Tag: gaming

In which read the disclaimers

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

Warntsr2101ing: Geek content substantially higher than normal.

I genuinely consider getting rid of my old-school D&D rulebooks to be one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my adult life.  I’m serious, here: I experience active regret about getting rid of my first and second edition D&D rulebooks at least three or four times a year, and sooner or later I’m gonna break down and just go find used editions somewhere and pretend I never got rid of them.  I still have my original Dungeons and Dragons boxed sets (all the BECMI books, from the red “Basic” set through the gold “Immortals” box) although I don’t have the boxes anymore. I know exactly where they are in the house and I’ll never get rid of them.  But I never really played basic D&D, whereas I spent most of high school and college playing 2nd edition.  I’m such a 2nd edition nerd that I’m convinced the only reason I’m any good at adding and subtracting negative numbers is because of THAC0.

Also, I still think THAC0 was a good idea, to the point where I’ll fight you if you say otherwise.  I’ve played a few games of D&D under the 3rd or 3.5 edition rules, and for some reason I could never wrap my head around how anything worked under the new rules.  I bought the full set of core rulebooks when 4th edition launched a few years ago, read through them once, and put them away, because 4th edition was a videogame-saturated horror and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Point is, when I left college I knew I was moving somewhere where I wouldn’t be playing anymore, and in a weird fit of altruism where I wanted the books to be with people who would use them more often, I either gave them away or sold them to the guys in my gaming group.  Never shoulda done it.

(Hell, I may just have to go to The Griffon tomorrow.  They carry used rulebooks.  I might get lucky.)

(Also, have I said this?  Grond, one of the two main characters of The Benevolence Archives, was originally one of my D&D characters.)

I downloaded the .pdf of– what the hell are they calling it?– the new basic rules for the newest, we’re-not-gonna-call-it-the-fifth-edition version of D&D.  The .pdf is free; their “starter set” is, I think, in stores now, and the traditional hardcover books are gonna trickle out over the next few months– no jump straight to the three-hardcover box set like the 4th edition did.

(Note that I still have my 3.5 and 4th edition rulebooks– the ones I hate.  Just not the rules for the game I played.)

Anyway, this is a really long lead-in for a really short observation: based on what I read in the .pdf, they’ve gone a long way to strip the obnoxious video-game and wargaming elements out of the game, which was my biggest problem with the 4th edition.  I no longer feel like it’s required to use a mat and miniatures with the rules.  I’m a purist, remember; I’ll draw out a map on graph paper if necessary as I play, but I’ll be damned if I’m counting hexes to decide if something’s in range or not, and the positioning rules were a God damned sin against man and nature.  Fuck did I hate 4th edition.

Right, got distracted: I think I like how this game looks like it plays.  I know at least one person who has already expressed some interest in running through the adventure that comes with the starter set, and it looks like only one person has to actually buy that to run through everything.  I may have to go ahead and join.  I miss playing D&D every now and again, as I said, and I miss enjoying D&D rather more often than that.  Finding the time is always tricky, but I think in this case it might be worth it.

MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Writing3 Comments

im0lgrix8xkvpnj8k47hI’m in the recliner again.

SECOND MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:  all story-writin’ for “The Benevolence Archives: Volume One” is finished, meaning that all that is left is an editing pass or two and also the (hopefully) not terribly complicated step of figuring out just how in the hell one turns a document file into a competent-looking ebook and then it’ll actually be available for sale!  I will, obviously, be letting y’all know repeatedly well in advance of the actual release date, so keep your eyes peeled here.

(Want to like me on Facebook?  You can do that here.  I’m not sure why you would, because Fazbuk is the dumb, plus I am immensely unlikeable, but go ahead anyway!)

THIRD MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:  I have survived Standardized Testing Hell Week, and thus will do my damnedest to avoid mentioning it (other than announcing that I’m going to avoid mentioning it) for at least a few weeks.

FOURTH MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:  Holy crap the new Call of Duty trailer looks cool.  I haven’t played a Call of Duty game in years and I haven’t liked a Call of Duty game since years before that, but dayum.

FIFTH MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:  “Dayum” and “datum” aren’t the same word, stupid autocorrect.

