Month: June 2013

On how to quickly and efficiently make me a crazy person

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy1 Comment

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I like Instagram more than I ever imagined I would.  I’m far from a good photographer and half of my pictures are bullshit that no one would ever have any reason to want to look at, so maybe I’m a terrible Instagrammer– but I like the hell out of this app for some reason.  I’ve got a couple of friends who appear to take pictures of every single object they look at and post them to Instagram; I’m not at that level yet (and, for the record, I’m not griping about those who are) but I may be headed that way.  I don’t know why this is so much fun but it is.

Anyway.

That’s the moon.  It was taken yesterday, at OtherJob.  It’s not blurry as hell out of any particular desire to be arty or anything like that; that’s just how the picture came out and I decided I liked it enough to go ahead and use it.

Note a couple of things:

  • That the moon is full, or is at least nearly enough so as to not matter for this picture.
  • That the moon is bright.  Full moons are bright!  That’s kind of the idea!
  • That the moon is, while large, not larger than you’d expect it to be.

You can cover the moon with a dime held at arm’s length, people.  When it’s at the horizon your brain tricks you with the Moon Illusion, which– while really, really cool– does not actually represent a change in the moon’s size.  The moon looks small from the Earth’s surface.  It should; it’s not very big to begin with (by celestial-object standards, I mean) and it’s, on average, 380,000 kilometers or so away.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

It is not a secret: people are wrong on the Internetduty_calls.   There are always people who are wildly catastrophically stupidly wrong on the Internet and they will always be out there, on the Internet, being all wrong and shit, and furthermore some of them are wrong on purpose and those people enjoy making you crazy.

For a certain kind of person, how capable they are of ignoring Internet idiocy is a useful measure of their overall mental health.  I say “for a certain kind of person” because some people don’t notice Internet idiocy; those are generally the kinds of people making the rest of us insane.  The quality I’m talking about is the ability to read something, recognize that you have lost IQ points to its soul-destroying stupidity, and then ignore it and move on with your life.

Anyway.  Here’s a guide to how to make me nuts:

1) Be wrong on the Internet.  This ain’t hard.  And, to make this clear, I’m wrong on the Internet all the time.  If I wasn’t in the habit of deleting all my Facebook posts a day or two after they go up I could point to many examples.  Some of the people most likely to set me straight when I’m wrong on the Internet may well comment on this.

2) Be someone who should know better than whatever nonsense it is than you just posted.  This is critical; I’m actually pretty good at ignoring stupid from people who I already think are stupid.  If I think of you as an intelligent person, or you occupy a job that should by rights be held by someone with a brain in their head, and I see you posting stupid shit, I’m much more likely to intervene and point out why you’re being stupid.  (2A is “or catch me in the mood to fuck with someone,” which I’ll admit does happen sometimes, but is less common than those who know me well might actually think.)

3) After I correct your stupid, use the phrase “that’s your opinion” or “we’ll agree to disagree.”

No.  No we fucking won’t.  You’re wrong, or I wouldn’t have wasted the breath on correcting your dumb fucking ass.  (Can I tell the difference between fact and my opinion?  Yes!  I’m about to illustrate the difference.)

Here is the difference: if me correcting you uses math, you’re wrong.

For example, if you’ve used the phrase “supermoon” in the last couple of days.  And if you’re posting on something you’re calling an “astronomy blog.”  And if you seem to think that the moon is not only going to be several times larger than it usually looks but is going to cause earthquakes and volcanoes due to its incredible proximity to the Earth, and you post this on your astronomy blog, it is entirely possible that I’m going to speak with you about it.  And when I use the numbers in your own post to point out that the difference between “average” moon and “super” moon is less than seven percent, and you tell me “that’s your opinion,” I’m going to get a little closer to losing my mind on you.  Because that’s not what “opinion” means.  And when I further point out that your stupid ass has suggested that something that happens a little bit less than once a year causes earthquakes and floods, and you tell me that “you’re just saying that the idea is out there,” I’m probably going to savage your soul.  Because, guess what, jackass?  There’s this thing, called observation, that we can use to determine whether the moon causes earthquakes and floods and volcanoes and swarms of locusts every 13.5 months.  And someone who calls himself a “scientist” probably ought to acknowledge the fact that there’s a way to determine with objectivity whether this “idea” that’s “out there” is true or not.

