… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.
Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.
We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.
Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:
So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.
I have said this, or variations on this, before. But this is the type of message that bears repeating.
No human being is illegal.
I favor completely unrestricted immigration to the United States. I don’t care if you get here on a private jet or by walking across the border. I don’t care if you have “papers” or not. If you think a better life can be had by coming to America, I think you should be allowed to live here.
Immigrants are not taking anyone’s jobs. The way I know this is the kinds of jobs immigrants work are always hiring, and I don’t see anybody lining up to work them.
Immigrants are significantly less likely to be criminals than US citizens, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if we end up bringing a statistically insignificant handful of criminals along with all of the honest immigrants. We have plenty of home-grown assholes and criminals as is, and I’ll happily trade that Nazi trash creature Stephen Miller for a dozen Mexican murderers anyway. They can move into my fucking neighborhood. We’re still better off. This is the “poisoned M&M” question all over again. If the M&Ms represent human lives, I’ll eat the whole fucking bowl. I don’t give a shit.
ICE should be abolished immediately, and anyone who still works for that agency could be dropped into an active volcano with no actual loss to humanity.
Let anyone who wants to come here in, and give them a path to citizenship. If they break the law along the way treat them like anyone else who broke the law.
Immigration is an unconditional societal good. We are better off because of these people, and the people most opposed to immigration are reliably the worst among us.
I know who I stand with, and I will not apologize.
Kinda lost my mind at the office closet just now, and pulled out a trash bag worth of just the most random shit imaginable that at some point I (possibly my wife, but let’s be real) decided needed to be saved. The above is the “after” picture, and as you can see, it’s still chaos.
Spoiler alert: none of this needed to be saved. Perhaps the lowest item on that scale was the pile of greeting cards I found, all for various events– birthdays, anniversaries, thinking of you, etcetera– all of which were blank. So at some point we … acquired some surplus cards? For some reason? And then just stuck them in the closet, forever? Construction paper so old that it has faded in a lightless closet. Three books of “tracing paper” that has price tags on it that have got to be forty years old. I suspect we moved these books of tracing paper from our previous house.
I’ve been looking for a project; I’m going to liquidate this fucking closet over the next couple of days.
Anybody want a ukulele? Or, seriously, twenty longboxes of comic books? Please, someone, take my comic books.
This game made me, for the first time in quite a while, want to turn my YouTube channel back on.
I’m still not quite done with Khazan, thus the lack of a review yet. I’ve beaten it, and I want to get through New Game+ before I put it away, but I wanted a palate cleanser, something that wasn’t combat-focused and that didn’t brag about being difficult. Something chill, for lack of a better word.
How about a puzzle game about translation? How much more directly up my God damn alley could a puzzle game about linguistics possibly be? It’s unimaginable.
Here’s the premise of Chants of Sennaar: you’re the … person, of indeterminate gender and no name, in the faceless hood up there. You’re exploring what is effectively the Tower of Babel, which is occupied by five different groups of people, each of whom speak a different language. Your job is to 1) get to the top of the tower, 2) learn everybody’s languages on the way up there, and 3) get everybody to talk to each other. There’s a bit more of a story to it than that, but it’s a little on the obscure side, and gets downright weird towards the end of the game. That’s good enough as a gist.
Each language has 42 glyphs associated with it, and follows different rules as far as subject-verb order, plural marking, and other things like that. Sometimes the meaning of a glyph can be intuited by what it looks like, and one language lays glyphs on top of one another in a really neat way that, once you figure out what’s going on, lets you create glyphs correctly that you’ve never seen. Your avatar keeps pretty good notes, and glyphs are marked in your journal as you discover them while you explore. You can add your own notes to any glyph, and if you think you know what something means but haven’t proven it yet, your assumed translation will show up in a different font when you’re trying to read something, so that you can see what you’re still guessing at versus what you’ve definitely successfully translated.
(What will happen is every so often your notebook will have a page that will have three to five pictures on it, and if you match glyphs successfully to the pictures, it’ll confirm the meaning and translate that glyph automatically from then on. This will happen even if your guess at the meaning was wildly wrong. It does mean that it’s possible to brute-force your way through some translations, and there were definitely times where I was certain I knew three of the four glyphs and wasn’t sure about the remaining one, and just worked through my unknown glyphs until I got the right one.)
You will also occasionally find Rosetta Stone-style texts that will have the same thing written in more than one language, which can help you figure out new glyphs if you’ve already completed one of the two languages. This is where different word orders and different pluralization rules can really mess with your head, though, and there are two languages that use markers to make an entire sentence negative, which can also be fun. I loved this shit, y’all.
There are some non-language-related puzzles here and there, but they’re rare and generally not hugely challenging and the occasional very light stealth section; they weren’t difficult (and not very punitive when you screwed up) but I found myself kind of resenting them after a while just because they kept me from the stuff I was interested in. You’ll eventually unlock teleporters between the different levels, and you’ll be able to translate entire conversations between different groups that will cause the residents to start cooperating with each other and sometimes change things about some of the areas. These were my favorite parts, honestly.
