Month: September 2022

Well that was certainly a day

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

I’m not going to go into a lot of details, but one of our teachers was assaulted last night at a soccer game, and holy shit did that make for a busy day for Union Guy today. I spent all day Handling Business and then got home and sent approximately four thousand words worth of emails and now I am very much ready for a few days where I do not speak to anyone under 35 whose genetic material I was not personally responsible for.

(I get to pet giraffes on Sunday. It’s going to be a good weekend.)

The thing is, I haven’t had a bad day yet. That’s the truth. I’ve had some long ones, but we’ll hit a solid month of school next week and I haven’t written a single office referral that was actually for me. There was one issue that happened in the girls’ bathroom that I happened to be the staffer on hand for and I made it clear that I hadn’t witnessed it, and a handful of uniform violations that I don’t really give a shit about and nobody is going to pay attention to anyway. It’s September 9th and I’ve barely raised my voice. I don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s been so long since I enjoyed teaching that I don’t even trust the idea anymore.

Complete change of subject here: The current series on the channel is the supremely interesting Raji: An Ancient Epic, but that’s going to be ending on Saturday, and as of right now I’m not 100% sure what the next Let’s Play is going to be. I’m not convinced that there’s a lot of overlap between my YouTube people and my blog people, but I was considering lifting an idea from Penny Arcade and finding a super-cheap game that I didn’t know anything about every couple of weeks or so and playing it for half an hour just to see what I think of it. Some of them might turn into Let’s Plays sooner or later but the idea would be just to find something completely random and see if I could turn it into an entertaining video. If it blew up somehow I might let people suggest games. Does that sound interesting at all?

I dunno

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

As if we needed a reminder that 2016 is somehow still alive and kicking, and there are more calamities yet to come, the Queen is dead.

And I have no earthly idea how to feel about it.

As a God Damn American, of course, I don’t have to feel a thing about it. We made our feelings about monarchy well known in 1776 and in my lifetime I’ve seen no reason to revisit them, and at least for me the most intellectually interesting thing about this comes from wondering what exactly would have to take place to shut down the entire British monarchy. Twitter has been on fire all day, particularly Irish Twitter, and I have no beef with anyone who has chosen to spend their day gleefully shitting all over the entire establishment. This lady, to put it mildly, bears responsibility for a whole lot of genuinely terrible shit. I don’t need to give examples; they’re not hard to find right now.

Then again, she’s been Queen for literally my entire fucking life, and if I’m being honest I have some trouble reconciling the kindly-looking old lady in the brightly colored outfits that she has been for as long as I’ve been aware of her with the History’s Greatest Monster treatment she’s been getting online, and it’s weird to me to acknowledge the fact that it feels like we’re talking about two different people. Intellectually I know better, of course. I get that that’s a weird thing to say. But it’s how I’m reacting.

I’m not in mourning; I’m not going to miss her. I spend very, very little time thinking about the monarchy. I would be happier if it were gone, but my wife pointed out during dinner tonight that King Charles, who is 198 years old, an actual vampire, and is somehow this woman’s son, is going to be the first full-blown figurehead on the throne, and that’s kinda close enough? Take most of his money, turn Buckingham Palace into a museum, and let him cut ribbons at department store openings until he inevitably dies on the throne six months from now. But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that one of if not the most influential figures of the twentieth century passed away today, and that’s worth taking some time to reflect upon.

Woohoo! I’m mediocre!

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I have successfully solved the Speed Cube three or four times, tossing it to my son in between attempts to have him remix it, so now I can start working on memorizing patterns since I’ve got the basic vocabulary down. This was already worth the $18 or so I spent on the cube, honestly.

That’s all I’ve got at the moment. I know I’ve been boring this week; please accept my most sincere apologies for my lack of dedication. Maybe something fascinating will happen tomorrow! I have a union meeting with my boss after work that has all sorts of potential to go deeply ugly. We shall see, right? Presume positive intentions and all that.

In which I have a new hobby

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I have decided that I need something to fiddle with when I’m bored that is not my phone. So I bought one of these today:

I do not expect to become an expert, but reaching “moderately competent” would be kind of cool. I’ve mixed it up and today’s goal is to solve it once. We’ll see how it goes.

Anxiety disorder, or just stupid?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Mental health is so much fun. There is nothing like being midway through a three-day weekend and finding yourself paralyzed and indecisive about what you should be doing, not because you’re overwhelmed with work, but because you haven’t finished Sandman yet even though every second you’ve watched of it has been amazing, and She-Hulk is probably one of your favorite comic book characters of all time and she’s sitting on your desk staring at you and wondering why you don’t love her enough and haven’t watched even a single second of her show yet, and oh by the way you have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on your leg and there is no work of human literature up to and including the Bible that has had more of an impact on your life than LOTR did and oh that new show started this week and have you watched that yet no you have not. How the hell am I eighteen hours behind on TV?

It is just amazing to be freaking out because you are so behind on things and what you are “behind on” is fucking television. Also I haven’t showered yet today, I’m halfway through like fifteen genuinely minor tasks that would take probably two minutes each to accomplish, and I need to write a blog post and record an episode or two of Raji: An Ancient Epic because like an idiot I found a way to make video games into an unpaid job.

An example of those minor tasks: there is a box behind me, maybe five feet away. That box is full of action figures and crap that I took off of my desk because I decided it was starting to look super cluttered and I only wanted it to look a little cluttered. I took a bunch of stuff off, put it in the box, and then put the box behind me, intending to move it into the closet in this room. We are talking about opening a closet door and moving the box ten feet. It might not even be that far.

The box has been sitting there for at least a week and a half.

There are three credit cards sitting on my desk that have been here for months. They need to be moved into my safe. The safe is locked and on a shelf down the hall. Months.

I’m really psyched about tomorrow. Why? Because I plan to spend all day at my computer getting shit done for work that didn’t get done before school started, so now that we’re about to start Week Four I probably ought to, like, get some vocabulary words up on the wall. Tomorrow at this time I expect to be happy at the amount of stuff I got done during the day, including a truly impressive pile of grading.

But that box? It’s still gonna be there.

Your what now?

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

My son’s eleventh birthday party was today, and he and his friends from Hogwarts had a laser tag party. This note from one of said friends was tucked into a card, and I would love to know if that kid’s mom vetted the note or not.

Either way I think I’m kinda scared.

Monthly Reads: August 2022

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

For a whole lot of reasons, August wasn’t a stellar month for reading, both in the amount of it that I did and the quality of the books that I was reading, but the Book of the Month was still pretty damn good: The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, by Dean Jobb. Ken Liu’s Speaking Bones wasn’t eligible because I’m less than a third of the way through it, and since it’s a thousand fucking pages long I expect next month’s stack to look short as well.