiti;
Mexico;
Any team from Central or South America (follow the “uniforms and vibes” rule if both teams are Central/South American)
Türkiye;
Any other team from Asia Minor/the Middle East; blah blah uniforms & vibes
Canada;
Anywhere else that isn’t Europe, including South Africa;
Europe, excepting the Netherlands; BBU&V.
So today we are supporting Qatar, Morocco and Haiti; tomorrow, Türkiye, Curaçao, ORANJE!, the Ivory Coast and Tunisia, and Monday, Cape Verde, Egypt, Uruguay and Iran. You get the idea, I think.
(*) I just found out that Curaçao is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, apparently, and moved them up on the list. We’re going to consider Cape Verde as Africa-adjacent as well.
Tornado sirens tossed us into the basement for about 45 minutes last night, and as a Midwestern dad I was contractually required to go outside the very moment the warning stopped to check it out. I was greeted with this weirdness: a little bit of evidence of rain but nothing currently falling, no wind, and near-constant lightning with very little thunder. A dad more committed to his Midwesternness would have gone out during the storm, but my wife is out of town this week and I’m trying to be good.
I woke up this morning and discovered that summer school wasn’t happening, as apparently there were more widespread power outages east of us. I have spent the day since then gradually sinking into a worse and worse mood for some reason.
Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly why; Earth has its first trillionaire, or at least its first official one (call me when Elon Musk goes on hajj and destabilizes Egypt’s entire economy along the way) and meanwhile literally everything is getting worse for everyone else all the time, with no sign that the pattern is ever going to reverse itself. Every opinion I have about Musk is unprintable, even by my standards. I tried to watch the livestream of Trump’s name being torn off of the Kennedy Center and they had to stop work because of the rain (the remnants of last night’s storm, maybe?) and didn’t get a single letter taken down. That kind of day. I can’t even rant properly, for fuck’s sake.
I need someone to face a consequence for something. Anyone. For anything.
The Marjan Kamali book I finished last night and the Julia Alvarez book my kids are reading for summer school are overlapping in some really interesting ways, but I want to finish the Alvarez book before I talk about either of them too much. Meanwhile I am sitting at my desk absolutely enthralled by this, which I just found out about on Bluesky and sought out immediately. I am hungry; all I’ve eaten all day is a couple of doughnuts and a turkey wrap, so maybe dinner would be a good idea, but I’m currently putting off food in favor of music. It’s that good.
The World Cup started today; the first match was apparently at 3:30. I initially planned on watching it but then didn’t in favor of mowing my front lawn in blazing heat, which tells you just how committed I am to following the World Cup. I don’t think I’ve ever not done anything in favor of mowing instead. But my front lawn is now mowed, and I’m no longer paranoid that my neighbors secretly hate me.
My back yard, meanwhile, is going to suddenly catch fire in the next couple of days and burn to a crisp and then I won’t have to worry about it or its ten-foot, carnivorous, mobile weeds any longer. Nobody can really see the back yard. I’m pretending it’s a nature preserve. There’s probably some insects in there somewhere, assuming the weeds haven’t eaten them.
In case you can’t tell, I don’t have anything staggeringly important going on at the moment. I had nine kids today, the most of them I’ve had, and they seem to be enjoying themselves well enough so I don’t think we’re going to drop down to four again anytime soon. The one I know from last year still hasn’t shown up, though, which is kind of disappointing. I’m doing a decent job acquitting myself as an LA teacher; some parts of my brain that I haven’t had to use in a long time are coming back online, which is fun. I was hoping for a decent change of pace with this job, and I’ve got it in a couple of different ways, and I’ll be even happier with the whole situation next week, when that first paycheck shows up.
I started Pragmataa little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.
This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.
I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:
It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.
The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.
And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.
My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.
At least, I hope so, although we may be in a good-news-and-bad-news situation. I had six kids today, and they were all nice kids, and they were willing to participate, although a couple of them have insanely quiet voices, and my two Hispanic girls who are good friends and look enough alike that they could be sisters have names that are only different by a few letters, which in a class of six is not fair. I should not be having to worry about mixing up names in a class of six.
Hopefully we’ll get more kids tomorrow, and (this is the maybe bad news part) hopefully they won’t decide that my attendance is so low that they need to combine my section with someone else’s. I’m a little worried about getting booted out of my cushy high-paying job early, now that I’m done worrying about it being horrible.
Anyway, I have reading to do, so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully the booing from Madison Square Garden will be loud enough that I can hear it in Indiana. We’ll see.
Tried to find an appropriate image for summer school and couldn’t find anything I really liked, so feel free to enjoy this ultra-rare photo of two of my three cats sharing my lap. It could have been better if one of them was looking at the camera or both of them were in focus, but I was worried that any movement at all might cause one or both of them to bolt, so I took what I could get.
Anyway, summer school, or, sorry, the Summer Learning Program, since technically I’m not employed by any school district for the next several weeks, starts tomorrow. I have to be there at 8:00, have an entire hour of prep, then three hours of teaching, then I do that 21 more times and then I’m done. I have ten kids on one roster and twelve at another, so we’ll see how many actually show up. I know one of them already and she’s awesome. Tomorrow is a survey and a pre-test and some getting to know you activities. Tomorrow there’s a different pre-test. Actual regular day stuff starts Wednesday. The curriculum is all pre-baked. There’s literally no accountability for anyone involved. This should be easy as hell.
