Month: July 2022

What day is it again?

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games3 Comments

This has been keeping me busy for the last couple of days:

I don’t know how familiar you are with Stray, but I’ve been jonesing to play it literally since the first moment I heard of it, before the PS5 even launched– it was originally talked about as, if not a launch title, something really close to it, and it just came out yesterday. I’ve got two livestreams up at the channel and I’m expecting a third Friday night; the game is short so I might finish it then or it might require one more (and then maybe another to try and snag the trophies) but I’ve been having an absolute blast with it. Even if you don’t normally follow my channel or video game YouTube in general, give this five minutes if you’re a cat person. It’s really cool.

In which I can’t win

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

I was not picked for jury duty, and my number in the pool was high enough that I’m not sure whether I was actually eliminated or just that they got the required number of jurors they needed before they got to me. The process itself was … fine, I suppose? It would have been significantly more fine had the St. Joseph County courthouse #3 at any point investigated the concept of moving air, or a similarly comfort-related concept called don’t cram sixty fucking people into tiny rooms during a pandemic. Unfortunately, neither of those rules were followed and I suspect that, despite being one of three (3) people who remained masked for the entire process, I have contracted Covid, Anthrax, monkeypox and probably rabies and fucking wandering womb syndrome as well.

Honestly, the most entertaining (or at least worth talking about) parts of the whole process were that 1) when the judge is conferring with attorneys they actually play static over the intercom to make it more difficult to pick up what they’re saying, and 2) the absolutely outstanding level of rudeness of the cop manning the metal detector on the way into the courthouse. Actually, a few things about that:

  1. I walked in behind a handful of people on the way into the courthouse. All of them put masks on as we were entering the courthouse; I assumed that they were mandatory. The moment everyone but me got through the metal detectors, they all took their masks right back off again. The hell?
  2. The cop was barking “Do you have a cell phone?” at everyone who came in. The gentleman in front of me answered in the affirmative. The cop actually picked up a copy of the summons we were sent and yelled at him about whether he’d read the “big box at the bottom,” and made him read out loud the part where it said to not bring cell phones into the courtroom.
  3. Three of us, including me, set off the metal detectors and were waved in without further investigation, so apparently the pistol I had taped to the small of my back was fine. I said I didn’t have a cell phone, though, so all good.
  4. I happened to be sitting where I could hear people coming in while we were waiting for everything to start, so I got to witness it when the same poor bastard who had gotten chewed out about having a cell phone realized that the room he had on his summons was different from everyone else’s. He made the mistake of asking the cop about it, and the guy yelled at him again, because you’re supposed to call a number the night before you have jury duty to make sure your trial is still happening, and this guy hadn’t done that. “You did not do what you were supposed to do!” the cop yelled. “Why would that be? Do you not know how to read instructions? I’m surprised you found the courthouse at all!”
  5. Dick.

The other big realization of the day is that people get too tied up in hypotheticals and don’t think shit through very clearly, but that shouldn’t be surprising because I teach and so I should know how fucking dumb most people are. It was still weird– and, frankly, it clearly had one of the attorneys confused– to see how many people indicated that they would not be able to render an impartial verdict were the defendant to choose not to testify. Several different people expressed variations on “I wouldn’t be able to make a fair decision if I didn’t hear both sides of the story,” which sounds reasonable and good so long as you don’t think about it at all. Like, y’all, we just had “beyond a reasonable doubt” explained to us a couple times. It’s not all that complicated a concept. The defendant does not have to testify. Period.

Examples:

  1. This was an armed robbery case. The defendant was caught on video robbing the store, clearly showing his face. There were several eyewitnesses to the crime, including the arresting officer and the store owner who was robbed. The robber dropped the gun while fleeing the store afterward, which had his fingerprints on it and was registered in his name. Before committing the crime, the thief posted a selfie on Twitter and Facebook of him outside the store and holding the gun, with the caption “Bout ta rob these motherfuckers.” In this case, I really don’t need the defendant’s version of the story. Guilty, thanks.
  2. Keeping with the metaphor of armed robbery. There were no witnesses other than the shop owner, who picked someone else out of a lineup and furthermore described a thief of a different race and gender than the person who was eventually arrested. The defendant has a solid alibi documented on social media for the time the crime was committed. There is video of the crime and the thief is clearly not the person on trial. In this case, again, I don’t need to hear from the defendant to decide to exonerate them.

