I bought this today:
And then, because I had bought that, I bought this:
And now I don’t know who I am any more. I shall diminish, and go into the West.
I will not be taking questions at this time.
Month: December 2020
In which fun is hurty
In general, I’ve been really pleased with the PS5 so far. I’m enjoying the hell out of the Demon’s Souls remake, the new Spider-Man game hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet but I’m expecting to really like it, and I keep discovering new little quality-of-life details that I enjoy, like the fact that it notices and puts itself to sleep if I turn off the TV. It loads games so quickly that it’s honestly kind of ridiculous. I can sit down in the rocking chair I use to play in and be playing a game like twenty seconds later. All of that is great.
The new controller is exactly the wrong size, and it’s the wrong size in a way I didn’t notice until today. I love all the programming touches– the new haptics are awesome, the use of audio is fantastic at least the way it’s done in Demon’s Souls— things like sword swings and hit noises come from the controller as well as the TV and the end result is a lot more immersive. But it’s the wrong Goddamned size, and it’s potentially going to be a problem for me going forward.
This is the PS4 controller:
And yeah! At least on the outside, other than the colors they look damn near identical. But if you compare this to the new PS5 controller above, you’ll notice that the grips are just slightly more rounded on the outside, and I think the triggers, which you mostly can’t see, are positioned slightly differently as well. And while I haven’t measured to check, and I don’t see a lot of difference in the pictures, the four buttons on the right and particularly the circle button feel like they might be positioned slightly farther apart on the PS5 than they are on the PS4. That flat circle they’re set into rather than the slightly more curved surface on the PS5 might be making a difference too.
At any rate, the cumulative effect of the exact size of my hands and what is admittedly a small handful of tiny changes forces my right thumb into a weird position. I have spent maybe an hour today playing– probably not even that long– and I tell you right now that my thumb hurts, right at the joint where it attaches to my hand. I’m willing to believe that the control layout of Demon’s Souls isn’t helping– the two triggers on the right side are mapped to attacks so they get used all of the time, and I think it’s the combination of keeping my index and middle fingers on the triggers (or my index finger moving back and forth) and my thumb on the face buttons and the thumbstick that is causing the problem. I think if I wasn’t using the triggers as often it might not be as much of an issue.
Obviously it’s possible that I’ll get used to it, and I’ll limit my playtime until I know whether that’s going to be the case; if it gets better, we’re all good, and if it doesn’t, the fact that the PS5 currently doesn’t have any 3rd party controllers is going to become an issue. My ability to type is a lot more important than my ability to play video games, and I’m not about to start fucking with my hands. So, uh, “keep fingers crossed” might not really be the best available expression of well-wishes here, but if you don’t mind doing something on my behalf– ask Jesus or something, I dunno– I’d appreciate it.
On reading the directions
This is a screenshot of the instructions I posted for today’s assignment for my kids:
I have a hundred and forty-two students on my roster right now.
Guess how many kids emailed me. Go ahead, guess.
Ten.
Scam alert update
It has been pointed out to me that the suspect checkout interface I pointed out yesterday is apparently the base checkout screen for the Shopify platform, and I had a couple of people show me legit websites that they’ve used repeatedly that use that platform. I’m going to slightly back off and modify my claim from yesterday, from a flat “avoid” to a “back out and do some research.” I’m also going to echo Elisabeth’s comment from yesterday that another thing these shitty sites have in common is Facebook and Instagram ads. You’re probably all familiar with this phenomenon; you click on one ad, sometimes by accident, or sometimes just linger over one too long and suddenly you have ads featuring the exact same pictures from several different sites.
I have a policy now; if I recognize a photo of a piece of merchandise from another ad, I start reporting every single ad where I see that photo as a scam. I have threatened to do this before and not followed through, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been to shutting down both Facebook and Instagram for good. I have here, TikTok and Twitter; that really ought to be enough social media for everyone.
Not much else going on today, but I thought I’d point all that out.
WARNING: Scam Alert
If you happen to be doing some Christmas shopping, and you’re at a website you’re not familiar with, and their checkout screen looks like it uses this template:
Back out immediately and do not make the purchase, as the site is likely a scam. Note that in this particular case I’ve added this item at random to create a shopping cart, but I have reversed a charge against Helli Shop, as it’s become more and more clear that they never intend to ship me the dice I ordered and upon closer examination (which I finally did today, after disputing the charge with my credit card company) the vast majority of their wares appear to have images stolen from other sites, including occasionally actually leaving the watermarks from the other sites on the image.
Why am I warning you about the template and not about the specific site? I’ve made one other order from a (different) site with this exact same template, and the item I ordered did arrive, but it was junk, and it shipped direct from China. Helli sent me tracking information six weeks ago using the same Chinese shipper, and the tracking information hasn’t moved from “item ready for shipment” since then. Those dice are never coming.
(It’s only $30, so if my bank refuses it’s not the end of the world, but I’m also changing some passwords too.)
Today, I was looking into a Christmas present for my wife, and noted that the template for checkout was the same. I backed out and did some more research on the site, and sure enough, all sorts of reports of either never receiving the items they’d ordered or in one case receiving what was supposed to be a “king-size” blanket that ended up being the size of a napkin. I also chased down a couple of the reviews from major magazines that they’d claimed to have for their product, and sure enough none of them seemed to actually exist.
So, yeah. Buyer beware, or even better, don’t be a buyer in the first place. I’d guess if I looked into it more deeply that all three sites would turn out to be registered by the same people, and they’re using this template for all of their stores. Avoid.
(Note, for those of you coming in through a link, that there is an update to this post.)
