Month: May 2021

That’s all, folks

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Year seventeen of my teaching career, done and dusted. This was absolutely the oddest year of my time in this profession, but unlike most of the teachers in this country it wasn’t the longest or the most stressful. Honestly, as ridiculous as it sounds, personally this was one of the easiest years I’ve ever had. I can’t claim that’s true for a lot of my students, mind you, and we’re going to pay for this next year– but a year where a computer did my grading and I had no discipline problems to worry about papers over a lot of problems. In a lot of ways, for the kids who showed up, at least, I got to be the teacher I have always wanted to be this year– and I got this intensely gratifying result from my end-of-year survey today as well:

This is only 50 of the 139 I have on roster, so hopefully I’ll get at least a few dozen more responses over the next few days, but this is on a scale where 1 is “I completely disagree” and 5 is “I completely agree.” So there’s a small handful of kids who either think I have favorites or I pick on certain kids, but if anyone thinks I pick on certain kids, no one thinks those certain kids are them. There’s a lot more to dig into on the survey, but these were the two results that really stood out for me and really made me feel like I was on the right track this year. I also got a handful of really nice thank-you notes, which hasn’t happened in a while, and a few kids said they were bringing things for me to the end-of-year recognition ceremony tomorrow.

(Which is going to be at school, and not outdoors in the rain, alhamdullilah.)

At the end of next year, I will have been teaching for as long as our high school seniors have been alive. That’ll be … fun. I haven’t had to teach the child of any former students yet, helped out by the fact that I don’t live in Chicago any longer and reset the clock when I moved back to South Bend, but that’s coming. I know enough of them have children that the oldest of them will be passing through middle school in a few more years.

I’m going into this summer, for the first time in a while, with no real plan to even try writing a book. What I need to do is study for my National Boards test and start seriously planning for next year. Some things are going to change again (we’re going back to block scheduling) and I want to hit the ground running in a way I never have before, so it’s going to take a lot of thinking and planning. I don’t see any real way next year can be better than this year was– structurally, given what’s coming it’s just not possible– but that doesn’t mean I can’t go in ready for it.

Bring it on.

Sure, whatever, I guess

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies2 Comments

Okay, it’s true that my track record on judging movies based on their teaser trailers isn’t great. But … if there wasn’t a Marvel Studios logo on this one it wouldn’t have made any impact on me at all, and right now I feel like seeing it is a chore I have to endure rather than something I actually want to do. I can’t tell you a single thing about a single one of these characters, I don’t know who any of them are, and with the single exception of Darkseid I really don’t have any affection for any of Jack Kirby’s characters when he was trying to Go Mythical. The New Gods bore the shit out of me too, frankly.

I think Black Widow comes out soon? Perhaps shockingly soon? Truth be told I don’t care much about that either, nor about the new Loki show that I think is debuting pretty soon. I liked things about both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but ultimately both of them left me cold.

It really is amazing how thoroughly Endgame killed my interest in the MCU, and one of these days I’m going to write a post about why, and it’s going to be 20,000 words long, so I probably ought to do my level best to avoid doing it.

One more day. One more day. One more day. One more day.

I can do this.

On returning to normalcy

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I feel like I should already know why you get so many pictures of Warren G. Harding if you Google Image Search the word “normalcy,” or at least that I should be able to figure it out if I apply some thought to it, but I’m not going to do that. This post could use some weird, frankly, and that picture is funnier if I don’t know why it came up.

One of my oldest friends passed through town on Friday, and we hung out for a while and chatted on the back porch; the topic of masking did not come up. Yesterday we put the pool up; it’ll likely be a week before we can take a proper swim in it, judging from the weather report, but it’s full already somehow and ready to go, and my wife got to say the words “I’m going to go buy sand and acid” to me earlier today and that was fun for both of us. I mowed the front lawn today (no cicadas yet, but I’m watching) and did some weed whacking and other various Adult Chores, and I was done with my grading within two hours of getting up.

It has, by any account, been a Productive Weekend. I still have some school stuff to do after dinner, but there should be plenty of time for guilt-free video gaming tonight.