These are both exaggerated, but it was really weird to hear so many people claim that they could not and would not be able to come to a conclusion without hearing from “both sides.” And again, the defense attorney was visibly surprised. The prosecutor had a similar situation in trying to ascertain if everyone understood the concept of “accessory to” being the same as having committed a crime; ie, you drive somebody to rob a bank and act as the getaway driver as well, but you weren’t the person who went in and robbed the bank. You’re still getting sentenced for bank robbery. Now, you could argue about whether this was fair, but the number of people who wanted to “what-if” this relatively simple hypothetical was still kind of alarming. No, the person wasn’t carjacked. Yes, they knew the robbery was happening. No, we’re not going to posit that someone was killed and the robber had promised not to kill anyone. Please stick to the current hypothetical, Juror 42. You know what, never mind, I’m rejecting all of you. Go home.

One way or another, I’m free for two years. Still haven’t made it to a trial. Hopefully next time it’ll be on a cooler day, but … yeah.

This again

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Jury duty tomorrow, and I think that this time I might actually make it into the courtroom. I’ve been called … seven times? Eight? Twelveteen? times since I moved back to Indiana, and never-not-once have I even made it as far as jury selection. I’ve had one cancelled as I was getting in the car to leave and another where they reached a deal right before jury selection was supposed to start, but I’ve never made it any further. Summertime is basically as good of a time as it’s going to get for me to be on a jury, and I don’t mind the idea in theory, so we’ll see how this goes. So long as they don’t ask me my opinions on anything I might even make it through voir dire! We’ll see.

In the meantime, there are robots out there who need to be shot with arrows, so that’s the rest of my night sorted.

I am only barely alive

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I dunno what’s going on around here today, but I got up just before 9:00 this morning and, as of this moment, I have been yawning for ten and a half hours. Both my wife and I spent prolonged periods of time today acting as immobile sleep stations for cats. I had plans today, dammit, and lazing around the house in a semi coma wasn’t among them.

I didn’t even sleep poorly last night. There’s no reason for me to be this tired but I’ve been a damn zombie since the moment I got up.

New face, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Holy shit, do I look tired.

I don’t even remember how long it’s been since I got LASIK– it was pre-Covid, I think, so it was in the Before Times and therefore was somewhere between seven and a million years ago and cannot be nailed down any more precisely by any human agency. The final-final-final resolution of All That is those glasses, which are new as of this evening, and are, for the first time in my life, bifocals.

For some time now I’ve been back in glasses, but sort of part-time? I didn’t need them for reading, and I found that in other contexts I didn’t want them on– eating was weird, and anything involving close detail work inevitably involved me removing my glasses. And being back in glasses again wasn’t that big of a deal– I started wearing them in second grade, remember, so it just wasn’t that big of a deal, but putting them on and taking them off constantly was driving me insane. So at my last eye appointment I told my doctor that I was interested in a more permanent prescription that would fix that problem. My understanding is that the “reading” part of the glasses involves very little correction, if any at all, and then there’s the weird transition area and the regular prescription, and, well. Sitting at my computer and typing was the last test the new glasses needed to pass and right now they’re doing quite well.

It’s too bad that LASIK didn’t work out perfectly for me, but honestly I’m still not super inclined to complain about it– my vision is enormously improved from before I had the surgery, but because I was blind as hell before I had the surgery they just couldn’t get me up to perfect, or at least couldn’t do it on the first try, and I’ve politely declined to give them a second chance to cut my eyes open with lasers. I can do lots of things without my glasses that were flatly impossible before; if I get up and go to the bathroom at night I don’t need to put them on, I can see while I’m swimming or in the shower, and I can drive without them. If I were to somehow lose my glasses, I’d be annoyed but fine until the new pair showed up. I apparently view my vision like I view my politics; I didn’t get perfect, but I got a substantial improvement and I’m perfectly happy with that.

Also, if you can get your frames from Costco, jump on that. I haven’t gotten a new pair of glasses for less than $400 in a minute, and these were less than a third of that.

So, ignoring the face they’re sitting on, how do they look?

