Sometime this weekend– possibly today, although it would require someone or a few someones to go a’wandering through the archives for a while, or looking at cosplay pictures— the site will surpass last year’s traffic. Which would be nice! That big spike in 2015 and a good chunk of 2016’s bar is all from a single post that went nuts, but in general I’ve considered 60K a nice round number to shoot for each year, and while I didn’t get there last year I should get a decent way past that this year unless the site collapses for some reason. I’m already up on visitors from last year, but I still need about 400 more hits to catch it in traffic, and there’s a bit of a way to go for Likes and Comments.
This site doesn’t make me any money, mind you, other than second-hand by occasionally driving readers to my books; I tried to go through WordPress’ monetization application and was denied because it turns out I say too many swears, and I’m not going to stop swearing for a few extra bucks a month. But it’s definitely nice to see traffic up. That’s probably an artifact of me posting more– last year was, uh, a bit of a bust in that regard, what with every aspect of my life imploding at once, and as of right now I haven’t missed a day since April 5th.
I was about to go into more metrics, but we’re close enough to the end of the year that I’ll put that off until my end-of-2020 blogwanking post. For now, I thought I’d acknowledge the milestone and leave it at that. Now go troll through my archives and get me over the hump today. 🙂
Yes, it is both minor and extremely important, shut the hell up. I know how grammar works.
You may be aware that there was supposed to be another debate tonight, and that a certain party dropped out when it was made clear that the debate was not going to be held in person, where he could spread diseases to people.
For some fucking reason, the notion that the debate was not going to be held in person led to an absolutely astonishing number of people who literally appear to believe that the debate was going to be held over Zoom, or some similar computer meeting type of shit.
This is fucking stupid and you should be ashamed of yourself if you ever thought it. And, God help you, if you’re thinking well, how the hell else are they going to do it? right now, you need to slap yourself silly, because your brain is stuck in 2020 in a really alarming way and you need to take a moment to reorient yourself with how literally everything ever happened before the world ended.
There are these things called TV studios, guys, and we’ve been using them to hold conversations between multiple people who are not in the same place for generations. Multiple Goddamned generations. Walter fucking Cronkite interviewed people who weren’t in the same place as him. Kennedy and Nixon held a debate where they weren’t in the same place in 1960. That was sixty years ago.
The Goddamned debate wasn’t going to be held over fucking Zoom. Please get your shit together, all of you.
I’m not going to go back to reporting numbers every day, but today was the worst day for new infections nationwide since July 31 and Indiana had their worst day for new infections ever. The US will likely start setting new records again next week. So, once again, yes, let’s definitely reopen schools. Because we definitely have not tried ignoring this shit hard enough.
For my part, I just completed my second day of “hybrid instruction,” and honestly I’m not doing enough differently to be this damned tired. I only worked two days this week so far, for crying out loud, and I can’t convince myself that I don’t actually have tomorrow off. The kids are all home, but all that means is that tomorrow is like last week, not that I’m not doing anything.
I have news of immense personal and familial value to share, but I’m waiting for somebody to take my leash off so I can do said sharing. And as of right now, I remain leashed. So I gotta come up with something else to talk about today.
Y’know. Like a chump.
Today was the first day of hybrid learning, and it was also yet another day of utterly shit covid numbers from both the nation, the state of Indiana, and my county. The number of kids in my classes ranged from three to, I think, five, or perhaps seven at the high end. Tomorrow will be similar, and then next week once the kids have realized that “return to in-person schooling” does not, in fact, even vaguely resemble anything like the school they remember, our in-person attendance is going to drop even lower than that. Luckily for me, I’ve gotten over the guilt. The people who were in my classroom today had the easiest gig in the world, and it’s only going to get easier.
On the other hand, there’s at least one more teacher in the building approved to work from home, and an email went out this morning looking for volunteers to cover her classes, so we’ve already run out of subs and available bodies on the first day. In, I must needs remind you all, in accordance with prophecy.
We’ll see how long it lasts. Word is the health department is about to put their foot down on this whole mess; we’ll see.
I had to do some running around tonight– I had my final LASIK follow-up appointment, and stopped by my dad’s to mutilate him give him a haircut, and I have some thoughts. Now, these should not be taken especially seriously, and I want to emphasize that they are based on a snapshot of maybe 10-15 miles of driving on a small number of streets in the Democratic part of Indiana. Take this all with a substantial amount of salt.
Nonetheless!
In general, there are fewer yard signs out than I would normally expect this close to the election.