SIXTH MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:  I can’t remember what #6 was supposed to be, and my wife and son just got home, so maybe there will be another post tonight!  Woo!

A really positive review and a really unfair one

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Reviews6 Comments

18007564You should go find a copy of The Martian, by Andy Weir, and you should buy it, and you should read it.  Right now.

And I gotta say it: I’m so glad to be able to say that. I was scared of this book, guys:  when you’ve got a novel you’re about to unleash on the world and your novel is set on Mars and someone publishes a book called The Martian with a picture of a dude in a spacesuit on the cover before your book comes out, it tends to inspire… panic.  Mild panic.  Oh shit he wrote my book.

(Note that this has happened to me once already.  I had a novel entirely planned out down to small details and was ready to start writing it when a Star Wars book came out that had the exact same goddamn plot except theirs had Han Solo and Chewbacca in it.  It was uncanny.  I shelved the entire story. I was worried this was going to happen again.)

But it didn’t!  The Martian is the story of an astronaut who is stranded on Mars when his  mission is scrubbed abruptly and in the scramble to get off the planet his team is given very good reason to believe he’s been killed.  At this point it becomes, as a back cover blurb describes it, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” which is the greatest four-word high-concept pitch in human history.  The whole thing is tense and engaging and funny and awesome.  It’s 370-some pages and I devoured it in two big gulps over two nights; I was up until midnight last night because there was simply no chance that I was going to put it down.  It is, in a lot of ways, the perfect novel for me.

Sadly, I feel the need to issue a warning: Weir is heavy on the science– and occasionally heavy on the chemistry and the math.  Yes, there’s math in this book, although Weir isn’t actually asking you to do any of it.  But there’s a lot of math drama of the “How do I get enough calories to live X days” type.  And when the main character accidentally turns the hab he’s living in into a bomb, he explains the chemistry behind his stupid mistake.

It is possible that this might turn some people off a bit.  Those people are bad people, don’t get me wrong!  But they might not like this book as much as I did.  Despite their badness.  For me, this is already on the shortlist for best books of the year.  Awesome work; read it now.

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I wrote a very brief post when I got home stating that I’d had a long day and I was going to go play some video games.  You may recall me buying a PS3 around Thanksgiving and a rapturous review of The Last of Us; the PS3 has kinda sat and gathered dust since then.  Earlier this week I got a bug up my butt and bought a couple of games that were PS3 exclusives that I’d never had a chance to play.  One of them was Heavy Rain, which took me much longer than it should have to buy because the guy behind the counter wouldn’t shut up about how great the game was for long enough to actually sell it to me.  (Generation gap warning:  He didn’t own a PS3.  He’d stayed up “all night” watching someone else play the game.  On YouTube.  I know “Let’s Play” videos exist, but… really?  That’s a thing The Kids do now?)

I’ve sat and watched Heavy Rain install for twenty-five minutes and played it for maybe twenty, so let’s not even pretend this is a fair review.  I’ve also heard in several places (and I knew this before I even bought the game) that the game starts really slow to get you used to the rather unique control system.  I’m fine with that.  I’m also pretty sure that by the time I finish the game I’ll not be griping about it.  But there is some serious nonsense in the first prologue chapter and I wanna gripe about it.

Yeah.  That control system.  The game starts with your character in bed asleep.  In his tighty-blackies.  The game instructs you to push up to get him out of bed, and wants to really impress you by showing you that the slower you push up the longer he takes to get out of bed.  For the most part so far I’m less playing a game than I am following on-screen prompts; I assume this will either get better or will become less annoying soon.  (Again: I really do believe the people who are raving about this game.  I’m just not there yet.)  Here are the things I did.  There are other things you can do; I didn’t do some of them, and part of the deal behind the game is that the story’s structured so that you can miss stuff.

