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.
We’re going to present these in reverse order, because one of them is a better picture than the other:
I finished the Lego Himeji Castle set this evening, which turned out to be a really fun build even if it continues the fine Lego tradition of putting a bunch of cool details in that are immediately completely covered up by other bricks, never to be seen again. I suppose I would rather have the cool details than not have them, but I wanna see them, dammit.
Also, I need a bigger house, because I have four unbuilt Lego sets sitting in boxes a few feet away from me right now and I have no idea where the hell I’m going to put any of them once they’re done. Anyone want to give me their house?
My wife got me (well, both of us, but I was the one who wanted them) registered for three pottery classes at a local makerspace for Christmas, and we had our second class today, charmingly titled “Build a Mug.” The first class was kintsugi pottery and I did not post my product from that one because, frankly, I screwed up on the very first step and didn’t notice it until it was much too late, and since the modern version of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with epoxy, the initial mistake meant that every subsequent piece I tried to put back together only ended up slightly more askew, and the final product just looks crap.
This mug? It’s not glazed yet, but I think I might actually use this mug once I have it finished in a couple of weeks. It needs to dry for about ten days and then we can go in and glaze it for final firing, so it’ll be a bit before I can post a picture of the final product, but my understanding is that glazing will smooth over a lot of the little imperfections. This obviously won’t look professional but I don’t think it looks completely crap, and the class was a lot of fun.
We’re actually doing a throwing class on Valentine’s Day, and I am fully ready to make pottery my entire Goddamned personality for a while if that’s as much fun as I think it might be.
First of all, in accordance with our most ancient and sacred traditions:
And while your family is eating dry turkey and you’re arguing with Aunt Ruth about whether trans people deserve to be able to pee in public or not, my family is doing this:
I know I talk about this every single time I put a Lego set together, but holy shit, the people who design these things are the smartest motherfuckers on Earth. I’m building the TIE Interceptor right now, which has been sitting on the floor in my office waiting for the right mood to strike me for probably several months now, and the cockpit and interior structure of this thing is just nuts. You can’t really see how detailed the cockpit is at this angle, and I couldn’t get any good pictures of it one way or another, but there are multiple screens in there for the minifigure to look at, along with two control sticks and a little radar screen with a picture of an X-Wing on it. My favorite little detail– see the two tiny gray dots at the top of the cockpit, underneath the two pale yellow studs? They wanted those two triangle pieces attached to them to be at an angle, and the pieces holding them at that angle are clearly guns. They took gun pieces from some other minifigure and reused them to hold the “screens” at the right angle.
It’s so creative it makes me sick. I could never be smart enough to design one of these damn things, and I’m in awe the whole time I’m building them. The model you get at the end isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about marveling at the ingenuity it took to create these damn things, and wondering what these motherfuckers could do if they applied their skills to curing cancer instead of making toys.
(Oh, shit, I think I have the red pegs backwards on one of the wings. I’m gonna have to check that, before it’s too late to fix.)
(Actually the top row of pegs was backwards on both wings. Fixed!)
Anyway, I spent the day in Michigan visiting my wife’s family, and continuing to be vaguely weirded out by the fact that while her cousins are all perfectly nice people, I have never particularly clicked with all of them, but every time I see them lately one of their kids suddenly becomes interesting. I swear I have talked about this before, although I can’t find the post now; my favorite member of her extended family is her closest cousin’s younger daughter, which is weird, and I’m at the point where when we go to these things I just assume I’m going to spend most of my time talking to the generation underneath us more than I’m actually going to talk to her cousins.(*) It’s less weird than it could be; everybody’s in or out of college now and my son is the youngest person at these things by a mile, which is too bad for him. We were at this particular cousin’s house for the first time today, and one of her daughters, who I have known since she was ten and is now 26, finally actually started talking today? And she combines being a horse girl and an emo kid somehow, and I find that combination kind of hilariously endearing.
Jesus. I’ve known these people for sixteen years? I really should learn everyone’s names.
(*) Her uncle Bill is super cool too, for what it’s worth. So I spend my time talking to the youngest and the oldest people there.
Spent the last couple of days putting this little thing together:
I took the picture from a couple of different angles and then realized if I was going to give you a picture of the TantiveIV, it really ought to let you see the engines, which are the most iconic part of the ship. And once again, while putting a Lego set together, I found myself musing on why the designers make the decisions they do on certain things, and just how dedicated these crazy bastards are to including Easter eggs. To wit, an earlier, in-progress photo of the front of the ship:
What you don’t see there is a third two-stud stack behind the white and blue one. That one has a white base and a brown top, to go with the one that is gold-on-gold and the one that is blue-on-white. Note where this is in the picture above; it’s completely invisible and covered up by the pieces that attach to those clamps on the side.
Why are those there?
