Tag: stupid

The literacy crisis is real

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Go ahead, watch this TikTok video, which is being weirdly inconsistent about whether it’s willing to embed:

@victorvacheroncomedy

Celsius was designed by scientists. Fahrenheit was designed by someone who had to go outside. ☀️ ❄️ #USA #Weather #Europe #Travel #Comedy

♬ original sound – victorvacheroncomedy

In response to this video, I posted the following comment:

You will note that that comment has 4601 Likes in 8 hours, which is a pretty good number! I don’t mind getting lots of likes on comments. However, right after taking all of the screenshots I needed for this post, I deleted the comment. Why? Because the dumbest fucking people on Earth found it, and I cannot believe the pure bullheaded illiteracy on display in the many responses to this comment. This is just a sampling, guys, and the number of people who seemed to think that I literally meant human beings boil is absolutely staggering. Have a gallery:

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I can’t decide which is worse: the “we don’t really boil” people, the “ONLY AT SEA LEVEL” pedants (the variance in boiling temperature is about 7% from sea level to the top of Mount fucking Everest; shut up), or the people who don’t seem to understand what fevers are. My favorite is the person who claims to have had a 106 degree fever for two full days; 106 degrees is a five-alarm, get-your-ass-to-the-hospital-NOW fever. 106 degrees will kill you stone fucking dead. Then there are the people who thought that I meant that people would … literally freeze into a block … at 0 degrees? Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.

I mean, beach_lily really thought “Literally not true” was something worth saying. You’re right! Of fucking course people don’t literally boil! What the fuck is wrong with you that you thought you needed to point that out?

I’ve said it before many times, and I’ll say it again: it should be painful to be this dumb. Your brain should shock you or something. You should pass out before you finish expressing thoughts this dumb. I am absolutely willing to live by this; I live in daily, constant fear of actually being as dumb as these people seem to be. This is “democracy is a terrible idea” level dumb. These people’s votes count!

Society is so fucking doomed.

I remain

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Defiantly unraptured, as of yet; we shall see if TikTok Jesus takes me tomorrow, as my understanding is that the end of the world has been rescheduled. Again.

I had one girl show up to school today in what I very well might have called a wedding dress on an older human; I decided not to ask any questions, and by afternoon she was in a cheerleading T-shirt and shorts, so … I still didn’t ask any questions. I don’t know if Jesus having child brides is a thing, or if he’s okay with his child brides going to school on the day he marries them? I have degrees in religion but I’m not as up to date on the fever swamps of evangelical Christianity at the moment, and unless someone starts paying me for it I have no intention of venturing any further than I already have. They are wrong, again; it is the only thing that they have ever been. What an immense surprise.

In which I’m getting dumber

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.

On degeneracy

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.

Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.

(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)

Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.

Bah.

I tried, I swear

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I’ve sat down three times tonight, intending to write something, and it hasn’t worked. Brain melty. Students test tomorrow. Four days until Spring Break.

Child, please

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.

Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.

God. Kids these days.

In which I don’t know what to do

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

As someone who cannot Art, this AI-art-generation phenomenon is completely fascinating to me; this is what the Wonder app came up with when I selected “Oil painting” and “very difficult decisions” as the prompt. Sometimes you get duds but I enjoy this one quite a bit.

Anyway, we lost two more teachers last week. Between the seventh and the eighth grade right now we have about six teachers. There are signs that downtown is starting to take our issues seriously but this game of chicken that everyone is playing is driving me slowly insane, and I just don’t know what to do if we, say, lose another language arts teacher, or if we end up down to one math teacher for the entire building, or whatever other bullshit might happen. I kind of think the folks who are likely to quit are mostly gone by now, but there are a couple that I’ve got an eye on.

And, well, I’ve got an interview on Tuesday and could potentially have a second soon too. And fuck me stupid if I didn’t get two good days in a row on Thursday and Friday and now I’m all oh, I can’t abandon these kids, wash wash blah blah blah. I fucking hate that I can’t make what is obviously the correct career decision, a decision I would have already made were I anything other than a teacher, and flee. And yet I had the whole weekend to finish the application for this other district and I haven’t done it yet. Because apparently I am a fucking moron. It’s not even goddamned October yet. This can still get so much fucking worse.

Well, this post ended up a little angrier than I thought it was going to be. Originally I was very much planning on Oh, I don’t know what to do and now I think I know what I’m going to do and I also know what I should do and I’m pretty sure those are two different things and I am making a stupid career decision again, and I am deeply, seriously, intensely angry with myself about it.

Meanwhile, this is my schedule tomorrow: Dentist appointment at 8:00 in the morning. Following that, go to school and do not teach first and second hour because my student observer is doing one of her mandatory lessons tomorrow. Then leave the building to go back to the doctor because, remember, I was injured breaking up a fight last week, spend however long that takes, then return to the building probably just in time for my prep periods and nothing else, because if I go home I have to take a half day and if I come back I basically don’t have to count the absence for anything since worker’s comp covers it. Remember that this building where I was just injured during a fight is the building that I feel like I can’t leave because waaah bjaaah the chiiiillllldrennnnn.

Fuck.

In which I’m still annoyed

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Can we just get rid of the apostrophe, please?

I found this three hours ago, and I haven’t Tweeted enough today to scroll the irritated tweet I wrote about it off of my screen, so it’s still sitting there bothering me. I don’t know if the person who designed this shirt (and there’s a whole line of clothing with this idiotic design) doesn’t speak English as their first language or what, but a whole bunch of people looked at this fucking shirt and didn’t do anything about it before it showed up on Amazon to annoy me.

I mean, before an R? Who the fuck thinks we need apostrophes before the letter R?

Seriously, though: there are seven apostrophes in this post so far. There’s not a single word— and there’s apostrophes number eight and nine– that would suddenly become ambiguous or unclear if the apostrophe was removed. I don’t have any fucking clue why this is so complicated to so many people– seriously, it’s not fucking hard— but society just needs to get rid of the fucking thing. We don’t actually need to have a whole punctuation mark to indicate removed letters any longer. I’m not completely convinced we ever did, to be honest.

There is a sports bar a few miles north of me called Mitch’s. Or maybe it’s Mitchs’, I don’t fucking know, because the front of the building and their road sign spell the name of their own establishment two different ways. I have never set foot in this place and I never will, because I hate them, and I drive past the place fairly frequently, and every time I drive past them, I have to think about how much I hate them and decide for the ten millionth time that I’m not going to burn the place down.

I give up. It’s enough. Human beings cannot be educated to do this properly, they’re not capable. For my sanity, society needs to abandon the apostrophe.