I have been tired and headachy all day, and seeing as how we have to go to Indianapolis for the day tomorrow and school starts Monday, I don’t have time to be sick right now. So I’m taking the night off and going to bed extremely early. Have a lovely evening, y’all.
We’re mostly there
The hex lights that you can see there on that desk are basically the only things that have to be put up; I was out of the proper adhesives to hang them up and they just arrived today, so I’ll get those hung up on Monday, and I have one more item of decor that is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. The pile of miscellaneous junk on that other desk has been banished to the staff lounge, where anyone who wants it can take it, and if it’s still there in a week or so (it won’t be) I’ll just throw what’s left away. But the room is ready to go; if I found out I was having kids or parents on five minutes’ notice I could toss a couple of things into the closet and nobody would know the difference. This means that I can take the ten hours or so of classroom prep time that I have spread over Monday through Wednesday and use it for every single other thing I have to have ready rather than getting the room set up.
From the “say the same shit you said on Bluesky in a more permanent form” files, I give you these two skeets:
And here is the result of that work, after … oh, an hour, to get everything up on the wall properly? I didn’t fall off of the stepladder or the counter I had to stand on, which you should be proud of me for. Also, note that every single one of those letters is stapled to the wall in defiance of the documentation we were sent about classroom decoration, because the walls are supposed to have things stapled to them.
Anyway:
One more weekend, and then we’re back for real.
Second verse, same as the first
Today was more or less the exact same day as yesterday– got up, went to work for a few hours, argued with no one in particular about my classroom furniture, got home, worked on school shit for a bit more. We met some family for dinner at a place that is traditional for my wife’s side of the family, and I think I am going to push back the next time it is suggested they go there, but “Luther didn’t like his dinner” is not the most engaging of blog posts.
So instead, I’m going to go read for a while. My suggestion to you is that if you have never heard Abdul el-Sayed speak, you should do some Googling and watch a speech or two. He’s been all over my TikTok lately and I’m starting to get serious Barack Obama 2004 vibes from the guy. I’m going to try to embed an appropriate snippet, but I’m not convinced it’s going to play nice with WordPress. We’ll see:
…
It will not. So click the link:
Let’s see if you can make me
I spent my first few hours of the new school year working in my room today; as per previous practice, we don’t actually start getting paid until next week, but if I wait until the days I’m supposed to be there, there’s not going to be anywhere near enough time to get everything done that I need to get done. Adding insult to injury, Open House starts at 1:00 in the Goddamn afternoon on our second day of the three we have before school starts, meaning that the real deadline for when our rooms need to be presentable isn’t even the day the kids come back, it’s a full day and a half before that.
I made two promises to myself at the end of last year, which were that I wasn’t going back into the building before school started, and I wasn’t going to spend a ton of money during the couple of weeks heading into school, and I’ve thoroughly broken both of those promises. (Want to help me out with supplies? My Amazon wish list is here.)
We got emailed a document a few weeks ago about the district’s new expectations regarding classroom decor and classroom furniture. I’m probably not supposed to post the entire thing, but I’m really, really tempted to do so. Needless to say, it bans several things I already have in my classroom, and I’ve already purchased, as in during previous years, specifically for use in my classroom. Shit that I not only have nowhere to put at home, but is too big to fit in my car to take home even if I had somewhere to put it. I’m not joking when I tell you they apparently want me to just throw away hundreds of dollars of shit I’ve bought for my room to make it more comfortable for my students. Hell, I decided I wanted to grab an end table we weren’t using at home (it’s been living in the garage for a couple of months) to put my iPad charging station on, and technically, I can’t even bring that in.
The policy basically boils down to “You are only allowed to use the furniture we give you, and we have no intention whatsoever of furnishing your room appropriately, so suck it.” The teacher chair from the district that I replaced with my $600 SecretLab chair was broken when I got it. Is somebody going to reimburse me for all this shit I already bought, that was perfectly fine in previous years?
Yeah, I know.
I don’t think most people realize just how bare a classroom looks when it literally only has the things in it that the school district paid for. They’ve even gone so far as to ban various kinds of flexible student seating (I don’t have them any more, because the kids popped them, but I’ve had fidget seats in the room before) that are commonly used in IEPs. They’re supposedly going to have the maintenance crew go through the buildings and mark the level we’re supposed to keep our lighting at on the switch plates. The maintenance people come through every single night and set my lights to the maximum before turning them off, a level of harsh overhead lighting that I absolutely cannot tolerate. We aren’t supposed to use staples or thumbtacks to attach things to the walls any more. Our walls are specifically constructed to take staples! They did that on purpose!
(My room didn’t even get fucking vacuumed over the summer, by the way. Everything is exactly where I left it at the end of the school year. I had no reason to put anything away.)
Anyway, my AP walked into my room today to say hello, and I’d moved my couch to a spot where it is clearly visible from the door, the same couch I’m not supposed to have in my room any longer, and she didn’t say a damn word about it. I’m not sure how much of a stink I’m willing to make about this, but I’m absolutely not complying with anything until my boss specifically tells me to, and I’m trying to decide if I’m petty enough for malicious compliance to kick in if that happens.
(The document also bans, believe it or not, cast iron bathtubs from being in classrooms. Specifically. There has to be a story behind this. I want to know what it is.)
Let’s talk about DAGGERMOUTH
It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this book yet, so let me set the stage here: H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is a dystopian romance that blew up as an indie title before getting a seven-figure traditional publishing deal, and it was just recently released in a pretty new physical hardcover. It has also been publicly accused of being written by AI.
