It’s happening again, somehow– my first viral video on TikTok is now up to 3.7 million views and really hasn’t slowed down all that much, and I woke up this morning to discover that one I posted last night had amassed 130K views overnight and has tacked on another hundred thousand in the 10 hours I’ve been awake.. The first video got me from around 50 to just under a thousand followers; this one has taken me from 900+ to 2100 in less than a day.
I am apparently at least a little good at this.
I still have over five times the following on Twitter that I have on the TT account, but TikTok gets massively more engagement than Twitter does. It’s kind of shocking how much of a difference there is given that TT doesn’t have any sort of “retweet” type of function.
(I know I’m still kind of being a dick by not posting my address on here, for those of you who care. It’s because it’s under my real name, and I’m still trying to avoid crossing the streams, so to speak. If you’re curious, email me or drop a comment and I’ll let you know individually.)
I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be somebody who gets this kind of engagement on every single post. I was just starting to break away from constantly checking my notifications inside the app like a rat in a Skinner box looking for a heroin fix, and now it’s started all over again. I assume that once it starts happening all the time you get over it, but it’s nuts how constant the new notifications are. There have been sixteen while I’ve been writing this, for example, and I write fast, and they’ve started to slow down because everything always slows down around this time of day. If this behaves like the other one, in an hour or so I will be able to clear my notifications, then reload and immediately have new ones, and I’ll be able to do that constantly. It’s nuts.
Still looking for a way to monetize this. At some point in the last 24 hours they decided I was important enough to unlock live-streaming on the app, which is terrifying and I’m not going to do it. If I get another 98,000 followers I can join the Creator Fund, but I gotta figure that’s still a ways off, right?
My first exposure to Mark Oshiro actually happened because a mutual Patron suggested that Mark read The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 on their Mark Reads Stuff YouTube channel. I admit I feel a little special because, technically, they had heard of me before I heard of them. Which, take that, traditional publishing!
Anyway, they seem to have been enjoying themselves, and watching them read my book has been fun as hell, so I figured there was a good chance I’d like their work as well, and in that spirit I just finished their debut novel, Anger Is a Gift.
And it has kicked my ass. I made a terrible mistake last night while reading in bed; at one point I looked over at my wife (who is reading Harrow the Ninth right now) and said “This book is trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I don’t trust optimism any more. Something terrible is about to happen.”
And like ten minutes later I was so angry I could barely breathe, and any thought of sleep within the next hour or so at the least was banished. Not angry at the book, mind you, although I did come very close to tossing it across the room. Angry on behalf of Moss Jeffries, the book’s main character.
As the events of the book begin, Moss has been without his father for a few years. His father was shot by a police officer while leaving a local corner store with headphones on and hands filled with groceries. He attends high school in Oakland, CA, at a school that has recently begun a policy where students can be pulled from class, at any time, by school police officers to search their lockers. As it turns out, the cop in question already does not exactly have the rest of the student body’s trust, and this policy goes badly.
Which leads to metal detectors at the door. Which goes badly.
Which leads to the students planning a walk-out as protest. Which goes very badly.
I’m not going to spoil any more; suffice it to say that protest and police brutality and loss are strong themes of this book, and it begins with a handful of content warnings that maybe I should have taken a bit more seriously myself, because reading this book as a teacher of Black and Brown children in 2020 was very, very difficult. These kids are failed by nearly every adult in their lives– Moss’ mother is wonderful, as is his boyfriend Javier’s mother, but the school personnel and even some of the other parents are benignly neglectful at best and actively harmful at worst, and I spent as much time angry with school personnel as I did with the actions of the police.
I will admit that there were a few moments where I had thoughts of the Would they REALLY … type, mostly relating to various actions the police take regarding the protesters, and … honestly, there’s no excuse to be thinking something like that in 2020. Even if this was mildly unrealistic when it was released in 2018, it’s just not any longer. It’s impossible to have watched the actions of the police across the country this year with your eyes open and declare anything to be beyond them.
That quote on the cover of the book declares it to be “beautiful and brutal.” And … yeah. That’s a really good description of the book. Anger is a Gift was a hard book to read, but absolutely well worth it, and I think you will hear about it again at the end of the year.
I tried to record this morning’s instructional video last night before going to bed and had to bail because I was finding myself entirely incapable of explaining adding and subtracting negative numbers in a way that made sense. Like, even to me. So I went to bed and tried to get up early to finish it.