  • I took a shower.  This sequence involved copious amounts of manbutt (and I’m pretty sure I’d be complaining about pointless nudity even if my character were female, so don’t think this is homophobia talking) and a ridiculous sequence where I had to shake my controller in certain ways so that my dude could dry himself off.
  • I found a note from my wife saying that she’d taken the boys out for groceries.  Note that this implies that everyone in the house is awake and dressed and out doing shit before this lazy bitch even gets out of bed.
  • I got dressed.  At around this point the game pointed out that I could hold a trigger to see what my character was thinking; this is a thinly-veiled way for the game to push you to move the story along.
  • My character thought about doing some work, but the game didn’t provide any feedback on what that meant, so I went downstairs.  I said hello to the family bird along the way.
  • I ate two grapes.  The layout of their house is really weird.
  • I drank juice.  I screwed up the prompt on how to drink the juice so I accidentally gagged on it a little bit.  Yes, that happened.
  • I made coffee.  Espresso, technically, I think.  Drank that too.  Healthy!
  • At some point in here I discovered that it was nearly lunchtime.  My character is seriously a loser.
  • Upon it being suggested that he wanted some “garden time” or something like that, I figured out how to go into the back yard, thinking that maybe there was some work for him to do back there.  I sprawled out on the grass and got back up and went inside.  No work for me!
  • Then my wife got home with the boys.  She handed me some bags, which I promptly dropped because the game made me hold down two different buttons to take them from her and I flubbed one of the buttons.  I put the groceries on the counter.  There is a birthday party for one of the boys soon; she said she was really busy and didn’t know how she was going to get everything done, and the game prompted me to help out.
  • She told me to set the table, but warned me that the dishes were fragile (because we use the good china for basic birthday party lunches.)  The game used this as an opportunity to demo the “move things carefully” mechanic, where you follow onscreen prompts with the thumbsticks really slowly.  I accidentally moved too fast and put a plate slightly off-center from where it was supposed to be.  I tried to fix it but the game wouldn’t let me; I spent the rest of the prologue wondering when that dish would get broken, but it never happened.
  • After doing a shitty job setting the table, I played with the kids’ electric car (I really thought that was going to hit a table leg and jar the plate loose, but it didn’t happen) and then went outside to roughhouse with my kids for a bit, including mercilessly beating one of them up with a plastic sword.  So much for helping my overworked wife, apparently.
  • She called us in for lunch, which was not on the table I’d set.  The boys ran in ahead of me.  I followed them and discovered that one of them had disappeared; how this happened, I don’t know.  I told my wife I’d find him and went upstairs.  He was crouching in front of the birdcage.  The bird was on the floor, dead.  He was sobbing that it was his fault.  My character (and this was a cutscene, so I had no control over it at all) assured him that it was not, with no trace of that damn bird was alive ten minutes ago, what the hell happened?

At this point the first chapter ended and I saved and quit out to go to the Internet.  There appears to be no way to save the bird; it’s not like I forgot to feed it when I got up at noon or anything.  Although given how much of a loser this guy seems to be maybe he’s actually never fed the bird.  I dunno.

I think I miss Q-Bert right now.

I had a long day…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

…and now I’m gonna go play video games.  

New rule!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

UnknownWhen it is 9:30 at night, and the most exciting things you’ve done all day are 1) fixing your UNBELIEVABLY GODDAMN LOUD garage door opener by the simple fix of spray some lubricant on it, you idiot, god, did you WANT the motor to burn out, what took so long? and 2) getting really mad at your PS3 and seriously considering a 2,000 word profane rant on the failings of the online store of a video game system that is literally already obsolete, and you’re sitting in front of your computer trying to come up with one, just one entertaining anecdote to end the day with, and those two things are the best you can do?

You go to bed and read, and then you fall asleep.  Even if it’s 9:30 on a Saturday.  Because you are a grown-ass man, and no one can tell a grown-ass man to stay up later than he wants to.

Except his wife.

Who is already in bed.

Like I said: new rule.

In which kids ruin everything

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting, Reviews11 Comments

TheLastofUsMankindParenthood changes you; everybody says that.  Prolly ‘cuz it’s true, and pretty self-evidently so at that.  What isn’t always obvious is the ways in which parenting messes with what was probably a perfectly good personality and lifestyle prior to having kids.  I was expecting having a kid to cut into my video game time, right?  I wasn’t expecting having a kid to change the way I related to playing video games, and that’s kinda fascinating to me.

Maybe not to you; I dunno.  Hey: my blog.  Shuddup.

