The one good thing about getting Covid is that I think I chewed through some backlog. We’ll see what I can do to this in June.
Unread Shelf: May 31, 2022
OK, Zoomer
The following is a true fact: I am an Old. I have written before about how I’m at an age where I straddle the line a bit between Gen X and Millennials; my preferred nomenclature is the Oregon Trail Generation, but that’s not exactly what the cool kids call it. All that said, one thing I definitely am is Old. Yes, the oldest Millennials are old now. They have mortgages– some of them, anyway– and cars and kids and are starting to worry about paying for their college, and whether debt is going to be declared inheritable before they die.
Anyway. My wife and I were out doing some running around today, in two cars because one of the jobs involved bringing the last carload of stuff that we’re keeping back from my father-in-law’s apartment, and I told her that I was going to stop at a local gaming shop that is up by his place. The place is far enough away that if I drive past it I’m probably going to stop, just because I’m not up there very often. Anyway, I puttered around for a bit and decided to buy something and got behind a couple of high school-aged kids who were also checking out. Both of them, as it turns out, were buying card booster packs of some sort; Magic, I think, but I’m not sure and at any rate it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the booster packs were expensive, and I heard the cashier quote a hundred and seventeen dollars to one of the kids, who pulled a handful of twenties out of his pocket, counted them carefully, and handed them over, receiving his change in the expected fashion.
And then the whole world went sideways, as the kid looked at his friend and said “I love these things. The money doesn’t come out of my account, so it’s like I’m not really spending anything.”
There was a moment of frozen silence. The cashier, a man of about my age, made eye contact with me, as both of us realized at the same time that this young man had just used the construction these things to refer to twenty dollar bills as if they were some sort of exotic and rare form of shell- or bead-based barter, and I don’t think either of us really knew what to do for a second. The kid’s friend saw the look we shot each other and also saw that I was either having a stroke or trying not to laugh, and rolled his eyes at his friend without saying a word and ushered him out.
I walked to the counter and placed my purchase in front of the cashier.
“Credit or … these things?”, he said.
And then I ceased to exist.
A couple of naps and then a nap
…and now I’m ready for bed.
Seriously, I just totally wasted today in every way possible, to the point where I’d like to hit reset and start over. If any of y’all know where the button is, let me know, because I can’t find it.
Some updates
The YouTube channel is dead; long live the YouTube channel.
I’m not deleting it, mind you, but after a couple of weeks of not updating, initially caused by Covid and then a couple of very busy weeks at home, I find that I don’t miss having to spend an hour or more every single day playing video games in a room by myself where no one is allowed to talk to me and where any noise or, God forbid, a bathroom break meant that I was going to have to spend more time after the video was done editing it. I want to spend some time just playing games when I want to and not worrying about some sort of schedule.
I’m not abandoning the idea altogether, mind you, and in fact I still have a couple of games I want to record. But I can tell already that Horizon: Forbidden West is, of all the games I’ve done Let’s Plays on, the one least amenable to the format I’ve chosen, and I want to just play it without having to worry about breaking it up into digestible chunks. The channel wasn’t making me any money and I was probably years away from enough subs to be able to make any money off of it, so I’m going to shove it back into the realm of “hobby” and stop taking it nearly as seriously.
Today was the first day of summer vacation, and speaking as someone who Does Not Know How To Relax, I feel like I used it pretty well. The front lawn is mowed, some cleaning was accomplished, weeds have been whacked, and I delivered some things to Goodwill that have been sitting around the house for a while. We need to finish clearing out my father-in-law’s apartment before June 1, so I’ll likely be up there tomorrow for a while, and then … well, who knows after that.
Playing around with the 3D printer continues apace; I have made five useless objects, one of which broke while trying to remove it from the print bed and another of which broke because of what I’m pretty sure was a design flaw in the model and not actually either user error or the printer being weird. This little axolotl I printed is pretty cool, though, and right now I’ve got it working on what will be a fourteen-hour, high-detail print of a hook horror from Dungeons & Dragons. The boy has announced that he wants a 3d print of every final-evolution Pokémon from Generation 1. There are, apparently, 81 of them. No word on whether he plans to pay for the filament, and I have to admit I’m also wondering what keeping this little nozzle at 200 degrees Celsius and the bed at 90 degrees Celsius for hours at a time is going to do to my electric bill.
This one’s a big deal: I had an interview scheduled at another school Friday afternoon, and was setting one up at another school for next week, and then had a long talk with the remaining members of my team Friday morning about next year. It is rumored that we’ve finally got a principal (and, to be clear, we have a name, not just a “they have found a warm body” rumor) and it’s amazing just what a difference the simple rumor that they’d named someone actually made. At any rate, after that conversation, I went back to my classroom, looked around, reflected on the fact that I’d been up very late Thursday night thinking about this interview, and emailed both the principals involved and cancelled. I will, for better or for worse, be returning to my current job again this fall, and I have closed out all of my various job-seekery accounts again for the time being. I’m about to go into year 19 of teaching. There is, unfortunately, a strong likelihood that my school will be closing at either the end of this year or the end of next year, and there is also a rumor that the middle school math teacher at Hogwarts will be retiring at the end of this year. If that happens, I plan to do everything in my power to get that job. But that’s a year away, if in fact it actually happens, and you best believe I’ll be keeping a close eye on it. But for now? I’m coming back.
I expect to regret this decision by September. We’ll see.
In which I discover music
Dax has been around for a minute, but I just found out he existed, like, yesterday, and hoooooooly shit y’all is this guy talented. Trust me, it’s worth watching.
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