Okay God Damn It Let’s Do This

On November 5, 2024November 5, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

6:33 PM: I am sitting on my couch, iPad in my lap, phone to my right, MSNBC streaming on the television in front of me. The polls in Indiana closed half an hour ago and the state has not been called yet, which I’m choosing to believe is a good thing despite the fact that Trump is up 60-40 with 3% of the vote in. I can’t promise regular updates or that I’ll not abandon this in a fit of depression in a couple hours but We. Are. Live.

6:40 PM: I know I said this yesterday but I actually do think we’ll have an idea of who the winner is in a few hours. Will it be literally called? Probably not, but I think the writing will be large and glowing on the wall. I’m sure I’m wrong.

6:41 PM: This Philadelphia DA really should have just said “Fuck around.” If you’re gonna repeat “eff around and find out” four or five times just say fuck.

6:45: One of my cats spies a random other cat through our front window and starts making absolutely psychotic noises at it, causing the whole house to temporarily freak out and descend upon the room he’s in.

6:50: I take a few minutes to track down useful local race coverage. It occurs to me that the school board races are probably the first things I’ll know about definitively tonight. Mike Braun and Todd Rokita are both up but there’s only about 10% of the vote in and I’m not worrying about it right now. No matter how things go nationally the local races in Indiana are probably not going to be good news.

6:54: Reports of multiple bomb threats in Democratic areas in Georgia, which … sadly fails to surprise me.

7:00: A whole lot of states are about to close, and meanwhile … this, from Rush County, IN. I don’t actually know where these results are from; they were just posted to BlueSky.

My wife has had a theory that Kennedy was going to do unexpectedly well in Indiana that she has been talking about for a while; we’ll see.

7:06: It does look like that data was flipped, and everybody’s called Indiana. They called Banks for Senate too, fuck. Oh well.

7:17: They’re chattering about Georgia and I’m reloading the local races over and over. I really want to see School Board results, dammit!

7:22: Mental note that I’m not allowed to look at the New York Times website tonight, first, because fuck the fucking New York Times, and second, because their tech people are on strike and I don’t cross picket lines.

I’m gonna have to figure out a way to charge my phone from the couch. Hmm. Surely the boy has a charger around here somewhere. He lives on the couch.

7:27: I mentioned this in other places earlier, but I dressed in blue from head to toe today without even realizing I was doing it. I just changed into comfy pants and those are blue too. Meanwhile, I can’t find a charger cord long enough for my phone, and my son’s charger is Lightning, not USB-C, so I’m screwed there. Somebody bring me a ten foot USB-C cable.

7:29: The Vermont Senate race is called for Bernie Sanders, who I didn’t realize was running again. Does he know how Goddamned old he is?

7:30: A few more states’ polls close and West Virginia gets called immediately for Trump. What a Goddamn surprise. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin’s Senate seat goes to a Republican. Sigh.

7:36: Still waiting impatiently for my county to report literally anything.

7:38: I threw $20 at Slingbox for a month of CNN and MSNBC, by the way. I’ll cancel it in a couple of days because once the election’s over I don’t need it any longer and the second month will be twice as expensive.

7:42: Some dude is on a college campus in Arizona talking to students waiting in line, and apparently some male student told him that he voted for Trump because Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he didn’t know what she stood for, and I think it’s fine if that kid is never allowed to vote again.

7:43: Apparently that dude is at Arizona State and his name is… Gottie? I dunno, Rachel didn’t spell it.

7:44: Sigh. AP has called the IN governor’s race for Mike Braun, which not only means that we have him in office but his Christianist, psychopathic running mate, who makes him look like Mitt Romney by comparison.

7:52: I swear to Christ that if Kamala should have done Joe Rogan makes its way into The Discourse I’m gonna commit some crimes. I don’t even know which ones. Some of the crimier ones.

7:58: The way I can tell all the MSNBC people are my age is that they just interviewed De La Soul and all of the anchors are losing their minds over it.

8:00: Seeing online that Mark Robinson has lost the Gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Florida just got called immediately which kind of catches me off guard. It probably shouldn’t, though. So far no real surprises anywhere.

Illinois being “too early to call” is kind of alarming, though. Then again, so was Indiana.

8:03: This is unreasonable but right here at this exact second is the first moment of real dread tonight. Rick Scott is projected in Florida, too.

8:06: I want a Big Board.