And it isn’t.

That’s not my opinion.  That’s fucking reality.  It is objective fact that the moon is not going to look five times larger in the sky on Sunday than it does today.  It will, to the naked eye, look exactly the fucking same.  Will it be bright and prominent and light up the night sky?  Yes!  That’s what the full moon does.  

So, yeah.  If you want to make me crazy, pose as a scientist, post blatantly nonscientific shit where I can see it, then try and blame me when I call you out on it.  The end.

(Seriously, though?  Look up on Sunday.  The moon is cool, “super” or not.)

In which glide glide glide glide side to side

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Cooking, ParentingLeave a comment

Okay, so, mental note: what I need to do around here if I want lots of comments is to fail at something. Message received!

I dropped the boy on his head this morning.

(Just kidding. I did not. I made grits for myself this morning without destroying the kitchen. I’ve been on daddy duty since 8:00 this morning, we are currently watching Sesame Street after having breakfast, playing with cars, and whatever game it is when he charges into our bedroom and announces that my leather chair is his. Thus far, no major disasters unless you count what happened when he hurled a syrup-covered piece of pancake at one dog and the other dog tried to eat it off the first dog’s face. That was… interesting. Also, he tried to throw a rather thoroughly used diaper at me, but that was stopped before disaster happened.)

I think I may have this episode memorized, by the way, or at least this segment. I’ve been awakened from a deep sleep with the goddamn G song running through my head.

Part of me is like “We’ve gotta introduce this kid to movies” and the rest of me thinks he watches too much TV already. Then again, at least the show he’s watching is teaching him letters and numbers. Sesame Street taught me to read; it’s working its magic on the boy too.

I reread THE DARK CRYSTAL yesterday, and I might watch the movie this weekend sometime. The scary thing is I think I have about a third of an idea for the contest. It couldn’t hurt to work it out a little bit more, right? The contest rules are significantly thin on details about rights, which would be important, but I can write the damn thing and just not bother to submit it if it turns out they can use my idea without paying me for it or something. Something like this would be work-for-hire, obviously, but there’s gradations of awful even within WFH contracts. Hopefully this isn’t too far toward “evil” on the scale.

Just drove past a car that had most of its passenger-side window obscured by a large “WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?” sign.

Here, lemme help:

obama-birth-certificate-mug

Fucking racist asshole sack of shit.

In which that just didn’t work at all

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking13 Comments

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I can’t bake.  I don’t know why.

I have demonstrated over the last six months or so that I can follow a recipe.  I’m not good yet at going “off-book,” for lack of a better phrase– I’m not able to look at my pantry and come up with a meal as opposed to deciding “I want this,” finding a recipe for it, and then going out and buying everything I might need to make that recipe.  But there haven’t been that many categories of food so far that I don’t seem to be able to handle *except* for baking.  Any dish involving anything called “batter” is going to go wrong in my hands.  It’s annoying and I hate it.

This one shoulda been simple.  Peel and chop up some apples, toss them with sugar and cinnamon, melt butter in my two 5 1/2″ skillets (the idea is that there’s one apple pancake per skillet, right?) then sauté the apples in the butter.  Meanwhile, mix up the batter, which is your basic butter/flour/egg/milk/salt mixture, pour it over the sautéed apples, then bake the whole mess for ten minutes in the oven.

The recipe was seriously like five sentences long.  This shoulda been simple.

