We did some work this month. Several of those are new but I feel like the page count is still way lower than last time.
Month: June 2023
I hate taking two days off in a row
… but it’s kind of been a rough day. I got some bad family news that I don’t particularly want to talk about yet and the Supreme Court already had me in a misanthropic mood (and we’ll see if it gets worse tomorrow) so proof of life and hitting Publish it shall be this evening.
I get emails
I just got an email from a company that makes “prone pillows,” supposedly designed specifically for use while lying down. They are meant to be ergonomic and I am not convinced the engineers behind the pillow have ever heard of fat people.
They are offering a “collaboration opportunity” involving me writing about their pillow and giving me a discount code that I can pass on to my readers, who they assure me are the perfect demographic for their product. Given that I have no demographic data for my readers of any kind, I find this assertion fascinating.
What say thee, readers? Should I see if I can get a free pillow out of these folks, and then review it for you?
What a weird day
My day started with a visit to my dermatologist, who is a lovely person. I only have a dermatologist because I asked my doctor once to check out a mole that is located on my back and squarely in the middle of a tattoo; she made me a referral out of an excess of caution and since then once a year in June or July I get way closer to naked than I’m comfortable with in a room sometimes containing as many as three other people (only two, this time) and they pore over damn near every inch of me– way too much, one way or another– with those little flashlights dermatologists use. As of yet there have been no issues, and as I don’t encounter the sun unless absolutely necessary, skin cancer really isn’t very high on my list of health concerns. My dad has had a few suspect moles removed, I think, but I have considerably fewer moles than he does.
When she came in today, I referred to my visits with her as the most awkward fifteen minutes of my year, which is a virtual guarantee that my regular doctor will insist on a prostate exam when I see her in July. Stand by for that one; it’ll be fun for everybody.
The rest of my day was taken up with interviews for the open assistant principal position at my school. I haven’t fully written out all of the rules for the Assistant Principal Interview Drinking Game, but if you sip every time you hear the word relationships and finish your drink whenever you hear servant leader, you will be fucking dead by the end of the game. This is the second round of first round interviews, since the first time around we went to two different people and offered them the job and they both went elsewhere, so we had to start the search over. I think we had two really solid candidates out of the batch, so hopefully one of them ends up still being available at the end of the week when we make an offer.
Also, if you get asked “What would you do if you witnessed one student bullying another student,” and your reaction is to freeze for ten seconds while you consider your answer to this utter fucking softball of a question, you may consider yourself instantly eliminated from the competition. You had to know there were questions about bullying coming. Had to.
Anyway, now I’m exhausted. I conked out on the couch for about half an hour after I got home, then got up and had dinner, and now that my Computer Tasks are done for the night. Tomorrow morning is another four hours of meetings with the honors teachers and then I think I’ve got the rest of the week to myself.
On expertise, again
I wrote the other day– I’m not going to link to it, it was literally two or three days ago; I have faith in your ability to find it– that I was generally pro-expertise in all areas but that I didn’t feel it was strictly necessary to be an “expert” in anything beyond basic biology and physics to have a decent idea of what happened to the Titan submersible, and as it turns out more or less everything I thought had happened in that situation had, in fact, happened.
Over the course of the last 48 hours there has been what appears to be an attempted coup in Russia, and I am staying so far away from commenting on that that you can’t even see it from here. I know nothing relevant to Russian politics other than a tenuous grasp on the geography and the names of a few of the major players, which is to say I know nothing at all, I have no comment, and I really don’t even know who to recommend that might count as authoritative. So if you were wondering where my line was, apparently “international politics” is it.
In which I swear this is a coincidence
It looks like my predictions about the Titan sub were correct; those men were dead before they had any idea anything was wrong, which given the circumstances is absolutely and undeniably the best way to go. I swear to you that what I am about to talk to you about is an utter coincidence and has nothing to do with the sub. I swear.(*)
I thought this was going to be the summer of Diablo IV, and I’m starting to think, having beaten the main story and unlocked the third (of four) difficulty tiers today, that I’m getting bored with it. Not because it isn’t a good game, or at least it is a perfect exemplar of the kind of game that it wants to be. It’s a really really good loot-based ARPG! It just turns out that I think loot-based ARPGs are kind of boring, or at least that they’re best in not-very-large doses.
No, it’s looking like this may be the summer of Subnautica, which is an older game– originally released all the way back in 2014, although this is an updated version– that I have been avoiding for no real reason. A whole lot of people have told me to play Subnautica over the years, and I basically only started paying the thing because I don’t really have much else to play at the moment that’s new so I may as well check out an older game. It’s technically a survival/resource-gathering/base-building type of game, and those usually leave me cold, but this one is really well done, and also allows you to play the game either with or without having to worry about food and water. I tried a few episodes where I could starve and die of thirst and it was annoying, so I turned them off and started over, and I’ve been having a much better time with it since then.
The premise? Your spacecraft crash-lands on an unknown alien aquatic world. Good luck! Try and stay alive. I’m having a blast.
If you’re wondering if this is going to turn out to be another plug for my YouTube site, the answer is yes, although I wanted to talk about the game anyway, so it all works out fine. Check out the playlist– Episode 3 dropped today, and I just recorded Episode 12, so I’m way ahead– right here.
