Let’s see if you can make me II

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

We have, like a lot of districts, an e-learning day scheduled for November 3rd, which is Election Day. Schools still get used as polling places frequently and a lot of districts have decided it’s safer and easier on everyone if they just get the kids out of the building for the day. We found out yesterday that we were going to be expected to be in PD all day. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should post this flyer or not, and landed on “fuck it”:

You’re already starting off in a deep, deep hole if you want me to take you seriously and the first thing I encounter about you is a fucking AI flyer. I’m stunned that it’s not in that AI font that is absolutely fucking everywhere all the sudden over the last couple of months.

I had a few minutes this afternoon and, knowing full well I was about to piss myself off, I looked into the company behind this, again, six hour training. A six hour training at which they have already told us they will be taking attendance twice. We have been instructed to bring “a writing utensil and a hard surface to write on,” because we’ll be stuck in fucking auditorium chairs all Goddamned day. What this means is that we’re going to spend at least a third of the six hours “reflecting” and “sharing” with an “elbow partner.”

So you can imagine just how excited I was about this even before finding out that the person behind the company has all of four and a half fucking years of classroom experience, and all of that was at a high-ranked district in Georgia, and all of that was as a special ed teacher, meaning that she’s very likely never been in charge of a full classroom, and all of that was before Covid and before 1:1 tech instruction, where we handed all these demonic little fuckers perpetual distraction devices.(*)

Their website also offers a free brochure (“free” meaning “give us your email address”, here you go) with five “tips to give teachers what they need to thrive in the classroom.” There are more typos in the brochure than there are useful tips. The first page calls it an “ebook.” It is nine pages long, counting the cover.

No.

This person has nothing to say to me that I need or want to hear. The last time they pulled this shit on us it was a three-hour presentation where the guy began by promising to “respect our time” (not once in the history of humanity has anyone said those three words and meant them) and whose most insightful contribution to behavior management through his three hours was assigned seats, which he presented as if he’d invented the idea himself. This time it is six hours, followed by a “mandatory” presentation by the superintendent that falls entirely outside of our contract hours and which I have already bitched to the union about.

And again: they’re telling us they’re taking attendance twice, so they know good and fucking well that they’ve spent a lot of money to bring this asshole here to waste our time.

I’m not doing it. I’m calling in sick that day, and if for some reason I’m prevented from calling in sick I’m going to show up with a bag full of rotten fruit and I’m going to heckle until I get fired. Just because you can con bureaucrats into shoveling money into your gaping maw does not mean that you have anything relevant to say to me, and we’ll see how your little behavior management techniques work on a grown-ass man who is pre-tired of your bullshit.

(*) I’ve found her LinkedIn, too. She has four and a half years of teaching experience, four years in three different behavior analyst jobs, and then founded her consulting company. She is a fetus, and she knows nothing.

Two quick stories

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life, TeachingLeave a comment

I went to work today! I still feel like butt.

QUICK STORY 1 of 2: I walked to Bree! Sort of. Every so often an ad for this app called The Conqueror will scroll across some social media or another, and I finally decided to bite and try the first Lord of the Rings challenge they offer. The idea isn’t super complicated: walk 145 miles, over whatever time frame you personally desire. You get access to an app that helps you keep track of your walking and after 145 miles they send you a medal that says you walked from the Shire to Bree. There’s a little miniature ring inside that envelope on the back of the medal. There are several more of these, of varying lengths; the next one takes me to Rivendell, and eventually all the way to Mordor itself. There’s also one that lets you follow Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas’ road instead, or you can do all of them. I just signed up for the one at first, because there’s a cost to it and I wanted to make sure the medal felt like it wasn’t a piece of junk, and it’s not. It’s a decent little display piece, and it’ll look even cooler with seven friends on it. So: off to Rivendell!

