The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I sold my thousandth book today, a feat that took a year and three weeks. I feel pretty good about that, I think.
Sadly, that’s about all I feel good about at the moment. I’m in a bit of a mood; yesterday’s weirdness has sorta carried over into today and I pretty much want to sleep for a thousand hours. One for each book.
Five days of school left. I can do this.
(I promise, I’ll be normal tomorrow.)
So the boy got into Hogwarts. Which is what I’ll be calling it from now on.
He actually had to do the preschooler equivalent of an interview today, which was basically just my wife dropping him off for a couple of hours and them making sure he didn’t try to stab anyone. I suspect the actual interview part of the interview was with us, not with him. But at any rate: he’s in. Next year my son will be attending a private school, nay, a private academy, that will cost me $car his first year and $muchnicercar every year after that. And my salary is about to drop. Rather substantially.
I’m conflicted.
On the one hand: like every parent, I want my son to get the best education I can provide him, and I’m willing to work harder to provide him with a better education. On the other hand, I’ve spent almost my entire career in public schools– hell, I’ve spent almost my entire life in public schools– and working in them while refusing to send my son to one seems just a wee bit hypocritical.
The more advantages I can provide him with now, the more likely he is to land on his feet as an adult. On the other hand, the first time he starts acting like he’s more special than the people who don’t get to go to schools like his I’mma slap him.
I’m not looking forward to the day where he finds out he’s one of the poor kids, and I’m even less looking forward to the day where I have to convince him he has no goddamn idea what poverty is.
There are not nearly enough children of color in his classes, and I don’t know that there’s more than one or two people of color on the staff.
They don’t do any standardized testing. Well, okay, there’s one test in middle school. But they pick it themselves and use the data for their own purposes, and it’s not the ISTEP. No IREAD. No second and third grade nearly entirely wasted on testing.
I’m not conflicted enough to even consider not sending him to this place, mind you. We can definitely afford it next year. The year after that… we’ll see. It’ll depend on an awful lot of things.
Until then? I think I probably need to spend more time writing books. And maybe jobhunting. We’ll see.
Ugh.
Don’t even bother reading this post. Seriously. It ain’t worth it.
So I’m maybe halfway through Bloodborne, which I’m still enjoying quite a bit. Despite the rumors of punishing, horrifying difficulty, I’m finding that I’m going through it at a fairly steady (if slow) pace, although who knows what the game has left in store.
I have maybe three hours a week to play. Maybe. Probably not even that much. The game will last several more weeks at this rate, especially if it gets harder.
The Witcher 3, which has a dumb name, came out, oh, a couple of weeks ago. It’s an open-world RPG in the vein of Skyrim or Dragon Age: Inquisition. I loved Skyrim. I hated DA:I, although it took me a while to be able to admit it. I’m hearing stories that there are 200 hours of play in The Witcher 3.
Five years ago, that woulda been some exciting shit. Now? It just makes me tired. That’s not a game, that’s another job. I’ll be playing it until 2018 at that rate. I don’t have time for this even if it’s the greatest game in the world, and I’m not starting a 200-hour RPG when I know good and well that I’ve got no time to play video games any more.
Then I saw this:
Welp, I guess we could just use The Witcher 3 to illustrate the rest of our #tropesvswomen series because it includes all the sexist tropes!
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) May 28, 2015
And I responded thusly:
@femfreq Aaaauuuughhhh. I wanna play this! — Luther M. Siler (@nfinitefreetime) May 28, 2015
For this silly little barely-a-third-of-a-full-Tweet I have received a minor torrent of abuse from a number of derps who I have been blocking as quickly as they can derp. This seemingly-innocuous Tweet has received over eight thousand impressions, which is ridiculous.
Then I found this article. Which… okay, I’ve got a kid, right? So I’ve done The Sex a couple of times. I’m okay with it! And I like naked people, and I have watched more porn than you have. But sex in vidya gaemz has never ever been anything other than awkward and creepy, and I watched part of one of those videos and wanted a shower. And apparently there are a bunch of places where there is pixel-sex. No thank you!
And it appears that not wanting to play this game makes derps angry enough in their teeny little souls that they try and argue with me about playing it over Twitter.
And that’s before reviews that mutter darkly about control issues, which are a real fast way to get your game to piss me off.
So:
I guess I’m not playing The Witcher 3, then, am I?
The end.
(I look forward to something that hopefully will not happen, which will be some derp reading this, including this paragraph, where I say nothing you can say will talk me out of this and I don’t actually care if I’ve gotten details wrong about the game, and trying to argue with me/correct me/convince me to buy the game anyway. It won’t work! I’ll mock you until I get tired of it and then ban you. The end! Again!)
They’re on a different time zone than me over there, and I think I’ve got this right, but if the link is dead give it an hour. At any rate, I interviewed Melissa Barker-Simpson about her new book over at Sourcerer, and you should read it. Both the interview and the book, I mean.