(*) The series is actually doing quite well so far, relatively speaking, and … oh, God, it’s not because of that, is it?
GET OUT OF MY HEAD
I have linked to Disturbed’s version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” several times on this site. I love it. I think it’s better than the original.
I found out yesterday that they have also covered Genesis’ Land of Confusion, which … I was unprepared for. So of course I’m going to share it with all of you. Partially because it’s actually good and partially because it’s been rent-free in my head and on constant repeat and I want it out.
And, of course, since the original version was also a hell of a video, the Genesis version:
Otherwise, I’m finding myself in a bit of a mood tonight, so this is all you get tonight. I fully expect to discover Disturbed has covered My Heart Will Go On sometime in the next week or so.
In which things are happening
I just want to talk about the news tonight, which you should understand to mean “I want to say things I already said on Twitter earlier today, but I want to use more words.” There were two big stories today; the missing Titanic submersible, and Hunter Biden pleading guilty to a couple of minor tax violations and a gun charge of some sort.
Let’s start with the easier story. I don’t care about Hunter Biden. If Hunter Biden is a criminal of some sort, convict and punish him for his crimes. I’m fine with that, and it doesn’t affect my opinion of Joe Biden, particularly since Dad appears to be going to great pains to get the hell out of the way. There is an argument being made out there that Hunter is actually being treated more harshly than, just for example, someone who hadn’t been targeted endlessly by the entire Republican Party for the last five years, might have been. I, myself, have turned my taxes in late before, although I think in Biden’s case the issue was he didn’t pay taxes at all for two years. I’m unclear on what the deal is with the gun charge although apparently it’s just going to be dealt with somehow. Whatever.
You might think, knowing the– ahem– basic outlines of my politics, that I might be pissed about Hunter Biden being held to a higher standard than most Americans while, oh, I dunno, some other president’s son-in-law can accept two billion dollars from the Saudis the minute his father-in-law leaves office and nobody does anything about it. I am, and this is probably obvious, still pissed about the other thing, but honestly? I’m a teacher and I’m well and Goddamned used to the idea that ethically and legally I get held to a higher standard than most people because of my job. I really don’t have a problem with the idea that the progeny of public officials need to keep their noses cleaner than most. One way or another it doesn’t appear that dude is going to jail. He’ll be fine. I’m not pressed about it.
I genuinely hope that the five men aboard the Titan are dead. That probably sounds mean, but the simple fact is that I don’t think there is any chance of them being rescued and it is therefore better for them to have died in some sort of explosive decompression incident, where they likely would have gotten little to no warning of what was about to happen and they didn’t have time for any of it to hurt. Because the alternatives are all terrifying. There is literally nothing they can do inside that thing to save themselves, and while there is a slight chance that the vehicle has managed to make it to the surface and will be found, it seems like there’s a really good chance that the process of heading for the surface would have killed them anyway, and dying from the bends, from what I understand, is fucking awful.
The other option, of course, is that four men who have gone their entire lives not being told “no” very much and the pilot of the vessel are trapped in pitch black, with little to no food and no bathroom facilities, slowly getting colder and colder– the ocean is fucking cold, and it seems reasonable to think that dying of hypothermia at that depth is a genuine danger, and could happen before asphyxiation, depending on a bunch of variables I have no access to– sitting in what amounts to a tin can with no seats and unable to get away from each other. The part of my brain that writes and reads horror stories is pretty certain that there has already been some unimaginable violence inside that tin can, if it’s the case that the submersible lost power or got stuck somehow. I would be shocked if they were rescued. I would be even more shocked if they were rescued and at least one of the five hadn’t been murdered.
There has been some other discourse on Twitter about how everyone on the internet has suddenly become an expert in deep-sea diving, which, on one hand, isn’t entirely without merit, and on the other hand, as someone with no relevant expertise of any kind, I don’t feel like anything that I’ve said really constitutes any kind of leap that an actual expert wouldn’t make, and the places where I could be wrong– maybe however far down it traveled before losing contact with the surface isn’t deep enough for the pressure to crush the ship, or maybe carbon nanotubes insulate really well and hypothermia isn’t a realistic problem. I could be wrong about those things.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it? The only way they’re getting rescued is if they’re bobbing around on the surface right now and they are found before they run out of air, and the prospect of running out of air while floating on the surface is a breathtaking bit of irony.
I didn’t mean to put that pun there, by the way, but now that I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in.
One way or another, though, the basic variables don’t seem to be all that complicated. I am, in general, pro expertise of all kinds, and I wish I knew more about literally everything than I do. And maybe I know so little about this that I don’t even recognize the degree to which I’m wrong; if you don’t quite understand what I mean by that, argue with someone about evolution sometime. So, yeah, I am no kind of expert at all, and I could theoretically be wrong about a whole lot of shit, but as near as I can tell most of the shit I could be wrong about just makes it suck more, and I’m absolutely certain that I know enough about human nature to be deeply worried about what’s happening inside that submersible if they’re still alive.
Anyway, I’m off to play Subnautica, a game about deep-sea exploration, and a game I had planned to start playing this week before I knew any of this was happening. It’s a coincidence, I swear.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 