You might remember I got myself a PS3 and The Last of Us around Thanksgiving.  I’ve owned an Xbox 360 (several, actually) since launch; it took until the launch of the PS3’s successor for a game to come out that finally flipped the switch and made me pull the trigger and mix some metaphors up and buy one.

A warning, the only warning you get:  hella spoilers.  If there is any chance at all that you’re ever going to play this thing, first, go do it now— it’s easily worth the price of the system all by itself– and second, don’t read this post until you’ve beaten the game.  I’ll see you in a month or so, if you’ve got my schedule.  Go forth.

A short plot synopsis:  The game starts in present day.  You’re a single dad with a fourteen-ish-year-old daughter.  The zombie apocalypse starts, except these are fungus zombies, which are neater and more frighteningly real than the regular kind.

Within fifteen minutes of the start of the game, your daughter is gunned down in your arms.

It’s… difficult.  As scenes go.  It really fucking sucks.  Badly.

Jump forward twenty years.  Joel (“you”) is still alive; society, not so much.  For various reasons you get tasked with escorting a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie, across the country.  Ellie, as it turns out, is immune.  Your job is to get her to some sciency folks alive.  

And we’re off to the races.

Folks, The Last of Us is probably the best game I’ve played in years; certainly the best game of 2013.  There’s no real doubt about that.  But what’s most amazing about it is the way it creates this relationship between Joel and Ellie, and pulls you along with it.  You’re tasked with protecting her for much of the game, although (thank God, because otherwise a game-long escort mission would have gone badly wrong) she does a good job of staying out of trouble and eventually is able to actually pitch in and fight alongside you.  But I really don’t think you can properly put yourself inside Joel’s head unless you’re a parent– and lemme tell you something, if you’ve got kids The Last of Us is gonna fuck you up.

There’s a point fairly late in the game where Joel abruptly gets quite badly injured.  The game throws a curveball at you by making you take over as Ellie for a while, trying to pull together enough food and medicine to get Joel through a Colorado winter alive.  There is, of course, one major zombie attack during this sequence, and to me at least it was one of the hardest points in the game– not just because it was, legitimately, a difficult gaming challenge to get through successfully, but because watching Ellie, this little kid who has been depending on you for, by this time, ten to twelve hours of gaming or so, get repeatedly killed was fucking gut-wrenching.  I had to turn the game off, not out of a frustration ragequit (although that was part of it, I’ll admit) but because I literally couldn’t watch Ellie get killed again.

(What did I do then?  Like an idiot, I tried to start the first chapter of the new Walking Dead game– which provided me with a refreshing tonal shift by making me play as 10-year-old Clementine from the first series.  That didn’t work very well either; I still haven’t finished the first section, for much the same reasons.  Plus there’s a thing with a dog and goddammit enough emotional bullshit from games tonight thank you.)

Anyway.  As I said, the main plot point driving the entire game is that Ellie was bitten by one of these things (off-camera, before you ever meet her) and she never succumbed.  She’s immune, and you’re trying to get her to this organization that Joel thinks can help to figure out why she’s so special and possibly find a cure for the Cordyceps fungus.  And then you get there.  And you’re separated from Ellie for a while.  And then you discover that the doctors do think that they can figure out what’s wrong with her– but that the fungus has invaded her brain structure and that it’s going to require risky brain surgery to be able to do anything about it.

It’s worth pointing out that at no point do they say “the surgery is going to kill her.”  They say “we have to do brain surgery” and Joel puts everything else together from there.

And Joel.  Goes.  Nuts.  Previously in the game you’ve either been fighting bandits (generally poorly armed and rarely protected by anything) or zombies (dangerous as hell, but generally lacking distance weapons.)  The last sequence throws you up against dozens of trained commandos with fucking body armor and machine guns.  Now, it’s become painfully apparent by this point in the game that Joel is a bit of a monster– the game isn’t really interested in letting you forget the fact that you’re killing people for part of it, even if those people can be broadly classed as Bad People a fair amount of the time.  It’s visceral.  It gets to you, after a while– and this was clearly a deliberate design decision on the part of the designers.  Joel gets more and more frantic about reaching Ellie before anything can happen to her– and, fascinatingly, so did I– I’m generally a hoarder in games like this, keeping everything in reserve In Case I Need It.  By the time you get to the last bit of the game where you know there’s not much more than a hallway between you and Ellie, I was playing with no quarter given for anyone— you’re behind a corner?  I’m not waiting for you to come out.  Molotov cocktail.  I shot at you once and missed?  Throwing a bomb.  Four of you back there?  Smoke grenade, followed by a Molotov, then breaking the neck of the guy who I missed.  Brutal shit.

