Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.
I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.
So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.
Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.
Every shirt I have that is okay to wear to work is at least three years old, so I’m starting to face the uncomfortable truth that I’m going to have to do some clothes shopping before this school year starts.
(Fun fact: I have two polo shirts that date back to my first teaching job. They are twenty-five years old. They somehow still fit and they do not, in any way, look their age. I promise I’d have tossed them by now if they had gotten ratty.)
Anyway, the tl;dr of this post is that it’s astonishing how many clothes websites are scams, and I came across an especially crispy example of the genre today. I’ve been scammed twice by clothing websites before, and I’m at the point now where before I order from any website I’m not familiar with I Google the name of the site and look for drama. If I find it, they don’t get my money. I saw a shirt I liked in an ad on a website I go to a lot (honestly, I’m at the point where “advertises on websites” is a reason to suspect fuckery is afoot) and clicked on it, and it wasn’t twenty seconds later before I decided the site was a joke.
That shirt above isn’t the shirt I clicked on, but take a look at that picture. There is no fucking way that’s a picture of a real shirt. Like, I’m not bothered by the idea that they might have dropped a model in front of a beach; that’s whatever, but that entire image is AI, and it’s not even fucking good AI. Look at the bottom seam of the shirt. It looks like plastic, and the colors on the entire thing are way too saturated to be real. The collar looks suspicious as hell, too.
This is so obviously a scam– and, upon doing my due diligence, the clothes ship direct from China, because of course they do– that I’m honestly tempted to order that shirt just to compare whatever I get– some cobwebs in a Zip-Loc bag is my guess– to the original image.
Shopping for clothing online, at least for anything more complicated than a T-shirt, was already ludicrous for a whole host of reasons, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m going to have to refuse to shop anywhere other than Amazon or brick and mortar places, and there aren’t a lot of brick and mortar places left that carry my size that aren’t ludicrously expensive.
Slightly related, I got an email from my district earlier today that spirit wear for 2025-26 was available, and went to take a look. Feel free to look around on the site for me bitching about my salary; I know there are plenty of issues with teacher pay, but I personally feel like I’m well-compensated for my work, but they still don’t pay me enough that I’m going to drop $60 on a fuckin’ polo shirt. If I’m wearing a shirt with the logo of the organization I work for, that shirt should be cheap or free. Not more expensive than any other shirt of that style I own.
Anyway, point is, you’ll get a post soon enough where I’m bitching about clothes I actually bought, instead of websites that expect me to send them money so they can send me a bag of ebola. Something for y’all to look forward to.
On the right, my five-year-old chair. Or the middle, if you’re counting the half of my wife’s inferior desk chair that you can see. On the left, the new hotness, ready for duty.
Again, I haven’t bothered to, like, dust, or de-cat-hair or anything like that, but the old chair is still in perfect shape, after five years of daily use. I couldn’t be happier with this company’s products, y’all.
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
You should play this game, regardless of how much time I spend dwelling on its mistakes in this review. Despite the … uh … let’s go with unwieldy name (“Clair Obscur” just means “light dark” in French, which is not better) this is a smart, tremendously well put-together game with a great story and impressive game mechanics that stumbles in an equally impressive fashion at the end. It’s turn-based, which is normally a sign for me to stay far away from a game, but it manages to throw in a few mechanics that depend on timing and skill anyway– your characters can parry or dodge attacks and there are a couple of other special attacks that you can avoid in specific ways as well. Dodge everything and you won’t take any damage; parrying successfully can lead to automatic counter-attacks. If people haven’t started doing no-damage or even no-attack runs on this game yet, they will be soon.
But the most impressive thing about Expedition 33 is its story, and I’m not telling you a damn thing about it other than the game is set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic France, except it’s not, and even the reason it’s not really set in post-apocalyptic France is a whopper of a spoiler, so I’m not going to say anything about it. Usually when a game is set specifically in a non-English-speaking culture I’ll do the audio in that language, but there are a couple of big names in the English voice acting team and I’d recommend you stick with that.
There were at least two times in this game where story developments knocked me flat on my ass. Prior to playing this, the most jaw-dropping moment I’d ever encountered in a video game’s story was the “would you kindly” moment in Bioshock, which came out in 2007. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, find something that can play Bioshock and get on that. Right now.)
At any rate, the Bioshock moment held a record for 18 years. The first moment in Expedition 33 held its record until the second moment. The game’s story is going to rip your heart out and stomp on it, more than once. Be prepared for that.
On a technical level, it’s one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played, particularly in its renditions of the game’s people. Everyone looks great, and the facial expressions especially are masterfully done. There’s a moment in the final battle where I think the game really wants you to notice someone having second thoughts without drawing direct attention to it, and it’s just incredibly well-done. The characters are memorable, and Esquie, who is a giant sentient balloon-thing who basically acts as transportation for your group, is probably the most adorable character I’ve ever seen in a video game before.
Here’s the problem, though: The game has three acts, and the story is effectively over at the end of Act 2. All you have to do at that point is go beat the main boss, and the game tells you exactly where to go to find that person. You are probably already leveled up enough to be able to get the job done, too. But there is a huge amount of content left– you’re no more than 50% of the way through the available locations and the handful of collection objectives the game has cannot be completed before the end of Act 2. The problem is, with no story left to get you to go anywhere, you’re either just grinding until you get bored or kind of flailing about because suddenly most of the “new” areas are way too tough for you. And that’s a damn shame. I ended up beating the game because I didn’t want to play anymore, and that’s not how this game should have ended. On top of that, because of the amount of extra stuff I’d done and some fiddling with optimizing my characters, when I finally got to the final boss I beat the shit out of him because he was scaled to be able to fight him right after completing Act 2. The climactic battle of this great game was over in no time because I was so overpowered– and had I maxed out my character’s available levels (I wasn’t even close) it would have been so much worse. I hadn’t even found the best available weapons for two of my five, and the ones I had weren’t fully leveled up. I never even found the materials necessary to hit max level on weapons, and beating the boss before that happens is nuts.
The pacing in this game is really unforgivable, and it’s amazing to me that no one caught it in play testing. All they would have had to do is move some of the major story beats back a bit, or given Esquie the ability to fly earlier in the game– he gets it automatically at the end of Act 2, but again, if you want, the game is effectively over at that point. And it’s a damn shame to be thinking that a game is a shoo-in for Game of the Year for the first two acts and then beat it because you’re bored five or six hours later.
So yeah: mostly successful, and hugely successful at what it’s good at, but with that one huge caveat you should be aware of. Play it anyway.
I didn’t sleep well last night, took a long nap in the afternoon, dinner was the first meal of the day and it isn’t sitting well, and I think I’m going to bed soon. Game review tomorrow.
There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.
Maybe?
That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?
Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.
That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.
Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.
(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)
(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)
(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)
I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.
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