I also filled the car up with gas, which is only significant insofar as I needed to break a $20, so I went into the gas station to buy a lemonade, and realized when I was almost inside that I didn’t have a mask on. I shrugged and went in anyway; the county mask ordinance has been cancelled and a two-minute in-and-out at the gas station is about as safe as an indoor interaction can possibly be. If someone had said something to me, I’d have gone and gotten a mask, but no one did. This is the first time I’ve purchased something in a store without some sort of face covering on in well over a year.

(I even did it without any particular self-recrimination about looking exactly like the kind of guy who refuses to wear a mask rather than a vaccinated person who briefly forgot, but I’m blogging about it fifteen minutes later, so maybe I don’t get to pat myself on the back about that one.)

In keeping with the theme of this year, which had about six “first days of school,” this Wednesday represents the first Last Day of School; this year will feature at least three, if not four. My students have their 8th Grade recognition ceremony on Wednesday and are not expected to return to the building afterwards. Friday is the original Last Day of School for everyone else, and since there was a day of school cancelled in January because the entire city lost power, June 1, which is the Tuesday after Memorial Day, is the technical Last Day of School, a day after a three-day weekend where I expect no students at all to attend. Then there’s my Last Day of School, which is June 2, and then I’m off until August, barring a day or so a week where I’ll have various responsibilities that can be done from home and studying for this math test from Hell I have to take sometime.

Bring it on.

#REVIEW: Army of the Dead

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews1 Comment

I have a weird relationship with Zack Snyder. Typically, if I don’t like a director, it’s because I’ve seen several of their movies and decided, for whatever reason, that their movies aren’t for me. Sometimes it’s because of the way they direct, like, say, Michael Bay, and sometimes it’s because they consistently pick stories that don’t work out for me. Like that one dude, who made that one movie whose name I won’t say any more.

Zack Snyder is the only director I can think of who I am, effectively, boycotting. I haven’t disliked his movies so much as judged them illegitimate from the start. I have had a chip on my shoulder about DC’s film output for, oh, nearly my entire life; look at the reviews that will no doubt crop up in links below for additional details if you like. If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you already know the gist; this man does not understand or care about the superheroes he makes movies about in any way and I refuse to spend money to find out I was right about something sucking.

That said: while I haven’t rewatched it in probably fifteen years, I enjoyed his remake of Dawn of the Dead, from way back in 2004 or so, which was before I knew who Zack Snyder even was, and my wife really wanted to watch Army of the Dead, and even a shitty zombie movie is still a zombie movie, and if you’d shown me the trailer without the words “Zack Snyder” appearing on them I’d have shrugged and handed over my no money, because this was showing up on Netflix and I pay for Netflix (actually, my wife does, so this isn’t even my no money) anyway.

So yeah tl;dr this is a really shitty movie. And I mean that it’s a shitty movie when judged on a “zombie movies” scale, and it’s shitty in a way that can be laid directly at the feet of the director, and it honestly kind of makes me mad that I disliked it as much as I did.

Spoilers an’ shit.

That said, let’s start with what I liked, which is the first 20 minutes or so: this movie starts off in a hurry, and gets the initial setup out of the way quickly– there’s a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, triggered by some Military Thing that isn’t explored because it really doesn’t have to be, and several of the characters get brief introductory vignettes as they’re killing zombies and rescuing people and seeing family members or friends killed, and by the end of the credits (which are playing over the introduction) Vegas is surrounded by a wall made of shipping crates, which sounds like it shouldn’t be all that secure but whatever, and the government is discussing simply nuking the place. Then there’s another 20 minutes or so of setting up the big heist that’s central to the plot and putting the team together and everyone’s stake in the mission being for progressively smaller amounts of money (which is understated and honestly kind of hilarious) and we’re off to the races.

There’s a zombie tiger and a zombie horse, but apparently there were no other nonhuman mammals anywhere in Vegas during the zombie apocalypse. The zombie tiger is kinda cool. And most of the time when shooting zombies is happening, it’s pretty cool.

