The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Not really, actually— l have spent most of tonight in a towering rage that I have not been able to shake. Everything is pissing me off and I can’t do the sensible thing and just stay off of the one social media account I have left because it’s the main contributor to the free-floating anger.
I wonder what being an emotionally intelligent adult might be like? I should try it.
The road trip went successfully yesterday, and while it was a tremendously long day– five hours of driving, half of it in the dark, is never fun for me– I do get to say for the first time in my life that my Thanksgiving dinner involved fresh squid-ink pasta, so that alone justified the entire trip.
I spent all day today reading this book here– the last 350 pages or so, to be exact– and while Iron Flame is significantly better than Fourth Wing in virtually every respect, I still feel like if I spend a lot of time talking about it, much like the first book, I will spend almost the entire review complaining and then tell you that I can’t wait for the next installment. I know, fundamentally, that that doesn’t make any sense, and yet it’s true.
The dialogue and the writing, in general, is much improved in this book over the previous one, but there are still a ton of decisions that Yarros makes throughout the course of the book that I just fundamentally don’t understand, and the worldbuilding still feels incoherent, but that’s due largely to the first book. Which maybe I should have reread? I dunno, but the main conflicts of the book still feel largely fuzzy to me in a way that I don’t think they should after eleven hundred pages of narrative, and one of the characters is kept as a gun on the wall for far too damn long and, to overextend the metaphor, when she is finally fired at the end of the book, I’m still not a hundred percent clear on how or why. I know that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, but I’m trying to not get into spoilery details here.
What this series does manage to do is be compelling enough that I don’t want to put it down, and Yarros excels at the sort of Dan Brown-esque one more chapter pacing that virtually guarantees that I’m going to rip through your book at maximum speed. I don’t care about the flaws at this point; I’m in for the next book, and when book three comes out I might go ahead and make the time to reread Fourth Wing and Iron Flame first so that I can definitely blame the book and not my own lack of reading comprehension/detail memory if something feels underbaked.
And again, much like the first book, if you’re reading all that and are unsure about whether I just told you to read this, well, yeah. I don’t know either.
So, uh … the winter NWEA went pretty damn well. I’m cherrypicking here, of course, as this class provided my most impressive results, but four of the six looked pretty damn good and the other two weren’t necessarily bad, just not impressive.
The rest of the week was a damn mess; I had a stomach bug that kept me out Tuesday afternoon (I actually cut out at lunch!) and Wednesday, and of course the two days of testing, and today was just chock full of drama for some reason, but I survived it. Tomorrow I have to drive to the northern suburbs of Chicago and back, which I’m … less than fully enthused about– I want to see my brother and his family but I’m impatiently awaiting some sort of Goddamn bullet train between my house and his that would make it unnecessary for me to actually drive. Then I spend Sunday as a melted puddle on the couch and two more days to Thanksgiving break.
And that’s really all I’ve got. Brainmelt and travel. But hey, at least I look like I’m good at my job.
The Marvels didn’t make much money over the weekend, at least by Marvel Movie standards, and … well, I feel the need to report that not even the big-screen debuts of two of my favorite Marvel characters of all time was enough to get me into the theater. I keep finding more ways to be surprised that I’m done, and there’s still a chance that we’ll see it over Thanksgiving break, but … yeah.
In other news, my son was sick last week with a stomach bug, so guess what I’ve been doing for the last 48 hours?
I swear to you that I woke up in a cold sweat at 3:17 in the morning last night, unable to remember whether I had written a blog post or not, and had to check my phone and confirm that yes, I had managed to deliberately skip a Saturday update and then accidentally miss a Sunday, and then fell back asleep and managed to have a nightmare about missing the meeting that I had to go to for work this morning. I did not miss the meeting, although I did manage to oversleep a little bit and then dragassed my way to work, making myself one of the last people to actually arrive for the thing.
Which … whatever, no one cares so long as you show up within the first 10 minutes or so.
Today was kind of a momentous anniversary; while it’s not literally a calendar year according to the date, I started at my new job on the Monday before Thanksgiving week last year, and this is the Monday before Thanksgiving week. I continue to believe that taking this job ranks among the smarter decisions I’ve made in my lifetime, and in all honesty the last year or so has finally been clearly trending upward after a whole lot of years in a row that I had described as the worst year of my life.
This is gonna be a weird week; we have NWEA testing tomorrow and Thursday mornings, and Wednesday morning there is a big choir practice that will take a fairly large number of my kids away for the morning. The combination of both in the same week, especially knowing that next week is only two days, has made planning … tricky. We’re starting slope this week, a topic so complicated and fraught that talking about it in public caused a man to threaten my Canadian teaching license several years ago. Hopefully it goes better for me this time; I miss teaching in Canada.
I have rediscovered my previous blog theme, or something close enough to it that it doesn’t matter, and I welcome you to Lovecraft II: The Lovecraftening, only with different colors and I’m probably going to spend some more time this weekend continuing to tweak things until I’m fully satisfied. I was looking for something earth-toned and everything is coming out too saturated, along with other bits of fiddling I want to do, so we’re not quite there yet. I also don’t like how this theme handles Featured Photos, which I never used before, so I need to go back through my last several posts and turn all of those off if I’m going to keep with a recolored Lovecraft.
