Tag: assholes

In which that’s not good enough

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

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.

Natty dread

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I’m not watching. I’ve not watched an IU football game this year– in fact, I doubt I’ve watched an IU football game since I graduated(*)– and if I decide to start now, they’ll lose. In fact, I’m going to do my best to ignore the internet during the game so that I don’t even get any accidental score updates. Hell, it’s been years since I watched an IU basketball game, and it’s more than a little shocking to me that I can name IU football’s quarterback and coach and am no longer able to name the coach or even a single player on the basketball team.

Sadly, my lifelong dedication to being superstitious about sports is not the only reason to pay no attention to this game. I am deeply pissed at IU right now, and while it’s genuinely upsetting to be cutting ties with the university I graduated from and that I’ve loved for literally my entire life, the way IU has been conducting itself recently has been beyond the pale and I can’t accept it any longer. I’m going to start telling people I graduated from Purdue. It’s that bad.

On top of that, the more I’ve learned how college sports works now, and particularly how college football works now, the less I want to do with any of it. We basically have a good football team now because Mark Cuban bought us one. Seeing video of Fernando Mendoza showing off his new diamond Rolex earlier today was literally disgusting. I’d rather suck, frankly.

I dunno. This sort of feels like Old Man Yells at Cloud to some extent, but I’ve not been a sports guy for decades if I ever really was, and ignoring a national championship run has got to be the last of a really large number of nails in that coffin. This hasn’t been fun for a long time, and now it’s actively repulsive, and I’m out.

(*) Not true, apparently, as WordPress dug up a post from last year where I talk about watching IU play Notre Dame in the football playoffs, a game I have no recollection of at all and which we, of course, lost.

Not yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I am still too angry to write anything that won’t get me arrested. There are a couple of books I could review but that kind of feels pointless and futile right now, much like … well, anything that won’t get me arrested.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Can’t do it today

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Anything I might write today would be illegal, so I’m not going to.

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

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.

On dead assholes

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I rejected a number of possible image choices for this post, one of which was a photo of the shitgibbon from today where it is very, very clear that half of his face is drooping in a way that absolutely screams “I’ve had strokes recently, and might be having one now.” I never ended up posting about the weird collective hysteria of a couple of weekends ago where the Internet all at once decided he’d died, and conspiracy theories and other forms of nonsense absolutely abounded for a few days. I myself got drawn into a conversation about whether a bunch of closed roads around Walter Reed Army Medical Center meant anything (answer: no) although I managed to avoid most of the really nutty shit.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to make what ought to be a really obvious point clear: that it is perfectly okay to be happy when absolutely fucking terrible people die, especially if said really terrible people die in the exact method that they have long suggested that it is perfectly acceptable for other, non-them people to die. My wife and I had a nice little moment together when it was confirmed that Charlie Kirk was dead, and accidentally viewing the video of him being killed a few minutes later (I don’t recommend looking, if you haven’t seen it) made it really clear that he’d been alive for maybe a few seconds after being shot and no longer than that. He could have been in the hospital with the trauma team standing next to him and already prepped for surgery and that shot would have killed him.

I feel bad for his kids. That’s it. And the truth is, I don’t even feel that bad for his kids, because they’re 3 and 1 and they will be better off without his awful influence in their lives, as will the entire rest of the world. I felt bad for them when he was alive, too. He literally died in a way that he had said was just fucking fine for other people to die. He had just said something racist and obnoxious seconds before dying. And he thought empathy was a personality flaw. So, cool. Fuck you, Charlie, I hope you’re in Hell.

(I’m having to be careful, as I’ve discovered that Kirk and Ben Shapiro are more or less the same person in my head. Shapiro is the one whose wife has never had an orgasm. Kirk is the “your body, my choice” guy, and someone else made a choice about his body today. I don’t care.)

And now, let’s engage in wanton speculation. No doubt me writing this and putting it on the internet will lead to being proved wrong immediately on most counts, so you can all look forward to that.

This was clearly an assassination; that’s not the speculative part. This was a deliberate and targeted shooting and was obviously planned carefully in advance. The shooter fired once, from a distance indicating at least some skill with his weapon, killed his target, and escaped completely undetected. Apparently the rifle has been found, but I genuinely don’t think Kash Patel’s FBI has enough institutional competence left to catch this guy and I’m also not convinced they’re trying very hard.