That’s … about it, as far as stuff that I liked.

My first problem, and this one can be laid directly at Snyder’s feet: this entire damn movie looks like it was shot on an iPhone with portrait mode turned on. At any given time half of the screen is wildly out of focus– not just at a “look at this part of the screen” sort of way, but wildly and ridiculously out of focus, and Snyder is constantly trying to raise tension by keeping even the thing the camera is pointed at blurry as shit until he wants to reveal it. It’s obnoxious as hell and it never stops. There’s basically a bokeh effect laid over the entire damn movie, and it sucks. It absolutely sucks. So right away Snyder is guilty of making directorial choices that come very close to making every frame of the film annoying.

One of the more unique details about the way this movie handles its zombies is that it breaks them into, basically, two separate races. The king zombie (whose name is apparently, I shit thee not, Zeus, a word that is never spoken in the film, which is good because it’s dumb) is presented as practically invulnerable in the initial parts of the film (and will later don a metal, completely bulletproof helmet) (and more on this later) and is fast and reasonably smart, although he can’t talk. He has a queen zombie. Any zombies he creates personally are also faster and smarter although they appear to die just as easily as anyone else, and it’s implied that any zombies those zombies, called Alphas, create is your typical undead shambler.

Queen Zombie gets her head cut off partway through the movie and her death is used as a motivation for King Zombie, as is the death of her– wait for it– unborn zombie child, who he actually claws out of her womb. Let that one roll around in your head a bit. When you toss in the fact that Dave Bautista’s character is also motivated by having had to kill his zombified wife this means that two different women got fridged to motivate the men.

So, yeah, long story short: Dave Bautista is the emotional center of the film.

Dave fucking Bautista is the emotional center of the film.

Just, again, let that roll around.

(Wait. Shit. This happens three times, because there is a scene toward the end where one of the women members of the team Declares her Love for Dave Bautista, and When We Get Out of This Let’s Make Babies, and then immediately afterwards King Zombie shows up and breaks her neck. Immediately afterwards. So there are three women in this movie who are killed as character development for the men.)

(Wait! No! It’s even worse than that! Later, two other women will basically kill themselves— one right after the other— so that Dave Bautista can live. So that’s five. Holy shit, movie!)

There was apparently a controversy where one of the actors in the movie was revealed to be a rapey dickhead, and he was basically edited out of the movie and digitally replaced by a whole different actress? And my wife told me about this going in, so I’m not sure how distracting this would have been or if I’d have noticed it if I hadn’t known that, but once you realize that there are no other actors in probably 90% of the shots with the replacement actress in them, it becomes hilarious very quickly.

There’s this whole subplot where there are zombie refugee camps, which are … something about quarantine, and lots of temperature checks, but any time anybody turns it happens immediately, so this is kind of incoherent– but anyway, this woman leaves her kids behind to go … explore the ruins of Vegas, to try and steal shit, and she gets led in by someone they honest-to-God call a Coyote, and then abandoned in there? And Dave Bautista’s estranged daughter insists on going in there to find her, because Dave Bautista’s daughter is so unable to face the idea of having to either abandon or raise this woman’s apparently really shitty kids that she insists on risking her own life to find her. She actually emotionally blackmails her dad into bringing her (untrained, useless) ass along so that she can risk everyone else’s lives by insisting on finding this one person in this entire enormous city full of hotels so that she doesn’t have to deal with her kids.

At the end of the movie, they find the woman alive, because of course they do, and Bautista and his daughter and this woman board a helicopter to evacuate the city before the nuke hits, and other than two brief shots of her looking out of the window this lady is never mentioned again and never gets a word of dialogue. The helicopter crashes, because that’s what happens when you detonate a nuke near a helicopter, and apparently she dies in the crash, because Bautista’s daughter is utterly unconcerned about finding her afterwards and we never see a body. It’s as if the screenwriters completely forgot about her.

