#Review: LIGHT OF THE JEDI, by Charles Soule

On February 7, 2021February 7, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Or Star Wars: The High Republic: Light of the Jedi, but these headlines can only be so long.

Here’s the thing: I’m pretty definitively in they keep pulling me back in mode with Star Wars. I actively despise the fandom as a group, and while there were definitely some things I really liked in the sequel trilogy (I continue to love The Last Jedi, and after a couple of rewatches The Rise of Skywalker has settled in at “dumb, but fun”) I still don’t like the broader decisions that those movies made. Or, to rephrase it in a way might not be helpful, I don’t mind the way they told the story they told, but I wish they’d told a different story.

And with the single exception of Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars and Timothy Zahn’s new Thrawn books, I haven’t really liked any of the books that have come out since Disney took over. The comic books have been uniformly pretty superb, but they’ve stuck within the confines of the OT and haven’t really roamed the timeline in either direction. And yet I’m still buying them. I could have dipped out with The High Republic, or at least shifted to waiting for paperbacks, and … well, you see how that worked out. It was a perfect excuse; set 200 years before the events of any of the movies, it would involve all new characters and had little risk of reinventing anything that I’d grown to love over the years.

But, damn it, the list of authors they’d gotten to work on this thing was something else. All of them great. And while authors I love have failed at Star Wars books before– one of my favorite authors, a guy who has written a number of books I’ve reviewed here and a few that have made it onto my end-of-year lists, wrote a Star Wars book that was so bad I couldn’t finish it— it was still all encouraging as hell.

So, yeah, fuck it, let’s read The High Republic. And while I’m not going to go so far as to recommend that anyone who wasn’t already thinking about it pick this up, this is good Star Wars. Charles Soule has written Star Wars comics in the past– and, again, the comics have been uniformly good-to-great, even after Disney took over– but to the best of my knowledge this is his first SW novel, and the high quality continues. One interesting thing that hit me at about the 50% mark of the book was that because they’re starting over with a clean slate (a couple of the longer-lived Jedi are still around, of course; Yoda gets namedropped several times but isn’t actually a character in the book, and there are a few other members of the Jedi Council who showed up in the prequels) he can really get away with doing whatever he wants to his characters. It doesn’t matter how dangerous the situation in the book is, you know Leia is going to be fine, right? You only ever had to worry when the books were pushing “now” forward, so they could kill Chewbacca off at the beginning of the Yuuzhan Vong war, but anything set before that, all of the major characters were going to end up intact at the end of the book.

Well, High Republic doesn’t have any “main characters” yet. If anything, that’s a weakness of the book– it never really settles on a main protagonist, and there’s a lot going on and a lot of characters, so the characterization is a little on the thin side. But the plus side of that is that Soule is free to kill off whoever the hell he wants and nobody is wearing plot armor. You don’t ever get to the level of holy shit did that just happen that, say, A Game of Thrones managed, but this isn’t a 600-page book, either. This is a good setup for whatever they have coming; the central struggle starts off feeling like a natural disaster and becomes more sinister as things roll on, the villains started off really giving off cut-rate Yuuzhan Vong vibes and became something more distinct and unique by the end, and the actual mastermind of the whole thing really comes into his own at the end of the book. Again, if you’re not already a Star Wars person you probably don’t need to join the club for this, but if you were kind of teetering on the edge like I was, this is worth the buy.

On that coffee

On February 6, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews4 Comments

I had a cup of Importin’ Joe’s Habesha coffee this morning, one of the two types I ordered, and as I was drinking it it occurred to me that I really don’t have any vocabulary for writing anything even approaching a review of a liquid. There is a little blurb on the front of the bag about what “tasting notes” to expect, and I’ll be honest: I picked up on the toffee, I guess, but other than that? It was coffee. It was good coffee, mind you, but I’m not a hundred percent sure how to go into detail about what the differences between “good coffee” and “bad coffee” are, other than that I’ve had Starbucks a couple of times and I understand what people mean when they say that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I have finally successfully conditioned myself to be able to drink my coffee black over the course of the last year, and so I didn’t put any additional sugar or creamer or anything like that into it. I’m not opposed to that or anything, but I figure since I can drink coffee black now I may as well drink my first few cups of this unadulterated so that I can learn what it tastes like. And yeah: it’s good stuff; I just wish I could be more elaborate than that.

