I was going to start yesterday’s aborted post by making fun of these horrifying things. After that I had a whole gross story about getting sick at work and hell if I remember what was coming after that.
So, yeah, I got sick at work, and then made it through the rest of the day and I’m fine now. Meanwhile, I haven’t technically fixed the deeply weird issue the new laptop is having– I think something about the OS isn’t playing fair with Gutenberg at WordPress, because nothing else makes sense– but I’ve found a sufficient workaround for now. I’m going to spend some more time tomorrow or Sunday fiddling with it; until then, all good.
Anyway, I’ll do a review of the laptop once I’ve had it for a week or so and put it through its paces. I’m pretty sure this particular issue (did I ever say what it was? Click on “new post” in WordPress, get a white screen. In every browser. No matter what. Every other device I have is fine.) is not the laptop’s fault. We’ll see if anything else stupid crops up.
Tomorrow we’re going to get some more shit done in the bedroom. The goal is to get work done in the house without inhaling enough drywall dust to give me cancer. Not the highest of bars. We’ll see if we can pull it off.
Was gonna use the spiffy new laptop to write a post.
New post wasn’t going to be about the spiffy new laptop, it was going to be about getting sick twice in two different ways at work today.
Spiffy new laptop won’t load the WordPress new post screen. Everything else works fine!
Guess why I bought the spiffy new laptop?
Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone and it is possible that there will be a ragesplosion soon, so y’all can look forward to that, because this makes no sense at all.
This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.
Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.
Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.
Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.
I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.
Y’all.
At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.
Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.
There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.
LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.
The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.
Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.
On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Yotei during my scant free time lately— it’s kind of nuts how busy the last couple of weeks have been, now that I think of it– and so far, about ten hours in, it’s at least the equal of Ghost of Tsushima, its predecessor, one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you go look at my review of Tsushima, you’ll notice I keep harping on how amazing the facial animation is– and, yes, I used the same line about Pong, which will keep being relevant until I stop playing video games.
I hit a moment last night that absolutely floored me, to the point where I decided I needed to be done playing for the night because there was no way anything else I was going to do in that session was going to top it. I’m going to dance around some spoilers, but I’ll do my best to be as ambiguous as possible.
There is a moment in the game where a character encounters another character who they believed was dead. And there is a good three or four seconds where you realize what is going on before either of the characters speak, just from the look in the eyes of the character realizing what is going on. Their eyes moisten, just a little bit, and the look that crawls across their face is this amazing and perfectly readable mix of disbelief, joy, relief and shame, and it is quite simply the most complex emotional moment I have ever seen a digital character convey in my entire life.
(To be clear, that’s a random screenshot above. I found some online that were from right around the moment I’m talking about and decided not to use them to avoid even that much of a spoiler.)
And this is just ten hours in. I’m sure there is more to come. That said, Sucker Punch, if you fuckers kill my horse again after what you did to me in Tsushima, we’re gonna have a problem.
Anyone have any ideas about why China, and not the US, has been my #1 source of traffic for the last couple of days? And traffic has been up pretty considerably in both viewers and pageviews, so it’s not like a single bot is crawling the site or something.
I feel like this has to be nefarious somehow, and also like my suspicion is maybe at least a little bit racist. But maybe not.
Anyway, I’m bound and determined to get to bed as early as possible tonight, so this blogwanking update was brought to you by the letter Zzzzz.
So we’ve got a new curriculum for math this year, and like most curricula in 2025 there’s what was supposed to be a robust online component to it. My kids took a math test last week, and I discovered while they were taking the test that a question about exponents that asked them to show their work had not provided any way to put a number into a superscript.
Which, y’know, feels like it might be a massive fucking oversight.
We’re moving into the real number system this week and they’re starting off with terminating and repeating decimals, so a lot of moving back and forth between decimals and fractions. I spent an hour beating my head against their system and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to designate a repeating fraction. Is there a help system? Of course not. Check this out:
It seems like typing in an answer, highlighting the repeating decimals and then clicking that tiny button which I had to hunt for for twenty minutes (and remember, my kids are working on iPads, which make highlighting anything a huge pain) puts the repeating decimal line– which is called a “vinculum,” by the way– above the numbers you’ve highlighted.
Take a second and stare at the options in that text box and reflect upon the fact that this is supposed to be for 8th graders. I do not have the slightest idea what probably 90% of the icons on that thing are referring to, nor do I really have any idea what is supposed to be designated by an arrow pointing at three diagonal dots.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work:
The top box is how it processed my entry. Why is there extra vinculum to the right of the seven? No idea, but it happened every time I tried. You’ll notice nothing extra is lined in the actual entry above. Why is the 27 in the bottom “correct” answer centered under the vinculum? Also no idea. I was not able to get a single answer correct involving a repeating decimal and absolutely nowhere was there any sort of help option that might have shown me what to do.
I sent an irate email to my team about how bullshit this was and I’m done for the night. I’m going to have these kids writing on the backs of shovels with coal by the end of the year. I’m so done with educational technology at this point that I can’t see straight.
My current phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple is a few days away from announcing the iPhone 17, and my phone has reached the point where on most days I have to charge it for a bit while I’m at my desk or doing something else; the battery isn’t getting through a full day reliably any longer. I used to replace my phone almost every year more or less whether I “needed” to or not; I’ve gotten out of that habit with the last few phones as they’ve gotten steadily more expensive.
So here’s my dumb problem: I don’t really want an iPhone 17 of any particular stripe, although it’d be highly unlikely that I would order anything other than another Pro Max. Not because I’m thinking of switching back to Android– I am Apple’s bitch now and forever, and am too thoroughly tied into their ecosystem to even seriously consider switching– but because their foldable phone is rumored to be coming out in 2026.
Rumors for the price of the foldable iPhone have ranged between two thousand and two thousand five hundred dollars, and that’s before whatever tariff fuckery might happen between now and next September.
That’s … a hell of a lot of money. And it’s even more money if I spend the $1200 or whatever I’m going to pay for a 17 in between now and then. And it’s also money that would be spent on a first-generation Apple product in a category that, so far, phone manufacturers have not exactly been covering themselves in glory with. Foldable phones are tricky as hell, and from what I’ve seen so far no one has really nailed the tech yet.
Now, for a sensible person who doesn’t have a spending problem, this isn’t actually a hard decision. I hold onto my current phone until it’s genuinely untenable to keep using it; if that’s before the Fold is released, well, that sucks, but it happened, and if the Fold comes out and I don’t like the price or something else about it (or they delay it, or the rumors are wrong, or or or … ) I just buy whatever the equivalent of my current phone is at that time.
That’s the sensible approach. But the sensible approach ignores the fact that I’ve been fighting off the newshiny for three years already, and I am maybe more sensitive than I should be to being annoyed by my phone– part of the reason I have a Pro Max is that I don’t like having to think about battery charge pretty much ever– and, like, September is the month you buy new phones. I recognize that all of this is stupid; that’s why I titled the post the way I did.
I could, in theory, try a smaller phone for a year, instead of buying the most expensive phone in their lineup. What would that be like? I don’t even know. But it would cut the pain a little bit if I decide to upgrade a year later.
Anyway. I have no common sense, but that’s why I have readers, who I assume are smarter people than me. What say you? Put up with bullshit for another year assuming I’ll want to trade up in 2026, upgrade but with a less expensive model so that it’s not as big of a hit in a year (worth pointing out: the trade-in will get me money back) or assume that I’ll manage to talk myself out of spending laptop money on a phone a year from now and just get the phone I’d be getting if I didn’t know anything about the Fold?
