It seems like an awfully daunting task to actually review James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, so I’m just going to write a brief post about it and hopefully that will be enough to convince literally every single one of you to pick it up. I finally finished the 9th book last night after sitting on it for a little while (beginning it at the same time I was starting Elden Ring wasn’t a great decision) and now that I’m done with the series, I’m just kind of stunned at what an amazing accomplishment the entire series is.
I was kind of irritated to discover that Leviathan Falls, the final book of the series, was compared to A Song of Ice and Fire on the back cover, as if ASoIaF is the superior product that Expanse ought to be compared to. I’ve said this about other series before, but The Expanse is markedly better than ASoIaF, not the least because it’s actually finished, and we all know George is never, ever finishing that series. It is also better than That Other fantasy maxi-series you might have in mind, if for no other reason than the series, unbelievably, is nine books and, oh, 4500 pages long or so, and features almost no bloat. That’s kind of astounding, considering what has happened with nearly all of the long-term fantasy series on the market right now.
(Why am I not comparing it to other SF series? Because in a lot of ways there’s nothing to compare it to. Scalzi has done a bunch of books in his Old Man’s War series, but they’ve all been pitched as standalone, more or less, as opposed to having been deliberately structured as a nine-book series from the start. Kevin J. Anderson has his two Saga of Seven Suns series, the first of which was seven books and the second a trilogy, but I’m the only person I know who has read those and I never see anyone talking about them, plus the Corey collective is simply a better writer than Anderson. The closest SF analog may actually be Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, but … uh, I haven’t read those.)
But yeah: one way or another, this series feels like it was planned out, at least in the broad strokes, from the beginning, and while the scope of the series ends up enormous, the author(s) have been smart enough to keep the characters a fairly tight group, with a core of four main characters who are in every single book. Is this a plot armor situation? Maybe, but it never really feels like it, and frankly my two favorite characters in the series both died, so they’re entirely willing to kill characters when they feel like they need to. The status quo keeps sliding around, too; there’s a thirty-year time jump at one point, and there are at least two points in the series where they basically kick the legs out from under everything you thought you knew and remap the board from scratch. Alex, Naomi, Amos and Jim are the constants; everything else is up for grabs.
I know it’s a hell of a thing to tell everybody to go read a nine-book series, but if you’re a sci-fi fan at all and you haven’t picked these up yet, you really owe it to yourself, and the series is done(*) so there’s no longer any excuse. Go get ’em.
(*) There have been several novellas as well, which are going to be collected into a 10th book sometime next year, I think, but this story is definitely finished as of the last few pages of Leviathan Falls. The universe is still out there if they want to come back to it, but it’ll be something very, very different if they do.
I have sung the praises of Potawatomi Zoo more than once in this space; our local zoo is genuinely a highlight of northern Indiana and we’ve been members for quite some time. They’ve recently acquired four new giraffes and have spent a lot of money extensively renovating a large swath of the zoo to construct a proper habitat for them. The zoo is typically closed during the winter, but once a month or so they have Zoo Days anyway, where they open for a few hours, rain or shine, and well, you see whatever you might be able to see. However, today was the first day that seeing the giraffes was possible, and the high today was a rather unseasonable 68 degrees.
We were going to the zoo.
Unfortunately, so was everyone else in South Bend. When we got to the zoo the line to get in was a block long, and the parking lot is a mess under the absolute best of circumstances, and “perfect Spring day featuring the public’s first real chance to see four hotly-anticipated new animals” is, uh, not the best of circumstances. So we did not go to the zoo today. And as soon as we decided we weren’t waiting in the line, much less whatever horror we might have encountered inside the zoo (they were limiting access to the animals, letting in a limited number of people for 10-minute blocks, so who knows how many a “limited number” is) we immediately drove past two perfect parking spaces.
We came home, opened all the windows, and I put shorts on.
There is a 60% chance of snow on Monday. Because Indiana.
If you want to feel like a celebrity for a little while, post the words “looking for an artist” on Twitter. Because holy shit are there a lot of people out there who very clearly have programmed a bot to reply instantly to any use of that sequence of words. And the funny thing is that I can tell from referrals how many people clicked back to the article, where I clearly describe what I’m looking for, and the vast majority of the 43 people who responded to that tweet or however many more who immediately DMed me did not (possibly because they were not human) click through the link on the Tweet to see what I was looking for.
Hilariously, however, I got a recommendation in comments almost immediately, and while I haven’t contacted the artist yet her style is exactly what I had in mind, so I think I’ve got somebody. I’ll take some time tomorrow or later today to go through all the comments I got and then delete the original Tweet just to do my diligence, but … man, asking the Internet for something worked this time.
