I’m starting to catch up with my Christmas books and my Barnes & Noble Half Off Hardcovers books, but people keep writing more things.
Month: April 2022
This might actually be real
My wife mentioned to me earlier today that Spider Man: No Way Home, or whatever it’s called, because I’m not sure that’s it, is fully available for streaming now … and I shrugged. And then I thought about the fact that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is out next week and I have no desire to go see it, and that Thor: Love and Thunder comes out in June or July and the trailer for that didn’t do a damn thing for me either.
I know I’ve mentioned this multiple times, but it’s amazing that it seems to be actually true: I really don’t seem to care if I ever see another Marvel movie or not. Like, she could download the Spider-Man movie on her own and watch it (and she might) and I really don’t think I’d care at all.
Amazing.
Progress, finally
I think that if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Fatima has been in my class since January. She has since been joined by two more Afghan students, one girl and one boy, and today, finally, we had a part-time interpreter in the room with us, and I have never been more excited to meet someone in my entire life as I was this poor guy. We did some quick diagnostics stuff (a lot easier to have the kids see what math they understand when you can explain to them what you want them to do) and then I just asked him to ask them to tell him about themselves.
Fatima likes grapes. Like, that doesn’t seem like much, but it’s communication. There’s still a few days of Ramadan left but I am absolutely bringing this kid some grapes sometime soon. Two of them are from Kunar province and the third is from Khost province, which means all three of them were right on the border with Pakistan. I asked the translator to reassure them that if they wanted to talk to each other during class, that was absolutely okay– the three of them are as quiet as mice pretty much all the time— and I actually heard the other girl (who needs a code name) laugh for the first time. It was great.
I think it is actually Thursday, which is good, because I’ve thought the week was nearly over all week, and that kept being wrong, and if it’s actually Thursday than that ought to make tomorrow Friday, the actual end of the week. Nineteen days of school left.
Speaking of the end of the week, Wednesday (I think) was my nephew’s first birthday, so we’re going to be out of town all weekend to go to his birthday party in the north Chicago suburbs, so if you follow the YouTube channel, updates are probably going to be light. I didn’t post any new videos today for the first time since I started the channel because yesterday was that busy, and I think my plan right now is to do one video a day for tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, and then try and resume the normal schedule on Monday. We’ll see if I pull that off or not, but it’s the plan at the moment. At any rate, if I go radio silent over there, don’t panic. I haven’t quit anything, we’ve just hit a scheduling snag.
Taking tonight off
God, I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday.
In which I’m not going anywhere yet
I didn’t mean for this to work this way, but this headline is doubly appropriate: first, because despite Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter, I don’t plan to immediately flee the service. I didn’t like Jack either, and actually I don’t know who the hell runs the place now, so it’s not like I’ve ever personally approved of whoever was at the top of the corporate ladder at the place. Musk’s ownership probably won’t become official for six months or so (and isn’t guaranteed,) and I’m not about to flee a place where I have nearly eleven thousand followers and something like fifteen years of history without a better reason.
Like, for example, “I hate it there.” I might leave Twitter because I hate Twitter. But not because of Musk. Not, at least, until he starts changing things. Then we’ll see.
Also, speaking of things that aren’t happening, I have officially not gotten the only job I have managed to get an interview for since I started applying to jobs a couple of months ago. And … honestly, whatever. I’m not bothered by it. They ended up going with someone with coding experience, which I always knew was a weak spot in my application, and if you’ve been following along lately you know I was lukewarm on the job at best anyway. I still don’t especially want to return to my current school in the fall, but I’m far from convinced that this would have been an improvement.
Are we sure it’s only Tuesday, by the way? Is there any chance that it’s Thursday right now? Because this has been an insanely long two days, and I really don’t like having my worst class at the very end of the day.
I am ancient and my memory is shot
…literally ten minutes ago I had a whole post, gloriously embedded in my brain, waiting only to be unfolded onto the screen and from there into your brains. Then I saw, like, a bug or something, and now it’s gone.