8:10: GOD DAMN IT ST. JOE COUNTY DO YOU NEED ME TO COME HELP COUNT THE POLLS HAVE BEEN CLOSED FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS REPORT SOME VOTES

8:20: Not a lot going on and one of the cats is trying really hard to move into my lap, which is already occupied.

8:21: Rachel Maddow says thirty-two different places have received bomb threats in Georgia today. Christ.

8:28: Fuuuuuck I do not want Mike Braun to be my governor. Again, it’s not surprising at all, nothing that has happened tonight has been a surprise yet, but I’d like some good news other than the North Carolina governor’s race.

8:30: Florida’s abortion amendment is running at 57% but Rick Scott has already been called as winning the Senate race and Trump has been called for the state. Make it make fucking sense.

8:44: Kind of in a holding pattern until 9:00 hits and a bunch more states’ polls close. We’re in the doldrums part of the evening right now and I don’t think things are going to be getting better for an hour or so. That’s if we’re lucky.

A tranche of votes hit in St. Joe County, and with a quarter of the vote in the guy I really don’t want on the school board is in second place, which puts him on the school board. No idea where the votes are from, though; there’s no way I’m getting precinct-level data on school board votes.

8:47: I just saw an actual TV ad for … a podcast? Seriously? We’re doing that now?

8:49: Oh, there were bomb threats called into Navajo areas in Arizona too? Really? Weird how these keep happening to Democratic areas.

8:59: How horrible will the next minute of my life be? Stay tuned!

9:00: Nobody’s talking about the House at all. Anything changing there? Anyone wanna mention that?

9:01: Pretty fucking horrible, as Texas got called fucking immediately. We can still hope for Cruz to go down, I suppose, but Texas continues to disappoint.

9:06: Wait, NBC hasn’t called Illinois or New York yet? Come on.

9:14: Big Board dude is going on about how suburban and rural counties are moving more to Trump, which is true, but a difference of 200 votes isn’t really going to make much of a difference if the cities move by the same percentage and have twenty times as many people.

9:20: OH MY GOD STOP SAYING SLIPPAGE. PLEASE. IT HURTS.

9:21: Quit talking about Georgia and give me some numbers from Iowa.

9:24: Hey, good news! Sarah McBride wins a House seat in Delaware, making her the first transgender woman elected to the House. That’s a big deal. And apparently Fani Willis just got re-elected, too.

9:25: The FBI says the Russians are calling in hoax bomb threats all over the place, in case that single minute of good news made you feel any better.

9:26: I don’t know who any of these people who aren’t Rachel Maddow are, but the old white guy just chimed in to say that we “never had bomb threats at polling places before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate.” That is utter bullshit, as any primarily-Black precinct in the fucking South could tell you. Christ, what ahistorical nonsense.

9:33: I think right here is where I abandon the idea that we’re going to know anything tonight. I was hoping for a scenario where we’d be overperforming the polls— the shy Harris voter thing— but it doesn’t seem to be happening.

9:37: Continuing tonight’s theme of Not Surprising but Still Depressing, Marjorie Taylor Greene is projected to win reelection. Which makes me wonder if Colorado’s polls have closed yet. I think they have; I’m gonna go check on Boebert.

9:39: She’s up ten points with 2/3 of the vote in, so she’s probably reelected too.

9:42: I know I’ve talked some shit about this costume for the new Superman movie, but I am hugely in love with this picture even if the S-shield is wrong and I can see the stupid high collar.

9:49: I would like Rachel Maddow to explain what the fuck is the difference between “too early to call” and “too close to call.” Do they just change the language when a certain percentage of the votes come in? Is it possible to flip back to “too early”?

9:52: Two hundred years since he first ran for president, I still do not understand how this guy is getting even a single vote.

10:09: Fifteen minutes of talking my brother off the ledge via text message. Having eerie flashbacks to having a similar conversation with my mother in 2016. Colorado called for Harris.

10:18: Seeing a report on BlueSky that the Dems are now projected to take the House? Assuming it’s nonsense for now; it’s way too early, but Goddammit the way I have no information at my fingertips about it is driving me insane.

10:19: Steve Karnacki, whose name I am almost certainly misspelling, continues his infuriating habit of talking about candidates outperforming or underperforming 2020’s vote totals without referencing the absolute number of votes being discussed. 50% of the vote in Philadelphia is in and Harris stands to net at least another 200,000 votes when the rest of it comes in, which erases slight Trump gains in dozens of podunk rural counties.

