Tag: humor

Done-ish

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

The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.

I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.

(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)

Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.

In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker: Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?

Crisis averted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Yesterday’s issue is resolved, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to commit any crimes, justified or otherwise.

This will be another short post, but let me tell you a fun story about teaching 8th graders: one of my boys fell asleep in class yesterday, farted loudly enough that it woke him up, and then, not realizing that the uproarious laughter taking place in the room was at him, joined right in on laughing so that it didn’t look like he didn’t know what was going on.

“Did you just fart yourself awake?” is not a sentence I ever expected to say to anyone at work.

My mom says I’m funny

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.

Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.

(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)

Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.

On narrative consistency

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, look, McDonalds. This is bullshit.

Nobody believed your asses two years ago when you said that the McRib was on its “farewell tour” or whatever the hell you called it. Absolutely no one. We all knew that the McRib is always a seasonal or at least short-term item (length of term: however long it takes for pork prices to rise again) and it’s going to go away and come back. Everyone knew this. You fooled no one.

But yeah. You had to make a big Goddamn deal about how no, really, this is the last time. No more McRib, forever, and all that shit.

And now it’s 2024, and the fucking world is ending, and you bring this bullshit back … and you dare to just not acknowledge that you insisted it was never coming back? No mention of it at all? What, are you just hoping we don’t remember?

Call the motherfucker Son of McRib and put it on a round bun for a while or some shit, I don’t care. Slap a little mustard on it (no, really, think about it) and pretend it’s not the same sandwich. I don’t care. But, shit, can we pay a little attention to worldbuilding around here? All I’m asking for is some Goddamned consistency. This ain’t comic books. You can’t reboot the menu. Or at least you can’t reboot the menu and pretend you didn’t do it.

Do not assume that just because I just ate two of these sonsofbitches because I am sad that I didn’t notice what you did here, Goddammit. I see the Hamburglar in my neighborhood anytime soon I’m slapping him.

That’s a new one

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I have this kid in my last class. He’s a decent kid; he’s not, like, one of my favorites or anything like that but he’s not a behavior problem and most of the time he’s a reasonably solid student. He’s absent a lot, though, and he asks to go see the nurse more often than most of my students do. Probably a couple of times a week. This is generally not something I say no to unless I can tell that a (generic) student is just trying to get out of class, and a lot of times with this particular kid I can tell just from looking at him that something’s bugging him and so I’ll let him go.

Today, though, he was off his game more than usual– fidgety, out of his seat a lot, more or less unmedicated ADHD behavior, although I can’t say for certain whether he’s actually on meds or not. He’s already asked to go to the bathroom right after getting to class and then asked to leave again to get a drink maybe ten minutes later, so the nurse request is the third time in a 55-minute period that he’s tried to leave the room, and I know good and Goddamn well the kid hasn’t gotten a single stitch of work done while he’s been in the classroom.

“Why do you want to go to the nurse?” I ask. He gives me a Look. I have been teaching for two decades; nearly one and a half times as long as this young man has been alive. I know this look. This look means I was not expecting to be questioned on this, and I am about to begin frantically making shit up.

“Well,” he says, and then he pauses. I wait.

“I was at the board during advisory, and someone threw an eraser at the board, and when it hit the board there, was, like, a cloud of chalk dust? And I breathed in the chalk dust, and now my stomach hurts.”

I took a moment to myself.

During my moment, I reflected upon a couple of things, to wit: 1) that advisory was a full two hours before this young man entered my classroom; 2) that everyone in the building was doing the same activity during advisory today, and that, while not impossible, it was unlikely that he had any reason to be near the board; 3) that his lungs are not actually connected to his stomach; and perhaps most importantly 4) that there is literally not a single chalkboard anywhere in the building.

I like our nurse; I have liked nearly every nurse I’ve ever worked with, but she is one of my top two or three favorites, I think. Fuck it, I decide, and send him to the nurse, and then I immediately go to my computer and compose a quick email, which I know she will see because her email is open 100% of the time, telling her to make absolutely certain to find out why he is in her office, because I cannot wait to see her reaction to this one.

Rather unsurprisingly, he was back in less than five minutes. I’m pretty certain he did not manage to get any additional math done with the remaining time he had in my room.

In which I get an award

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I mentioned to my first hour that I had a band and choir concert to go to tonight at my son’s school, and a moment later joked that I kind of had to go because I am still married to the boy’s mother and we still all live in the same house and it would be rather difficult to pretend that I had something else that I needed to be doing other than going to the concert.

This provoked a literal chorus– multiple kids– telling me that their dads were still married to their moms and never showed up for any of their concerts anyway, and why was I such a good dad (calling it “doing the absolute minimum” probably didn’t help) and could I be their dad instead of the actual dads that they have now.