The funny thing is that if I’d been able to figure out how to make that “trending” section at the bottom of the previous theme into something that was actually highlighting popular posts, I’d probably have ended up keeping it.
So, yeah, the other thing, and if you’re thinking about telling me that the previous two paragraphs don’t count as an anecdote you are both 1) right and 2) in need of shutting up. One way or another I’m using it as a lead-in to two things that happened this week: one, that there was a SWAT action in the town I teach in now where the cops stormed a house, filling it with tear gas and doing a ton of damage in the process, killing the owner of the house in the process.
The owner? Grandfather of one of my students, who was in the house at the time and has not been seen at school since. He may have to change schools now, since Grandpa’s house is no longer suitable for habitation and Mom does not live in our district.
Second, I have reached the absolute shit worst of milestones as an urban public school teacher, as I found out yesterday that yet another former student was murdered earlier this year– I have to be up to double digits for dead former students this year– and that, for the first time, it was another former student who murdered him. I have a handful of convicted murderers among my former students, and more who have died to gun violence, but this was the first incident where both the victim and the murderer were former students, and while my memory doesn’t retain this level of detail it’s entirely possible that they were in the same class.
Great week.
For some reason, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately. I am, to be clear, perfectly happy with my stupid little Alien Green Kia Soul– it is a comfortable drive and the car is reliable and gets me where I want to go. I’ve had to replace the tires and the battery since buying it, as well as some brake work if I remember correctly, but nothing that doesn’t fall squarely under routine and expected maintenance, although I suppose I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of warning that the battery was about to shit out on me.
The plan has always been to hold on to this car until my son is old enough to drive and then to give it to him. He’s 12, so that’s still four years off, and I feel confident that the car still has a good 8 to 10 years left in it at least, assuming that everything doesn’t suddenly fall apart at once. So I am not in any meaningful way in the market for a new car right now, and that’s not going to change, absent some sort of disaster that requires me to get a new car.
Anyway, point is, at the moment all of this is purely theoretical. However, I find, the more that I think about it, that I really want my next car to be a Nice Car. And in looking around and trying to decide on what I mean by “Nice Car,” I’m discovering that most of what I find myself idly looking at ends up around the $45-55K range.
My current car cost me $16000 and is the most expensive vehicle I’ve ever owned. So this would represent a bit of an upgrade. I’m literally considering going from a Kia to a Lexus or a Mercedes.
Will I be able to afford it? Maybe. It’s gonna depend on how good I can be with my money once I murder all of my non-mortgage debt during this school year, which– again, knock on wood, absent any disasters– feels pretty thoroughly doable, especially now that I’m getting paid for this overload.
(My first post-overload check is tomorrow. Am I excited? Hell yes.)
So, he said, having taken six paragraphs to get to the fucking point, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot, and I’ve been paying closer attention to the cars I’ve been driving past while I’ve been on the road, and just kind of noticing what I notice, if that makes any sense and I hope it does.
And in the process I’ve been wondering about car logos. How many of these do you recognize?
Some of them have words in them, of course– you’re not going to screw up Ford or Volvo’s logos, and some of them have pretty clear letters in them, although the H in the Hyundai logo is pretty stylized, and the L in Lexus’ logo in the featured photo could probably be mistaken for an ordinary acute angle. But at least half of those don’t have any clear connection to the name of the company they represent.
The point: Why do car companies use logos like this, and — to my knowledge at least, and I’m willing to be proven wrong — no other category of corporation that I can think of? I mean:
With only a very few exceptions– Windows and Shell, and Shell’s icon is a shell— there’s damn near nothing on there that doesn’t have at least some text in it. Computer companies, maybe might be more likely to use abstract logos, but not as rigorously as car companies do. So what’s the deal here? Why are car companies, specifically, so likely to use such abstract logos? I mean, every company has a story behind their logo, and I admit I didn’t notice the T in the Toyota logo until reading about it today, but I can’t find any reason why cars and more or less only cars tend to use wizard sigils instead of readable logos like a sensible company.
I need a historian of marketing. Help me out here.
The boy had a field trip to Chicago today, and we had more parent-teacher conferences somehow, and work was exhausting, and now it’s 7:45 and everything is pulled together for tomorrow and I’m going to go hang out with my family for a bit. Enjoy the large-format astronomy picture that has absolutely nothing to do with this post and the excerpt that will likely use most of it. 🙂
(Discovers he can limit the length of the excerpt)
(Hits publish, discovers that feature doesn’t seem to work)
(Figures it out)
Well, enjoy the picture, anyway.
Okay, one more thing: I like the idea of a “trending” set of posts on the front page, but right now it’s just displaying my last four posts? I had the idea that maybe after a few days it would figure out what the most “trending” posts were, but … not so much. Anybody know enough about the theme editor to have any suggestions at all? Because I cannot figure this shit out to save my life.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 