10:22: God damn it, MSNBC calls Iowa for Trump. And fucking Cruz in Texas. Fuck. Fuck. The fabled Seltzer poll appears to have missed the mark.

10:32: Speaking of “shit I saw on BlueSky,” somebody’s called Georgia for Trump? That’s bad. That’s the first genuinely no-shit really bad sign of the night.

10:39: I’m starting to get deeper into the weeds in looking at county-by-county results in individual states. I’m getting depressed and scared and starting to contemplate taking brain meds. The bomb threats across Georgia are starting to look like they flipped the state.

10:43: Also assuming that the “we’ve taken the House” report was bullshit at this point.

10:58: Okay, new plan is never pay attention to BlueSky again; I don’t like what I’m seeing in Georgia, but people are literally still voting and if anyone has called it I haven’t heard about it other than that one post.

11:00: God, I hate this. But I’m pretty sure I felt the exact same way at this time in 2020. Polls in California have closed and it’s called immediately for Harris. Trump takes Idaho. Still no surprises.

11:02: HOW IS NORTH CAROLINA TOO EARLY TO CALL, RACHEL MADDOW. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST AND ALL THAT IS HOLY TAKE THIRTY SECONDS AND EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK THAT MEANS.

11:03: Dare I look at Montana and see what’s going on with Tester’s race, or is it going to just depress me more?

11:05: Okay, only about six percent of the vote is in. Nothing to see here yet.

11:16: NBC calls the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno, which means that we have lost the Senate. Even if we pick up the seat in … what is it, Nebraska? and hold Montana, the Senate’s gone.

11:21: AP has called North Carolina for Trump. And I know that this is more or less exactly where we were at this point four years ago, but I think I’m done now. I’m sweaty and tired and I need brain medication. We haven’t seen a single state flip yet but the only one I feel good about is Pennsylvania and there are going to be flips somewhere.

God, ETS, eat a dick

On June 6, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

ETS, the company behind these fucking Praxis tests, is one of the worst organizations in the history of the entire fucking planet, and by “organizations” I’m including the Nazis, the KKK, the Republicans, and whatever flavor of Communism might be most on your nerves at the moment. I hate these people to a degree I’m not entirely able to explain, at least not without the FBI taking a closer look at me.

I passed another practice test today, by a larger margin than the first one, and decided, fuck it, I’m going to go ahead and schedule this thing. The last time I looked I was able to schedule an exam the next day, so you can imagine my surprise when I logged in and discovered that I can’t get in before July 1 any longer. Which … fuck. This blog is already turning into the All Math Test All The Time website, and now I have to wait three more weeks? I’m ready now, motherfuckers. Let’s do this.

And then I went through their list of “requirements,” and …

… look, God damn it, I need these fucking testing companies to understand that their shit is not that fucking important. The fucking NSA doesn’t protect their shit as carefully as standardized testing companies do. They won’t let me have scratch paper for a fucking math test. I have to use a fucking whiteboard, which can be “erased in front of the proctor,” because … what? I might share questions with somebody? So the fucking hell what? Every test is fucking different, and you sell practice tests, you stupid dicks. Which is the actual reason, by the way, because extorting $120 out of me for the fucking test isn’t enough; they need more money from anyone who wants to study for these fucking things, like the blood-sucking rent-seeking fucking parasite scumbag shitstained vermin they are.

Make sure any other devices in my home that use the internet aren’t running?

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not even going to try to do this. Avoid wearing jewelry? Fucking why? And what’s “dressed appropriately” mean? Are people seeking teaching licenses likely to have their dicks or tits out while testing, so likely that they need a rule about it?

Elsewhere, I am told that I am expected to be able to show the proctor “all four walls” in the room I am in, presumably because any wall they can’t see is obviously covered with posters explaining how to do the questions on the test. My webcam is part of the fucking computer, though, and I’m not sure how the fuck they expect me to point the Goddamn monitor at the wall behind it.

(Also, remember: approximately zero percent of teaching involves blind recall of facts in the complete absence of resource materials. If I forget anything I’m supposed to be teaching, I can literally look it up right in front of the fucking kids if I want to. These things should be entirely open notes; what I have memorized is completely irrelevant.)

God, I hate this fucking company.

Ugh

On May 8, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I had actually been having a pretty good Sunday until a few minutes ago, when the exact same settings that I’ve been using for months to create videos for my YouTube site suddenly decided to shit the bed and produce a 31-gigabyte un-openable monstrosity, and now not only do I not have my videos for tomorrow ready but I get to spend time researching how to repair damaged .mp4 files, which I don’t think is actually a thing that can be done. I’m pretty sure it’s all scams and “Okay, this will work, but send us $70 first” types of things.