And failed, because I slept for shit last night, and I’ve spent most of the day just sort of gazing into the middle distance.
I have nothing intelligent to say tonight. Have a woodworking video as penance.
I did a curious thing while playing Mortal Shell. I was enjoying myself, but it’s a short game, and when I realized that basically all I had to do was to beat the final boss and I was done with it I actually stopped playing for almost a week. I feel like there’s something inherently contradictory about not playing a game because you don’t want it to end, but that’s what I did, and I just sat down and actually beat it on Friday.
Mortal Shell is a soulslike, a $30, 12-15 hour game created by a dev team of less than 20 people, and I think how much you like it will be determined by how much you like the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Nioh/Sekiro style of games and how much you have been itching for a new one lately. For my part, I enjoy them very, very much, as anyone who pays attention to my game posts is surely already aware, so it was a pretty good time for me, especially at only $30. Your mileage may vary, of course.
The good stuff: Combat is surprisingly fun, and the weapons feel like they’re hitting and doing damage; there’s a good tactile sense to battles, and the game’s decision to replace blocking with a shield with a “hardening” mechanic, where you can basically turn your body to stone on a moment’s notice, mixes things up interestingly. Healing is tied to a few items that heal over time and don’t heal much at that, and a parry mechanic, where your counterstrike to a parry will heal you as well. I was never especially good at timing parries, but the better you are at that the easier time you’ll have while you’re alive.
There is no level-up mechanism for your character at all, although you can unlock passive bonuses and attacks for your characters by earning “glimpses” as you play. There aren’t really classes either, being replaced with four “shells”– basically bodies that your spirit can wear that have differing levels of health and stamina and different unlockable abilities. There are four weapons, each of which has two additional special attacks that can be unlocked by finding items in the game world, and each of which can also be leveled up in damage.
The thing is, unless you’re willing to do an enormous amount of grinding, there’s no way to unlock all the abilities for all of your Shells over the course of a single playthrough, and while you can (and probably will) find all of the extra-ability items for all four weapons in one playthrough there are not enough of the damage-increasing items to go around, and you can’t grind for those. So in practice, while the game offers some choice, you’re going to settle on one Shell and one weapon that you like pretty quickly (and the weapon will be the hammer and spike, because it’s notably superior to the other three) and you’ll max those out and that’ll be all you use. The weapon imbalance is so stark that I really don’t see anyone disagreeing with me about it; even people who are using other weapons online have been framing it as using the sword “instead of” the hammer, for example.
I was a fan of the sound design, although the music is forgettable– having beaten the game I can’t remember any of the main music themes, but the thwacks and thumps and ambient noises are pretty damn good. The graphics are … okay. Graphics are not something I usually even notice unless they’re especially noteworthy, but this game absolutely loves muted colors and grey and brown, and that’s really all you’re going to get. Level design is excellently twisty and turny and everything connects together nicely, but the quick travel item that you unlock toward the end of the game is very welcome and I never did get especially good at finding my way around, mostly because of the aforementioned sameyness of the graphics. There are a few clear landmarks that will help, but it’s mostly a matter of remembering what’s near each of the landmarks and then wandering around until you find whatever you’re trying to find.
The difficulty level is weird, too. The lack of healing items means that unless you master the parry and hardening mechanics you’re going to have a hard time until you get the hammer leveled up, at which point nearly everything becomes trivial. I had to fight the first boss with an unfamiliar weapon (the game doesn’t tell you what items do until you try them, and it turned out that the item I tried summoned a weapon I didn’t want, and didn’t have a way to turn it back because the level I was on was the one level where something happens and you can’t leave until you kill the boss, and I didn’t have the item to summon the weapon I wanted back) and that took probably an hour of trying, but every other boss, including the final one, I absolutely annihilated. I needed two tries on the final boss because it turns out that there’s a bug involving one of his attacks and your dodge, and if they both happen at the same time you get slammed through the floor of the arena and die. That was it.
Boss design was pretty cool, though, especially the boss of the obsidian palace.
So, yeah– Mortal Shell is probably a 7/10 or an 8/10 if you’re being generous, but if you’re as into the Soulslike genre of game as I am, it’s still worth checking out, particularly at the $30 price point. It’s not going to change your world, but it’s a pretty good time.
Next: beat Desperados III, which I bailed on when Nioh 2 came out.
