TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The okaywe’redoneination

On April 22, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

There’s still the tiniest amount of work to be done– note the spot that needs to be patched and repainted next to the towel rack– but the bathroom is, at this point, nearly entirely finished, or at least close enough to post. That’s actually our vanity (those drawers are soft-touch, which I love) and our actual storage cabinet to make up for the fact that the shower ate a closet. Seriously, check the storage out:

There’s a lot of storage in there. I am pleased.

In other news, at approximately 5:05 PM this afternoon– which, remember, is a Friday– I got a call that my phone identified as “possibly” belonging to the guy who interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and then, as far as I could tell, ghosted me, since he said they’d be back with a decision over a week ago and they weren’t. I did not answer the call because I found myself suddenly not in the mood for it, and he …

… not only didn’t leave a message, but he didn’t email me either, which leaves me wondering exactly what the motivation for calling me at the end of the day on Friday. I don’t know if that’s a good news thing or a bad news thing, and I also don’t know what the reason for not leaving a message might be.

Either way, it’s not making me more interested in taking the job.

How my day went

On April 21, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I sent this email to my principal, my assistant principal, and my dean of students this morning, after sending six students out of my classroom:

There are twenty-four days of school remaining. If I start every third and fourth period with five referrals for the next twenty-four days, then so be it. The guy who wanted to be reasonable has left the building. The ragey asshole is all they have left now. I am not spending one single additional second during this school year arguing with rude children who have no academic agenda.

In which I may have made a slight mistake

On April 20, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I still haven’t really decided if I’m going to return to an hour of new videos a day once the Elden Ring series ends tomorrow over on YouTube; you would think that my use of the word tomorrow in that sentence would imply some urgency, and you might also think that the existence of a Let’s Play thumbnail right there on the screen might imply that I had, in fact, already started another series! I have. Sorta. I’m two episodes in, and then I got distracted by Infernax, which is more fun than it has any right to be, only that game is only like six hours long and I’m already most of the way through it and I haven’t been recording any of my playthrough because I’m currently kind of tired of that. So I need to finish up this game before I pick up that game and I already don’t remember where the hell I was or what the hell I was doing and did you know that the way the Xbox handles family accounts is bullshit? Because it kind of is.

There will probably be a whole post on that, once I figure out how they think this bullshit works.

Oh, and also Cuphead, which I’ve settled into a nice little boss-a-day schedule on, although I think my video game skills are going to top out before the game does. I don’t remember the last time I played a game and thought “I can’t beat this,” but this might be the one.

This is all to say that I have been playing Infernax pretty much nonstop since dinnertime and I have to write an assignment for my ~~shitheads~~ students tomorrow (I used the phrase “rude-ass child” to refer to one of my kids today, and when she threatened to tell her mom I told her to go for it and that the conversation wasn’t going to go the way she thought, and I don’t feel the slightest bit of remorse over it) and I probably ought to do that at some point. Then again, I get to work 40 minutes early most days. That’s plenty of time, right?

… right?

Sure.

I read a manga!

On April 19, 2022April 19, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

I’ve said this before— the clearest line of distinction between people who are very late Gen Xers and people who are very old Millennials is Pokémon. If Pokémon played a role in your childhood (or a role in the childhoods of people your age) chances are you’re a Millennial. If you made it to college without ever having heard of Pikachu, you’re Gen X. Along with this comes the idea of being into manga. I can assure you that I was into every nerdy hobby available in the Midwest in the 1990s and I never even heard the word “manga” despite being deeply into Western comic books. It just wasn’t a thing over here yet. Anime, much the same. And while I’ve had plenty of opportunities, I’ve never really gotten into either. Something about the style of most anime (and the weirdly wordy way Japanese seems to translate into English a lot of the time) has always just sort of repelled me, and I’ve never had a good explanation for why I don’t like the stuff, I just don’t.

I bought the collected edition of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki earlier this week for no clear reason– like, I learned it existed and that it was “horror manga” and I bought it, and I’m not sure why– and I seem to have broken that streak finally, to the point where last night I ordered the collected editions of this dude’s other two series. Or, at least, two of his other series? I’m not sure how much he’s actually done. Uzumaki is kinda random and goofy in parts but it’s creepy as hell throughout, and it reminds me of Scary Stories to Read in the Dark in the absolute best way possible and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The idea– and this is kind of a “roll with it” scenario– is that a town is cursed, and the curse manifests itself in spirals. The first eight or ten chapters are all standalone, where some character or another is affected by the spiral psychosis in some way, and then everything knits itself together very satisfyingly over the last several chapters. The whole thing is six hundred pages plus, so it’s pretty beefy, and it’s big enough that the art has space to shine and for all that it’s a quick read anyway. If you’re a manga person you’ve probably already encountered this, but if you’re not and you want an entry point in the genre, this one roped me in, so give it a look.

I didn’t post yesterday, breaking a 200-plus day streak. Why? No good reason, I just didn’t feel like it, and after a while I get tired of the ceaseless WordPress notifications that I’ve blogged X days in a row. My cold isn’t quite gone yet although today was better, so hopefully this will be gone in the next day or two. We’ll see.

Still sick

On April 17, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

…and my father-in-law is in the hospital— he will be fine, from what my wife tells me, but he’s still in the hospital– so between those two things and spending like four hours grading this afternoon I’ve just had a dandy Easter. How are you doing?

I have ILEARN starting this week, so I’m probably going to take tomorrow off and hope that it kills the cold if I spend the whole day in bed reading, mostly because I absolutely can’t miss any testing days, and I’d rather pull the trigger early than go in and end up all fucked up. Hopefully that ends up being a good decision, we’ll see. Meanwhile, there are only 28 days with the kids left. This week and next week are testing, so they ought to go quickly. We’ll see how the month after that plays out.

I have a cold

On April 16, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

… and I’ve been reading and napping all day. It’s not Covid. But I’m taking the night off and turning in early anyway.

A couple of quick things

On April 15, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

It is 8:17 PM as I’m beginning this, and I am already completely ready for bed. Asleep by 9:00 is not in any way out of the question right now. It might even be likely. So, in no particular order:

I am starting to think I didn’t get that job I interviewed for over Spring Break, as they were supposed to be making a decision by today and I haven’t heard anything, which makes me think they’re waiting on a “yes” from someone else before they tell the rest of us no. This is actually fine; I wasn’t sure I wanted it (losing my summer break and taking a pay cut, even if it’s a small one, is kind of a rough ask) and if I’m not offered the job I’m not put in a position where I have to turn it down myself. I am still powerfully ambivalent about next year, but I’m not sure this is the solution.
I have really been enjoying Moon Knight, but I completely forgot about it this week. It aired Wednesday. I didn’t even think about it until today. In other words, it’s suffering the fate of every TV show I like.
There will be at least one more game series on the YouTube channel; I started recording Tunic today, which looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
The cabinet and vanity is finally installed in the bathroom and we got some repainting done today as well as some drywalling in the laundry room. The last major piece to be installed is the mirror (which I may just do myself) and then a little bit of detail work here and there. I’ll post pictures again once the mirror is in place. This long saga is finally almost at an end.
I still do not have Twitter on my phone, but I put TikTok back on it today.

Five things is more than a couple, so I’m going to bed now.