And then you burst into the surgical suite.  Ellie’s on the table, unconscious.  There are three doctors in the room, unarmed.  They see the crazy man with the flamethrower (yup) and the machine gun burst into the room… and they cower.

I was expecting, at this point, to be presented with some sort of choice.  No.  Why not?  Because the game has gone to great pains to set up Joel’s character by this point, and isn’t terribly concerned with what you want to happen.  And there is no way in sweet shrieking Hell that Joel is letting anyone stick a knife in Ellie’s brain.  None.  Period.

Your only option is to gun down the (unarmed, hiding) doctors and pick up Ellie and run– which brings you right back to the beginning of the game, where you’ve got a defenseless kid in your arms, and because you’re carrying her you can’t get to your guns and shoot back, and your only option is to run like hell or you’re both going to die.  Because as it turns out the guards do not suddenly get less pissed at you once you’ve killed the doctors and taken Ellie back.

And you know how the game handled this the first time it happened, too.  She died.  And Joel didn’t.

And just to make sure this is clear: I had an Atari, people.  I’ve been a gamer for a very long time; I’m part of the first generation of people who can say honestly that they’ve been gamers for their entire lives.  And I have never once played a game where the main character was given the chance to save the world and chose not to.  Because if the choices are save the world, or save your kid?  Fuck the world.

Like I said:  if you’re a parent, this shit’s gonna fuck with your head.  Because, as contrived as it sounds, that’s not a choice that I could make and expect to keep my sanity.

Amazing, amazing stuff; everyone involved with the game should be proud of themselves.  And you should have played it by now.  Go forth and game.

In which I kvetch about stupid things

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting1 Comment

…so, just like every post, really.

The boy’s current YouTube obsession is a video, not even a minute long, where Elmo is playing with a beluga whale, and it is a horrible, horrible video. First, it requires Elmo to twice ask Winston the beluga whale to “please show Elmo what love is,” which is absolutely completely creepy if you are possessed of a remotely filthy mind, and I swear to you that the filth in my brain has made run-of-the-mill perverts run screaming and enter monasteries. Also, in the last shot of the clip, Elmo is leaning over the whale’s pool so that he can receive belugish lovin’, and it is painfully apparent that they’ve positioned his ass off-screen so that the puppeteer can actually make him move. You can see every part of him but the back of his ass and it’s really weird and distracting and creepy.

On the plus side, he– the boy, not Elmo– has learned how to use the remote for the Apple TV to repeat his YouTube videos, so he no longer requires us to repeat the video for him. On the minus side, since he knows how to do this, his new move is to start the video, run out of the room to do something else, then run back in a minute later to restart the video– which means he isn’t actually watching it but I fucking have to because if he comes back in and the video is off he screams.

Did I mention that the video is only a minute long and I have to listen to the sentence “Oh please, show Elmo what love is” twice during that single minute?

I’m losing my goddamn mind, folks.

Currently occupying more braincycles than it ought to: whether I’m buying a PS4 or an Xbox One. I mean that in two senses; first, whether I’m buying one at all, and second, which one I’m buying if I’m buying one. This is a stupid thing to be wondering about for a wide variety of reasons, chief among which being the fact that I’ve barely touched my Xbox 360 since having Paul Revere riding bitch behind me and calling out incomprehensible directions for me to avoid British soldiers caused me to stop playing Assassin’s Creed 3. Combine that with the fact that the game I’d bought before AC3, Bioshock: Infinite, was almost completely devoid of anything interesting and it’s been forever since I tried to play anything on it.