This also means that the daughter’s insane rescue plan (“I’ll make my dad take me into the super dangerous place to find the needle in the haystack, then run away, and then we’ll all die!”) was not only for nothing, because this woman died, which would have happened anyway, but the movie didn’t think it was important enough to make it explicit what happened to her, or ever mention her apparently-terrible kids again.

King Zombie is invulnerable at the beginning of the film, shrugging off an awful lot of close-range machine-gunnery. At the end of the film, when it is necessary for him to die so the movie can end, he is dispatched with a single pistol shot.

You find out there’s a double-cross at the end of the movie, and instead of wanting 200 million dollars the Mysterious Rich Benefactor actually wanted this other thing, but the problem with that is there wasn’t any need to lie about it. If you think you can make unlimited money from This Thing and you’re a Mysterious Rich Benefactor, then just offer a million bucks per Thing You Want and set the team loose, maybe also pointing out that hey, there’s $200 million in this vault if you want to try and get that too, and then it’s the same movie but it’s less dumb.

And I can hear some of y’all, and your point that hey, it’s a zombie movie, it doesn’t have to be smart is heard and understood, but you also don’t have to make movies deliberately stupid! Sometimes I reflect on how much movies cost and how many people are needed to work on them, and the fact that we still have movies this stupid is kind of amazing. Most of the time, making a movie smart instead of stupid isn’t even more expensive! Just, like, think about your plot for a second during the early stages, and … like, adjust things, to be less dumb.

I promise this is possible. I promise it. But making a stupid movie is a choice– no movie is accidentally stupid– and that choice means I get to criticize you for it, especially when being less stupid wouldn’t have been harder.

(EDIT: Well, that’s hilarious. WordPress’ link robots appear to have decided this post is about feminism.)

Okay weird

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I can’t get the post editor to load on my desktop, but it’s loading on my phone. God forbid that I even risk having a day when I didn’t post.

That said, this isn’t viable for an entire post, so if it behaves later, I’ll write more.

#REVIEW: Persephone Station, by Stina Leicht

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Let me start with the tl;dr of this review: I really enjoyed the story of this book, but there are certain aspects of it that are going to make it flat-out unreadable for certain people, including my wife, so that’s kind of tempering my reaction to it and it’ll be really interesting to see how much of it sticks with me in a month or two.

One of the pull quotes on the back of this book describes it as Casablanca meets The Magnificent Seven meets The Mandalorian, and that’s … pretty astonishingly accurate, honestly, although it was a miss to choose The Magnificent Seven and not Seven Samurai, the movie Magnificent Seven was based on, since Seven Samurai is an Akira Kurosawa movie and the main spaceship in this movie is actually called the Kurosawa. If that mix of things– seedy bars, bounty hunters, big guns, combat mechs, corrupt government and law enforcement and a small team of people fighting back against an overwhelming force, plus aliens— appeals to you, then this book is going to be right the hell up your alley, and while I hadn’t actually seen that blurb when I bought the book, it would have immediately sold me a copy. That’s not up my alley. That’s my entire fucking alley, and this is a very Star Wars kind of science fiction, where we’re not worried about the science so much as it’s set in space and there are laser guns and giant mechs and AI and talking space ships and aliens. Honestly, it hit me at about the halfway point that this very easily could have been a Benevolence Archives story with a couple of minor setting tweaks. That’s a compliment, in case it’s not clear; anytime I read a book and think Damn, I wish I’d written this, it’s a good thing.

And all the main characters are women or nonbinary– yes, all of them; I don’t think there’s a single male in the book who gets more than a handful of lines– and not quite everybody is gay, I suppose, but a lot of them are, and it’s all delightful.

Except.

