Tag: fuck this

On 2016, six days later

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade wrote this the other day, and it crystallized a couple of things for me:

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And… yeah.  That’s about right.  Not only was 2016 the worst year of my life, even before we take into account anything that took place outside of my immediate household, its nefarious and evil aspects spilled over into the end of 2015 and the end of 2017.  At the end of 2015 I had a Health Event, ending up in the hospital twice.  I was on medical leave for months and resigned at the beginning of 2016.  I figured I’d be employed again within a month.  Two, at the most.

It took six.  And I haven’t had a weekend off since, and three days a week I work eleven-hour shifts, barely get to see my wife, and effectively don’t get to see my son at all.  And my income is, well, we’ll say unstable.

I’ve sold one book (99 cents!) in the last two months and haven’t written a single word of fiction since July.

Oh, and my mother-in-law is in hospice and probably has less than a week to live.  It could very well be today.

And that’s before the part where we installed a fascist in the White House, a fact that overshadows every single other bad thing that happened outside of the walls of my home last year and that I have been firmly in a state of I Cannot Even for weeks.  I was talking with an old friend about it the other day; it’s really odd to know you’re in a state of denial, to recognize it and not be able to do anything about it.

My job is dependent on the economy being functional.  I need to be preparing for Armageddon over here, in what may as well be a completely literal fashion.

Nothing’s getting better this year.  Nothing at all. As much as I’d like to endorse that last sentence up there, and I really want to, I don’t know how to protect anyone from what’s coming.

Fuck 2016.  Fuck it to death.  And by God, by the end of this year I’ll probably be looking back at it with nostalgia.

In which I stab my eyes

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music2 Comments

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So– hah– this post was gonna start with the words “just a quick note, since I want to be at school by 8:30” when I sat down twenty minutes ago to start writing it, before I 1) decided to look and see how much a song I heard on the radio would cost to download and 2) make sure to download a new album onto my non-3G iPad so that I could listen to it at work today.   I was going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this New York testing fiasco, where they switched to a Common Core-based standardized test and, in accordance with prophecy, “proficiency” scores fell through the fucking floor.

Neither of those two things worked, though, and now I’m all “fuck everything digital” and no it has not escaped me that I’m using a computer to write that on the internet, and if you’re so clever how come you haven’t figured out a way to go fuck yourself yet?

One, the goddamn MP3 album was three bucks more expensive than the CD.  And that’s bullshit, always.  You cannot charge me more to Not Send Me a Thing than you do to Send Me a Thing.  The digital version of a thing should always be less expensive than the Actual Thing.  And most of the time shouldn’t exist.  I’ve been converted to MP3s because MP3s are genuinely more useful than CDs are– yes, I really do want my entire twelve-some-odd-thousand song music collection with me all the goddamn time, because I never know what I’m going to be in the mood for, and my tastes are catholic enough that it’s difficult to even come up with a proper representative sample.

I pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, which is supposed to ensure that everything on my computer also lives in the cloud and can be accessed by both my phone and my iPad.  Granted, in the case of the iPad, if I want to be able to listen to something when not in reach of a wireless network I need to specifically download it, but I knew that when I bought the thing.

So why is the fuckin’ album I want to download the only album that doesn’t seem to have shown up on the iPad, almost a week after I initially downloaded it?  Hell if I know, and attempting to convince my iPad to find the damn album has unleashed hell in a manner that I don’t have time to describe.  Needless to say: technology clusterfuck, and nothing has the right album covers anymore, among other more massive but less obvious problems, and THIS DOESN’T FUCKING HAPPEN WITH CDS, GODDAMMIT, AND MAYBE SOCIETY SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT A BIT?  Earlier this week just about my entire (small, as I hate them) collection of books disappeared out of both devices.  I had to redownload everygoddamnthing twice.  Have I ever had to redownload a physical book?  Nope, not once, and the total number of books I’ve lost or accidentally destroyed over the course of my life is probably twenty, most of which were lost in The Great Dog Piss Incident of 2009.  It happens to digital files all the fucking time.

I fucking hate the future.  Also, standardized tests, but I’ll bitch about that later, apparently.