The Snowpiercer post has gotten 200 referrals from Instagram in the last 40 minutes or so, and I can’t see exactly where they’re coming from. Typically when this happens it’s because someone’s calling me an idiot somewhere. If anybody’s come here from there and cares to leave a link in comments just so I can see where this is all coming from, that’d be cool. I don’t plan to engage with it, mind you.
Month: February 2021
In which we escape
Okay, well, if you’re gonna be picky about it, technically we didn’t escape. By, like, under a minute, I think, and I’m pretty sure I spent at least a minute saying “Wait, we didn’t win? Explain why we haven’t won,” before the final clue and the final win condition was made understandable.
Lemme back up.
My wife and I have done two escape rooms– one with a bunch of her college friends where we were not successful, and one just with the two of us where we were. She’s done a couple of others for work things as well. She got me the game pictured to the right for Christmas, and we finally pulled it out and played it tonight on her birthday. Not like we can go out to dinner or anything, right?
(I know the exact date of the last time I was in a restaurant, by the way, and we are closing in on the one-year anniversary of that date.)
Anyway, Escape Room in a Box: Flashback is exactly what it says it is, an escape room in a box. It’s a one-shot play, basically, but at basically a buck for every three minutes of play I figure the time is worth it. I would say you’re looking for between one to four players (there’s no reason you can’t play by yourself, frankly,) mostly because more than four are going to get in each other’s way. There are three of what they call “paths” but are basically separate puzzles, and then clues from all three are necessary to solve the final puzzle at the end. The final puzzle at the end is more or less what cost us the game; I thought you had to just put three physical things together, and I did, and then precious time was wasted convincing me that no, there was one more thing needed. Anyway, small teams could work on the three “paths” individually, but at some point you’re making it too easy– if three teams are working on the three paths simultaneously you’re more or less guaranteed that you’ll finish in a fraction of the time you’re allotted.
There’s a werewolf theme, but it’s not that important. It’s also technically a sequel to another game (prequel? Is that why the word “flashback” is in the title? Maybe.) but no knowledge of the other game was necessary at all. I do think we’ll end up picking it up, though, because if it’s of equivalent quality to this one it’ll be a good time. The puzzles themselves are also pretty refreshingly clear of anything that can be looked up or Googled; you’re not going to miss a clue because you’ve never seen a movie or didn’t know the date something happened or something like that and knowledge of trivia will not save you. There are maybe a couple of clues that could have been worded a little more clearly but that’s about it.
Oh, and you’ll need a freezer.
5/5 would play again, but I’d win immediately, so I’m actually never playing it again but you get what I mean.
IRATE SHITPOST
Was this image specifically engineered to make me insane? Is this what we’re fucking doing now?
SIN NUMBER ONE: This is a seriously fucking milquetoast quote and it doesn’t need to be framed as a quote in the first place. It’s not bad as a sentiment! Throw it on the rainbow background and call it good!
SIN NUMBER TWO: If you’re going to phrase something as a fucking quote than take the ten seconds it takes to Google it and figure out who the shit said the damn thing in the first place. Don’t ever fucking put “unknown” as the source for a quote. It makes you look like an asshole. And if you’re going to insist on putting “unknown” as the source for your fucking quote…
SIN NUMBER THREE: fucking spell “unknown” right.
Christ.
In which I don’t wanna (again)
This post could be a couple of different posts, only I don’t want to write either of them. I don’t want to do a full review of Day of the Oprichnik, the Russian novel I just read, but it was so insane that I feel like it deserves a write-up, and I also had a conversation with a parent via text message today that I kind of want to reproduce here in its entirety, but doing that will mean that I’ll have to strip out all of the references to her name and anonymize the images and this was somehow a real long week and I just wanna sleep.
So instead I’m going to go play video games. This is about to be a three-day weekend, so hopefully it will be full of words one way or another. Just not tonight.
In which that’s a new one
Periodically I’ll let my students work on a site called Quizizz. There are three Zs in Quizizz and I think I have them arranged correctly but I can never be sure; I think they change it from time to time. Quizizz is one of those sites where it’s best used with an entire class at once, but doing it asynchronously works just fine as well; the students are asked questions and provided four answers, and points are awarded based on 1) whether the answer was correct and 2) how quickly the answer was provided. You can also set the quizzes so that the kids can take them as many times as they want, which is fun for the more competitive ones. I typically will take it once and offer a small number of extra credit points to anyone who can beat my score, which is definitely a thing that happens, especially if I fuck up and actually miss one.
Quizizz also allows the kids to customize how their names are displayed, which sounds like it’s an opening for XxXMelvinThaRaper420XxX (Melvin does not know how “rapper” is spelled) to show up on your list of students, but they either have robust blocklists in place or my students have been displaying a rare level of self-restraint, because I can only think of a couple of times where it hasn’t been immediately clear who a kid was, and they’ve never used anything even remotely inappropriate. Usually they just use shortened versions of their first names and their real last names and it’s not a problem.
Until the last couple, when “Adam Thompson” showed up. I don’t have an Adam Thompson. I also don’t have an Adam or a Thompson. Adam was getting good scores, too, which made it weird that when I was posting announcements to our classroom stream asking who the hell he was, he wasn’t outing himself– after all, if I don’t know who you are, I can hardly put your attempts at Quizizzery into my gradebook, now, can I?
And yet.
Well, today I got a bug up my ass about it for some reason and I mentioned Adam in every single class I had and my instructional video. And I got this email just after school let out today:
And … well. I should have guessed; it’s my student with selective mutism. I haven’t updated y’all on her in quite a while; as you can tell, she’s perfectly willing and able to communicate in writing, which means that teaching her during a pandemic isn’t really all that different from teaching any of my other students. This is another manifestation of her social anxiety, though, and it’s a new one; she wasn’t doing this earlier in the year. I told her that now that I know who Adam is I’m okay with her continuing to use that name on future assignments if she likes; I see no reason not to allow it, and now that I know who Adam is there’s also no reason to mention that name again in class either.
