Tag: old people

In which I’m officially old

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

Pearl Jam, otherwise known as the greatest band on the planet, is on tour right now in support of Dark Matter, their most recent release, which somehow is one of the best albums they’ve ever done. Bands that had their first release in 1991 aren’t allowed to release one of their best albums in 2024. This doesn’t make any sense. They did it anyway.

Anyway, tickets to Deer Creek– fuck you, I don’t know what the hell the Ruoff Center is, it’s Deer Creek– were absolutely fucking ludicrous when the show got announced. Like $600+ for lawn seats.

I’ve been keeping an eye on them anyway, and … well, they’ll be at Deer Creek next week and tickets on the lawn (which, at Deer Creek, are still pretty damn good seats) are down to a much more reasonable $120 apiece, and even actual seats are at a price I’m willing to pay for them.

Now, note that I said “next week.” What do you think that implies about the actual date of the show? Or, more relevantly, the day of the week?

Because the Goddamned show is on a Monday. And I’m sorry, even building in taking the next day off, I absolutely cannot go to a rock concert on a Monday night when I am 48 years old. I just can’t. I have seen these guys in concert three or four times (I am so old I can’t immediately tell you exactly how many) and I have still somehow never seen them play Black live so I absolutely have to see them at least one more time before I die or one of them does, but I genuinely think I could get free tickets and the creeping existential horror that takes over when I even contemplate going out on a Monday night, much less to something I have to drive a couple of hours to, would keep me from going.

I mourn my lost youth. Not a lot; I didn’t really use it that well when I had it, but still.

I said this would be about video games

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

So I just kind of randomly noticed that The 7th Guest has a 30th anniversary edition (!!) out for PS5, and then I also sort of randomly mentioned that to my wife, not expecting anything in particular to happen based on that disclosure … and I’ve been informed that as soon as she’s done eating dinner she and I are going to be spending the rest of the evening playing The 7th Guest.

So. Uh. Enjoy your Friday?

Maybe you’re wondering, probably not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I haven’t said a word, at least in this space, about the current New York Times-driven media frenzy to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There are a couple of reasons for that; you can probably predict most of them without me saying anything.

  • I can’t do anything about it and I have enough fucking stress in my life right now;
  • I find the entire thing hideously, insanely, diabolically stupid;
  • The people calling for Biden’s ouster fall into one of two categories: media-aligned chaos agents, by and large who should be lined up against a wall and shot, and frustrated Bernie types who still think the DNC somehow used their magical election-fixing powers and forced millions of fucking people to vote for Biden. The former are actively for Trump (the NYT never gets another dime from me) and the latter will not be satisfied with anyone the Democrats replace Biden with anyway;
  • Not one in ten of these people have actually thought through how complicated it would be to replace Biden with anyone other than Kamala Harris, and again, the people who have been calling Harris “Copala” for the last six years, again, are still gonna be mad. Fuck ’em.

There’s been some horseshit about Parkinson’s disease lately; there is no way that the legislation Biden signed this week about Parkinson’s disease could have resulted in Parkinson’s experts showing up at the White House, right? Nah.

Ultimately I will literally vote for Biden’s corpse, or Harris, or Bernie fucking Sanders, or a cold pile of bloody vomit in November, whatever is running against Trump. I give no fucks. President Cold Pile of Bloody Vomit will be an adequate replacement. I don’t have the mental energy to war-game this out; it’s the exact same bullshit as But Her Emails or Kerry’s Purple Hearts or Obama being from fucking Kenya. The news media has to have a big lie for every Democratic president. Ultimately, I’m gonna vote for the old guy with the stutter, even if he gets sick a couple more times between now and the election, and anyone who doesn’t want to do that can literally die in a fire for all I care, and that’s all the fuck I have to say about it.

On the Theatrical Experience

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

It hit us sometime this week that we hadn’t even considered the idea that our son might want to join us at the Pearl Jam Dark Matter Theatrical Experience. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it got me briefly looking at tickets again, which entertained me greatly. Our showing, the sole one available when the email went out from Ten Club in the first place, was nearly sold out, with only a few stray seats available. Ironically, one of them ended up being next to us, so the boy would have had a place to sit while he was simultaneously bored out of his mind and paralyzed by loud.