Most of my gaming lately has been on my iPad, honestly; and it’s been playing Baldur’s Gate, which came out when I was in high school or early college or something like that. I could blame the boy if I wanted to; certainly fatherhood has cut down on both my inclination to and my time for gaming, and the fact that I’ve been spending almost all of my leisure time reading in a frantic and pointless attempt to get through 200 books this year hasn’t helped either. But I don’t like the idea of not owning a gaming console. It bothers me. But the Xbox One has a number of features that bother me rather intensely. For example, everything they’re saying the Kinect can do is something that I absolutely do not want a device in my living room to do, and the damn thing makes the system cost $100 more than the PS4. And I don’t really want a PS4 because, well, I skipped the PS3 and I think of myself as an Xbox guy. But I’m mad at Microsoft and the Xbox One is stupid. But I want a new console. But there aren’t really any games I want to play for them anyway. And it’s not like I can find one in a store. But I like shopping for futile things. But I don’t want to spend the money! But I’m frustrated and want retail therapy.(*)

I love it when I’m stupid.

Blah blah blah wank wank wank first world problems. I know. But it was either this or post about work, and the last couple of days require some thinking before I write about them. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll have eight hours at OtherJob and it’s supposed to be cold and snowing so I’ll have plenty of time.

(* Also? Thinking about buying a PS3. I want to play The Last of Us in the worst possible way and if the PS4 was actually backwards-compatible that feature might sell me the system all by itself. And I figure by the time I’ve worked my way through the PS3’s backlog of good titles that were system-exclusive, which will all be cheap by now, the PS4 will have enough of a library that it might be worth buying. Which… this is probably the most sensible approach, which is why I’ll likely not do it.)

On venturing into public

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

My belly is full of pizza and my brain is full of nonsense. At the moment I prefer the contents of my belly; ultimately the pizza will cost me less. That said, it’s been a very long time since I was getting any kind of exercise regularly– and, despite my near-permanent status as a professional fat dude, I actually enjoy exercise. I got a weird little thrill when my wife pointed out that the current bathroom mirror (which is six feet wide and about four high, with no borders– just a big piece of mirrored glass) ought to go down into the basement as part of our as-yet nonexistent home gym. I was actually angry with myself that I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

I ran into three different families’ worth of students during the ten minutes that I was buying pizza, by the way, which makes me think maybe living in more or less the same neighborhood as my school isn’t that much of an advantage.

One of them asked me what I was doing there, which tells you the caliber of kids I’m dealing with. (Yes, this is an unfair thing to say. No student anywhere thinks his teachers are real people, and running into us in public, thus confirming the unwelcome truth that we exist outside of our classrooms, is always an occasion for wonder and mystery. But it’s still funny.)

“I’m here for pizza,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked.

I leaned forward.

“I actually live here,” I whispered, and pointed under one of the chairs by the door. “I slept there last night. Don’t tell anybody.”

Her eyes tripled in size. Her mother got their pizza (I was waiting for a Deep Dish pizza, which takes longer even though it’s more of a Deep Ish pizza) and shot me a weird look as they left.

By the time the third family said hello and left, I think the employees thought I was some sort of rock star.

The pudgy, bald, talentless kind, of course.

I tried to spend part of last night applying for a field trip grant through Target. Have I mentioned the DC trip yet? I take a group of seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C. every two years, and this year is a travel year. The trip is hella expensive so we’re trying to find a good way to pay for it that doesn’t involve me having to run a fundraiser. First it took twenty minutes and two changes of my password to log into the site, which is justweird, and then after taking three thousand or so characters to say I want to take my kids to DC so they can lern history gud, it lost my entire application except for the biographical part at the beginning. Frustrated, I tried to flip to the last section of the application, which asks me to break the trip cost down in ways that are frankly impossible (it costs, roughly, $800 per kid, but that’s a flat fee– they don’t break it down by transportation or food or lodging or whatever. It’s just $800. Target wants everything broken down specifically– I can’t even realistically estimate those numbers– and I doubt they’ll like it very much if I just put $32,000 HOLY FUCKING HELL ARE WE SERIOUSLY PAYING THEM THIRTY-TWO GRAND into one of the boxes.

Holy shit. How the hell are they making thirty-two thousand dollars off of us? That’s fucking insane. Mental note: redouble plans to become a DC tour guide once I decide I can’t teach any longer.

Jesus.