QUICK STORY 2 of 2: I had my first real referral of the year today, for something I’ve never written a kid up for before: starting a fire in class! With a lighter he’d managed to kludge together by stripping some wires on a vape! I would be impressed with his ingenuity if it wasn’t being used in the pursuit of such sheer stupidity. He rolled up a piece of paper into what looked like a joint and lit that, so it wasn’t a big fire, but as it turns out that’s not an especially salient detail when you set a fire in a school. Even small ones are a problem! You’re not supposed to do that.

NOT A STORY BUT I’M INCLUDING IT! I’m reading this book right now, and this is easily the prettiest author signature I’ve ever seen:

I really want to see the fountain pen she used. That had to be a fountain pen.

#REVIEW: The Only Way Out is Up, by Django Wexler

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Absolutely true fact: I only bought this book because of my inner magpie. I have the Broken Binding version, which has the same cover but also has matching purple/pink sprayed edges, and for whatever reason I am an absolute whore for that color. I have two of Django Wexler’s books; Goodreads tells me I enjoyed The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne when I read them in 2013 and 2014, but for some reason that is entirely lost to the mists of time I never picked up the third volume, and I haven’t read anything of his since. Well, I’m going to have to add Thousand Names to my second chances project next year, because I stayed home from work again this afternoon and I read this damn thing cover-to-cover in more or less a single sitting.

I am not exactly sure what a “progression fantasy” is, if I’m being honest, or how much such a thing overlaps with a LitRPG; this book calls itself a progression fantasy and Matt Dinniman blurbs it on the cover, but it doesn’t have the emphasis on video game/RPG mechanics like leveling and ability scores that LitRPGs have. Wexler himself calls it “Pokémon with robots,” which … isn’t entirely wrong, but there’s a lot more going on than what you might think from that description.

At any rate: the main character is Taj, a young scrapper who lives in a slum literally built among the remnants of an underground junk heap. The surface is kilometers away, and occasionally showers of metal or giant objects fall from the sky and kill people. Taj turns out to be talented with … well, not quite robotics, as sigilcraft is an interesting combination of magic and technology that doesn’t quite line up perfectly with “robots,” but it’s close enough for this piece and you can see from the cover that there’s clearly something mechanical running around with him. At any rate, his robot is named Star, and because of a particular sigil Taj discovered, Star can both communicate mentally with Taj and to all appearances appears to be sentient. Taj supplements scrapping with occasional petty thievery, and one night he sneaks up to a higher (and thus wealthier) level of the giant pit he lives in and robs a young woman named Ky. Ky takes one look at Star and offers him a better deal: she’ll bankroll him into a tournament for combat versions of these robots in return for his help with some shit she has going on, and we’re off to the races.

So the Pokémon angle is the fighting robots, mixed with a heist novel, a closed-off postapocalyptic society reminiscent of Dust or Fallout, a magic sigil system that reminds me of the tech in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, and some great character work. I like Ky and Taj a lot, and Taj’s semi-adopted found family and the menagerie of fixers, gamblers, gangsters and aristocratic degenerates they encounter throughout the book are uniformly fun, as are the little glimpses of society aboveground you get here and there. My only real complaint is that the book could have used a little bit more breathing room, although as long as the books I’ve been reading lately have been, it was nice to sit down and blast through something short. There are a few questions that I assume are going to be dealt with in sequels– Taj is awfully good with sigilcraft, and everyone he encounters expresses disbelief that he’s been able to cobble Star together with essentially scavenged parts, and then there’s Star’s apparent sentience, which is kept a secret from most of the other characters throughout the book. Revelations are coming, I’m sure.

Definitely worth giving a look, and then give it a prominent place on your shelf so you can enjoy the pretty colors.

Oh, cool

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I’ve felt like butt all day– my monthly day where my body just shuts down, apparently, and I called in this morning and slept until 2:00– so I don’t really have anything to talk about, but make sure you check out the comments on the previous post, where Wright Thompson himself pops in (!!) to talk about the subtitle on The Barn.

