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March 11, 2023 Luther M. Siler

I suppose technically I’ve posted today, since yesterday’s post just went up (oops) but seeing as how I need two episodes to finish uploading to YouTube before I can do anything serious involving my computer I may as well go ahead and write the post I was going to post.

If I can remember what the hell it was going to be about, that is.

I nearly Tweeted tonight. I removed Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram and TikTok from my phone a couple of weeks (?) ago in a fit of social media hatred, leaving only a single Discord server to represent social media on my phone. I reinstalled TikTok a couple of days ago because my wife has been out of town and I was bored but I’m already tired of it and about to take it off again. My wife is back in town again as of this morning, so we’re starting to return to normal around here, which is good. I haven’t necessarily missed interacting with people on Twitter, but occasionally a thought occurs to me that I want to throw out into the void and I lack a place for stray thoughts at the moment.

(Yes, I know that not every stray thought I have needs to be shared with the world. Sure. I know. Still.)

At any rate, I deleted the proto-Tweet unsent.

Friday featured one of my girls telling one of my boys, with a fair degree of certainty in her voice, that yes, she did have a scrotum, and that it was in her lower back, just like everyone else’s. I pulled her over to my desk and explained the difference between an scrotum and a sacrum to her, and a few minutes later had to ban further use of the word scrotum by any of my students, whether they possessed one or not.

Ah, middle school.

Whatta revoltin’ development

December 15, 2022 Luther M. Siler

Let’s navel-gaze about our social media for a bit, shall we?

The kids discovered my Discord server today. What, you didn’t know I had a Discord server? There’s a reason for that! I never use it. I set it up, and I spend a decent amount of time on an Internet writer friend’s server, but mine just kind of existed because it could. They found it anyway. We had an e-learning day today, with the kids at home and the teachers in the building, and happened to glance at Discord on my lunch break to discover dozens of students, most of my Honors kids, merrily chatting it up in my server, secure in the knowledge that I hadn’t found them yet because they knew I was at work, the little bastards.

A number of things happened very fast– first, renaming the server to remove the word “Siler,” then putting my own name on a list of blocked words– or, rather, making my name the entire list of blocked words– and then rapidly introducing a set of Official Rules that hadn’t been there before because there hadn’t been people there before. Technically the kids aren’t really doing anything wrong, especially once I introduced the Thou Shalt Not Use Each Other’s Last Names and Thou Shalt Not Post Selfies, For Thou Art Minors rules, and now I mostly need to find out if I’m going to get fired if the district finds out about it.

Which strikes me– I’ve never seen any sort of district social media policy, nor was I asked to sign one when I got hired. I actually thought that was a pretty common thing for school districts nowadays, but if we have one I don’t know about it. I’ll have to ask the boss tomorrow. I’ve told the kids they’re on probation– any shenanigans, tomfoolery or other synonyms for nonsense and I’ll either ban everybody or just shut the server down, which, again, I wasn’t using anyway. On the other hand, so long as they’re behaving, it’s a public server and they’re members of the public, so … whatever? I don’t even know who, specifically, 2/3 of them are. I dunno. We’ll see.

This is further evidence of how careful I need to be to keep my social media cleanly split between accounts that use the word “Siler”– the blog, Twitter, and Mastodon, although I’m not using Mastodon a ton just yet– and the ones that just call me Luther, which would be TikTok, Discord (now, at least, as they didn’t appear to notice when I renamed the server) and YouTube. I very much am not interested in them finding my blog or my Twitter, in particular, although I think if any of them had taken it into their heads to Google “Luther Siler,” they’d have done it by now and I’d have heard about it. So I think I’ve dodged that particular bullet, at least for the moment, and if I make it through tomorrow I think I’m in the clear, since we’re on another damn e-learning day and I fully expect them to spend the whole day on my Discord again. Hopefully by next week they’ll lose interest and I won’t have to worry about it one way or another. We’ll see.