Uh. Oops?

At any rate, middle school band anchor concert, and it’s 9:00, and we just got home, and I’ve been there for (no exaggeration) hours, so I’m gonna cut this short and go to bed now.

Another true story of 8th graders

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

Upon entering my classroom this morning upon my arrival at work, feeling vaguely impish, I wrote the following on my whiteboard. I deliberately wrote the words relatively small and up at the top of the board, not front-and-center like I might with something important I wanted the kids to read:

THREE day WEEK end
(clap, clap, clapclapclap)

My sixth hour is the tampon crew. Typically between fifth and sixth hour I will go use the teacher bathroom, which is in the office area across the hall from my room. The kids know this, and they’re well-behaved enough that if I leave them alone for a couple of minutes while I go get rid of my lunch, nothing bad is going to happen, and if I’m not in the classroom the very second the bell rings no one is going to panic.

That little phrase was on the board all day, and none of the students commented on it.

I came out of the bathroom and saw/heard one of my kids in my room say “Okay, he’s coming!”

And then the chanting started.

And they were being so loud and I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t exactly encouraging them to stop, and it took the principal poking her head into the room before everything calmed down. She wasn’t pissed or anything but she was definitely wondering what the hell was going on.

I find myself glad that my classroom isn’t on the second floor. One can only imagine what the teacher underneath me might have thought.

#REVIEW: Kings of the Wyld, by Nicholas Eames

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Y’all, this one was delightful.

This isn’t going to be a long review; in fact, I’d be surprised if the cover art doesn’t take up more real estate than the actual review. Suffice it to say that this is the kind of book where I can identify the characters on the cover by their weapons (left to right: Patrick, Gabe, Clay, Ganelon and Moog) and I enjoyed it enough that I ordered the sequel before I’d finished it and almost went directly into the sequel afterward. It won’t be on the unread shelf for long, I can assure you of that.

Kings of the Wyld is a pure epic fantasy adventure, featuring a gang of murder hobos fighting monsters that any D&D player will recognize, with the minor exception of substituting rabbit-eared immortals called Druin in for the expected elves. The hook, such as it is, is that these guys have been retired for a while and most of them have gained a bunch of weight, gotten old, moved on from the adventuring life and have spouses and children. The story kicks into gear when a giant horde of monsters nearly takes over and besieges a town far to the north, a town that Golden Gabe’s (adult, also adventurer) daughter happens to be among the defenders of. Gabe’s plan: get the band back together (that phrase is literally used, repeatedly) and go rescue his daughter. The problem: even before you get to the city surrounded by tens of thousands of monsters, you have to get through the massive forest full of other dangerous monsters in between them.

Toss in some Pratchett/Adams-level humor and you’ve got yourself quite a book. I gobbled this up in just a couple of days, and enjoyed every page of it. I have a few gripes– I’ll get to those in a second– but all in all this was a hell of a treat.

So: the gripes. The book remains firmly locked into the third-person perspective of Clay “Slowhand” Cooper, the guy with the big shield (it’s more important than the sword) on the front cover there. Clay wants to get back to his wife and daughter but his loyalty to his friends is what gets him to go on this one final mission. The problem is, I feel like a few chapters here and there from another perspective might have helped. In particular, I’d like to have seen some chapters from Rose, the daughter trapped in the city. Gabe is nearly frantic with worry for most of the book, but we never really see the danger Rose is in because they spend 85% of the book trying to get to her. At one point they’re able to contact her via a scrying tool of Moog’s, but she rather brusquely tells her dad to stay the hell away because she doesn’t want him to get killed and … well, he doesn’t take it all that well.

This is also very much a Dude Book. The five main characters are all men, and the representation level isn’t great: one of the five is gay, but his husband is Tragically Dead before the events of the book start, which is kind of annoying. Now, the dude-heavy nature of the team might be part of an ongoing commentary throughout the book of How Things Have Changed Since Our Time, and I’ll point out that while the main story thrust of the book is the Damsel in Distress trope, Rose herself is an ass-kicker, she’s just an ass-kicker surrounded by a hundred thousand demons, and most of the younger bands of adventures feature women rather heavily, including one exclusively female group that manages to rob Clay and his team multiple times over the course of the book. The sequel, starring Rose, will presumably be better on that front.

I think it’s fair to say that if those things are going to bother you, you can probably pick up Bloody Rose, the sequel, because I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to have to have read this book to know what’s going on, and given the quality of the writing I feel safe recommending Bloody Rose unread. I was not bothered by them so much as I noted them and moved on; your mileage may vary and adjust your expectations accordingly. But I loved this one, and I can’t wait to get to the sequel.