I am running out of ways to introduce these, as there’s only so many ways I can say “God, it’s amazing to watch someone else read your book and react live, and I’m so happy he seems to be enjoying it.” I absolutely cannot wait for him to read the story that ends the book. Absolutely. Cannot. Wait.
(Also: my next book to read is one of Mark’s. I’m psyched.)
I’ve been in this weird place for a couple of weeks– months? Hell, who knows, time has no meaning– where I want to get into woodworking. You may have seen the turning videos I’ve posted. That’s what people in the know call it, you see.
I’m not going to get into woodworking. I have nowhere to work wood, no tools for woodworking, and no one to instruct me in woodworkery, and I suspect this is not really something that one teaches oneself from videos on the internet. I have also considered getting into spin painting recently. You may recall a Teach Myself to Draw project a couple of years (?) ago if you’ve been around a while; that fizzled when I realized that while I did want to be good at drawing things, there wasn’t any particular thing I wanted to draw, and that’s … kind of important?
That ukulele is still around, too. Never gonna learn to play it. (I am, and I swear this is a coincidence, listening to Eddie Vedder’s ukulele album right now.)
What creative thing would you be good at if you actually wanted to put in the effort to get there?
I encountered an argument today that I thought was interesting and also kind of caught me by surprise, and I wanted to talk about it here both as a means of wrapping my head around it a little bit and to see if anyone else has any thoughts on it.
Every year I spend, conservatively, several hundred dollars on my classroom– either for basic supplies like pencils and paper, wall decorations that will probably last through the year, and on occasion more long-term, expensive items like my laser printer. Some years are more expensive than others, of course– any year where I change classrooms or subjects is gonna be bad– and even this year, when I’m not actually in the building yet, I still shelled out a chunk of change for items to improve the lighting in my office, a new mic stand, and a few similar things.
(I have a classroom wish list, which I’m pretty sure does not expose my real name; I link to it not because I want you to buy me things right now but so you can get an idea of what sorts of things I’m talking about.)
This teacher’s argument was that we should not be spending our own money on items for our classrooms. That, in and of itself, I’ve heard before and thought before, plenty of times, and the basic reasons for it are obvious. No other job, or at least none that I’m aware of, expects employees to pay for the basic services and tools necessary to do that job. My job is supposed to make me money, not cost me money, and blah blah whining about teacher pay.
No, her argument was different: that we should not be spending money on our own classrooms, because it creates an equity issue among the staff and among the students. So if Teacher A can afford whatever they want to put in their classroom and creates a magical learning wonderland by spending a bunch of money, and Teacher B is a new teacher who is struggling with student loans and isn’t getting paid jack, Teacher B’s students are going to get a lesser learning experience through no fault of Teacher B’s, when the fact is the state should be funding the rooms properly in the first place and making every classroom a magical learning wonderland. This is particularly an issue at the primary level, where there might be three fourth grade classrooms and the kids are with the same teacher all day.
And I’ll admit, part of me wants to dismiss this idea immediately and part of me thinks it has some merit. As a math teacher that every 8th grader in my building is going to see, it’s less of a concern for my situation, because all of them will be in my magical learning wonderland for a class period a day regardless of whether I spend a ton of money or not. But I can see this mattering at the elementary level. Then again, there is already going to be a certain level of educational inequality from classroom to classroom simply because of the composition of the classes and the skill and experience level of the teacher. We’ve all wanted to be (or have our kids) in a certain class with a certain teacher or h ad one who for whatever reason we’d rather avoid, and sometimes that’s the breaks.
This is, I think, less an argument against the actions of any one specific teacher and on stronger footing as an argument against the system itself. We all know the arguments about the ways we fund schools and what, as a society, we prioritize and what we don’t, and the simple fact of the matter is that the wealthy teachers shouldn’t need to use their money to spruce up their classrooms, particularly in a situation like we’re seeing now, where we see that some teachers are literally creating carrel desks out of plexiglass so that their rooms are safer from the plague. So we’ve got teacher income inequality leading to situations where, at least in theory, students are literally physically safer than in others.
That is bullshit, as I think we can all agree, and I’m not going to fall into the usual rant about how little America actually values education beyond paying barely-understood lip service. Throw a rock on this website; you’ll probably find one. But does the argument in general have merit?
Some, I think, but I still need to think about it more. What say you, commenters?
