On the plus side, it looks like I get to go back to work tomorrow, but on the minus, I’m stressed out and have been eating nonstop all day. I think I’m going to bed early tonight. As soon as I finish this book.
Let’s start an argument
Or, “In which I choose violence at 8:52 AM”
I will die on this hill: that’s Battle Cat. I was not aware that I had strong, nay, immutable opinions about something as ridiculous as He-Man until the other day, when I said something about Battle Cat being in the trailer and my wife, who, for the record, was not a boy in the 1980s, tried to tell me that was Cringer.
Her argument? Battle Cat wears armor. Cringer does not. That cat is not wearing armor, therefore it is not Battle Cat. Quod erat motherfuckin’ demonstrandum.
The intellectual in me wants to make this post about ontology and how we construct identity and how we construct our categories and definitions. The ‘80s kid in me started screaming bullshit right away, and now that I’ve seen other people spreading this nonsense it’s time to fight about it.
It is true that that cat is not wearing armor. It is also true that that cat is holding his head high and his tail straight, and while he is standing behind the people in the image, I’d argue that that’s an issue of shot composition and not hiding. His bearing and stature conveys nobility. That is not Cringer.
A similar shot, from just a couple of moments later. Again, look at his eyes. This cat isn’t afraid of Goddamned anything. Also worth pointing out— he’s huge. Cringer grows during his transformation. That cat is absolutely big enough to ride, saddle or not.
And the coup de grâce:
Cringer ain’t never had that look on his face not once in his whole life. I don’t care about a helmet. That is Battle Cat, and if you think otherwise you are wrong and he’s going to bite your face off if you try and tell him otherwise.
That is all.
In which that’s not good enough
It’s a little hilarious that it was so easy to find a picture of a guillotine appropriately sized for the World’s Littlest Nazi— I have had less luck finding an image of a Smurf-scale gallows—but I want it clear that simply being sacked and thrown back into his rank-and-file regular local Nazi job does not count as a consequence. I’m not sure I believe the news, to be honest; it implies that someone in the current regime either recognizes that Bovino has fucked up or thinks he’ll do as a patsy, and I don’t really believe any of them capable of that kind of thinking. At least I won’t have to look at him or his stupid little cosplay trench coats for a little while, at least until Fox hires him at a much higher rate of pay as an “analyst.” Or he runs for the Senate, or replaces Rubio as Secretary of State. He’ll find a way to fail up; they always do.
The only thing I will accept as a genuine consequence for any of these motherfuckers is life in jail or public execution. That’s what you’re supposed to do with Nazis, God damn it.
Off again tomorrow, and as cold as it’s supposed to be on Wednesday I have an immense amount of trouble believing that we’re going to be back before Thursday. We are going to get what they’re calling a “ground blizzard” tonight and into tomorrow— my wife made the point that they’ve had to make up a lot of words to properly describe this storm. What is a “ground blizzard”? It’s when you get a shitton of relatively dry, powdery snow that blows around easily and then have a night of 40 mph winds. There’s not actually supposed to be much, if any, new snow tonight, but apparently all that we have is about to be redistributed. I cleared the driveway again this afternoon and measured; we’ve received a pretty consistent 14” of snow over the last several days— the deepest part was 23”. It’s probably closer to fifteen or sixteen inches of actual snowfall since it’s starting to compress under its own weight. You can actually see the striations between the different storms, which is really cool.
Thursday is looking like it’s going to be at least relatively calm, but then Friday’s going to roll around and it’s going to be -12 wind chills again, and it seems like double-digit negative wind chills have been a pretty hard line for cancellations for the last couple of years. We’ll have two days of in person school, max, for the second week in a row.
God, I hope next week calms down a little bit, in a whole lot of ways.
Snnooooowwwwwwww
I know I’ve taken basically this exact same picture any number of times, but I thought the snow was especially pretty this morning. Note the ice berm at the foot of the driveway that I get to clear later this afternoon. Whee!