At some point they’d added a second screening and not told anyone. That one was happening at 8:45 PM, and it had sold about eight seats, which entertained me, as it suggested that a) everyone who wanted seats had bought them for the first show, and b) the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are roughly my age, their late forties if not older, and had absolutely no interest in going to an 8:45 PM anything on a goddamned Tuesday.

I didn’t take the picture above– I snagged it from Reddit– but it gives you a pretty good idea of how the thing went. I am provisionally very happy with the album, more than I thought I’d be, and as a music lover the notion of sitting in the dark in a theater with a good sound system (critical, it turns out, and apparently some of the theaters weren’t well-chosen, but ours was fine) and listening to a new album by a band I love for the first time is pretty Goddamned appealing.

Unfortunately, the second listen, the one with the “mesmerizing visuals,” was a little half-assed. They put the lyrics on the screen, which was nice, as if you know PJ you’re already aware of how close to impossible Eddie can be to decipher on an early listen, but the visuals themselves basically amounted to a different high-res, movie-screen-sized screen saver for each song. They weren’t particularly thematically linked and they weren’t, like, in time with the music or reacting to it or anything. And for some reason the lyrics weren’t there for half of one of the later songs, for no clear reason. This appears to have been the print and not somehow the result of our theater, as there were other gripes about it on Reddit.

The point was the music, though, and again, I’m a big fan of the album. I’ll talk about it more once I’ve had a chance to listen to it at home– and, while I’m griping, it wouldn’t have killed them to put the name of the damn song up in the corner of the screen during the second listen, either– but it’s solid, and possibly their best work since Avocado. We’ll see.

INCOHERENT SCREAMING

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I remembered what the extra thing I wanted to include in yesterday’s “Today’s Nonsense” post was– that I had been teaching my kids about the Pythagorean theorem, and all day the phrase Hypogean Gaol was interfering with it and making the words come out wrong. The Hypogean Gaol is an area in Bloodborne. I am an idiot.

I’ve realized something today, which is that I don’t actually think I would be able to graduate from college if I were to attend today. There is something that happens to my brain each and every time I am forced to access Canvas for any sort of training, and I am completely unable to pay attention to any prerecorded or even live talk through a computer screen for more than fifteen to twenty minutes. I have never in my life shown any other signs of ADHD; it’s not that I can’t focus in general, but something short-circuits in my brain whenever I have to listen to someone talk through a computer screen and I cannot do it. And unfortunately right now I have put myself into three different situations at once that are requiring me to do either or both. Again: I am an idiot.

Featured in the above image: I am currently enrolled in a program to build online courses through Indiana University. That launched this week, with a horrifying two-and-a-half-hour Zoom meeting last night, and is supposed to be 10-15 hours of work a week on my end, with a $2500 reward if I make it through nine weeks and actually manage to collaborate with other humans to build this class. Unfortunately, the first thing we need to do is make it through this week’s work, which is an “eight to ten hour” Canvas class called Responsive Engagement and Virtual Learner Assessment. I did a few early bits of it today, including a request that we read the article above and “socially annotate” it, and, well, you can see my response to the bit I highlighted in purple on the right.

There are around 200 people involved in this thing, we’re all supposed to do this course this week, and as of right now there are no comments whatsoever past the second page of the article, which is 17 pages long. The yellow highlighted comments at the top there are one person writing “test comment” three times.

The other thing that’s driving me nuts is that we have been in a world where we have done everything online for a solid year and there are still people out there on the “I don’t know how to rotate a PDF” level of understanding of technology. How are you a teacher in April of 2021 and you don’t know how Zoom works? Look at this:

Now, part of this is IU’s fault, because I am a tech guy and even I’ve been kind of blindsided by the sheer number of digital tools that they want us using to be able to do this, and there have been some clear “wait, we sorta fucked up the roll-out here” signs from the people running the program, so I imagine people who aren’t as savvy are probably drowning. But how the hell do you log into Canvas, open a course, navigate through a third of the first module of that course, follow the instructions to open and register for another web service, then use that web service to complete your assignment by saying you don’t have access to Canvas?

