The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I got home from work at a decent hour, having left almost precisely as early as contractual obligations allowed, then sat in a chair and did not move for two and a half hours. Dinner was two bowls of Frosted Mini-Wheats.
I’m, uh, gonna go play video games now, these three sentences having represented the apotheosis of my intellectual abilities at the moment.
There is no force on Earth or in Heaven that could compel me to watch the State of the Union tonight. It used to be a thing I made sure to pay attention to; I am fairly certain the last one that I watched was during the Obama administration. If anything of significance happens I can find out about it on BlueSky afterwards like everyone else.
Nothing of significance is going to happen.
Today went well, although I’ll admit I may possibly have checked my phone more often than was strictly reasonable this morning to make sure that there wasn’t another snow day. A few of the super rural districts around here had a delay, but most didn’t, and the roads were clean and dry on the way in to work. Tomorrow will mark 2/3 of the school year gone, which is crazy to think about. I still haven’t done an office referral in 2026.
(Typing that will guarantee that I have six tomorrow.)
Anyway, I’m off to play Nioh 3 until all the jibber-jabber is done with and then maybe I’ll turn my phone on. Or maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow morning. I finally started Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem and so far it’s been much better than the early reviews led me to believe, so maybe video games, books and sleep will cap off my evening. We’ll see.
Pictured: Not my TV.
I think I am entirely giving up on the idea of television. It’s been a minimal part of my life for years, but I don’t even want the concept around any longer. I don’t give a shit about the Super Bowl but I’d kind of like to watch Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, and it appears to be completely impossible to watch the Super Bowl on the television in my office without either purchase of additional equipment (the TV is not currently hooked up to any sort of antenna, since it’s almost exclusively for gaming) or signing up for something. I tried to download something called Fubo, where apparently the game is being streamed for free, and my TV told me that I had to sign into it– as in sign into the television— in order to download the software.
No. I’m not signing into my television. No thank you.
So, yeah, fuck it. I’m going to hit “publish,” make a very cursory attempt to stream the game on my computer instead of my TV, and if I don’t have it up and running in under a minute, it’s YouTube tomorrow for me. Things were better when you could just turn the Goddamned TV on and watch one of the five things that were on. I don’t give a fuck if that makes me a Boomer or a Luddite or whatever; television is so thoroughly enshittified at this point that I’m simply opting out of it altogether. I’m tired of idly thinking that maybe I’d like to watch a certain specific thing and then inevitably discovering that despite the ten fucking million options out there and the fifteen things we’re already signed up for, I can’t watch that thing because Reasons. It literally happens every time I decide I want to watch something specific.
I absolutely refuse to create a login for my television. That’s the line, apparently.
Fuck it.
There’s not gonna be a post tonight and I’m not gonna get into why. Nothing too terrible, just a Not Everything Is For The Internet situation.
The big bastard is still not out of his box, and … I dunno, maybe tomorrow? My kids did really well on their test today; that’s good, I suppose. Everything else going on in my head involves thinking about how society would be way way better if literally like three people either died or were divested of all of their worldly possessions or both, and I don’t really want to put that on the internet right now, so maybe it’s best if I just go play a video game on the big bastard’s older, smaller brother and continue to minimize my Internet time.
I actually didn’t really have much lesson planning to do tonight, and fell into Black Myth Wukong for a while instead, and now I’m in “I’ve got nothing” mode, so … just go read that book review from yesterday again. It was a good book! I mean it!
I’m going to write a few sentences, finish my Arabic and then I think going to bed several hours early might be the move tonight. I’m not only not going to watch the debate, I want to be in a position where monitoring it online isn’t possible, so I need to either turn off every device in the house or actually be unconscious, and one of those two options requires a lot less work.
I sent this email to my principal, my assistant principal, and my dean of students this morning, after sending six students out of my classroom:
There are twenty-four days of school remaining. If I start every third and fourth period with five referrals for the next twenty-four days, then so be it. The guy who wanted to be reasonable has left the building. The ragey asshole is all they have left now. I am not spending one single additional second during this school year arguing with rude children who have no academic agenda.