#REVIEW: The Barn, by Wright Thompson

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

I probably shouldn’t write this tonight. I spent the first hundred pages of this book thinking about putting it down, not because it was bad but because it wasn’t exactly the book I thought it was when I picked it up. I bought this book on sight in Barnes and Noble, and I didn’t know it existed prior to finding it, and I had to flip it over and look at the back to be certain it was about Emmett Till’s murder. There are a lot of barns in Mississippi, and there have been a lot of murders. And the title of the book does not mention Till.

It becomes clear fairly quickly upon starting to read it that The Barn is not only a history of the Till murder. It’s a memoir before anything else, I think, and if it’s a history of anything it’s a history of Mississippi, framed around the young man’s murder and the barn he was killed in. Often when places are mentioned, their distance from the barn is the first thing you find out about them, carefully measured down to the tenth of a mile. “Secret history” makes it sound like it’s going to be digging up long-buried stories, which actually is accurate, but mostly because Mississippi has never been interested in the truth. Mississippi buries history like a fucking professional, you see. Lying about itself is in the state’s blood.

And, well. About that.

Here’s the cover of the UK version of this book:

I literally made this discovery five minutes ago, as I sat down to write this; the first thing I do whenever I’m writing a book review is find a high-res copy of the cover, of course, and … well.

I am surprisingly angry about the title change, and I really want to know which one was the original title. I feel like the UK subtitle has to be the original one; I can see changing the title from that to the more sensationalistic, less specific US version despite how fucking awful a decision I think it was, but altering the title from the US version, especially the way the cover emphasizes Till’s name, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the average British citizen, or even the average British reader of nonfiction about America, probably doesn’t know who Emmett Till is? Or, at the very least, his name has significantly less salience over there than it does here? I could be wrong, I suppose, and it might be worth pointing out that we have one cover that does not mention Till and one cover that does not mention Mississippi. And, again, this book is more about Mississippi than it is about Emmett Till.

I’ll do some digging tomorrow and see if I can find out the story of the title change. It’s 2026; maybe Wright Thompson is on Bluesky. You never know.

One way or another, once I got out of my own head and started judging the book for what it was, rather than what I thought it was going to be, it’s a phenomenal piece of work, and even if the title was changed for the most base and cowardly reasons– and, Christ, the title of a book about Emmett Till getting changed to omit Till’s name is the most Mississippi thing that could possibly have happened– I can’t blame the book for that. And the third section of the book, called 1955, tells the story of the murder well enough. I don’t know that there’s enough in a straight history to fill 400 pages, but the way Thompson weaves hundreds of years of Mississippi and US history around the events of a single night in a crumbling barn in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere makes it an impressively hard book to put down. The research that went into this book is detailed and exacting, the prose soars, and I sat down and tore through the last 170 pages in one sitting immediately after finishing dinner tonight. This is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year. You should read it.

Nope

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Far too fucking crabby to expose other humans to my nonsense tonight. Starting a book about Emmett Till and then doing my mandatory child abuse training tonight may have been a bit too much for a Sunday night.

Scammers make no sense at all

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

I always have the weird urge to fuck with people whenever I get a wrong number text message, and this was waiting for me when I got out of the shower earlier today. I almost responded with the literally true “No, I just got out of the shower” to that first message, and then decided I wasn’t in the mood to troll a stranger and just played it straight, expecting either no response or a quick apology and then radio silence. Instead, I got this interaction, which just gets weirder with every message.

Why did you send Emma a selfie of you already at the gym?

Why did you ask me to confirm I wasn’t Emma, when I’d already told you twice? Was there a chance that I was going to turn out to be wrong, and realize I had been Emma all along?

What’s the deal with “work” coming through as “wr ok” both times? And “numbver” twice?

And I made sure to include the timestamps on the rest of the messages, because the timing was so weird. There’s an hour between “How should I address you?” and “You haven’t answered my question,” and then another 40 minutes between that and Emma showing up, nearly two hours after the original message. Nothing about this interaction feels normal at all, which makes me feel like it has to be a prelude to a scam, but this is not the first time that I’ve felt like I was on the path to being scammed by someone and, bewilderingly, never actually got to the part where the scamming happened.

