griping – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Please, for your interest and edification, note this Bluesky “skeet” from me, written roughly four months ago:

At the time I wrote that, I believed it to be true. And it is possible that it’s still correct; after all, Paige Mahoney has been getting knocked out for five books now, and Vis from Hierarchy has only had two. But it has got to be true that Domitor Vis Telimus Catenicus Leathfhear Diago Carnifex Deaglán Silverhand Siamun has been grievously injured more than any other character in the history of the written word. And it gets so much worse when he gets split into three, because then they can just totally throw logic to the wind and hurt the hell out of him in every chapter, because you’re not going to remember that spear wound in his thigh in six chapters when you come back to him, and the other two versions of him don’t have the spear wound. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s one of those things that can’t be unnoticed once you notice it. This man has had at least seventy concussions. You’re ideally not supposed to be knocked out so hard you don’t wake up for a week even once in your life, and Vis has it happen multiple times over the course of the maybe a handful of years that both books take place over.

The second special bonus gripe is connected to Islington’s world-building, although this is not at all something that is unique to him, and in fact I’ve been seeing it a lot lately across multiple authors. Y’all, if you’re going to make “Gods!” or “Hells!” a swear word in your fantasy series, the gods or the hells need to have some presence in your book other than the swearing. Maybe this is another example of me being a sloppy reader, but there are a handful of gods named in a glossary at the end of the book, and there’s whatever the hell Religion is (I don’t know! There’s literally just a thing that the graduates can join called Religion! I don’t know what it is or what they do.) but worship and/or fear of and/or basic acknowledgment of divinity is damn near entirely absent from the book. Vis certainly doesn’t worship anything. And I’m sorry, but if any form of the concept of Hell made it onto the page at all beyond “Hells” being a swear word, I missed it. It’s lazy, especially in a world where they already both use standard English profanity and a made-up word, “vek,” that is a pure expletive in the way you might yell “Shit!” or “Fuck!” if something bad or startling happened. There’s no verb form. No one veks, and nothing is ever described as veking (vekking?) anything. But we don’t need “gods” or “hells” or “gods-damned,” which is somehow worse, and it’s one more annoying detail in a book full of them.

Okay, I’m done now.

Y’know, I don’t expect perfection from weather forecasts– either forecasts by actual trained meteorologists or through a weather app. I want a vague idea of what the temperature is going to be like and a radar; I can figure out the rest on my own. I’ve discovered a new request over the last couple of days as the weather’s approached record-shitty levels: I would like the projections being made to make some kind of fucking sense. To not be, oh, impossible.

To wit:

2014-01-06 10.49.48

This particular screenshot is taken from the weather channel’s app; I probably ought to have taken it from Yahoo’s, as Yahoo’s app is terrible, but it’ll do. Take a look at the forecast for today, Monday, and tomorrow.

Unless they are using definitions of what I consider simple words– “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “high,” and “low”– that I do not recognize, there is no goddamn way that these can be right, because temperature does not teleport. If today’s temperature is not going to go above -8, it is impossible for tomorrow’s low to be 3, because at some point the temperature has to be in between those two temperatures.

Note that Wednesday’s low is Tuesday’s high, which would be expected and consistent given a gradual warming trend over those two days. That one makes sense!

It gets worse: when I look at the hourly forecast, I find out that at 7:00 AM tomorrow, they’re expecting the temperature to be -11 and the wind chill to be in the neighborhood of -36. This is from the same weather service that says the low is going to be three degrees. Their hourly forecast doesn’t project a positive temperature until 2 PM tomorrow, and even then expects the wind chill to be -17.

Again: it contradicts the high and low data that their own weather service is providing. You can fit both of these inconsistent forecasts on the same screen.

Ordinarily, I’d blow this off– but it really doesn’t seem like it ought to be a terribly difficult programming challenge to get these numbers to pull from the same database, and there is a very real concern about whether my students are going to be expected to walk to fucking school, or wait for a bus, at 7:00 in the morning tomorrow. There is a big damn difference between three degrees and 36 below fucking zero.

I fully expect school to be cancelled again tomorrow. They haven’t done it yet, but we didn’t get the call until around 1:00 yesterday afternoon, so they’ve got a couple of hours. But they’re going to be getting very different data depending on which forecasts they’re paying attention to (and, again, this isn’t just one app— I’m seeing nonsense like this all over the place about tomorrow’s forecasts) and I would hope they’ve got somebody who understands how goddamn numbers work doing the deciding.

I don’t expect perfect forecasts, and I have some understanding of how these things work. I’m not the type of guy who sees a 20% chance of rain and then gets pissed off when he gets wet. But a little bit of internal fucking consistency would be nice.