The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Today was awful; I had to put a kid out in five of my six classes, which is fucking ridiculous, and I got asked if I qualified for a fucking senior citizen’s discount while attempting to buy a whole rotisserie chicken and two boxes of cookies at the grocery.
No I do not shut the fuck up.
So yeah. Gonna go crumble to dust in my bed now.
I have encountered what has got to be the worst idea of all time. I dare you– I dog dare you– I triple dog dare you with almond milk— to come up with a stupider idea than this idea. You cannot. It is impossible.
According to this article, McDonald’s is in the process of opening a new restaurant chain that will focus on “coffee and other drinks,” competing with Starbucks for that space.
That’s not the bad idea.
The chain is called “CosMc’s.”
That is not the bad idea.
Brace yourself for this shit. You’re going to gasp. I’m not joking. This idea is so breathtaking in its awfulness that I almost don’t want to expose anyone else to it, but I had to read this fucking thing so you ought to have to as well.
Here you go:
I need you to understand that this Kempczinski person is not making fun of McDonald’s for this incredibly bad idea, and that in fact he is the McDonald’s CEO, and he thinks this is a good idea.
I’m going to bed now, because my head hurts, and I don’t think it’s ever going to stop.
I’m literally on the last boss in Elden Ring and my PS5 suddenly won’t send a signal to my TV.
BRB, Googling how to make a nuclear weapon.
On the one hand, something has finally dragged me away from Skyrim, although I’m not remotely close to finishing the game and will be going back to it sooner or later. Skyrim is just that big, if you’ve never played it, that a month of four or five days a week play has gotten me maybe halfway through it. If I’m lucky.
On the other hand, the game that has dragged me away from Skyrim is Returnal, otherwise known as the game where you can’t save, and I just had a pretty successful run (I finally found the sword, and I beat the first boss for the first time) that took nearly two hours, on a night where I legitimately had a handful of other things I would like to have done. I was having fun, mind you, and I don’t necessarily begrudge the game the time, because it’s immensely satisfying to play– but I would like to have quit after, say, an hour of that successful run to go do something else, and come back to the game at some other time. I’m only typing this now because I finally got killed a bit of the way into the second level and thus was able to get up and walk away.
They’re gonna have to fix this, I think, for this game to be viable. The basic gameplay loop is a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m going to get more efficient at it as I play more and get better, but tonight was about as long as I ever have to play at a stretch (he said, ignoring the imminence of summer vacation) and they’re going to have to build in a viable way to put the game down and walk away or I’m really not going to be able to play this for much longer.
I had a whole thing planned here as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, but it’s almost Goddamned nine already, and I guess I’l let you wait until tomorrow and tell you how my Cheating Solution went. I expect to leave work tomorrow with every student I have angry with me.
Raise our hand if your wife bought your 8-year-old son what is obviously a drinking game for Christmas!
(Looks around)
Just me, eh?
Okay.
So I’m reading this book right now. It’s the third book in a series that I think is going to be seven or ten books long, it’s 1200 fucking pages long, and the two books before it were both also over a thousand pages long. I started it right around the first of the year and I’m barely a quarter of the way through the thing. I feel like I sailed through the first two, and I really enjoyed reading them. That said, it’s been a while, and I read so much that my recall is not always great. At first, I thought that was the reason that this book felt like a slog– that I just didn’t remember the story well enough from the previous books and it was holding me back.
There really shoulda been a goddamn recap chapter in the front. I mean, shit, your book is already twelve hundred pages long, maybe you give me another 15 to recap the previous 2200 pages in the other two books? It’d be nice.
Something hit me about this book last night. The big conflict in this one (so far) appears to be that the race (fantasy book, remember, so literal non-human race) that humans have basically been using as slaves since time immemorial have, for lack of a better word, woken up. They were basically big strong mute servants until recently and now they’ve got their minds back. And they are, rather understandably, somewhat pissed about the whole centuries of slavery thing, and so there’s a bit of Kill! All! Humans! going on out there.
The book expects me to be on the side of the humans in this conflict. All of the main characters are human. There’s been at least one, maybe two POV characters from the other side in previous books but he’s either dead or just hasn’t shown up; I literally don’t remember.
I am not on the side of the humans in this conflict.
There are hints that one character is going to take the side of the newly-awakened slave race, but those same hints imply that he is going to lead them, and I kinda don’t feel like a white savior narrative is going to improve this book any.
Oh, and the series has always explicitly associated blue eyes with social status, which I was willing to ignore the implications of previously but now is kinda looking upsetting given recent developments. Like, characters’ eyes literally change color to blue if they achieve certain abilities.
So right now I’m at war, with my 2500-page investment along with a healthy dose of “give the rest of the book a chance; this may not work out the way it seems like it’s going to” on the one hand, and literally ten other books that I’d like to start reading and nine hundred more pages of this one to slog through on the other.
Feel free to provide advice if you’d like.
(Also: I’m not a hundred percent sure why I’m effectively subtweeting the actual book here; my Goodreads feed isn’t exactly a hidden thing. But that’s how the post came out. I dunno.)
I checked Twitter before leaving work, after an incredibly busy and yet almost entirely non-lucrative day, and “golden showers” was trending, and it involves a person who is, apparently, supposedly going to be President?
I cannot. I cannot even. Not tonight. Sorry. Have a music video.
The scene: OtherJob. It is cold and rainy outside, and getting darker by the moment. I am still sick and very bored, and the book I have brought to work with me is not very good. I am playing Temple Run on my iPad.
The phone rings.
ME: “OtherJob, how may I help you?”
IDIOT JACKASS WHOSE PHONE NUMBER AND NAME I COULD TOTALLY POST BUT I’M NOT GOING TO: “Yeah, how late is your driving range open?”
I glance outside. It is still cold and raining. And we don’t have a driving range.
ME: “We don’t have a driving range, sir.”
IJWPNANICTPBINGT, suddenly sounding very irritated: “What? Is this OtherJob?”
ME: “Yessir.”
IJWPNANICTPBINGT, ignoring my affirmative answer: “Well, do you have their number, then?”
Sound of teeth grinding. No, I don’t have the number of this place you made up, and why would I give it to you if I did? Who thinks the world works like this, where I can just call one business and have them give me the number of another business?
ME: “This *is* OtherJob, sir. You’ve dialed the right number. We don’t have a driving range.”
Literal, not-shitting-you sputtering sounds from the phone. This guy cannot believe my effrontery.
IJWPNANICTPBINGT: “My friend told me you had a nighttime driving range.”
ME: “We do not.”
IJWPNANICTPBINGT,angry: “You’re serious? You’re not fucking with me right now?”
ME, suddenly much less in the mood for this idiot: “Check Google Maps or something if you don’t believe me, sir. There’s no driving range and nowhere to put one.”
IJWPNANICTPBINGT: “Well, do you know where it is?”
ME: “No, sorry. I don’t know of anywhere around here that does that.” NOTE: This is true. I might not have told him if I had known, because I don’t like people swearing at me on the phone, but I truly don’t have the vaguest idea who he might be referring to. Plus it’s COLD AND RAINING, WHAT THE FUCK.
IJWPNANICTPBINGT, working his way into a huff again: “So my friend’s just lying to me, then, huh? That’s your story?”
ME: “Sir, we close at eight. You come on over. If you can find the driving range, you can play for free.”
The line goes dead.
Exeunt.
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