Issues were as follows:

  • Waaaay too much butter for what I was trying to do. This I blame on the recipe.  It said to melt the butter then use “half” of the melted butter for the batter; no.  There were pools of melted butter rising to the top of the batter when I poured it into the skillets.  This may possibly be related to issue #2, but I don’t think issue #2 would have been as much of a problem if I’d just had less butter to begin with.
  • I don’t think I sautéed the apples for quite long enough.  There was too much apple for the skillets (leaving me with several pieces of cut, peeled, sugar-and-cinnamoned raw apple, which isn’t exactly a problem) but even with a bunch of them held back there was too much apple in the skillets and I didn’t cook them down long enough.  This one’s my fault; I was trying to get everything done before Bek left for work so I figured I’d be able to cut short the apple-cooking part.  It ain’t like raw apples taste bad; they’re just crunchier than properly cooked ones would have been.
  • Forgot the salt. Dumbass rookie move; on the other hand, it was just supposed to be a pinch of salt per skillet’s worth of batter so I can’t imagine it made a huge difference other than to the taste.
  • After that, though?  The oven turned into a smoky hell, because the skillets flat weren’t big enough to hold the batter.  “You should have used bigger skillets,” you say?  Pfah.  The recipe and the cookware are both from the same brand, and the cookbook I used is by the same company that makes the skillets.  The recipe was literally tuned specifically for this skillet.  The one you’re looking at turned into some sort of Fourth of July magic snake-lookin’ bullshit and the other one just flat didn’t cook at all; the butter boiled over the edges and burned in the oven, which meant that when I opened it the fires of hell poured out and I had three fire alarms going in my house at 6:45 in the morning with a sleeping baby not too far away.  WHICH IS ALL SORTS OF AWESOME AND FUN LET ME TELL YOU.

The one I pulled the apples out of and then threw away, deeming it unsalvageable.  The pictured “pancake” was at least edible but tasted awful, possibly due to lack of salt but possibly also just due to the recipe generally being crap.  I may try this once more and make two of them in a much bigger skillet, which ought to minimize spillage and also give me a bit more room to sauté the apples properly before pouring the batter in.  This ought to be something that tastes good, dammit; it’s bloody apple pancakes and apple pancakes are supposed to be fuckin’ tasty.

Bah.  Food is stupid.

In which I don’t relax well

ImageIt’s my second day off in a row and my brain has already turned into useless mush.  There’s one more tomorrow before I work on Friday; I may deliberately keep the boy home so that I have something to do.  I’ve been up since eight (I slept in a little bit today) and spent the first few hours of my day finishing off a book that insisted on getting weirder and weirder the farther I got into it; I think it took a high-dive into the deep end about sixty pages from the end.  I have, naturally, directed my wife to finish it as quickly as possible so that I have someone to discuss it with.

I should mow the lawn.  The back yard in particular needs it; Bek got most of it after my lawn care disaster last week but “most” does not mean “all” and now not only is the goddamn thing looking generally unkempt across most of it but the side portion is completely out of control.  Deathwish the Toad is having a party out there.

(Mentally reviews where this post is going.)

Nah.

I’m just going to leave this here and say that I’m fascinated by it and then go mow the lawn.  Maybe while that’s happening I’ll come up with something interesting to say.

http://www.darkcrystal.com/authorquest/

I have no idea what I’d do with that but I think it’s neat that they’re using this approach.

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Another announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

http://www.infinitefreetime.com should be resolving here within a few hours.

In which I’m not quite sure what’s going on

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

album_yeezus_mini2

I don’t actually like Kanye’s music all that much, so why I’m on my third listen of his new album Yeezus when I only downloaded the thing about three hours ago is kinda weird.  I get kinda hypnotized by music reviews sometimes.  I should never read them, because I never have any idea what the hell music reviewers are talking about when I read their reviews– and I have half a theory that most of the time they don’t either.  But the reviews on this one are all dwelling on how different and how angry (and “conscious,” which is an adjective that, when applied to hiphop, causes me to spend money) and bloody weird the album is and it sucked me in.

I’ve always found Kanye’s music to be really lazy.  He’s got a weirdly nasal voice and you can do a pretty effective Kanye impression just by saying “eeee” and “nyeee” a lot to some sort of rhythm.  His lyrics don’t often make a whole lot of sense; he’ll always prioritize a rhyme over coherence and frequently will just repeat words in lieu of finding new ones that rhyme with whatever he just said.  I’ve caught him repeating entire verses on guest spots on different albums.  When you consider that half of everything else is just about how rich he is and how good he is in bed… sigh.  I got over this shit in 1996, dude, it’s boring.  Try actually saying something.

