I was going to write a post about how these special editions of the Nevernight Chronicles went on sale yesterday, and I really want them, because I love those books and I don’t have hardcover copies. The problem is the publishers are overseas and, because my government is run by maniacs and fools, they won’t ship to the US. So I was going to see if I could possibly leverage my worldwide fandom to ship a copy to me if I ordered it and sent it to their house instead of mine.
Only it’s sold out now, in barely over 24 hours.
So I’m gonna go play video games instead, and add one more fucking thing to the incredibly long list of reasons why I hate Donald Trump.
Fuck, and I mean this with all imaginable disrespect, the BAFTAs.
I wasn’t going to put my two cents in on this one. As a white guy with no particular disabilities it’s probably safe for me to sit it out, and I don’t really need to have an opinion on every single thing that happens. But I learned a couple of things today about the BAFTA’s setup for this event and their reaction to John Davidson yelling the N-word at Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan, and … man, seriously, fuck these guys.
In case you’ve been off-planet: John Davidson is a British disability activist who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, specifically the version known as coprolalia, which is the unwanted uttering of obscenities and slurs. There was a movie made about him, called I Swear, and that film was up for some awards at the BAFTAs, so Davidson was invited. Lindo and Jordan were on stage to present an award unrelated to Davidson, and he shouted the N-word, and all hell broke loose.
Now, to be clear: people with disabilities have the right to exist in public. Black people also have the right to exist in public without having the worst slur in the history of the English language shouted at them. How one chooses to sort out those two rights when they come in conflict with one another is something that I’m going to allow people with better qualifications to address, and if you want there are any number of posts and videos out there of people talking about that.
I was already aware that the program was aired in the US on a lengthy (two hours, I believe) delay, and I believe it was broadcast on a short delay even in Britain. And apparently the BAFTAs did see fit to edit it out when an award winner said “Free Palestine!” at the end of his acceptance speech. Two things I was not aware of, however, were that:
Davidson also yelled “Pedophile!” at host Alan Cumming, who is gay … and they edited that out too.
The amazing thing is it’s Davidson himself who is calling them out in this article. You would think “Hey, the Black guys weren’t the only people I yelled horrible slurs at” would not be much of a defense, but it’s really starting to look like the guy yelled a whole bunch of offensive shit that got edited out and the only thing they left in was the N-word. “Pedophile” gets edited out. “Free Palestine!” (not from Davidson, but still) gets edited out. Half-a-dozen uses of the F-word get edited out. The N-word? Nah, that’s fine. It can stay.
That’s a huge fucking problem, and it’s racist as fuck, but it’s a problem that can be laid directly at the feet of the BAFTAs, and not John Davidson. On top of everything else, apparently nobody from BAFTA said anything to Lindo and Jordan afterwards, which is just insane.
I also read another opinion piece, which I can’t find now, that included the words “John Davidson can’t spend his whole life apologizing,” which … I feel like he kind of can? And maybe should. People apologize for things that happened inadvertently all the Goddamn time. You apologize when you hurt someone’s feelings and you feel bad about it. Davidson, by all accounts, seems to be a lovely person, and I cannot imagine that he enjoys yelling racial slurs at people. I don’t feel like apologizing when you do yell racial slurs at people is that big of an ask. This is not a perfect analogy, but I’m a big motherfucker. I try my best to keep all of my body parts to myself in public, particularly when I’m in the midst of a crowd, but the very nature of being large and surrounded by people means that occasionally I bump into them, and anybody that isn’t paying attention and runs into me is very likely to end up on the ground. And do you know what happens when that happens? I apologize. Every time. Whether it was my fault or not. I apologize and I check to see if the person is okay. It’s not an imposition, it’s kind of a required part of trying to be a good person. And it’s not especially complicated, either.
Again, I don’t feel qualified to comment on how to handle the intersection of guy-who-inadvertently-shouts-racial-slurs and people-who-get-racial-slurred-at as a matter of policy. It feels unfair to tell Davidson he can’t be in public and it’s deeply fucked up to keep Black presenters off the stage in case Davidson yells something. But what I do feel comfortable with is the idea that, however you do handle this, you definitely don’t handle it by doing what the BAFTAs did. I can identify fucked-upedness without having to solve society’s problems. And what they actually did is completely fucked up, and some heads need to roll because of it.
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.
Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.
Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.
To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.
(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)
I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!
Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.
The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.
My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.
Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.
The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.
Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.
All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.
I kind of need tomorrow to go well.
(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.
We had a surprise snow day today— I woke up, thought “Man, it would be great to find out we had a two-hour delay,” and then we did, and less than an hour later it turned into an asynchronous cancellation. We had an ugly burst of sleet and lake effect snow at the worst possible time, apparently, and the rural roads were disastrous. This is somehow our seventh snow day of 2026, which is absolutely insane.