What’s the best coffee you ever had? And can you tell me what made it the best coffee you ever had?

On coffee and customer service

On February 5, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

You know this already, if you’ve been around for a while: I moved to Chicago in 1998 after graduating from college, and lived there until getting engaged and moving back home to South Bend in 2007. I loved living in Chicago, and one of the things I miss most about it even after all these years is the food. Chicago’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and (especially once you got used to getting around) you could find anything there, and most of them delivered. Thai food at 3 AM? No problem.

South Bend is not like that. Most of South Bend’s restaurants, for better or worse, are regional or national chains. We’ve got some gems sprinkled here and there (Nedderman’s Steak Place, some good teppanyaki, and a really good hole-in-the-wall Venezuelan bistro) but in general if you’re looking for quality cuisine outside of what you would expect to find in a mid-size Midwestern city you’re going to be disappointed.

I found out yesterday that we’ve recently acquired an Ethiopian coffee business. How did I find out? They brought a bunch of free coffee to work, and the secretary emailed everybody that there was free Ethiopian coffee so come get some free Ethiopian coffee, and I wasn’t at work to go get it, so the email just sort of sat there and teased me. Interesting fact: they don’t appear to have a retail footprint, but they’ve got the website, and if you’re local they bring you your coffee. If you aren’t, they’ll still ship for you.

I ordered some coffee yesterday evening at around 6:15 PM. At 6:38 I got an apologetic text message that due to the blizzard taking place outside my coffee would not be delivered that evening. So their usual standards are pizza-delivery speeds, which I feel like isn’t completely necessary for coffee. I replied to make it clear that they could take as long as they needed to; I don’t need someone sliding off the road into a ditch so I can have novel caffeine the next morning.

At any rate, I did get my coffee today, and had a weird moment with the delivery guy when we both realized the other one looked kind of familiar, but it was dark and bloody cold outside and also COVID and neither of us were masked up (side note: “masked” can autocorrect to “naked” if you aren’t careful with your typing, which would have altered the meaning of that sentence somewhat) so we did not stand outside and chatter at each other long enough to figure out where we might have known each other from. Have I consumed coffee yet? No, which might make this post premature, but I figured the whole apologetic about not bringing me coffee during a blizzard thing probably warranted its own post. Plus, dear God, I know better than to have coffee at 8:15 at night, and that’s, like, Folger’s and shit. I assume this is probably going to be a little stronger.

I’ll report back tomorrow, of course.

On small victories

On February 4, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I had cheesy grits and vegan breakfast sausage for dinner just now and I’m fairly certain it’s not only the best decision I made all day, it’s probably the only good decision I made all day.

I am now going to play video games for an hour and then go to bed, because I’ve had more than enough of today.

In which my mother is laughing at me

On February 3, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting1 Comment

When I was in fifth and sixth grade I was in a special program for academically talented kids called DEPTH. I will, if I live to be a hundred, never forget what the acronym stood for: Differentiated Educational Experiences for Promoting Talent Development in Highly Capable Students.

Yeah, it’s not the most elegant of acronyms.

Anyway, they took a bunch of fifth- and sixth-grade smarty-smarts and put us in an honest-to-God trailer in the parking lot of the school with the lowest standardized test scores in the city and then bragged about how that school’s scores had gone up the next year, which was an early lesson for me in both the abhorrent cynicism and blatant manipulation of basic mathematics that grown adults can get up to when test scores are the only metric of a school’s success that anyone pays any attention to. And if you’re doing some strategic guessing and theorizing that maybe the gang of imported smarty-smarts weren’t, shall we say, a good demographic match to the rest of the school, especially given the optics of literally separating us from the rest of the students in the school … well, pat yourself on the back, because we learned some things about institutionalized racism along the way too.

That’s not why I’m talking about that program right now, though. Those first three letters– Differentiated Educational Experiences? The idea was that the class wasn’t all taught the same stuff at the same time. The teacher was supposed to be a facilitator of those differentiated experiences, and we signed contracts with her each week that specified how much work in each subject we were supposed to be doing– the idea being that the contracts would be tailored to each student’s individual needs and preferences, and we were all off learning at our own pace.