Whoops
I somehow just flat forgot to blog yesterday, interrupting a streak at least a couple of months long. That doesn’t happen often; there are times when it hangs over my head all day and I put a “taking the day off” post up later in the evening when I realize I don’t have anything to say, but I swear to you that the notion that I occasionally write things for the Internet to read never once crossed my mind yesterday.
I wasn’t even that busy. Hell, I even had a good excuse for a post, since we put our Christmas lights up:
This image entertains me, because it was pitch-black outside when I took the picture, and my iPhone clearly had no idea how to handle processing the image, so it ends up looking like dusk since so much of it is artificially lightened. I actually watched the camera struggle with it for a few seconds before finalizing the image. We’ve done the projectors for the last couple of years, but the lights on the porch and the bushes in front are new for this year, and I think we might add more net lights to the tree and the bushes to the right of this image, as well as something wrapping around the driveway light post in the foreground of the image. You may know that I’m not a huge Christmas guy, but this year? Fuck it, we’re going full festive.
Watch, two years from now I’ll have inverted my personality entirely and we’ll have those damned inflatable things in the front yard.
Other than that, though, not much going on– I have eight days of instruction left before winter break, if I don’t count the twenty minutes that are left of today, and I’m about to bail on those twenty minutes, since (not entirely surprisingly) none of my students have decided to grace my 8th hour Meet with their presence yet. Back to the PS5, I guess, and trying to finish as many books as I can before the end of the year.
#goals, right?
#52booksbywomenofcolor: now with 52 women!
I started Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree today, which is the 57th book and 52nd individual author on the list. Still in the plans for this year are two books each by R.F. Kuang and S.L. Huang as well as one more YA book by Tiffany D. Jackson, so depending on how much reading I’m able to get done by the end of the year I might be up to 62 books. But the initial promised 52 are done, and so is the expansion to 52 authors. Should I just post ’em all? Sure, why not:
In which I give up
Wednesday remains Trainings and Meetings day around here, and as such I did not have any interaction with my students beyond responding to emails. What I did have was a very depressing Math team meeting where we looked at some data, reflected on the fact that the mid-year test had been (rightfully, mind you) cancelled and so we therefore weren’t going to get any updates on that data anytime soon, reflected further upon the fact that this particular assessment tool demonstrates that our students, by and large, appear to know nothing at all, and had a brief discussion wherein we were all forced to admit that none of us had the slightest idea what we might be able to do under the current circumstances to fix the problem.
(Nor can we be sure that the data captures the issue accurately, since the test was administered while the students were home, and we have no way of ensuring that it was taken seriously.)
One of the more entertaining fights in comments that I have had over the life of this blog was a post where I was complaining about my students performing poorly on a test about slope. Well, it is now several years later and I can confidently report that despite attempting to teach slope in a variety of different ways and with a variety of different strategies since then, my 8th graders still do not really appear to understand slope, and attempting to teach it virtually during a pandemic is … suboptimal.
Allow me, if I may, to further elucidate.
I have not yet actually introduced the formula for slope, which is complicated enough that I can’t reproduce it in WordPress’ text editor and would have to copy and paste an image. Instead, I’ve started beginning the unit with simply counting. Count the rise, or the vertical distance between points A and B, remembering (hopefully) that if you go down from A to B your “rise” is negative (this is confusing, because no one naturally thinks of something called “rise” as negative, and I wish the word was different) and then count the “run,” which is the horizontal distance between A and B and is always positive.
You will note on the above image that the slope of that line is -4, because you count down 4 squares to go from A to B and one square for the run, and -4/1 is equal to -4. I’m breaking this down in such a granular fashion that today was the first day we actually talked about negative slopes. Also, the reason there are no numbers anywhere on that image is that I discovered that some of my kids were simply writing down the number nearest to one of the points as (chosen randomly) the rise or the run, with no actual counting taking place. So I removed them on today’s assignment.
I have discovered that many of my students genuinely believe that there are five squares between A and B, because rather than starting from 0 they are counting the line A is actually on as 1 and going from there.
I have discovered– this is not surprising, but remains depressing– that a number of them do not include “left” and “right” among the concepts that are salient to them, and thus I must frequently remember to say “from A to B” rather than “from left to right.”
And I had a genuinely bewildering conversation with one of my kids, a kid who generally does well in class and has one of the highest scores in his grade on the test we were discussing earlier, absolutely cannot wrap his head around the words “uphill” and “downhill,” a set of terms I was using to distinguish positive slope (uphill, from left to right) and negative slope (downhill, from left to right) while I was talking. He consistently reported that any line was both going uphill and downhill at the same time, even when I made it clear which direction I was moving in. I eventually ended up creating this diagram:
He is color-blind, by the way, a disability that I have somehow never had to worry about in 17 years of teaching, so I have to make sure that color is never salient information in any diagram I do for an assignment, which is why one of the lines here is dotted. This can occasionally be trickier than it ought to be.
Anyway, I pulled this diagram together, still trying to work on this uphill/downhill thing, and asked him, gesturing with my mouse while talking, which of the two lines was going uphill when I moved from left to right. I even said “We’re moving from A to B on the dotted line, and C to D on the solid line. Which is going uphill?”
“Both,” he replied. And I swear to you, he wasn’t fucking with me. I tried a stairs metaphor. Which of these lines looks like you’re standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, looking up to the top? Both. You’re sure you understand the “left to right” thing we’re doing here? You’re telling me C to D and A to B both look like walking upstairs?
Yes. Yes, he was.
This kid’s not stupid. Not at all. And he wasn’t fucking with me; I could hear the frustration in his voice. He was trying to get this, as opposed to the dozens of my students for whom no set of directions can be short or clear enough that they can be expected to read or follow them. But I don’t have the slightest Goddamned idea where the hell the disconnect was happening.
Today was not a good day.