But I’m tired and my eyes hurt and I want to finish reading a book anyway. Which may not be good for my eyes but damn it they need to do their jobs.
See you tomorrow, probably.
This was almost a politics post
…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.
Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:
Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:
The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?
Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.
Some quick book reviews
In April of last year, I reviewed Laura R. Samotin’s The Sins on their Bones, which I was sent an eArc of by a publicist. I liked it enough that I finished it in six hours and immediately ordered a physical copy of it, and while it’s been sitting on my shelves for a minute or two, I got the sequel on release day as well.
And … well, I could literally rewrite the previous review more or less word for word for this book. I finished The Lure of their Graves in an hour before going to sleep last night and a few hours across this morning and afternoon– less than a day, easily– and if I talk about it much it’s going to seem like I hated it. My gripes about the first book still apply to the sequel; everyone’s obviously Jewish but the word “Jewish” never appears; Russian only exists for the phrase moy tzar, the main character is kind of a lot, the characters in the book are supposed to be the main figures of a government but come off more like a grad school polycule, etc, etc. I’m slightly revising my initial “holy shit, this book is gay as hell” assessment; it’s gay as hell, but what it actually is is a world where literally everyone is bisexual. Sexual orientation and possibly even sexual preference effectively doesn’t exist. Dmitri Alexeyev, the Tzar from the first book (and still the tzar of the second, although he’s never going to feel like a ruler of anything at all) spends most of the book trying to decide who he should marry to keep his country and the surrounding lands stable, and the three main candidates are a man, a woman, and a nonbinary person who makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that they are willing to swing any direction the vine can get to.
Also, I genuinely don’t get the title. It’s possible that I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.
That said, once again I enjoyed the hell out of this book and I will be reading more from Laura Samotin in the future. Yes, I know I just did nothing but complain. I contain multitudes. Deal with it.
I apparently didn’t review K.M. Enright’s Mistress of Lies when I read it back in July, but I liked it quite a lot, and I finished the sequel, Lord of Ruin, yesterday, and because any time I read a Laura Samotin book I have to have weird synchronicity with the book before it, it’s also super gay and involves a spymaster and a king and an attempt at a rebellion and a fair amount of explicit sex, although this one also involves the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered in a book (Oh, and the book before this, Coffin Moon, also involved vampires, so we’re all about the themes recently) and a Polynesian monstrosity called a manananggal that is not something that your nightmares need to be aware of in Donald Trump’s America.
Oh, and magical trans people. I’m deliberately withholding details. But transitioning at least can involve magic– it’s not clear if it has to– and you’re going to be confused at a couple of points in this book by who has what body parts, because being trans in these books does not work like it does in the real world. Just a heads-up. The Cursed Crown books are a duology that is now finished, and Enright’s series still has one more coming. I’m definitely in.
Well, that was fun
Fall’s over, apparently, after a delightful couple of weeks; there’s a winter storm scheduled to roll in tomorrow that in theory could deposit as much as a foot of snow. We got our annual “Here’s how we handle snow delays” email from the boy’s school– and, as he’s an 8th grader, had a moment of reflection as we realized we were never getting another one after eleven years. We’ve been parking both cars in the driveway since March as the garage has gotten filled with bullshit, so the big task today was to de-bullshitify said garage and make it able to harbor motor vehicles again. The snowblower and mower have switched positions for the season.
You may remember that we had a synchronous e-learning day recently so that we could basically rehearse for snow days; I am entertained that one looks at least distinctly possible if not likely (“Hazardous conditions could affect Monday morning commutes” is a danger sign in a winter storm alert) and absolutely no one was warned to bring devices home over the weekend. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
Tomorrow I am hanging the new curtains if it kills me. I will not go another day with the general public being able to see into my living room, God damn it. This may sound like it’s not much of a project, and it genuinely shouldn’t be, but I can’t believe I’ve been staring at these boxes on my dining room table for this long.
On vocabulary
I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.
(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)
Burn the whole technology to the ground
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
It’s bedtime somewhere
I had a dream last night that I couldn’t sleep.
Do you have any idea how fucked up it is to dream that you can’t sleep?
It was a sign how the day was going to go.
Not a good day
This has been a massive mess of a mental health day. It started off absolutely wonderfully, with the literal first thing I was greeted with upon turning my phone on being that Dick Cheney had died, but then featured a lunchtime panic attack that led to me calling off for the rest of the afternoon (it was all meetings, not teaching, but still,) getting home all full of piss and vinegar about getting a couple of things done while everyone else was out of the house, then doing none of that, and ending with one of my more unshakable depressive episodes lately, as I sit here watching election returns and dealing with a shitton of possibly-misplaced family and work-related guilt.
Part of me is blaming DST again. It was pitch-black before 6 PM and my mood just fell apart. Seasonal affective disorder is not usually a problem I have, and it’s worth pointing out that my day was shit when the sun was out too, but I’ve had a hard time this week for some reason.
Heh. “This week.”
It’s only fucking Tuesday.
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