I played a lot of D&D in fifth grade.

I also managed to go something like three months without doing any math at all, because my teacher was (I thought, at the time) lazy and was probably (I think now, reflecting on this nonsense) massively overwhelmed by the immense amount of record-keeping and paperwork she was expected to keep track of, and no doubt undertrained as well (she was literally the only teacher in the corporation with this job) and one way or another I figured out that so long as I told her I was doing whatever math assignments every week, she wasn’t going to check them.

Well, that fell apart eventually, and my parents, who were already not happy with the school for a variety of reasons (my favorite: we were sold shirts emblazoned with the logo and name of the program and our names on the back, and then the school declared that we weren’t allowed to wear them to school. This was way before uniforms were a thing, mind you) basically landed on me like a ton of bricks, and I basically had to do three months worth of math over one long, miserable fucking weekend, and then my poor fucking teacher had to grade all of that shit over the next week and give it back to me, so that I could correct anything that I’d done wrong.

So. Fast forward, oh, 32 years or so.

My son has been working from home all year. My wife works, broadly defined, in the healthcare field and I’ve obviously been home all year as well, and both of our dads live alone and one of them is seriously immunocompromised, so all of that has made us just a touch more paranoid about the virus than most. My kid hasn’t seen another kid in person in nearly a fucking year. His science teacher either forgot to let him into class today or had technical difficulties and wasn’t able to and she emailed me to let me know what had happened and tell him about his assignment. He’s got a packet for this science unit and he was supposed to do pages 17 and 18.

Go ahead, take a moment and make some assumptions. I’ll wait.

No, of course there wasn’t a single fucking mark on pages one through sixteen. Now, I’ve not torn the boy’s head off yet, because I don’t know how this teacher runs her class, and it’s possible– I don’t think it’s likely, mind you, but it’s possible— that she’s either jumping around or they’ve been working through this as a class and he hasn’t necessarily needed to write out his answers. It’s possible. I’ll withhold my swift and terrible retribution until I know for sure.

But yeah. Just one more piece of evidence that he’s my goddamned kid.

On what passes for good news nowadays

On February 2, 2021February 2, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Is this good news? Hell, I don’t know.

We’ve been working on systems of equations in class lately. So, just as a reminder, if I tell you that y = 2x and y = x + 2, you can use those two equations to solve for both X and Y to find out that X is 2 and Y is 4. The process isn’t that important if you don’t remember it. There are three ways my eighth graders are supposed to learn how to do this– graphing, substitution, and elimination, and we’re working on substitution right now and have already covered graphing. I’m going to cover elimination later this week and I’m hellbent on knocking it out in two days because, frankly, it’s just not that damn important by any measure I’m concerned with.

But good news! Today’s assignment is out of 10, with a two-point bonus question that I thought was going to be quite a bit harder, so it’s possible to get up to 10/12 on it. And right now, with twelve minutes of class left in my final period of the day– yes, I’m blogging during school; the kids aren’t talking and if they start I’ll quit doing this– the median score is 12/10 and the average is 10.48, so the average score is actually into the realm of extra credit.

Sounds great, right?

I have 143 students and have only been able to mark 52 present today. But, hey, that’s still a pretty solid average out of the 52 who showed up and did the work!

…Oh, you say only 25 did the assignment? Ah. That’s … well, that’s seventeen and a half percent of my students.

That’s, uh, not as good.

But hey! Out of the third of my kids who bothered to show up to class today, the half who did the assignment did really well!

…except it’s not like the graphing method doesn’t work perfectly well with what are supposed to be substitution equations, and there are websites that they can use that will graph lines for them. I know they know they exist because I’ve used them in class. And that probably explains the bonus question, too … and these two kids in different classes who got this system wrong in the exact same way, which only works if you forget a negative sign on one of the numbers and then graph that …

So I really have no evidence of any kind that any but the tiniest handful of my kids who have worked through stuff with their cameras and microphones on have any understanding of how to do this.

But hey! Those three kids! They’ve got it!

I take my wins where I can find them nowadays, I guess.