Aaaaaauuuuugggghhhhhhh. It reminds me of this:

One more thing, and then I’ll draw this embarrassing bout of whining to a close: part of the 2 1/2 hour zoom-a-thon yesterday was a talk by a retired History professor at IU, of tenuous connection to the course, about what he called bottlenecks to understanding class material. A bottleneck is not an especially complicated concept, and in fact it’s something that’s a known problem by every teacher with more than about ten minutes of experience: that sometimes our students have trouble with our material because of other things that are interfering with their ability to learn said material. Now, he seemed to be limiting himself to academic roadblocks, such as, to stick with the Pythagoras example, if you think “squared” means “multiplied by two,” you’re going to have a hard time figuring out the length of a missing hypotenuse. I asked at one point if he considered economic or family or even motivational factors to be bottlenecks and unfortunately didn’t get an answer. And the lecture was over an hour long, which wouldn’t have been an issue in-person, but over Zoom was absolute torture, because I can’t pay attention to people talking at me on Zoom. It was made worse by the competing factors that 1) I thought the material was a classic example of academics thinking they’ve discovered something that is, forgive the pun, elementary to the people doing the work, and 2) no one else seemed to get what he was talking about. Like, he asked us a couple of times to talk about bottlenecks that we’ve seen from our students in our classes and people just started listing topics. Like, “finding a main idea” is not a bottleneck! Not by itself! “Integers” is not a bottleneck, but brain development issues that make the abstract concept of subtracting a negative to be difficult to understand might be!

tl;dr I am tired and quite possibly an asshole.

In which I admit something uncomfortable

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews11 Comments

image_39515_fit_940Okay.  The truth, now: I don’t like Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I’m not having any fun with it at all.  I’d say “It’s time to stop playing,” but the simple fact is I just had two weeks off from work and I haven’t touched my PS4 since about the third day of the break.  So I sorta already did that.

There has been an interesting backlash happening against the game lately, where a whole lot of people who put 100 hours into the game are looking back at it and going “What the hell did I do all that for?”  I played the shit out of the first two Dragon Age games; I have literally every single Achievement point available for the first one and beat it with every character class; I didn’t replay DA2 quite as much, mostly because Skyrim and, oh, right, the birth of my son prevented the extended replay time the first one got– but I am a fan of this series, guys.  And DAI has done nothing for me.  A fair amount of this is my own changing priorities as a gamer, granted, but a lot of it I’ve got to lay on the game.  They’ve already done this right twice; the fact that the crafting interface sucks so horribly and managing inventory is an enormous pain in the ass and there’s so much of the game dedicated to literally waiting around is on them.  I’m, I don’t know, maybe 35 hours into it?  I just completed a quest that effectively made me emperor and yet at the same time I feel like nothing I’m doing is changing the game at all.  By the midpoint of both previous DA games I had all kinds of stuff I wanted to go back and do a different way to see what happened.  This game?  I can’t think of a single meaningful choice I’ve made since the very beginning of the game, where I went up a path instead of down a hill.  This last quest could have ended a couple of different ways, but I don’t care about how it might have gone differently.  That’s a serious problem.  There has, to date, not been a single decision made in the game that I had to think about for even a couple of seconds.  There were decisions in previous games where I had to stop playing for a while to think about what I was going to do.

I hate the war table.  A lot:

IMG_2181

I ended up having to just take a picture of my TV, because I couldn’t quite find a picture that showed this exactly the way I wanted, but this is how you activate most of your missions.  You have to go to this one specific spot in your castle (which, by the way, you had to find on your own; there was literally a “find the war room” mission.  This?  Bullshit.) and then move that little glowing eye thing in the center around one of the two halves of the “map”– yes, there are two halves, for some reason they couldn’t put everything together.  Some of the little spots and lights and exclamation points are things you can do.  Others are things you have other people do, and there’s a bunch of words to read and  then a little prize anything from ten minutes to several hours later and don’t worry about it because none of it was important.   There are tons of these little things and by now they’re not making me curious; I just want to find a way to turn them off.

Each stage seems to have lots of shards to find.  I don’t know what the shards are or why I’m looking for them.  There was one of those somebody-else missions that had something to do with them but I accidentally hit a button too fast and the text went away, so I don’t know what happened.

Right.  Words.  There are lots and lots and lots of words to read in this game.  Ordinarily this is a good thing for me– I read every syllable in the first two games– but this game doesn’t even want you to read all that shit, making me wonder what the hell it’s there for.  An example: during loading screens, there are three little cards you can shuffle through on the screen. Each of them gives you a fact about the game, or a tip, or a little bit of backstory for something.  Some of the bits of backstory are several hundred words long.

The game gives you maybe five seconds to cycle through those– not remotely enough time to read anything– and then will fade to black for thirty seconds or so.  What the fuck?