On Thursday a student walked up to me and asked me what the plan was for the walkout protest next week, since she had heard I was “in charge” of it. And holy fucking Jesus I have never shut an incorrect idea down so quickly. High school students across northern Indiana (and I assume most of the country, but this was definitely the week for them around here) had walkouts this week, and there are more planned for next week. Our district sent out a communication to the teachers explaining precisely what their expectations were for the staff were our students to decide to walk out of class. I have been talking with a lot of my students about the protests (at, to be clear, their instigation, not mine) and to be completely fair, the idea that I was “in charge” isn’t completely out of left field. I quietly distributed whistles into the staff mailboxes late last week, and it was hilarious how no one in the building, including my principal, hesitated for even a moment to decide that it was me behind them.
The problem is that I genuinely don’t love the idea of middle school students doing a walkout. Teachers have been told that they must remain in their classrooms if even a single student does not walk out, and we are to “continue instruction as normal,” and if everyone leaves, we are to contact the office for further instructions. I strongly suspect that there will not be enough supervision. This is a very different thing from high school walk-outs, where half of the students are at least on the verge of adulthood, have drivers’ licenses, etcetera. There are eleven-year-olds in my building. It is not the same thing. And while I’ve quietly encouraged a handful of students to take leadership roles if and/or when, the social environment in a middle school doesn’t work the same way a high school does either. Not to mention the fact that in my specific building, without providing a lot of detail, the physical layout of the building and the surrounding streets aren’t great for marching.
The notion of these kids spreading themselves out over a few blocks while they march around the building or whatever— or, worse, some of them deciding to do that while others congregate near the doors and chant or whatever— is … kinda terrifying, to be honest. All we need is one rogue asshole to decide to start a fight and all hell is going to break loose. Again, high school is different; there are going to be some of the same concerns, of course, but the kids are more able to self-police themselves.
Oh, and we already know ICE is in the area despite this being a red state, and all it takes is one fucking car full of Nazis to try to snatch one of the brown kids.
I happen to have an eye appointment scheduled toward the end of the day on one of the days that is being frequently discussed for a walkout. I could, technically, take the afternoon off, and then none of it would be my problem. But if I did that and something happened— or if I followed my district-issued instructions and stayed in my room for one kid or whatever— and something happened, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I find myself genuinely hoping they don’t have the guts to go through with it.
My day featured an absolutely abominable amount of Teenage Girl Drama and far too much politics than I’m comfortable with at work. I got asked by a student to help them plan an anti-ICE walkout and stuff kind of snowballed from there and it’s February third and I already feel like maybe it’s told January to hold its beer.
I’m either going to go read, go play Nioh 3, or, most likely of the three, go sit in a chair and stare into the middle distance for a while. Ugh.
It’s a little hilarious that it was so easy to find a picture of a guillotine appropriately sized for the World’s Littlest Nazi— I have had less luck finding an image of a Smurf-scale gallows—but I want it clear that simply being sacked and thrown back into his rank-and-file regular local Nazi job does not count as a consequence. I’m not sure I believe the news, to be honest; it implies that someone in the current regime either recognizes that Bovino has fucked up or thinks he’ll do as a patsy, and I don’t really believe any of them capable of that kind of thinking. At least I won’t have to look at him or his stupid little cosplay trench coats for a little while, at least until Fox hires him at a much higher rate of pay as an “analyst.” Or he runs for the Senate, or replaces Rubio as Secretary of State. He’ll find a way to fail up; they always do.
The only thing I will accept as a genuine consequence for any of these motherfuckers is life in jail or public execution. That’s what you’re supposed to do with Nazis, God damn it.
Off again tomorrow, and as cold as it’s supposed to be on Wednesday I have an immense amount of trouble believing that we’re going to be back before Thursday. We are going to get what they’re calling a “ground blizzard” tonight and into tomorrow— my wife made the point that they’ve had to make up a lot of words to properly describe this storm. What is a “ground blizzard”? It’s when you get a shitton of relatively dry, powdery snow that blows around easily and then have a night of 40 mph winds. There’s not actually supposed to be much, if any, new snow tonight, but apparently all that we have is about to be redistributed. I cleared the driveway again this afternoon and measured; we’ve received a pretty consistent 14” of snow over the last several days— the deepest part was 23”. It’s probably closer to fifteen or sixteen inches of actual snowfall since it’s starting to compress under its own weight. You can actually see the striations between the different storms, which is really cool.
Thursday is looking like it’s going to be at least relatively calm, but then Friday’s going to roll around and it’s going to be -12 wind chills again, and it seems like double-digit negative wind chills have been a pretty hard line for cancellations for the last couple of years. We’ll have two days of in person school, max, for the second week in a row.
God, I hope next week calms down a little bit, in a whole lot of ways.
