Ragey Tuesday

On May 5, 2020May 5, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

(Is it Tuesday? Sure. Let’s go with that.)

My day started with my wife abruptly waking me up to come help her because she’d fallen in the driveway while getting in her car to go to work and broken her foot (which, okay, I’d way rather be the one who was woken up than the one with the broken foot, but still) and it has not improved really at all since then. I’m having one of those days where it seems unreasonable to conclude anything other than that Americans are the stupidest people on Earth, and as my job is literally to educate Americans I find myself taking it personally.

She’s more or less fine, by the way. 5th metatarsal; she’s in a boot and has an appointment with a sports medicine specialist tomorrow to see if there’s anything else they need to do for it.

I only have nine days of online “instruction” left, and as of today I have given up assigning anything other than the very simplest of review work to them. I don’t know who to blame for the fact that they seem entirely unable to absorb new knowledge provided remotely via the videos I’m recording in my office for them, and it’s entirely possible that the answer is they aren’t trying and my videos suck, but one way or another out of 165 students I have like six who appear to be genuinely trying to learn.(*) I’m on office hours right now while I’m typing this; I’ve been doing two hours of office hours a day for several weeks now and the total number of students who have come in to ask me questions about the assignments (as opposed to the ones who come in just to say hi) so far sits at zero.

One little bit of irony: you may recall me talking about my student who is a selective mute; she is probably in the top three kids I currently have in terms of the frequency of her emails. Some of my very best kids have dropped off the map entirely; I’m at the point where 25% of my students attempting an assignment (meaning they do it at all, regardless of the grade; 1/4 of those will generally be Fs) is a victory.

This isn’t working, and I have no idea what the hell to do about it, and I’m completely terrified about what this fall is going to look like, because if the morons have their way (or if the projections the CDC released yesterday are even close to accurate) we aren’t coming back in the fall either. Free advice for college students: take next year off, or if you’re a graduating senior, don’t go yet. My 8th graders don’t have that option, but you do. Next year will not be better. Don’t go into debt for it.

(For the record, and obviously I’m not a doctor but I’m more of an expert on this than anyone the person in the White House is paying attention to: I don’t buy that it’s going to be THAT bad; 200,000 cases a day is fucking apocalyptic, and despite my ranting above from what I’ve been seeing most Americans are still being at least somewhat sensible about this nonsense. I think those projections were probably released so that if the actual number is anything less than that, they can take credit for it.)

Bah.

And today’s disaster numbers are, as of 3:19 PM on Tuesday, March 5: 1,193,027 confirmed infections and 70,110 Americans dead.

(*) As of 4 PM, which is the point where my “work day” ends, a whopping 30 students have completed today’s (insanely easy) assignment, which is approximately 18% of my kids. That’s a new low.

Because capitalism

On May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It is May the 4th, Star Wars Day, and I find myself not in the talkiest of moods. So I will do something I haven’t done on here in a while, which is to say that if you enjoy Star Wars you will very much enjoy my Star Wars-inspired series The Benevolence Archives, and that you should give me 99 of your American pennies and buy the first book. Then, once you’ve read that and you like it, you can get the other two! It’s also available in paperback at just $7.99, same link. Go forth, then, and I’ll be back tomorrow.

5:42 PM, Monday, May 4th, 2020: 1,177,784 confirmed cases and 68,387 deaths.

#Review: BEASTIE BOYS STORY

On May 3, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Music, ReviewsLeave a comment

Man, it’s weird when rappers get old.

I’m in the odd position of wanting to review something that I’m pretty certain very few of you will actually be able to watch: the documentary BEASTIE BOYS STORY, directed by Spike Jonze, currently exclusive to Apple TV+. Which I only have because I bought an iPhone this year and you get a free year when you do that. So far we’ve watched this documentary and season one of SEE, which was entertaining and pretty and unbelievably, heinously dumb.