#REVIEW: Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Before getting into talking about the book, I want to point out that this is one of several books that I either have on deck or have read recently that I discovered through TikTok. My main location for book discovery right now is Twitter and. has been for a while; I follow so many writers and agents on there that anything interesting is inevitably going to cross my radar sooner or later. But #BookTok is becoming a bigger force as time goes on, and I still don’t think I’ve heard about this one on Twitter anywhere, so it’s good that I was paying attention, because Ciel Pierlot’s Bluebird is a hell of a book.

Also, it’s been a running joke around here for years that my book “reviews” are often about anything but the book, and … well, this one isn’t going to be an exception? So let me say the words Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space and just walk away after that, because I know my people, and that sentence got a certain number of you opening up Amazon already. It was certainly all I needed to order the book, and I got exactly what I wanted, and while I once criticized a book whose tagline was lesbian necromancers in space on the grounds that there was not quite as much lesbian necromancy or space as that sentence implied, this is well and truly a book about a lesbian gunslinger fighting spies in space and it is absolutely everything I want from life right now.

It is also– and here we go with the review being more about me than the book, so brace yourself– about 75% of the way to being a great Benevolence Archives book, with most of that remaining 25% being simple matters of renaming a few characters and slightly altering the villains. Because the main character of this book reminds me so much of my Rhundi that it’s scary, and I kind of want to hand my entire universe over to Ciel Pierlot and let her run wild in it to see what happens. I mean, Rhundi isn’t a lesbian, and Pierlot’s main character Rig’s relationship with her girlfriend June is one of the best parts of the book, but the personality and the attitude and the swagger are all there, and I feel like my writing style and Pierlot’s are similar enough that matching the tone of the BA books wouldn’t be a challenge for her at all.

So obviously I really liked the characters. The worldbuilding here is pretty cool too, with the galaxy divided up among three warring factions more or less separated by religious beliefs about the same original set of facts; blah blah blah God did this, and all three factions are convinced that this was done for their benefit and not that of the other two. I’d love to see more; we get enough into the weeds to tell this story but there aren’t any places where I felt like the book was info dumping just for the hell of it. That said, I think the one place where the book does fall down a bit is related to the worldbuilding: Rig is a Kashrini, an alien race that may as well be an ethnic minority given how the book treats them, and there’s a subplot going throughout the book about how the Kashrini are treated (poorly) by their faction that I felt could be explored a little bit more. Rig in particular makes a habit of reclaiming Kashrini artifacts whenever she finds them in the possession of non-Kashrini– think Killmonger in Black Panther for a close analog– and I would like to have learned a little bit more about her actual people. She spends most of the book trying to rescue her sister, and found family is definitely a theme, but I’d like to have seen a bit more detail on this one story thread.

Bluebird is a standalone, tying everything up with a nice bow at the end, and I don’t know right now what Pierlot is working on next. I’d love to see more done with this world and these characters, but one way or another she’s on The List now, and I’ll be keeping my eyes out for her next book. Check it out.

On standards

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I’ve done this rant before– so, so many times– so I’ll spare you the full version right now. But two pieces of information have recently crossed my radar and I thought I’d take a moment with them.

First, a report on Twitter– I’m not going to dig it up, just trust me– that half of American adults can’t read at an 8th grade level. Which … y’know, that sounds pretty alarming! 8th graders are kinda young and have a decent amount of school left to go through, so you’d hope that adults would be able to read as well as them, right?

Second, and I found this out today, that less than five percent– rather significantly less, unfortunately– of the students in my school passed the Math portion of the ILEARN last year. Lower than one in twenty, to phrase it differently. And the scary thing is, looking across my district, my school doesn’t really stand out against the scores most of the rest of the schools got.

I’m going to make two points here. Well, maybe three, depending on how you count the points. First, that if half of American adults can’t read at an 8th grade level, it stands to reason that more than half, in fact probably significantly more than half of actual 8th graders probably cannot read at an 8th grade level. Which, okay, we can all shake our heads sadly at that if we want to, and we probably should, but it brings this question to mind: what exactly does the phrase “8th grade reading level” mean in this context, and who decides what an 8th grade reading level is? Because if (to make up a number) 70% of American 8th graders and half of American adults can’t read at an “8th grade level,” I feel like it stands to reason to suggest that perhaps whatever that level is, it isn’t actually an 8th grade level. Further, that we can talk about having high standards as much as we like, but at some point does it ever make sense to suggest that the bar we’ve set for our kids is actually and genuinely too fucking high? And that if less than a twentieth of 8th grade students can’t pass what is supposed to be an 8th grade test, maybe we should blame the assessment and not the kids?