But… man.  If you don’t pay much attention to the lyrics, Yeezus is seriously something else.  I am, again, manifestly not a music reviewer, and absolutely shitty at describing music, so lemme pull this from the Rolling Stone review, because it’s on the mark, I think, maybe:

Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind. 

There are some seriously standout tracks on here (“Black Skinhead,” “New Slaves,” and “Blood on the Leaves,” which samples fucking Strange Fruit of all things, are awesome) but again you don’t want to pay too much attention to the words because by and large they’re nothing terribly interesting.  “I Am A God” is particularly dumb in this respect, although it sure as hell sounds good.

So, is that a “buy it!”?  I dunno.  See if you can stream it somewhere or something.  It’s damn interesting, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that about a Kanye album.

In which I throw money away

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

Well that didn’t last very long.

I’m supposed to be at a training– roughly seven hours a day or so, six and a half if you don’t count lunch– every day for the next two weeks. For attending this training I was supposed to receive a thousand dollar stipend. I’ve already taken off day shifts at OtherJob so that I can do this; I was going to behave similarly next week.

After one day of the training, I’m ready to bag the whole thing and say to hell with the thousand dollars. (Okay, $800 or whatever after taxes, since the school corporation is paying us through payroll rather than the university we’re doing the training at.)

My problem: I have a perilously low tolerance for bullshit, and a perilously low tolerance for idiots, and a perilously low tolerance for having my time wasted. This manages to be all three.  It turns out that the prospect of receiving a thousand dollars basically for sitting in a room and being annoyed but making nice for two weeks is not sufficient motivation to allow my time to be wasted. Without getting too far into the details, I was told specifically more than once that this training would not cover material that I have not only taught twice but been trained on twice in two different contexts. Today, I found out that fully one-half of the training is going to be material that is entirely redundant to me. Annoyingly, it’s half of every day, not half of the days, meaning I can’t just go one week, skip the other, and insist on being given $500. I’d have to cut out every day, which seems unnecessarily rude.

The other portion of the day is going to be math stuff, which I have not done in the past, except insofar that I’m, y’know, already pretty good at math. There might be some new tips and tricks in there, I dunno. But I signed up for the training with the promise of new science stuff. Science is where I’m weak; science is where I need to improve my instruction. I’m not saying I’m incapable of becoming a better math teacher; that’s certainly not true. But it’s not the focus of my self-improvement efforts at the moment.

The person doing the math training spent virtually all of her time mumbling to herself and standing in front of what she was doing at the whiteboard. The time when she wasn’t mumbling or blocking our view of what she was doing, she was struggling with the (not terribly complicated) projection technology that the classroom already had in place. I had maybe an hour with her today and it was unbearable; a good part of the morning was taken up with housekeeping stuff for the entire training and, in what proved to be a poor omen, the exact same math and science pre-tests we’d taken when I did what was supposed to be a different training entirely two years ago. Tomorrow she’ll have her full time. I can’t deal with it.

Combine that with someone sitting with me all day who has proven to be an utter moron and, for reasons I won’t go into, doesn’t seem likely to be choosing anyone else to sit with for the next two weeks, and… God, I’ve already got two jobs. Fuck your thousand dollars. I’ll just spend less money this summer.

This is probably stupid, I dunno. But I can’t deal with getting up every day for two weeks during my summer break and putting up with soul-destroying bullshit. Soul-destroying bullshit is what third quarter is for.

(Sidenote: As I said, I’d taken that precise test two years ago. I whiffed on the exact same question I whiffed on two years ago, involving logarithms. It’s about the third time I’ve whiffed on logarithms in the past several years, and I’m tired of forgetting what they are. Maybe the phrase “reverse exponents” will finally stick in my head this time. We’ll see.)

An announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I am locked in a room being trained for sciency stuff all day and then have to go to work pretty much immediately afterwards. There will therefore not really be a post today unless I happen to score some free time and have something to say.

In conclusion, logarithms are stupid math and also stupid. Boo logarithms.

The end.