Shit.

Anyway, if there’s no 4:00 video tomorrow (there won’t be) that’s why.

In which you aren’t supposed to suck

On November 14, 2021November 14, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I am a fanboy, I admit it: I am typing this post on the most advanced iMac that was available when I bought it; my last several phones have been iPhones, my watch is an Apple Watch, there are at least two if not three iPads in the house (I’ve lost track of one, and we may have recycled it) along with at least two Apple TVs and, if I had brought my work laptop home, which I never do, there would be two MacBooks in the house as well, even though my non-work one needs replacing.

I am so stuck in Apple’s ecosystem that it would require wholesale overhauling of a number of significant aspects of my life in order to properly escape from it. And I mostly don’t want to. But, y’all … this weekend my people got in my damn nerves, and I haven’t quite escaped from Minor Inconvenience Tech Hell just yet and I’m still peeved about it.

To start (and I mean “minor inconvenience” when I say it) Apple Maps decided that it was going to choose a different route to get to my brother’s house than the one I picked. He lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and your options are basically “through the city” or “not through the city,” both of which take about the same amount of time because one is long but fast and the other is shorter but, well, takes you through the city, which means you’re guaranteed to encounter some bumper-to-bumper bullshit on 90/94 somewhere. I haven’t lived in Chicago for going on fifteen years, and there are still some things about living in the city (which I loved, and still do) that I miss damn near every day.

Traffic is not one of them.

Anyway, I realized too late that not only was my phone trying to direct me through the city but it was trying to send me to Lakeshore Drive for some reason, which if you know the city will cause you to raise an eyebrow and if you don’t, well, that’s wrong no matter what route you’re trying to get north with, trust me. At that point I decided that, fuck it, I was going to go rogue, only it turned out that 1) my memory of the city’s highways wasn’t as great as I thought it was and 2) even if I wasn’t heading to LSD just yet I was beyond the point of no return to stay on the Dan Ryan, which meant we got a fun little detour through Chinatown.

I mean, it cost 15-20 minutes, maybe, while I got back on the highway I wanted to be on, so again: minor inconvenience, but I didn’t want to be driving through the West Loop yesterday one way or another, and if my phone had taken me though the route I chose rather than the route it thought was a good idea, this wouldn’t have happened.

The second thing was an ongoing sync issue with Apple Music and iTunes, and if you’ve ever had to deal with that particular slice of bullshit you can probably understand the vast aggravation and high dudgeon I’ve spent most of the last two days in whenever I had a moment where fuck with my phone became a possibility; ie, any time I was not covered in flour or sleeping. I think I’ve solved that problem finally as of about 20 minutes ago, but we’ll see if it shows up again tomorrow where the only tracks I can listen to from this album are the three preorder tracks. (This happens every time I preorder an album, which I’m done doing. It’s digital files. You can’t run out. No more preordering.)

Anyway.

There’s some more Elden Ring live-streaming coming tonight, from 10:00 until 1:00 AM or until I have the sense to go the fuck to bed, whichever comes first, with a full post of my thoughts coming probably tomorrow. The short version: Don’t expect to talk to me in March. I have shit to do.

Three more days

On October 8, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Work wasn’t … bad today, per se, but I’m exhausted anyway because Friday, and I recorded three episodes of the game I’m playing last night and then discovered that my microphone wasn’t working for any of it, leading to annoyed troubleshooting, an eventual restart of my computer, and a lot of obnoxiousness. Now I need to record commentary tracks over all three of the videos. I’m not looking forward to it.

This is all to say I’m taking blogging off tonight, but I’ll likely see you tomorrow. Bat-time, bat-channel, etc.

Holy cow dude

On March 26, 2017March 26, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn moviesLeave a comment

…go see Logan. I know, I’m behind on this one and a lot of you probably have seen it already, but… man. Yeah. When my biggest gripe is “I don’t think Charles Xavier would say ‘Fuck’ that many times,” but I really kinda got off on hearing Patrick Stewart say “fuck” a bunch of times… that is not very much of a gripe.

Go see it. Let’s not let this lead to a whole shitton of unnecessary R’s for superhero movies, mind you, but go see it.

Posts involving my thinkybrain delayed until there’s some room in there. I’m working on the sexism one alluded to yesterday, though.