Combat is boring.  This is a little bit my fault, as I chose an archer for my main character– meaning I tend to be a fair distance from the battles– and by predilection in these sorts of games I’m very resistant to the idea of playing characters who aren’t “me” even though the game is perfectly happy to let me take anyone over.  But my role in combat is to hold down a button.  That’s about it.  There’s an overhead tactical view; I’ve never used it for more than a couple of seconds.  I suppose I could play at a higher difficulty level but I suspect the big difference would be I was bored and dying a lot.

The game wants me to take time between missions to talk to each of my party members, so that I can advance each of their own individual storylines.  In previous games, I did this.  In this one, I can’t be bothered any longer; it feels like a chore and I have no interest in it.  I’ve not started a romance with anyone because I just don’t have the energy.  I’m willing to accept this one partially being on me, because it’s effectively the same mechanism the previous DA games as well as all three Mass Effects used.  Then again, I played along in those five games.  This one?  Nah, bald elf dude whose name I can’t remember, for Christ’s sake, you just go be boring over there by yourself.  You’re gonna have that staff for the rest of the game; I hope you like it.

I hate it when I don’t like something that I feel like I wanted to like.  I’m perfectly happy to dislike something that lots of people like, but dammit I wanted to really love this game, and had perfectly cromulent reasons to think I would.  But I stopped playing it over two weeks ago and at this point I’m really not sure if I’m gonna go back to it or not.  The thought that they released a Dragon Age game that I can’t even get into enough to beat really sucks.

Blech.

In which I am old and weird

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

So I wanted, for no good reason, to Tweet a particular line from a particular song, and I couldn’t quite piece together the words.  When one of the words in a song sounds like “mack-a-dang-dang,” and your ears are old and getting bad like mine are, you look them up.

So I tried to look them up.  Finding words to songs has never actually been difficult; this is among the easier Google searches in the world.  However, for some reason, when the artist’s name is Lyrics Born, finding the lyrics to his song suddenly gets real complicated, especially when the song is called Knock Knock and there are a bunch of songs by that name already.  Note that I still can’t actually find the lyrics anywhere– I have found a few videos and several places to stream the song, but not the actual lyrics.  Even my usual lyrics sites, usually on the top in the Google searches, have failed me.

(Resist the urge to be a smartass and find them; that’s not the point.)

Anyway, here’s what I thought I was hearing:

The name is Lyrics Born, AKA mackadangdang
Live from the 0-1-5 doing my thang thang

Silly, right?  Sure.  LB has some impressively complicated songs, “Knock Knock” isn’t one of them.  It was running through my head and I wanted to Tweet it.  But I could not make “mackadangdang” turn into a phrase I understood.  But it sounded pretty clear, right?

What the hell; I googled “mackadangdang.”  A few minutes and some spelling variations led me to this:

Screen Shot 2014-08-15 at 7.41.36 PM

 

You would think this would end the story, with me sheepishly realizing I was officially and irrevocably an Old and that there were words that The Kidz were using that I knew nothing of.

No.

Instead of Tweeting the silly line from the silly song that was in my head and giving my followers an essentially meaningless Tweet to skip over and not read, I Tweeted this:

Because I wasn’t done being dumb yet.

And LB, because the world is a dumb place and it is endlessly fun to make fun of me, retweeted it.  To ten thousand people.

So now ten thousand people who have never heard of me know I’m old and dumb.

The end.

wait what are you serious

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching12 Comments

I still can’t really talk about the new job (that restriction should be gone to some extent by the end of the week) but I’m pretty sure I can talk about this.

There’s a new kid coming into the building next year.  This is obviously not a new thing.

He has a criminal record.  This is also obviously not a new thing, although I’d prefer it happen less often.

The criminal record involves felonies.  This is, uh, worse.

Felonies involving state police.  Even rarer.

I am likely getting some of the details wrong and am probably lying about some of them, but apparently this kid has managed, in two separate incidents, to shut down the email system of an entire school corporation and once managed to coax state government officials into giving him important email passwords over the phone, which he used to impersonate a government official in mass emails to members of a school community.

In…

wait for it.

Wait for it.

waaaaaaiiiiiiittttt for it.

Fourth grade.

He did this in fourth grade.  He was arrested from his dinner table and charged with multiple felonies in the fourth grade.

And he’s ours next year.

Fun!