And the thing is, I’ve been a Beastie Boys fan for, functionally, my entire damn life. License to Ill came out in 1986, when I was nine, and if it wasn’t the first rap tape I ever got it was the second, since I don’t remember if I bought this or the Fat Boys first. (Also, Jesus, at least two of the Fat Boys don’t even scan as fat any longer. I’m bigger than all three of them, I think.) So it’s weird to see Adrock and Mike D on stage as, basically, two old dorky white guys telling terrible jokes and reading, mostly not especially compellingly, off of a TelePrompTer.

I was thinking this was going to be a more standard talking-heads type of documentary, but what it actually is is a two-man stage show, with Spike Jonze handling audio and video on a giant screen behind them and tons and tons of white people in their 40s and 50s in the audience. And while I definitely enjoyed watching it (and, perhaps more importantly, so did my wife, who doesn’t have remotely the attachment to hiphop that I do, and virtually none at all to the Beastie Boys specifically) I have to admit that there’s a certain bittersweet element to watching it, as MCA was absolutely and undeniably the brains and the soul of this group and he passed away of cancer in 2012. It’s as if Lennon got shot and the only members of the Beatles left were Ringo and Pete Best. The Beastie Boys didn’t have a Paul McCartney, y’know? Once Adam Yauch was gone, the group was over; there was never any chance of either of the other two even trying a solo career.

Seen as the artifact it is, this is definitely worth two hours of your time, especially if you have ever been a fan of either rap music or the Beastie Boys (and I can watch music documentaries all goddamn day long even if I don’t like the artists they’re about) but I did find myself wishing we could break away from the perspective of the two surviving band members from time to time. I’d like to hear what Rick Rubin or Russell Simmons have to say about the group’s split from Def Jam, or what Run-DMC had to say about their tour together, and oh my god this is what Rick Rubin looks like now:

Holy shit. Dude.

Yeah, well, point is, some other perspectives would have been nice, from time to time, and there are a couple of weird lacunae in what we get that could have used some shoring up– early bandmate Kate Schellenbach gets enough attention that you expect there to be some sort of payoff, which never really arrives, for example. But if you go in knowing what you’re about to see– Mike D and Adrock (who damn near never calls himself that; he’s “Adam” throughout the documentary, and Adam Yauch is “Yauch,” not MCA) talking about their lives on stage, mostly from a script, and some almost insultingly corny jokes from time to time, it’s not a bad way to spend two hours. Call it a B-, I guess.

4:49 PM, Sunday May 3: 1,154,340 confirmed infections and 67,447 Americans dead. Meanwhile, a whole lot of places open back up tomorrow, and … this is not going to go well, at all, for a whole lot of people.

#REVIEW: Sixteenth Watch, by Myke Cole

On May 2, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Interesting phenomenon: I just looked at the Monthly Reads post I put up yesterday and realized that of the last fourteen books I’ve read (including A Memory of Empire, which I just started yesterday and isn’t in the pile,) all but three have featured main characters who were women. That’s certainly not something I did intentionally, although I suspect the 52 books by women of color series is skewing the numbers slightly, it doesn’t account for that level of disparity. And while I’m not going to name the specific books, several of the last half-dozen or so books I’ve read have featured MCs who consistently made terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad decisions all the time, to the point where I noticed the trend, which was starting to get seriously on my nerves.

I’ve read one Myke Cole series in the past: the excellent Sacred Throne trilogy, which also happens to feature a female main character, but my understanding is that he’s always been primarily a military sci-fi guy, and Sixteenth Watch is a return to form. It’s another one of those books where I feel like I should just be able to state the premise and then get out of the way while you go buy it: it’s about the Coast Guard.

…

I’m waiting.

Wait, you’re not running. What, you don’t want to read a book about the Coast Guard?

Okay, it’s about the Coast Guard on the moon.

