Tag: bullshit

So anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

I was going to start yesterday’s aborted post by making fun of these horrifying things. After that I had a whole gross story about getting sick at work and hell if I remember what was coming after that.

So, yeah, I got sick at work, and then made it through the rest of the day and I’m fine now. Meanwhile, I haven’t technically fixed the deeply weird issue the new laptop is having– I think something about the OS isn’t playing fair with Gutenberg at WordPress, because nothing else makes sense– but I’ve found a sufficient workaround for now. I’m going to spend some more time tomorrow or Sunday fiddling with it; until then, all good.

Anyway, I’ll do a review of the laptop once I’ve had it for a week or so and put it through its paces. I’m pretty sure this particular issue (did I ever say what it was? Click on “new post” in WordPress, get a white screen. In every browser. No matter what. Every other device I have is fine.) is not the laptop’s fault. We’ll see if anything else stupid crops up.

Tomorrow we’re going to get some more shit done in the bedroom. The goal is to get work done in the house without inhaling enough drywall dust to give me cancer. Not the highest of bars. We’ll see if we can pull it off.

The worst thing about adulthood

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I can put off deciding what to have for dinner for as long as I want, but it’s just going to be dinner time again tomorrow and I’ll have to do it again.

I hate to do this two nights in a row

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… but guess what I had to buy four of on no notice tonight?

The good news: turns out I can afford a sudden low-four-figure emergency! Which doesn’t mean that I want to spend that kind of money, or that it doesn’t toss me into a shitty mood for the rest of the night, especially when it takes just over an hour to get the new tires installed. And especially especially when I can feel my stomach lining eating itself while I’m waiting, which leads to a 3500-calorie Burger King dinner, and I think I’ve already eaten enough in January and February to last me until March.

And it’s going to end up being three nights in a row, too, because tomorrow after school I have my weird little gay kids club and then after that I have TRIVIA NIGHT for probably longer than I think. I haven’t done TRIVIA NIGHT in a while but feel free to read this and this to find out how the last one went.

Duckery

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.

Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.

Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.

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.

I’m so fucking tired of this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So for the last several years Indiana has had this thing called a Teacher Appreciation Grant, or TAG. We’ve gotten it before Christmas and it’s amounted to maybe an extra $300 or so. It’s generally gone to anyone who spent the previous year working for whatever their district is and didn’t get a bad rating on their yearly evaluations. It might have been slightly more for teachers rated Highly Effective than teachers rated Effective, but it wasn’t a huge difference.

The morons in the statehouse, who have never seen anything that wasn’t worth making worse, decided this year that the award needed to go to significantly fewer teachers and that it needed to be competitive, because there is no better way to feel appreciated than to have to fight everyone in your district for a check. They’re no longer allowed to give the grant to more than 20% of the teachers in any given district, and it has to be based on test scores.

I’ll spare you quoting the borderline-incoherent email we got from our district “explaining” how to apply for this thing, but apparently we do need to apply– God forbid the district figure out who deserved this thing on their own– and we need to provide our own evidence of how we’ve increased test scores over, presumably, the previous school year, although the email does not actually say that the data you send them has to be from the 2024-25 school year. This feels like an oversight and is not especially surprising.

I teach 8th grade. My students leave me and immediately go to high school.

You get one guess about whether I have access to any data about any of my previous students, at all, during the time I’ve been working for this district.

Shit’s due next Wednesday, so I suppose I ought to get to making shit up soon.

Let’s double-check

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Raise your hand if any of your students got expelled yesterday for trying to sell a gun to another one of your students and his brother, who also got expelled.

No? Just me? Just checking.

Ooh, I’ve got another one! Raise your hand if, while discussing the gun seller, you discovered that part of the reason he’s the way he is that his dad shot his mom in the head and then killed himself right in front of him when he was six years old.

Just me again?

Okay.