In which HOLY SHITBALLS

On December 2, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

JESUS FUCK WALKING DEAD JUST KILL ME WHY DON’T YOU

On progress and discipline

On August 22, 2013August 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t normally bleed at work, and I’m not terribly fond of it, but I managed to be bleeding before the first bell even rang this morning. I broke up a fight– or, at least, what was about to be a fight– and one of the combatants managed to scratch my finger in an annoyingly painful fashion while I was separating the two of them. I spent most of the rest of the day telling my boss that he owed me workman’s compensation once my finger fell off. I didn’t know one of the kids; he’s relatively new to the building (possibly this year, but I think he came in late last year) and the other one was an eighth grade kid who I’ve been having irregular run-ins with since he was a fifth grader. I’ve broken up more than one fight he was in and manhandled him into the office on more than one occasion.

The weird thing? I actually get along with him fairly well, all considered. He didn’t start this particular brawl, and the fact that he let me get in between the two of them and separate them actually represents progress. I’m not going to go so far as to say that I’ve made a connection with him– I honestly don’t think anyone in the building except maybe for the football coach can say that, and I’m not even sure about him– but I seem to have figured out how to finesse him to get him to do what I want. I grabbed him in the hallway later that day and let him know that I’d put in my write-up that he wasn’t the guy who started the fight, and talked to him again at the end of the day to make sure that there wasn’t any ongoing beef with the kid who had been messing with him. He said it was going to be okay, and I figured he was telling the truth.

Then his bus was late. The buses are terrible this time of year, and this was a perfect example of why: when the bus finally showed up to school, there was still a primary center kid on the bus, who either didn’t know his address or had gotten on the wrong bus or some piece of nonsense that was keeping the driver from dropping him off at home. Complicating things, the driver’s radio wasn’t working properly for some reason and she wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone at the little guy’s school. So the kids all filed outside to get on the bus and then the driver had to make them all wait (outside, in drizzling rain) while she went inside and made some phone calls to try and figure out what to do with the kid.

This didn’t set well with him. So he and another kid (his girlfriend, maybe? And as I’m writing this it occurs to me to wonder where his little brother was…) decided to walk home.

They can’t walk home if they’re supposed to ride the bus, even if the bus is late. There are massive legal issues involved; if they’re bus riders, they ride the bus. Period. Is it unreasonable? Yeah, probably, on some level or another, but it’s still the rules and I’ve got to enforce them. I managed to get him to head back into the building, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“This is fuckin’ bullshit.”

One of our new paraprofessionals overhears this. “What did you just say?”

“Fuckin’ Christ, dude, leave me alone.”

He takes exception. And I did something I haven’t done before: I actually waved the guy off, letting the kid go into the building unmolested and holding the para back (not physically, mind you) to convince him to ignore a fourteen-year-old not only directly disrespecting him but doing so in an impressively profane fashion.

And the interesting thing? By the end of the conversation, the guy agreed with me. The kid, meanwhile, went inside, like I wanted him to, and while he was the last to sit down like he was supposed to, he did it. The thing about this kid? He’s all street, and has absolutely no parenting whatsoever at home. His mother’s worthless– another teacher in my building, who has his little brother, and is new to the building, met her the other day and said she was the rudest person she’d ever met. I have absolutely no idea where or who his father is. For all I know, neither does his mother.

This kid is not going to back down to anyone, and he’s even less likely to do so when he’s already had a shitty day. There are things I need him to do, right? I need him in the building, where I’m not going to get my ass sued off if he gets hit by a car while he’s walking home or just never goes home at all. I need him sitting down and being with everyone else (granted, this I need less than I need the first thing) and I need him back on the bus in a few minutes and not in a screaming match with the driver who’s keeping him from getting home on time. And a stranger (remember: new paraprofessional) getting all in his face about how he said “fuck” a couple of times is not going to make any of those things happen.

So I basically let him get away with dropping the F-bomb a couple of times. Maybe I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow. Today, this afternoon, wasn’t the time, and doing it in a confrontational manner definitely wasn’t going to work. Confrontation itself doesn’t work with this kid. The only thing I’ve seen work with him is quiet, calm conversation and simple, direct requests, which he’ll usually comply with, and ignoring his occasional outburst.

Is this doing the right thing? Or am I guilty of not having High Standards of Behavior now? Have I Done Nothing to punish his profanity if all I do is remind him about how to talk to adults tomorrow? Is a lunch detention really gonna make any difference?