(Dodges the trampling horde)

The MC of this book is Admiral Jane Oliver, a lifelong Coastie (which is a word I’d never seen before, and I like it) who is sent to the America-controlled portion of the Moon to take charge of the Coast Guard’s contingent there, and along the way to train a group of soldiers in catching, breaking into and subduing enemy ships so that they can win a game show.

(That’s the “roll with it” part of the review; trust me, it makes more sense in context, which I don’t plan on explaining because this way is more fun.)

Oh, and along the way it would be cool if she was able to keep lunar border tensions between China and the US from erupting into a hot war, which would no doubt spill back down onto Earth. So this is both a book with a lot of action to it (and enough military acronyms that there’s a glossary in the back, which was absolutely necessary at several points) and a fair amount of politics as well, as Oliver both has to navigate several tense moments with the Chinese as well as keep the Navy and Marines out of her jurisdiction and off her back. Oliver is smart enough and good enough at what she does that she felt like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of what I’ve been reading lately, but she’s not perfect and the upper brass in the book is only tentatively on her side, so there’s conflict all over the place and on all sorts of different levels.

There’s a lot made of the fact that the Coast Guard is the only branch of the military whose job is to save lives rather than fight wars, which is a really interesting perspective for the book to take, and one I’ve not seen previously in military science fiction. I already knew Cole was a good writer, but seeing him back in his wheelhouse was a really good time, and I was up way too late the other night finishing this one off.

I realized at about the 2/3 mark of the book that we actually have something called the Space Force now, and I sent Cole a tweet asking him about it:

One wonders if there will ever be any books written about the Space Force before the next president gets around to disbanding them.

3:49 PM (How the HELL is it nearly four already?) Saturday, May 2: 1,121,414 confirmed cases and 65,908 dead Americans. The world is about to pass the quarter-million dead mark.

Mark Oshiro reads more of the Benevolence Archives!

On May 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Turns out he’s going to read the whole of Vol. 1, which I’m super excited about, and I’m thrilled at how much he seems to be enjoying it. Check it out! Here’s Part One, if you missed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NchASZfoKIs&feature=youtu.be

Monthly Reads: April 2020

On May 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Book of the Month: SHOREFALL, by Robert Jackson Bennett, but this month has some seriously good books in it.

Stuff what I don’t wanna write about

On May 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, PoliticsLeave a comment

CW: Sexual assault. Skip the first thing if necessary.

THING THE FIRST: I have been deliberately Not Writing About Tara Reade for … God, time is meaningless right now, but for however long it’s been since I first heard about her allegations against Joe Biden. Well, as it turns out, apparently John Cole and I are the exact same person, as he’s written basically the exact post I would have had I chosen to write about the situation, with the single absent detail that this is why I decided to go ahead and vote for Elizabeth Warren in the primary. I doubt Reade’s story for a number of reasons, but it’s always possible other, more credible allegations could surface. If anything, that’s the strongest argument against this: nobody who does what Tara Reade says Joe Biden did to her only does it once.

I tweeted this a couple of days ago:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1255653156312305665

Y’all, this is Jack Harlow:

And, dammit, I admit it: I read that Tweet I was responding to, genuinely thought that “Jack Harlow” might be Macklemore’s real name or something like that, and he actually has a song called “10,000 Hours“, and then Googled and found out that no, he wasn’t Macklemore, it was this dude. And if anything this dude looks even less like a rapper than Macklemore. And then I pulled him up on YouTube, because I was in the mood to make fun of a bad rapper, and now it’s two days later and I own two of this motherfucker’s albums. He’s not the best rapper in the world by any stretch, but the kid’s got bars, and I went from Oh, this is gonna suck to this isn’t terrible to God damn it I hate it when I’m wrong in, like, ten minutes. He’s got this great, laid-back, chill flow to his music, and in complete seriousness I think the last time I discovered new rap music that I liked this much was Rae Sremmurd.

Anyway, point is, give this a listen, but maybe do it with your eyes closed. More later today; I’ve got like three posts queued up right now.