The problem is, of course, that I and every other teacher I know who has been doing this job for more than a few years are fully aware that our kids have been getting dumber, every year, for our entire careers. My 8th graders fifteen years ago make my current 8th graders look like kindergartners. They know nothing, and it’s not a demographic thing, because I’ve been working in the same kinds of communities for more or less my entire career. They get dumber every. Fucking. Year. They know less every. Fucking. Year.

Go ahead, find an educator with more than, say, seven or eight years of experience who disagrees with me. You won’t be able to do it. As soon as we started focusing on Test Scores Uber Alles a couple of years into the Bush administration, the kids started knowing less and less as every year went past, and at this point they’re so far behind that the notion of them actually internalizing 8th grade work is laughable. I can get some of them to be successful in the moment. Two weeks later none of them will remember any of it. Then there’s the third of my class that is literally in school for no reason at all, who go all day without a pencil and do no work of any kind. I never had to deal with that shit earlier on in my career. Maybe a kid or two. It’s literally a third to a half of every class now that does nothing all day. I mean that literally. Not a single stitch of work. No supplies. Nothing.

Now, this “eighth-grade level” thing is probably more a failure of journalism than it is of pedagogy; what it probably is referring to is some sort of lexile scale or something similar, where some lexile (YES AUTOCORRECT LEXILE IS A FUCKING WORD CUT THE SHIT) band has been arbitrarily assigned to “8th grade level,” and currently half of adults are below that. But you can’t tell newspaper readers that half of American adults read at lower than 1000L or whatever; it’s not meaningful information and “8th grade level” makes sense in a way “1000L” doesn’t even if the lexile level is more technically accurate.

(It’s still arbitrary, btw, but it’s nonetheless more precise.)

Anyway, long story short, I’m shit at my job apparently, and while I haven’t been able to gain access to my kids or my grade level’s results, I’m willing to bet that the school as a whole outperformed them anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to put me in a better mood.

tl;dr education is bullshit, Americans are awful and I hate it here.

On entertainment

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I spent some time earlier today contemplating what my life would be like if I stopped buying comic books, something I’ve been doing on a weekly or near-weekly basis since I was nine years old. I don’t think there’s much of a risk of this happening, mind you; it would definitely save me some money every month, probably in the $150-200 range or so, but it would also cost me the only adult interaction I have every week that isn’t work- or family-related. I really like the owners of the shop I go to and consider them friends, and in some ways it’s almost sad to consider that my most reliable relationship is one that only exists in a purely capitalistic context. It’s not like I hang out with the comic book people. They don’t come to my house or anything like that. But damn near all of my what-I’ll-call-for-the-sake-of-argument real friends live out of town now, and there are only maybe five of them anyway. So … yeah, it’s kind of a fraught decision, and not just in the context of these picture books I keep bringing home every week.

I have pretty much given up on any form of entertainment I have to leave the house for, frankly. I’ve now skipped three Marvel movies in a row and I don’t have the slightest idea what it might take to get me back into a movie theater at this point. I used to see like fifty movies a year back when I was a grad student and I talk endlessly about how much I miss that but the fact is I’ve never taken any of the opportunities I’ve had to fix it. Hell, I could see fifty movies a year from my bedroom without spending any additional money and I don’t do it. I’m still mostly enjoying the TV shows but once She-Hulk is over in a few months (?) I don’t know what they’ve got coming next and one way or another there’s nothing I’m looking forward to.

Star Wars? Pfah. I enjoyed Obi-Wan Kenobi well enough but if I never saw another Star Wars-related program again I think I’d be fine with it. Star Wars fans are the only people I hate more than I hate Marvel fans at the moment. I don’t ever want to hear another fan theory again, about anything, and despite being someone who writes reviews of things on a fairly regular basis I am really tired of other people’s opinions on things.

I dunno. This post started off maudlin and is starting to get worse, and I just came close to deleting the whole thing and replacing it with “I tried to blog but it didn’t work, sorry.” I’m gonna go shoot robots with arrows for the rest of the night. Maybe at some point I’ll watch that Joey King movie TikTok keeps telling me about; it looks entertaining. Anybody out there seen The Princess?