I did have a trans boy in my class last year who let me know that he wanted to be called Ryan partway through the school year, and I’m intrigued that she (my current student, not my trans student) chose a boy’s name, but I don’t think this is a deadname sort of situation– it’s a pseudonym for her assignments, more or less the exact same thing as me using Luther Siler, which isn’t my name, for my books. That said, it is another knock-on effect for the same social anxieties that have led to her not having said a word since she was in 5th grade, so I’m going back and forth on whether I should pass this up the chain and let the counselor or the psychologist know. I know the last time I mentioned her one or two of you had previous experience with kids who didn’t talk, so if anyone has any suggestions I wouldn’t mind hearing them. I don’t think she’s in danger or anything like that, I’m just trying to decide if this is something that should be alarming at all. I’m leaning toward no, but I’m not done thinking about it yet.
#Review: THE SEARCHER, by Tana French
I have rarely been so relieved to have enjoyed a book as I was with Tana French’s The Searcher. I’m pretty certain I’ve read every novel she’s written, and until her last book before this one I’d enjoyed all of them quite a bit. I was … not a fan of The Witch Elm. I wrote a review saying so, a review that has haunted me by regularly being one of my highest-viewed posts every month since I wrote it. I don’t know why this happens so often when I write negative reviews; people seem to enjoy seeing me not like things for some reason. But I like Tana French, damn it! It was just that one book! She’s still awesome, read the Dublin Murder Squad books!
I don’t know if she’s done with that series or just taking a break from it, but the notion that her newest book, The Searcher, was also going to be a stand-alone had me … nervous. I feel bad about how well the review of Witch Elm has done. And I felt like I really needed to have The Searcher be a return to form. Chances are if I hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have reviewed it, but I’d have to make a decision about whether I was buying more Tana French books as they come out in the future, and I need my Irish crime fiction fix, damn it.
So: yeah. The Searcher is absolutely a return to form. In fact, it might be my favorite of her books, although I’m going to hold off on that decision for a bit and let the sense of relief fade and see how well the book holds up. It shares DNA with a lot of her previous books that was jettisoned in The Witch Elm: the main character is a detective again, although he’s retired, and the book is written in the 3rd-person present tense of the rest of her books and not the first person of Witch Elm. It is not quite a murder mystery; the main character, Cal, is a Chicago cop who has recently gone through a messy divorce and has repaired off to a crumbling house in middle-of-nowhere Ireland, hunting for peace, quiet and smallness. He is rather forcibly befriended– adopted might be a better word, or at least serially imposed upon— by one of the local kids, Trey, a thirteen-year-old from a messed-up household and badly in need of some stability. And then it comes out that Trey’s older brother has disappeared, and Cal gets dragged, mostly unwittingly, into searching for him. There is always the question of whether the brother is alive or dead, but it’s definitely more of a missing-person story than a murder mystery. Can’t have a murder mystery without a dead person, right?
The other interesting thing: Cal, as I’ve said, is retired and a recent arrival in town, and while he’s not exactly taken leave of his detective skills he’s more than a little hamstrung by the lack of any sort of institutional support or knowledge of the local power structures. There are several places in the book where he’s deciding what to do next, and frequently he runs up against well, I can’t run his phone, or do criminal history checks or anything like that because he simply doesn’t have that kind of access any longer. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a fish out of water narrative, but there are certainly elements of that type of story complicating his search, and it’s an interesting change of pace for a book that might otherwise fit in a bit too neatly with the Murder Squad protagonists.
I liked this book a lot. I liked Cal, I liked the relationship between Cal and Trey, and I liked the small cast of supporting characters that get built up over the course of the book. The book is about 450 pages long and I read it in a day; again, I’ve liked-to-loved all of her books but the one, but I don’t remember another one that demanded I finish it immediately the way this one did. There’s a single story decision that comes up at about the 2/3 mark that I still don’t quite get, but it doesn’t turn out to be the misstep that I thought it was going to be when it first happens, and the book ends quite well, I think. I read some other reviews on Goodreads and the biggest knock against the book is that it’s slow-paced. That’s definitely true, but it’s a deliberate decision and quite consistent with everything else going on in the book– Cal has moved to Ireland precisely so that he can lead a slower and more deliberate life, so the book taking its time to watch the rooks in his yard mirrors the main character’s mental state pretty precisely.
Hooray! I enjoy liking things.
Hey, Disney, let’s make this happen
Saw Gerrera needs a Disney+ TV series.
That’s it, that’s the post.
I mean, I can elaborate a little bit, mostly by riffing on the idea that Gerrera is enough of an anti-Empire extremist that he’s considered a terrorist by the people who blew up the Death Star, and I find that to be endlessly fascinating, and I also could watch Forest Whitaker read a phone book. That said, Gerrera is old by the time Rogue One happens, and if they wanted to cast someone else in the role and set it in between the Clone Wars and A New Hope that would be fine too.
I am spoiled by Marvel; they’re giving shows to everybody they can think of and a lot of them sound great. My favorite characters are showing up all over the place. Star Wars is … not so much, just yet. I’ve given up on ever getting official confirmation that Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus were a couple even if I’m willing to die on the hill that says they were, but … just give Saw a damn show.
The end.
In which I cannot worry about what I cannot control
Progress reports for 3rd quarter come out today. These are the current grades for my 3rd hour class. They are not unrepresentative of the rest of my classes.
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