Well, it’s C-3PO, R2-D2 and Princess Leia, of course. Each rendered as two single studs in the right color. And it’s just there to put a little smile on your face as you’re putting the set together, and as a little secret that you know about once the build is finished. The Tantive IV, of course, is the ship that Leia is trying to escape Darth Vader in during the opening moments of A New Hope, and so of course she has to pass the Death Star plans on to the droids.
In other news, as of last night I thought I’d fixed my computer again, only to spend forty fucking minutes trying to get the damn thing to launch Chrome this afternoon so that I could work on writing practice finals for my classes this week. The following all happened:
Apple Music crashed, repeatedly;
Chrome crashed, repeatedly;
One hard restart;
After the restart, my desktop images on my extra monitors were on the wrong monitors (?!?)
My touchpad lost connectivity three times, and had to be turned off and turned back on again;
Audio was coming through the wrong monitor at one point;
Every so often I could move the mouse around but couldn’t click and the haptics on my touchpad were disabled, and every so often I could click on things but not move the mouse;
Attempting to open the systems settings crashed every other open app, then the system settings opened as if nothing had gone wrong;
Probably a few other things.
At this point, I have officially caved and ordered a new screaming fucking beast of a computer that is so much more computer than I need that it’s actually kind of sad. Like, I’ll need to develop a new hobby or go back to gaming on YouTube or something to justify this purchase. Naturally, after dinner, the computer had mysteriously reverted to working just fine, and I’ve been sitting here for just over an hour, writing the two initial practice exams and this blog post with no issues of any kind. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’ve had enough of dealing with it.
Allow me, if you will, to show you a picture from a few weeks ago of one of my bookshelves:
Direct your attention to the upper left of that picture. Now look at this:
I’ve made this distinction before: my wife reads a lot too, right? Not as much as I do, but more than most people. My wife and I are both readers, but I have a second hobby, which is that I collect books. My wife distinctly and definitely does not collect books. We would be in desperate trouble if she did. She buys perhaps a couple a year and most of the time exists off of rereads and reading books I’ve bought.
I feel like I’ve crossed a line lately.
I’ve never really liked the covers to the Red Rising books, particularly the specific ones I own. If you look really closely at the dust jackets in the top cover you’ll notice a couple of small tears in Golden Son and a rub mark in the bottom of Iron Gold, both signs that I got the books from Amazon, because I wouldn’t have bought them from a physical store with flaws in them. Those awesome covers are not new books– I actually special-ordered custom dust jackets from Juniper Books to replace the original dust jackets on my hardcovers. Which I’m keeping, of course, although I’m not entirely sure why.
I’ve found myself really tempted by special editions of books I already own lately, too, especially if their original covers annoyed me in some way. For example, I think whoever is responsible for this abomination should be literally pilloried:
…and, as it turns out, there’s site called the Broken Binding that offers these fucking beautiful bastards, at the low low cost of $150 for four books I already own:
And, Goddammit, I’m tempted. Sorely tempted. I just kicked ass at work and I feel like I can justify rewarding myself, but shit, that’s a lot of money, for something just to look better on a shelf, which … feels unreasonable, even to me?
I dunno. My birthday’s July 5?
(I also keep almost ordering this hat, not because I think it would look good on me but because the model in the picture is rocking it, and I feel like maybe ordering clothing I can’t wear because it makes a different human look good is maybe a sign that having a small amount of discretionary money is starting to get to me. Can I just shift into Saves Money Guy for a few years, please? Enough for a decent emergency fund, or at least to pay for the new fucking computer I’m probably going to need soon without putting it on a card?)
(We won’t talk about how much of my money Lego is currently trying, and failing, to take from me.)
One day, I will write a coherent and interesting blog post. I was hoping that day would be today, after several days of bleh.
But after driving home from Chicago and spending … what, two? let’s go with two– hours grading, all I want to do is dissolve into a puddle in front of my PS5 right now.
We did go to the Lego store on the way home from Cary and I managed to get out of there without demolishing my bank account, so that’s good. It’s a really neat store. I mean, you can already kinda imagine what’s in there, but still. If I buy much more Lego I’m going to have to invest in a storage and display solution of some sort and that’s not happening, Goddammit, so we aren’t buying any more expensive sets for a while.
(Thank God they didn’t have the huge Star Destroyer set in stock, so I didn’t have to decide not to buy it. I think it’s discontinued by now.)
While I’m kvetching: does anyone think this is legit?
I straight-up forgot to post yesterday; I’m no longer remotely as pressed about posting every day as I used to be, but I do like it when I actively decide to not post on a given day rather than forgetting. But yesterday was nutso busy and I just forgot. I assume y’all have already forgiven me, if you even noticed.
And today I’m out of town, at my brother’s place in the Chicago suburbs, what we used to call North Northytown back when I lived in Chicago. We are watching football and my son is starting to agitate about heading to the hotel now that his cousin is in bed for the night. One way or another I wasn’t about to skip the night after forgetting. More tomorrow. We’re going to the Lego store on the way home and my goal is to get out without spending $500. We’ll see if I make it.
