Compulsive masturbator and God-botherer Mike Johnson is, according to this brief but hilarious CNN article, having trouble convincing fellow Republicans to come to the House GOP retreat scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday. Part of the problem, apparently, is that Johnson, who is so addicted to porn that he and his son share an app so that they can monitor each other’s special dinkie times, has booked a deliberately “family-friendly” resort in West Virginia for the retreat. The article does not explicitly say that the House members are pissed because they prefer their hookers to have more teeth than facial sores, but it comes awfully close for something from the mainstream media.
I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.
Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.
Got home from work, sat down in a recliner, and then it was two hours later and my eyes were stuck shut. It’s possible that I should go to bed early tonight.
I haven’t reviewed a video game in forever, for a whole bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that that for a long time I was saving that for the YouTube channel, and– perhaps more saliently– it’s been forever since I actually beat anything. My gaming backlog, assuming I’m going back to anything that I started and put down, is literally longer than it’s ever been before, and contains some genuinely good games that I just stopped playing for no good fucking reason and moved, ADHD-style, on to the next shiny thing. I quit playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because it depressed me, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Armored Core 4, and a couple of others are also out there, and I’ve also downloaded The Surge and Sifu for cheap-as-hell and free, respectively, and not touched them yet. It’s too damn much, I tell you! Too much!
I started playing Nobody Saves the World because I’d hit a section of Prince of Persia that my platform skills weren’t up to par with without a lot of practicing and I wasn’t in the mood to beat my head against a wall any longer. Also, I thought I had downloaded a demo, but apparently I bought the entire game, I assume on the cheap, and then … forgot? But I played an hour and a half or so before realizing that I’d accidentally started a whole-ass new game and wasn’t playing a demo, and by then I was stuck. And I don’t mind being stuck, because this is a hella fun game, with its only real drawback being that it’s impossible to stop playing and it took up more of my life than I wanted it to on more than one occasion.
See all those characters up there? With the exception of the wizard Nostramagus, who is the only one with eyes, they’re all you, including the egg. At the beginning of the game, Nobody– a pasty white humanoid who looks more or less like the Pillsbury Doughboy without his clothes, and who, entertainingly, doesn’t appear in the above image– gets a magic wand that lets him change shape. You start off being able to turn into a rat, and over the course of the game gain a ton of other shapes, including a bee, a dragon, a robot, and the aforementioned egg. Each form has its own abilities and powers, most of which can be readily swapped between shapes, so by the end of the game you might be using the Dinosaur but have added the Slug’s mucus trail (seriously) to his abilities and also be borrowing a passive ability from the Bodybuilder that lets you knock enemies back further than you might have before. Everything, and I mean everything, is upgradable, and one of the reasons the game is so hard to put down is that there’s always a reason to play another three minutes– you’re either right on the cusp of gaining a level or a new form or a new power for a form or there’s a dungeon over there that’s ripe for pillaging or you just figured out how to solve a puzzle halfway across the map that requires the power you just unlocked, or or or or or.
It’s kind of repetitive, and at 25 hours for a damn-near completist run I’d say maybe don’t shoot for a completist run, but there’s a world out there to be saved and you’re the doughboy to do it, one way or the other. The art style is lovely and the music is burned into my brain rather unpleasantly and the sense of humor throughout is really great.
My recommendation: Go wander through a big crowd until you get Covid and an excuse to stay home for a week (Screw you, CDC!) and then download this (it’s apparently inexpensive) and go to town.
I was a big fan of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson’s Shadows of the Short Days, which made my Top 11 Books list last year. The sequel has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get to it for a minute, and I just finished it tonight, and …
… well, I’m kinda torn. Shadows got tons of comparisons to China Miéville, and Storm has been as well, but this one isn’t Miéville so much as it is pure Lovecraft. Like, it’s a book-length Icelandic reimagining of Mountains of Madness; there are byakhee and Elder Things and what amounts to a Deep Ones cult and a talking brain in a jar and unnamable colors and fungi from Yuggoth. It’s so overt that I don’t understand how anyone managed to miss it.
That’s not a complaint, mind you, as I remain an unabashed fan of Lovecraft’s mythos despite the fact that the man himself was the worst kind of trash. And this is absolutely good nu-Lovecraft, which is something I’d like to see more of. But there’s no escaping the fact that one of my favorite things about the first book was its breathtaking uniqueness compared to everything else on my shelves, and this book is a lot of things, but “breathtakingly unique” isn’t one of them.
It also ends strangely, with the climax a good hundred pages before the end of the book and then a leap forward by a decade or so, and while it very well could be my fault for trying to read after getting home from work on a Friday I felt like the last part of the book was somewhat incoherent and unnecessary. I’ve only said this once before, but when you hit that time jump, if you’re not a hundred percent invested, you can probably get away with putting the book down at that point. It’s not quite as severe as the quality drop in Seveneves— I’ve never seen anything else that has been– but it’s jarring and more than a little under explained.
(There’s another connection with Seveneves, actually; take a close look at the cover.)
And it’s at this point where I realize that I’m in paragraph five and I haven’t mentioned the plot yet, but really, you already know. If you liked the first book and you like Miéville and Lovecraft and don’t mind a lot of Icelandic vocabulary you ought to pick this up. Hell, if you haven’t read the first book you can probably get away with reading this one anyway, as the connections to the first book aren’t as strong as you might generally expect. It’s a loose sequel, and saying more would constitute spoilers, but I think it works as a standalone.
I deleted my TikTok account last night, because I can’t take it anymore. Or, at least, I sort of did; if I log back into TikTok in the next thirty days it will reactivate the account, and I have never managed to take a 30-day break from the service, so I don’t have high hopes, especially since my wife has already told me she misses sharing videos with me.*
This leaves a sad, neglected LinkedIn account under my real name as my sole social media presence.
Also, if you were wondering (no one was wondering) if I was going to watch and/or react to the State of the Union tonight … no. No, I am not. I’m going to go sit on the couch with a book until it’s time to go to bed, and then that book and I will go to bed.
(*) Yeah, yeah, the government is trying to ban TikTok again. I wish a motherfucker would. I continue to maintain it’ll never happen.
I have paid less attention to this election, at least in writing, than any election since probably Bush/Gore. The reasons are probably pretty obvious; first, that the outcome is more or less predetermined no matter what foolish children on TikTok or Dean Phillips think and second, I don’t enjoy the existential horror that rears up every time I contemplate the idea of the Beast getting a second crack at the White House. It doesn’t help that I’m holding firm to my stance that I Know Nothing About Politics, and it also doesn’t help that the polls seem to be pretty clearly saying one thing, and every other aspect of reality appears to be saying another thing, and those two things are not the same.
(Almost starts a rant, aborts)
Anyway. Today was an e-learning/meetings day, and tomorrow and Friday both ought to be pretty calm. Ought to; we’ll see, as e-learning days can really screw up the rhythm of the week and it’s entirely possible that I’m going to get a loud and annoying Monday-Tuesday cycle (Tuesday is reliably the worst behavior day of the week) for the second time this week instead of the usually more sedate and chill Thursday-Friday. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
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