Graphics and audio do their job; my wife commented at one point that she found the sound of my character walking around to be really satisfying, for whatever that might be worth, and the different areas are really visually distinct from one another, from a forbidding fortress area to a science lab to mines to a really futuristic area toward the very top of the tower. This took me nine hours to play through for $15, and I got a Platinum trophy out of it. I did have to consult a guide once, where I couldn’t figure out how to move forward and it turned out that I’d been meant to pick up an object that I didn’t realize I could interact with. That was it, so it really hit that sweet spot where some careful thinking could always get me past whatever obstacle had been thrown in my way.
This isn’t for everyone, I realize, but for me at least it was a hell of a game, and at just $15 you should definitely grab it if puzzlers are your thing.
As you might expect, I follow a lot of teachers on my social media accounts, especially on TikTok. And one thing I see a lot of this time of year is teachers who are being really defensive and insisting that we Don’t Really Get Summers Off, because of … I dunno, planning and continuing education and a bunch of other stuff.
I have been teaching for over twenty years, and large portions of my job are muscle memory by now. I very much have my summers off and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you think that’s unfair you are absolutely welcome to become a teacher, and if you’re not running to do that, well, you must not be that upset about my summers.
I’m a week into summer break now, and y’all, I am seriously in need of a routine or a project or some shit like that. I cannot just stare at my phone and take naps all summer long, and I am dying over here.
This has got to be Find a Project week. I’m going to a Counting Crows concert next Saturday, so that can be my reward for having a productive week, right?
I don’t remember the last time I wrote a movie review. It’s been a while, I can tell you that.(*) The thing about me reviewing movies– and if you’ve been around, you’ve seen me say this before– is that I have to guard against my own enthusiasm a lot of the time. There are plenty of times when I’ve written a movie review quickly after watching the movie and in retrospect it’s been more positive than maybe it would have been if I’d waited a few days.
Last night, after watching Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, I commented to my wife (and posted on BlueSky, I believe) that I’d have been more positive about it had I never seen From Dusk Till Dawn. And since FDtD is easily the movie’s most obvious point of comparison, let’s go straight at this: the two movies are similar enough that you could tell me Sinners was deliberately meant as a remake and I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That might feel like a slam; it’s not, as From Dusk Till Dawn is a great movie. But that’s where I was; I enjoyed Sinners quite a bit but I felt like in large part I’d seen it before.
I’m sitting here right now, fifteen or so hours later and having slept on it, wishing I’d bought the thing instead of renting it, because I want to watch it again.
Sinners is that rarest of things: a movie that’s growing on me. I think I’m just going to assume that everything Ryan Coogler makes for the rest of his life is going to be gold; Michael B. Jordan is amazing playing two of the three leads in twins Smoke and Stack,(**) and the entire supporting cast ranges from solid to outstanding– I haven’t seen Delroy Lindo in anything recently, and I could watch that man read the phone book. I’m not familiar with Wunmi Mosaku, but her Annie is tremendous, and Hailee Steinfeld disappears into her role thoroughly enough that it took a good 2/3 of the movie before I realized who she was.
(A quick word about that: apparently there are people mad about Steinfeld being cast as this character, who says at one point that her “daddy’s daddy was half Black,” which makes her an eighth Black. The fact that Americans have a word for someone who is 1/8 Black is part and parcel of how fucked up this country is, and light-skinned Black people moving away and quietly passing into the white community has been a real thing for going on two centuries in this country. Steinfeld herself is literally an eighth Black. She is the exact race of the character she portrays. Pick up a book, Goddammit.)
Anyway, I always forget to talk about the plot so let’s do that: it’s 1930-something, somewhere in Mississippi, and Jordan’s Smoke and Stack have returned to their hometown after leaving years ago, loaded with cash and guns and planning on opening a juke joint. The first half of the movie is getting ready to open, pulling everyone else into their orbit, including the actual main character, Miles Caton’s Sammie, himself an extraordinarily talented blues musician. Sammie is Smoke and Stack’s younger cousin. They open up the joint to a successful first night, and then everything goes directly to Hell in more or less exactly the same way it did in From Dusk Till Dawn, and if you haven’t seen FDtD and don’t know the twist (although they haven’t done much to hide it) I’m not going to go any further than that.
Other stuff: everyone’s praised the music, for good reason, although Buddy Guy’s 88-year-old voice coming out of Sammie’s mouth is a little odd. Guy actually shows up in person in a stinger at the end of the movie, so don’t turn it off when the credits roll, although you probably won’t be in enough of a hurry to turn it off that you’ll miss it. The movie is almost a musical but not quite. There are numbers, but they make more sense in context than, say, Alexander Hamilton randomly bursting into song.
(Okay, yeah, it’s a musical, but it’s not the type of musical that people who don’t like musicals should avoid. Just fuckin’ trust me, please, plus blues musicals are amazing, as it turns out.)
So, yeah. Two thumbs up. Check it out. But it’s only five bucks more to buy it from Amazon Prime than to rent it, so buy it; you’ll want to watch it again.
(*) It was over a year ago, and ludicrously enough, it was Abigail, which I also compared to From Dusk Till Dawn.
(**) I would not have called myself an MBJ hater, but I’ve never quite gotten the hype about the guy? I mean, he’s good, but he’s got the reputation of the second coming of Denzel Washington or something, and I haven’t seen that from him yet. Okay, y’all. I get it now. Plus, not for nothin, he’s insanely sexy in this movie. Do what you want with that information.
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