On YA, genre and litratcher

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I was originally going to write a review of this book and discuss this in the review, but I took a nap this afternoon and still have 60-some pages left. Why did I just say “this book” and not the name of the book? Well, I’m doing that thing where I don’t want this post necessarily showing up in search results for the book, especially since this post is going to be pretty critical and it’s important for you to know that I’m really enjoying the read. I’m going to be a little sneaky about which title I’m talking about, though. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

I am a lifelong genre reader, and for most of that time I’ve been fairly open about my disdain for what people call Literary Fiction. Feel free to blame it on me being too dumb for Literary Fiction. That’s fine. I have an ego but for some reason it doesn’t extend to being bothered by that particular allegation. I don’t get most of the examples of the genre I’ve read; I usually don’t understand why anyone bothered to write the book in the first place and I understand even less what anyone is talking about when they praise them. In particular, use of the word “comic” can be a red flag. One guarantee is that any time a book reviewer I’ve never heard of describes a book as “comic” is that it will not, in any way, be funny. In fact, for the most part, it won’t even be trying to be funny and failing. “Comic” means something else to Literature People. I don’t know what it means and I’m not going to bother finding out.

This particular book has a bunch of pull quotes by people I’ve never heard of who wrote books I’ve never heard of on the back. The sole exception is George Saunders; I’ve heard of him and I know he’s fancy but that’s all I can tell you. The blurbs aren’t as bad as they can get; none of them appear to be random collections of words, and none of them use words that should not be used to describe books (“deliciously turquoise and refreshing prose”– HARPER’S) in them. But this was on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books list, which usually means only ten people read it, and it was a National Book Award finalist. Here is the list of every National Book Award winner. I admit, I have read five of them– interestingly, all but one nonfiction winners– and I have never heard of considerably more than five.

Anyway, this book should have been YA and nothing, nothing will convince me otherwise.

If the exact same book had been written by a woman, it would be shelved with YA. It’s The Hunger Games with a more complicated vocabulary, more swearing, and footnotes about the American carceral system. The premise is the most YA-coded thing I’ve ever seen; the idea is that incarcerated criminals can get their sentences commuted if they agree to engage in gladiator combat to the death every so often; if they make it three years and are still alive, they get to go free. They earn something called, no shit, Blood Points as they work their way through the combats; Blood Points can be cashed in for food, weapons, armor, better accommodations, shit like that. There’s this weird color-coded & scientifically implausible technology built into their wrists so that their captors can torture them for talking.

And partway through the book the main character finds out that she’s going to have to fight her girlfriend in her final fight– the convicts are loosely organized into teams, and a rule change means people on the same team have to fight if they’re at the same rank– and predictable angst occurs.

Come the fuck on.

Now, I’m not done with the book, so I don’t know whether the two characters are actually going to fight or not, but this is one hundred percent a science fiction dystopia that would have been shelved with YA with a different author. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! I’m thoroughly enjoying the book, and I’ll finish it tonight, having burned through its 360 pages in less than a day. Unless it completely blows the ending, it’s gonna be a five-star review. But looking at these blurbs and a couple of other pieces about it, it’s hilariously obvious that most of the people reading it have never touched dystopian literature in their lives and haven’t read any YA at all, because … one thing this book is very much not is especially original. I could have sketched out a broad outline of the plot within ten pages of the start of the book. So could anyone who has read any YA in the last fifteen or so years. I’m not going to look up how long ago Hunger Games came out because I don’t feel like being old. But there are a ton of “blabla has to fight to the death, because Reasons, plus fascism” books out there and while this is an excellent example of one, that’s still exactly what it is.

I’ve got lesson planning to do and then I really do want to finish this book tonight, so I’m going to leave this here– I probably will do a second post once I’ve finished the book, though. But come on, guys. Somebody got chocolate in your peanut butter and peanut butter in your chocolate and you’re doing your level damn best to not admit that you’ve got a Reese Cup in front of you. It’s a Reese Cup. We love Reese Cups. Just admit what it is and eat the damn thing.