Most of the signs that are out are for local or statewide races. There are a lot of school board signs, and more than I’d expect for the coroner’s race.
There are a handful of yards on this drive that can be reliably counted upon to have a sign for everyone running in whatever political party the house belongs to. Interestingly, while the Democratic houses all have Biden signs, the Republican houses do not have signs for the other guy. Houses with signs for him tend to have only a sign for him.
If you have this in front of your house I’m going to assume you’re a crazy person:
I assume that the stake is because of vampires. Like, seriously, people, the man is an atheist and he hates you.
I only saw one yard with that sign but it’s uncomfortably close to my house.
There is no gubernatorial race. Not one sign for Holcomb, even in the “we have signs for everyone” yards, and none on their own, and not one sign for his opponent anywhere.
There are also a couple of houses that reliably have large signs for Jackie Walorski– like, the size that require 4×4 posts driven into the ground– and those houses do not have signs up for That Guy either.
Again, draw no conclusions from this and I make no predictions. I’m mostly writing this now so that I remember to compare it to what that same drive looks like on, say, the 30th.
Many moons ago, I had a kid in my class named, oh, let’s call him Lafayette, for the usual “it amuses me for reasons I won’t reveal” rationale. Lafayette transferred into my room in December, and on his first day took a seat as far away from everyone as he could get and didn’t make a sound. He got called down to the office after about an hour and didn’t come back. When I inquired about it later, I was told that he’d been expelled from his previous school for threatening to murder his teacher, and that we were honoring the suspension. He’d be back in January.
For the record, while he wasn’t a great student by any stretch of the imagination, I had no real discipline problems with Lafayette. He was, on his worst day, squarely in the middle of that group in terms of his behavior.
The year after I had him, a photo of him went Facebook viral, as his mother forced him to stand on a street corner for several hours carrying a sign announcing to everyone who drove by that he was failing all of his classes and was generally not a good person. I can’t find the picture now, but it still resurfaces every now and again.
Several years later, at 16, he was arrested for attacking an elderly woman, beating her unconscious, and stealing her car. He’s in state prison now; the soonest he has any chance of getting out is 2027. I assume he was tried as an adult.
His younger brother, who wasn’t ever in my class but who I met at least once, is currently the subject of a manhunt for murder. They haven’t caught him yet, but his face is all over the place.
Mark Oshiro’s name has been coming up a lot around here recently– they read The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 on YouTube, which was immensely fun for me to watch, and I reviewed their debut novel Anger is a Gift back in September. Reading Anger is a Gift got me to order their second novel, Each of Us a Desert, which I finished last night.
I loved Anger. Loved it. And I’m kind of fascinated by my reaction to Desert, because while I didn’t enjoy reading it to the degree that I did Anger, I think it’s objectively a better book, and it’s definitely more interesting to me as an author than Anger was, because, especially for someone who hasn’t written any fantasy novels before, Oshiro does a magnificent job of slapping the genre around, and from a craft standpoint this book is a marvel.
Each of Us a Desert is second-world fantasy set in what is basically an analogue of Mexico, and let’s get this part out of the way early: there is a lot of Spanish in this book. It’s mostly single nouns and verbs, so if you don’t speak any Spanish you can pick up a lot from context, and there aren’t a whole lot of entire sentences and phrases, but it’s going to be a much harder read for someone with no Spanish than it was for me. (I can get by, if necessary. I had a student who barely spoke any English in my class last year and most of the time I spoke to her in Spanish, with Google Translate next to me as an aid when needed.)
There is a whole conversation to be had about how using multiple real languages in fantasy literature works, by the way. I’m not going to have it in this post, but I spent a lot of time while I was reading thinking about the technical side of things; when you decide as an author to render a word in Spanish rather than in English, and how much of the editing process was dedicated to, more or less, calibrating the amount of Spanish in the book, or what it means to the characters to use Spanish instead of English. Note that, again, this is second-world fantasy, and the words “Spanish,” “English,” and “Mexico” appear nowhere in the book. There is no indication that any of the characters know they’re flipping from one language to another, which is part of what makes it interesting.
But anyway.
The main character of the book is Xochitl, a young woman who lives in a tiny village in the middle of the desert. Xochitl is a cuentista, which is basically a priestess of the sun god Solís. As a cuentista, her job is to take in the stories of the people around her and then release them back to Solís. If you’re familiar with the concept of the sin eater, this isn’t far off; there is definitely an element of absolution to Xochitl taking a story, of the emotional aspects of the tale at least, and when she releases them back to her god she no longer remembers them afterwards. Until she takes a story from a friend and realizes that her home is in danger, and that she has to choose between doing something about what she knows or doing what she is supposed to do with the story, which is the conflict that sets the book’s story going.