(A quick side note: If you aren’t an Atlantic subscriber, you won’t be able to read the article at that link. Ironically, perhaps, there is at least one other website that has taken the entire article, stripped the author’s name off of it, and reposted it, with only an “originally published at the Atlantic” link at the bottom to indicate that they didn’t produce it. I’m not going to link to that article. You are welcome to find it, if you want.)
Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have picked this book up in the first place. I’ve read my share of romance novels/romantasies in the last couple of years but I’m growing tired of it as a genre, and what the kids call “spice” is starting to slowly slide toward being a reason not to pick up a book. But a good friend who has become The Person I Talk About Books To told me she’d read it and recommended it, and then told me about the AI controversy, which at the time I hadn’t heard about. She thought the accusation was ridiculous, having read the book, and pointed out that of course the author everyone was tossing accusations at was a young Black woman.(*)
For what it’s worth, Wolfe’s publisher, who gave her a whole lot of money, is standing behind her on this, and since AI-written text can’t be copyrighted, you’d think they’d have a significant interest in making sure she actually wrote the damn thing.
The book is on Kindle Unlimited, as it turns out. So I didn’t even have to pay for it. Fuck it, I thought, and downloaded it.
If this book was written by AI, we are all in really fucking big trouble, folks. Human-generated culture is dead if AI wrote this book.
That sounds like a strong recommendation. It’s not. Not quite. Daggermouth has a problem that for some reason seems very common to the indie-book-to-tradpub-success pipeline: Wolfe constantly either uses words that are just slightly not the right word or describes situations that sound good at first and don’t make sense upon second looks. The type of thing that sounds like nitpicking if you only provide one example, and I don’t plan to eviscerate the book at the moment, so let me nitpick: there is a bit early on where a character is drinking from a glass, and his many rings “clink” against the glass.
The glass in question is a wine glass– stemware, in other words– and if you’re holding stemware in such a fashion that your rings are clinking on it, you’re holding it wrong. At one point– hell, this might be the same conversation, I don’t remember– a character is sitting behind an executive-style desk having a conversation with a second character. He stands up and “in four long strides” (Wolfe is terribly fond of counting her characters’ strides) he walks to the other character to get all up in his space.
The problem is that this description both 1) forgets that he was sitting behind a desk and 2) puts the other character really far away from that desk. Seriously, take four “long strides” right now. Is that normal conversational distance?
The writing, in other words, in a mechanical and a craft sense, is mediocre. I’ve read a lot worse, mind you. But it’s definitely not good. And again, this is a weird indie-to-tradpub problem; I had the exact same issue with Ryan Cahill’s books, and I can think of three or four other authors I’ve had the same complaints about who I’m not going to bother to call out by name right now.(**)
The story hits its stride at about the 100-page mark and is off to the fucking races after that, and never lets up or slows down for the last 80% of the book. This is a good story, poorly written. And there’s enough genuinely good stuff in there– particularly the ending, which caught both me and my friend completely by surprise. There are bits that are ridiculous, too; the worst offense was a bit where the fated lovers of the piece surprise eight soldiers in his apartment, kill all eight of them, and then decide to stay the night in the apartment rather than, say, realize their cover is completely blown and go literally anywhere else. They don’t even clear the bodies out until the next morning.
I didn’t have any damn idea how to rate this, and had I not spent the first 100 pages debating every third word choice and mapping out locations in my head, this might have been a five-star read, because it needed to get good enough that I stopped paying attention to the flaws in the writing. The book managed to shut down the persnickety editor part of my brain, and usually, once that guy is unleashed on your book, you’re done. But I got caught up enough in the story that I finished the book basically overnight, and after that first 20% I was genuinely expecting to have to DNF or force myself through the rest of it. I put it at four and a half on Storygraph (follow me!) and four on Goodreads.
I would not have thought for a single second that this text was AI-generated had I not been told that it was controversial. And, to return to the article for a moment, I’m not convinced of their methodology, at least based on what the article tells me– there are, for example, two entire sentences that appear word-for-word in other books that they looked at, but they leave out the kind of important detail of which book came out first. Maybe the fucking AI ate the sentences for this book and spit them out for the other one? Plus, I’m sorry, if you’re comparing this book to a book from someone who “wrote” 400 books last year, and the sequel to this one isn’t coming out for another year, guess what? I know which author I think is writing AI. Hell, I know which author I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. If this book comes out as a higher percentage chance of being AI than one of the other person’s 400 books, your methodology is crap and you should redo your study.
Is it possible? Sure. I’m not going to claim that my internal AI detector is top-tier or anything like that; in 8th grade the easiest way to see if a student cheated and had AI write a paper is to ask them to read it out loud, and as soon as they hit a word they can’t read, ask them what it means. It works every single fucking time. I generally don’t have to think about it a whole lot harder than that. But if it is? If a fucking genAI slop program wrote this book? It doesn’t have to be fucking Dostoyevsky for that to be a major fucking concern.
So, yeah. I’m pretty sure H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is not written by AI. It has issues but ultimately I enjoyed reading it. I’m in for the sequel. And I am absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to human culture if I’m wrong.
(*) I Googled “H.M. Wolfe age,” and the fucking AI assistant told me she was born on October 28, 2025, and then helpfully added “Age: 0” afterwards.
(**) In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the only indie-to-tradpub author who I haven’t had this problem with is Matt Dinniman, including his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl books.
I am never fixing anything again (clap, clap)
Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.
Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.
“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.
But why the quick onset of the killing rage?
Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.
We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:
I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.
MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.
MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.
Taking tonight off
But, because I love you, the music video of the song I’m listening to right now:
Monthly Reads: July 2026
Book of the Month is … damn. There is no Antimemetics Division? Sublimation? Challenger? The Empire of the Vampire series as a whole? Angel Down? Seriously, throw a dart. July was ridiculous.