(Follow-up to that story: I did eventually get a response from the real editor on LinkedIn confirming that no, that message was not from her, and I got a whole different message from a different scammer a few weeks later which I replied to with total credulity, hoping something fun would happen. No response to that one either.)

Anyway, I dunno. Maybe Mia’s older than she looks and English isn’t her first language and she’s maybe friendlier than she ought to be and that’s why everything feels so off, but I kept waiting for the part where she hits me up for $500 for a picture of her tits or something, and instead it just sorta trailed off. If anybody has a good idea about what the hell was going on here, or wants to try to convince me that this was a normal interaction that I’m reading too much into, feel free.

#REVIEW: My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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An interesting thing happened while I was thinking about reviewing this book: I popped over to Goodreads, saw my review, and knocked it down a star. Don’t misunderstand me; that change was from five stars to four, and this is still a book I enjoyed reading and can recommend to people. But if you’re going to read something by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and you should, you ought to start with Cursed Daughters, which I can be much more enthusiastic about.

MStSK begins on the floor in a bathroom, as our main character Korede uses bleach to remove the blood of her sister’s murdered boyfriend. Her sister, Ayoola, is perching on the toilet, blood drying on her body, as she waits for her sister to remove the evidence of her kill. Later, the two of them will dump the body off of a bridge into a lagoon below, hoping the local wildlife gets to it before anyone finds it.

(There are going to be some spoilers, more than I usually have in a review, so be aware of that. The tl;dr of the rest of the review is that I think this book would have been better if it had more room to breathe, and I don’t think it lived up to its own promise. It’s not a bad book, it’s just a distinct step down from Daughters.)

It is, as it turns out, the third boyfriend Ayoola has murdered, and the third Korede has helped her dispose of. Strangely, the police don’t seem to have noticed any sort of pattern, although Braithwaite is quick to emphasize how easily bribed and incompetent Nigerian police are. Ayoola is eventually questioned about this current boyfriend’s disappearance, but the body is never found and she’s never in any serious danger of arrest. And we don’t really get any details about the previous killings.

Here’s the thing: I read this in a couple of big gulps (and it’s short, so you probably will too) and in the moment it was a fun and interesting read. And it’s still a fun and interesting read, but it’s one of those books where a couple of days later the holes are going to start to show. Ayoola is younger and prettier than Korede, and has much better luck with men, and Korede is the more studious and responsible one as well. And eventually Ayoola meets the hot doctor that Korede has a crush on at her job (she’s a nurse; Ayoola is unemployed) and of course he falls for her, and this is supposed to be where the big emotional crux of the novel is, as Korede tries to decide what to do about the whole situation, but it just sort of fizzles. Ayoola temporarily abandons the doctor to fuck off to Dubai with another guy, this one married, and he somehow dies of either food poisoning or a drug overdose while they’re gone, a story Korede immediately doubts, and eventually she tries to stab the doctor but he ends up stabbing her himself in self-defense. Then Ayoola finds another man, and the book ends as Korede comes down the stairs in their home to meet him.

That sounds worse than it is, partially because I’m still in the bad mood I’ve been in all week, but I think the main problem with this book is missed potential. It’s about 220 pages long, and I think it could have used another thirty or so at least, and another hundred pages wouldn’t have been a problem. There’s a lot of backstory spent on Ayoola and Korede’s deceased (and abusive) father, and a side plot about a man in a coma who Korede has been caring for and using as her own private confessional, who wakes up and remembers more of what she told him than she expected. He wakes up and decides he’s in love with Korede, divorces his wife, and sort of hints around that he’s willing to hold what he knows over her head, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere.

So, yeah. Read more Nigerian fiction. Read Braithwaite. Just don’t start with this one.