The entire book– the entire book– is structured as one long prayer to Solís. Which is fascinating, and the true importance of which doesn’t really become clear until the last few pages. The book’s ending is perfect, and moved the book into five-star territory for me. (Also, I normally don’t mention the acknowledgements section of books unless they mention me, which has happened once or twice, but please consider the acknowledgements required reading. Trust me.)
Also worth pointing out: the book is absolutely a fantasy, as I’ve already pointed out, and features magic and monsters and such, as you might expect, but it owes less to Tolkien than it does to Lewis Carroll. There’s a lot of wandering through the desert in this book, and the hallucinatory aspects of some of the encounters that the characters have throughout the book are fascinating– you’re often not quite sure if something is really happening or is brought on by dehydration and heat exhaustion, and I’m pretty sure the answer is “both” at least a couple of times.
This is a book you should read, but it’s especially a book you should read if you’re an author, and it’s really especially a book you should read if you work in speculative fiction. My final reaction to it is more of respect than love, I admit; I want to read Anger again because of how great a story it tells, but I want to study this book and pick apart its techniques. Either way, thumbs way up.
Has the number of white people losing their shit in public over trivial and sometimes imaginary violations of either their “rights” or the sort of behavior they expect from other people actually skyrocketed in the last six months, or is it just that, much like police brutality, it’s always been there and the difference is now as soon as someone starts showing their ass in public six people whip out cameras?
I’m not even necessarily talking about covid-related stuff. I’ve seen so many videos over the last couple of week of people just purple-faced and incoherent with rage over absolutely nothing that it’s genuinely shocking, and it’s not like I’m going to look for this kind of stuff. And there have been a number where it’s clearly crossed a line from misplaced rage and landed straight on mental illness. I mean, sure, sometimes it’s funny to watch somebody lose their damn mind at a cashier who clearly doesn’t give a shit because their burger had too many pickles on it or whatever but I’m starting to see a subgenre where by the time they’re done they’re not funny anymore and I just want someone to put the poor person in a place where they can get help.
Pictured: not my pile of branches. I didn’t get a picture for some reason.
I made a terrible mistake today and did some yard work on purpose. We have a large tree in the front yard whose branches hang too low, so that if you’re mowing or whatever they need to be moved out of the way to take care of the part of the yard under the tree. I was all ready to post something on Twitter or whatever commenting on how it had turned out to be one of those jobs that you dread for forever and then takes like fifteen minutes when you actually do it, and then I discovered my neighbor standing behind me. I had headphones in, so this isn’t terribly surprising, mind you.
At any rate, I then got to have a lovely conversation about how too much of my tree was overhanging her yard and also overhanging the roof of her house. Now, this tree is really tall— I’m terrible at estimating distances, but it’s easily over twice as tall as my house, so obviously doing something like cutting a straight line along the property line wasn’t going to happen. I pointed out that we were having some folks out sometime soon to cut down the locust tree in the back yard and that I’d ask if they could hack this one back a bit on the taller branches, and that I’d take care of the stuff I could reach today.
And then it occurred to me that somehow the following had happened: one of my neighbors came over, complained about the state of my yard, demanded that I fix the state of my yard, and that somehow I not only did it but I’m not even mad about it. Like, that’s got to be a tricky conversation to have with somebody, right? I can see that going poorly. Were the situations reversed I’d have just asked if she minded if I cut the damn branches myself to avoid the chance of a confrontation going south and ending up on YouTube or some shit.
The problem here is that I’d already cut enough branches to fill our two allocated yard waste bins, so now there’s a giant pile of branches in front of my house the size of a car that are just going to have to sit there until what’s in the bins now gets taken away, and then I can cut them apart and fill the bins again. And frankly it’s not impossible that the process will have to be repeated twice. In the meantime, I’ve been sweaty and tired all afternoon and a lot more achy than I intended to be, because using a pole saw for an hour is tiring.
Also, I made sure that not one single inch of that pile of branches is on her yard. I’m considerate like that.
I feel like “you need to reconsider this decision, and you need to reconsider it right now, before someone dies” might be slightly too intemperate of a message to send the School Board and the superintendent, but this is where I’m at right now:
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