I do not have any trouble believing (which is not quite the same as saying “I believe”) that someone set this guy up to 1) give a nice little excuse for even more right-wing violence and fascism and 2) as much as I hate to say it, continue to try and knock the Epstein Files out of the news. Trump? Maybe not. Stephen Miller? Absofuckinglutely.

Dude got shot in Utah, which is not well-known as a bastion of liberalism, at a college that had not only invited him to speak in the first place but got what looks like a nice-sized crowd to hear him. It’s difficult to imagine why someone would deliberately target Charlie Kirk absent a specifically political motive, but I also have no trouble believing that he was killed because he wasn’t batshit enough for the shooter. I’m not interested enough in the rabbit hole this will take me down to do much research, but apparently he wasn’t super popular with some of the further reaches of the fever swamp for some reason. Feel free to enlighten me if you like.

And finally, if it was a leftist of any stripe who shot him, Kirk is not going to be the only one, and I’ll bet it’ll be no more than a few weeks until there’s at least another attempt. If you decided to start killing right-wing figures and were as successful as this guy was, would you stop with one? I kinda doubt it. I can’t wait to see the fucking nickname the press drops on the shooter if it happens again.

I apologize

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video gamesLeave a comment

I have spent my Wednesday evening trying to put Wuchang to bed for good, failing because of a bug in the final trophy, somehow refraining from throwing my Xbox through a wall, and then … well, laughing a whole fucking lot at something that’s gonna get me in trouble if I talk about it.

(Forgive the movie clip; if there’s an actual video of Malcolm’s comments, I can’t find it.)

On motorcycle-type things

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have had the idea for several years now that in the unlikely event that I were to decide to become a Motorcycle Person, I would quite likely become a boring Motorcycle Person. I’d end up in one of those oversized, three-wheeled jobs with an oversized windshield and lots of places for storage– I think the technical term for them is “baggers.” The type, frankly, that if I spot on the road are likely to be driven by someone with a decade or two on me even considering my advanced age. The excitement/danger factor of riding a motorcycle doesn’t really impress me; in fact, it’s quite the opposite; I think I’d spend most of my time terrified of being run off the road by a car and part of the reason I’m more attracted to a larger, more stable vehicle is they just feel safer. I can’t ride a bicycle, remember; the notion of one that goes 70 miles an hour is not inherently attractive.

Anyway, I was driving home from work today and I noticed the person in front of me was driving … probably not that exact vehicle, but close enough for our purposes. He was, in accordance with prophecy, grey-bearded, somewhat portly, and wearing a full helmet, and while obviously I couldn’t get a good look at his face, he vibed as a guy in his late fifties or maybe early sixties.

As I was following him, I was musing about more or less exactly the same things I’ve been talking about in the last couple of paragraphs. I’ve not seen many of these things with the two wheels in front, which was kind of interesting, but I think I prefer the traditional style.

After a mile or so, a guy pulled up beside us. This guy was younger, helmetless, and riding a stripped-down crotch-rockety sort of thing that was more or less the exact opposite of the first guy’s bike, and in fact the type of thing that I’m absolutely certain I will never ride, because I will die.

The second guy said something to the first guy. I obviously couldn’t hear it or seem him well enough to read his lips, but his body language seemed more or less friendly and positive? The first guy, perfectly reasonably I thought, pointed to his helmet (which looked like the kind with headphones built in, so he was probably listening to music, too) and made a sort of sorry, dude, I can’t hear you gesture.

Bro went nuts.

Traffic is reasonably heavy on my evening drive, and so my guy on the trike managed to stay in front of the motorcycle guy mostly by just staying in his lane, and to be completely honest I’m not even convinced he was aware of the guy, since again, he had his helmet on and the guy was behind him. He was right to my right, though, so I got to witness a bunch of unhinged screaming and yelling and occasional attempts to get ahead of him. Eventually he found an opening, drove between two cars, and pulled in front of the guy, nearly clipping him in the process, then found a hole and got far enough away that I lost track of him. And other than the part where the dude nearly hit him, I really don’t know how much of probably two solid minutes of spittle-flecked raving the trike driver even realized was happening. Good thing the stupid bastard didn’t have a gun, I suppose.

Anyway, I’m keeping my car.