Today started with waking up to take a piss at 4:30 in the morning and then walking directly into a spider innocently trying to make its way from the ceiling to the floor. I managed to slap myself directly in the face, not scream, thus not waking up my wife, but then my adrenaline was up so I couldn’t get back to sleep, then I did get back to sleep and overslept, meaning that I had to go to work without taking a shower this morning. This was only made possible by the fact that I happened to shower before bed last night, but it was still yuckier than I want my life to generally be. Then once I got to work I discovered that because of ILEARN the schedule was getting shifted around and my least favorite group would be my class for the last two periods of the day, otherwise known as the only way to make them even more poorly behaved.
So, yeah, forgetting a post ten minutes after conceiving of it is more or less par for the course for today, and I am ready for Monday to be over.
Spring Cleaning
So, do you know what happens when you renovate a bathroom, and said bathroom backs onto your bedroom?
Okay, a lot of things; that question could have been a bit more specific. The biggest one, though? Dust. Oh, my God, so much fucking dust.
But the bathroom is oh so very nearly done, and what’s left to do isn’t going to generate any more dust, or at least isn’t going to generate any more dust that makes it into the bedroom.
So today I put all my laundry away, wen through my clothes for Goodwill donations, took all the boxes that came out of what used to be a closet and is now our shower and put everything back into its new location, dusted every Goddamn horizontal surface in the bedroom, dusted all the furniture, swept, vacuumed, moved most of the furniture (the bed will be a day all by itself, and I’m not touching the bookshelves) and vacuumed under that, then mopped probably 60% of the floor, with the 40% unmopped being the area under and around the bed.
Now it’s raining and the bedroom looks much better and I have game recording to do, I guess, because YouTube is still happening, so go subscribe.
The end.
I read more manga: GYO
I talked about my experiment with, and affection for, Junji Ito’s Uzumaki a few days ago, and that led to me ordering two more collected editions of his work, including the above, called Gyo. And … uh … well, I have one more left and I guess we’ll see how it goes, because Gyo is … kinda bad? Like, “about fart monsters” bad. The big scary beasts in the book are literally fart monsters. There are lots of lovingly detailed drawings of fish, people, and various other living things with tubes implanted into their asses to harvest their internal gases. That’s not a joke. It’s not even a humorous exaggeration. They’re fart monsters. Their farts might be sentient. It’s unclear.
Fart monsters are not scary, no matter how you try.
Now, there’s definitely some creepy shit in here, and Ito’s art is awesome, particularly the way he ramps up the detail whenever he’s drawing anything particularly horrific, but the problem is that the creepy pictures are connected by story and words and talking, and the words ruin the cool pictures. Not the least because I hate the font this book is lettered in, which makes everyone look like they’re shouting, all the time. And a lot of time they are! There is quite a bit of shouting in this manga. Not always for a good reason.
It also features one of the worst female characters and one of the worst romantic relationships I’ve ever encountered in literature, period. Kaori is terrible in every imaginable way, and is a collection of every misogynist stereotype about women one could write down, and her boyfriend Tadashi is also terrible although not in an especially gendered way. You never for a second understand why these two even like each other because they are both insufferable and their relationship is toxic as hell, and I’m not sure if the book was deliberately written that way, but I don’t actually think it was. Like, she’s worse than him because her shittiness is so explicitly gendered, but they’re both terrible characters.
So, yeah, I didn’t like this one, although I’m still three-starring it, mostly on the strength of the artwork and the two amazing stories at the end of the book. They are both maybe the length of a standard Western comic book, so we’re talking two ten-minute reads, maybe, but the second one in particular, called The Enigma of Amigara Fault, is spectacular. The other suffers from a little bit of The Dumb; there will be some who won’t like it because it’ll fail the smell test right away and it isn’t long enough to win your trust back, but if you get past that it’s a great little short horror story. It also suffers a little bit from being translated into English; I assume the phrase “principal post,” meaning the main support column of a house, doesn’t sound quite as ridiculous when repeated in Japanese as it does in English. Amigara Fault, though, is great, from start to finish. It’s just that I’m not sure those two stories are enough to justify purchasing the entire volume, since Gyo itself is so Goddamned goofy.
One more, though, and then I’ll have to decide if I’m looking for more to read or retreating back into my superhero comics where I belong.
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