In which I have to start posting earlier
No school again tomorrow, so we’re doing another synchronous day, and I looked at my Algebra class and realized that for the life of me I have no idea what the hell the next unit is supposed to be. One of the things that has really frustrated me about this year is that no one seems to be in control of the scope and sequence for either of my classes, and there’s been a lot of flailing around as we try and figure out what to teach when. The district hugely mistiming both of our ILEARN checkpoints so far hasn’t helped. We have a meeting tomorrow (virtual, of course, but the agenda mentions breakout rooms, so it’s going to be horrible) to try and iron some of this out, but for right now my Algebra kids are doing the same thing as my regular 8th graders tomorrow because whatever I plan for is going to change tomorrow afternoon anyway and I really don’t have the energy for this nonsense at the moment.
We’ve gotten maybe seven to eight inches of snow today— I went out and hit the driveway around 2:00, and there was between five and eight depending on where I measured, plus another inch or two since then. Hopefully we don’t get hammered overnight; I don’t want to have to schedule another driveway session in between classes or meetings.
Anyway, the call-out didn’t happen until after six, so it took me a minute to get all my shit set up, and now it’s 8:49 and I have no brain or energy left. I’ll try to post tomorrow when it’s still daylight outside. This thing where I never post before 8 PM lately needs to stop.
Quick #review: For We Are Many, by Dennis E. Taylor
Okay, I can get this written. I think.
I promised that once the second Bobiverse book, For We Are Many, showed up I’d get it read quickly so I could follow up on whether there were any women in this one. Good news and bad news: the first time a woman speaks is a hundred pages in. She has one line, it is about her son, and she disappears for a while afterwards. But one of the more important secondary characters is female! In fact, she’s kind of important to one of the bigger themes of the book. Now, unfortunately, we’re nowhere near passing the Bechdel test or anything like that— to the best of my recollection there isn’t a scene with more than one woman talking at all, much less to each other— but this book represents an improvement, if not a huge one, over the first.
It is still good in all of the ways that the first one was good, and frankly it’s genuinely getting more interesting, so I’m kind of hoping that as time moves on a lot of the male secondary characters all have daughters and we can interact with them some more. All of the Bobs, of course, are immortal so long as they aren’t killed, so I would expect the secondary cast to change a lot.
Book Three comes out in the fancy new edition in March; I might cave and read it digitally before that. We’ll see.
Not tonight
My brain is full of violence and I have spent too much time on this website to be healthy today.
Yep, it’s cold
We haven’t gotten any substantial snow yet, but I think the idea is it’s supposed to mostly roll in tomorrow and Sunday, so we’ll see what happens. My classes went fine today; turns out that if you tell kids you’ll give them extra credit if they show their pets (or any nearby object they’re willing to pretend is a pet) on camera, they show up for Meets, and then they even stick around afterwards.
There’s a fairly high risk of school being cancelled Monday as well, depending on how shit the next couple of days go; I’m really hoping if that happens they just cancel school and add a day to the end of the year. Today went well but I feel like two synchronous days on either side of a weekend are not both going to go well. We’ll see, I suppose?
After a big traffic spike for the last few months of 2025, including a lot of traffic from China and Singapore (but also elevated traffic from the US) I’ve been struggling to hit 100 page views lately. I’ve finally got access to Google Analytics– which, weirdly, happened the same day the traffic fell through the floor– and I’m struggling to understand what I’m looking at, to be honest. Like, right now, Google is telling me I’ve had 9 “active users” in the last half hour, but my hits on WordPress Stats haven’t moved? Ultimately I’m aware that none of this matters since the site isn’t monetized at all, but just for my own shits and giggles I’d like to know how these things overlap and intersect, y’know? Analytics isn’t super forthcoming with definitions, unfortunately.
Also, I thought I was supposed to be able to see what search terms were leading people my way, and what referrers, and so far I haven’t been able to dig that information out. I feel like it should be have been simple. Like, what the hell does this mean?
Sixteen thousand “engaged sessions,” of zero seconds of engagement time each, but … less than a hundred “page views”?
Somebody just download this shit into my brain so I don’t have to work to understand it. I’m tired, dammit.