It occurs to me that it’s not impossible that what has happened here is that somebody fucked up and sent the ARC version of the story to the printers. Because there are parts of this book– published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster, mind you, not an indie title or a small press– that very clearly did not have the attention of an editor. There is the occasional hugely clunky sentence, the type that every author produces from time to time, where you accidentally switch tense or something halfway through, but you notice it during editing. There are misspelled words. There are misused homophones from time to time. There is the occasional word that is simply the wrong word, like that word doesn’t mean that and doesn’t belong in that sentence. It’s not constant– more like once every handful of chapters, although I remember at least one three-page run with multiple errors packed closely together– but it happens often enough that I’m really surprised this book came from a big press. And the book is 500 pages long, so “every handful of chapters” is still a good number of times. Stina Leicht isn’t famous enough to have gotten the Stephen King/George RR Martin treatment where the “editors” are barely doing a pass on her books and otherwise she can write whatever she likes. And the book’s not badly written— where it works, it really works, and these are the sorts of errors that nearly every manuscript is going to have from time to time, and the type of thing that I’m used to seeing in ARCs, which often aren’t final copy. But this is final copy, so somebody dropped the ball somewhere, and if you’re the type of person who is going to be knocked out of the book by that, you’ll want to stay away.

I am 100% in for more from this author in the future (and, to be clear, this isn’t her debut) and I would love to see more of these characters, but this is a one-shot as far as I know, and the story ends satisfyingly. But the bad editing is a thing, and it’ll be interesting to see whether I remember this better in six months for having really enjoyed the story or all the mistakes I noticed.

I think I’ll disappear now

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Hey, remember how a couple of weeks ago I had lox for the first time and I was all “Hey, that was good“?

I had another one this morning, and now I am never eating 1) lox, 2) cream cheese, 3) capers, 4) tomatoes, 5) red onions, 6) bagels or 7) anything at all ever again.

I am not going to describe the nature or the quality of the distress I have been experiencing today but there was something wrong with that bagel.

I had a couple of posts planned– I finished a good book last night, and some interesting stuff has happened at work in the last couple of days, but right now I’m going to go lie down and try not to die.

An essential Returnal update

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Y’all. I am having fun with this one.

Returnal has one major problem and one major annoyance. The major problem is the saving thing. It is absolutely crazy that there’s no way to take a break in the middle of a run. Go ahead and wipe everything after dying just like you’ve been doing; hell, set the save functionality at the Reconstructors and charge me Ether for them if you want to, but there’s got to be a way I can quit and go have dinner like a human being or, hell, go to bed on time without risking a run.

The major annoyance? Maybe not that major, I dunno, but Trophies are borked to hell and back, and for people who are known to be completists like me, that’s aggravating. I’ve beaten one particular boss three times and the trophy for beating him hasn’t popped yet. I assume it’ll show eventually, maybe after the next patch, but right now it’s pissing me off.

(If you don’t understand a single sentence of the last two paragraphs, forgive me; I don’t have any friends or even online acquaintances who share my video game habit so my only real option is to write on the blog. I can’t even get anyone to bite on Twitter. You’d think at least a handful of the nearly eleven thousand people who follow me there would be a gamer, but you’d be wrong.)

Beyond that, though, this is one of the most fun shooters I’ve ever played, right up there with Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is probably my favorite shooter of all time. The controls are just beautifully executed on a technical level, and this game shares some DNA with the Dark Souls series, in that at least so far everything has felt fair. Like, don’t get me wrong, everything and everything and everything wants to and is able to kill your ass, and absolutely will kill your ass, but the word “bullshit” has escaped my mouth very few times during some very long runs, although there’s been a serious difficulty spike in the most recent area I’ve gotten to. The weapons are all great; everything that I’ve used except for the starter pistol has been my favorite weapon for at least a little while, and the pistol’s not bad, it’s just … y’know, a pistol, which isn’t remotely as fun as, say, the weapon called the Rotgland Lobber.

I love my Rottie. Love it.

The story is another thing that is holding it back from my usual BEST THING EVAR enthusiasm, but it’s possible that I’ll feel differently once I finish the game. There was a hell of a mid-game twist, but they’re leaning heavy into what-the-hell-is-going-on-here and it remains to be seen whether I’ll think the story is coherent once I’m done with the game. I will, of course, update again at that time.

I know you don’t have a PS5, and don’t buy one just to play this, but if you get one, you should probably pick Returnal up with it.