Pictured to the right here is the current logo I’m using for my YouTube channel. I like the basic idea of it; it looks enough like me that anyone who knows me recognizes it instantly, I actually own that shirt, and he’s playing video games.
That said, the look on his face is … off, and it’s really obviously a Bitmoji; the style of those things, even if you don’t recognize the particular pose the image is in, is instantly recognizable.
I know some artists, but I’m not sure any of them are appropriate for what I’m looking for: I want to redo the logo image for my channel, and I want something that is reminiscent of this, and in a cartoony style (that’s where everyone I know falls down; none of them are what I’d ever describe as “cartoony”) but I want something that is unique and looks like me without obviously being from some specific site on the internet that is reproducible by anyone who can find the proper settings.
If you know anyone, please let them know, or if you feel like you are such an artist, drop me an email with pricing and a portfolio link. We can talk details then. To be clear, this is to be a planned gig; I have a budget in mind and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount, but we’ll see.
This was a really fucking rough day. I got through my third and fourth hour basically by deciding that I was blind on the left side of my body. I have been keeping track of the swear words I hear for the last few days, and I’m averaging around fifty a day, and generally half of those or so will be the N-word. It’s still not impossible that I end up back in a classroom again next year, but it’s getting less and less likely with every passing day. I’m just completely exhausted with all of them at this point, and I don’t want to do this any longer. If that means I need to ignore fully half of one of my classes so that I can concentrate on the group of them who still have a modicum of interest in receiving an education, well, fuck it, that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m well beyond feeling bad about it.
And then as I was walking out of the building, our social studies teacher stopped me and asked me how one of our … more troublesome students had done in my room today, and by “troublesome,” I mean “has 74 office referrals so far this year, and is somehow still allowed to be attending school despite having not the slightest shred of an academic agenda.” I thought about it for a moment and realized that not only had I not had to put him out– I’d had to speak to him a couple of times, but not especially seriously– and that he’d actually turned in his work, which given his current 11% class average (and that’s his third-highest grade) is not a common occurence.
She has a student teacher this semester– and, God, of all the years to be student teaching, you couldn’t have chosen a worse one than this one– and he’d had to put this kid out of class himself today, and he was having a really hard time with it. Ed school fills your head with all sorts of nonsense about how it’s always the teacher’s fault if you can’t “reach” any of your students, and the notion that for one reason or another certain students might be unreachable is simply treated as heresy. I don’t even know this guy all that well and I could tell he was beating himself up over it.
And fuck me dead if I didn’t spend the next fifteen minutes talking this poor guy off of a ledge and trying to make him feel better about himself and his future as a teacher. He was always going to have a hard time with middle school– he’s got a prominent lisp among a couple of other, uh, prominent physical characteristics– and he was one of those guys where it’s difficult for one’s first impression to not be “the kids are going to eat you alive.” But he’s putting in the work and he’s doing his Goddamned best and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a kid who easily ranks in the bottom five percent of students I’ve taught in my career fuck up this guy’s day. And I think by the time I left I had him feeling better, and on the one hand, yay me, and on the other hand I really don’t think anyone should be going into teaching until we have a serious societal reckoning with what we actually want our teachers to be and what we want from our schools, and that reckoning needs to firmly eliminate the word “babysitter” from our job descriptions. Because that’s what we’re doing with this kid, and with a higher percentage of my students this year than I’ve ever seen before. These kids have no interest and no business being in school other than fucking up the educations of the kids who want to be there, and any vestiges of patience I might have ever had with it are simply gone at this point. A completely honest accounting would have involved telling this guy that things weren’t going to get better because in the last twenty years nothing has ever gotten better in education. That trend isn’t reversing anytime soon.
But hey, I got him off the ledge. And if I go to work tomorrow, it’ll be five days in a row. Baby steps, I guess.
I have recorded, as of ten minutes ago, twenty-five episodes of my Elden Ring series. I discovered before doing tonight’s recordings that episode 22 has just … disappeared. The audio files are there, and the folder is there, but the recording itself? Gone. Anybody out there wanna recommend some good Mac file recovery programs? I can’t imagine how the hell I might have deleted just the .mp4 file out of that folder and kept everything else; that doesn’t adhere to anything about how I manage game files, but it appears to have happened, unless what actually happened is I made the file invisible somehow, and showing invisible files on a Mac is literally just a button-press and it’s not happening. So I need to see if I can find it.
It’s actually been a decent couple of days at work; I can proudly report that I have been to school three whole days in a row, and am planning, like a grown-up, to attend tomorrow as well! And if I pull that off all I have to do is go to work on Friday and then I’ll have shown up a whole week in a row!
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